Comprehensive information and links about Kafu Nagai

(永井荷風), born Nagai Sōkichi (永井壮吉), December 4, 1879 - April 30, 1959, was a Japanese novelist, playwright, essayist, and diarist. His works are noted for their depictions of life in early 20th-century Tokyo, especially among geisha, prostitutes, cabaret dancers, and other denizens of the city's lively entertainment districts.

Among his major works are:

Kafū was born at Kanetomi-chō 45, Koishikawa-ku [now Kasuga-chō, Bunkyō-ku], Tokyo, the eldest son of Nagai Kyūichirō (永井久一郎), his father, who was then 28 years old, and Nagai Tsune (永井恆), then 19. Kyūichirō was a scholar, bureaucrat, and businessman who later became known for his Chinese poetry. Kafū had three brothers and one sister. When the second son was born in 1883, Kafū was sent to live with his mother's family. In 1884, he attended the kindergarten affiliated with the Ochanomizu women's teachers' college, and his father visited Europe on government business. Kafū returned to his parents' home in January 1886, when he entered elementary school.

In 1891, he attended a private English-language school in Kanda, Tokyo. In 1894, he became ill, perhaps with scrofula, and spent several months in 1895 in a hospital in Odawara. He began studying the shakuhachi and Chinese poetry in 1896 at the age of 17. In February of the following year, he made his first of many visits to the Yoshiwara red-light district. The same year, he graduated from middle school and failed the entrance exam for university. With his mother and younger brothers, he visited Shanghai, where his father was now working for the shipping company Nippon Yusen. He returned to Japan in the autumn and enrolled in the Chinese-language department of a foreign-language college.

In 1898, he began writing short stories and studied with the novelist Hirotsu Yūrō (広津柳浪), and in 1899 he became involved in writing and performing rakugo and dropped out of the foreign-language school. In 1900, he began publishing short stories. In 1901, he got a job briefly as a newspaper reporter and later began studying French.

The following timeline is based on notes that he appended to the 11th handwritten volume of i

Kafū continued to write and keep his diary until his death in 1959. The edition of his collected works published by Iwanami Shoten in the 1990s runs to 30 volumes.

varied depending on his genre and audience. Reflecting his study of classical Chinese and his wide reading of premodern Japanese texts, his diaries and some of his essays are written in the highly literary i typical of the era in which he wrote, and the dialogue spoken by his characters seems particularly natural and unaffected.