Kafu Nagai

Kafu Nagai (Sōichi Nagai, 1879–1959) was a Japanese author whose fiction mourns, with exquisite precision, the disappearing world of Edo-era Tokyo — the geishas, the pleasure quarters, the old low city (shitamachi) being swept away by Meiji and Taishō modernisation. A man perpetually out of step with his own time, he lived in Paris and New York in the early 1900s, and the experience of exile sharpened his sense of what he was losing at home.

His works — The River Sumida, Geisha in Rivalry, During the Rains, A Strange Tale from East of the River — are elegies for a Tokyo that was already vanishing when he wrote about it, and his prose is correspondingly suffused with a beautiful melancholy. He was awarded the Order of Culture in 1952 and is one of the most important figures in the literature of nostalgia.