Something Strange Across the River

Kafū Nagai’s short story “Something Strange Across the River” (1937) takes us through the streets of early 1900s Asakusa, then the center of Shitamachi (“low city”) culture and entertainment, as well as Yoshiwara and the surrounding districts. The piece is steeped in nostalgia for how things once were during the narrator’s, or Nagai’s, youth (“the old, nostalgic world made manifest as muse to my exhausted heart”). At times, this sense of longing and the imagery it evokes brought to mind Yasunari Kawabata’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (1929).

What I enjoyed most were the descriptions of this fading world, as the protagonist guides us across the Sumida River:

I pushed aside the high grass and climbed up the hillside of the embankment. There were no objects to obstruct my view of the street I’d just come up. The rambling old towns, empty lots, and developing areas could all be seen. On the other side of the river, corrugated iron roofs spread out in all directions, broken here and there by the towering chimneys of the baths, all of it cast in the glow of the setting summer sun. At one end of the sky the colors of sunset grew weaker and colder as they drifted away. The moon shone bright, as if night had already come. Between the iron roofs, in the gaps that showed the streets, neon signs crackled to life, and the echoes of radios clicking on here and there rose up from the town.

Also interesting, and at times amusing, is the narrator’s disdain for Ginza and the “inner city,” along with its “distasteful sorts,” as in:

There are other sights to be wary of in Ginza. The middle-aged man, for example, in his perfectly cut foreign suit and distasteful countenance, his hair perfectly styled, his occupation nebulous, swinging his cane as he walks down the street and sings to himself, berating the young women and the children who cross his path.

I don’t think the story itself will stay with me for very long, but it was certainly worth reading for its vivid portrayal of a particular time and place.