America in Color: The Young Kafū and His Search for Chromatic Harmony

In the first phase of his career, and to a certain extent for his entire life, Nagai Kafū (1879–1959) devoted great care to the textual representation of spaces and spatial configurations of material objects and behaviors through sensory narratives that encapsulate both his vision of the world and the array of influences shaping his literature. American Stories(Amerika monogatari, 1908) is an early work that carries several narrational devices testifying to the young Kafū's tendency to experiment with a variety of patterns and styles and reveals his fascination with French literature. This essay focuses on visual representation in the American short stories, in particular on Kafū's manipulation of colors, to gauge his debt to Charles Baudelaire not in terms of imagery, but rather in the symbolic chromatic organization and visual structures, which owes a great deal to the French poet's theory of color harmony. I also address later writings by Kafū to highlight further developments and elaborations of Baudelaire's ideas to serve changing narrative necessities and historical specificities.