ABSTRACT
The focus of this chapter is Hiyori geta (Fair-Weather Clogs, 1914/1915), a collection of eleven essays bespeaking Nagai Kafū’s (1879-1959) interest in Edo period woodblock prints and urban culture. Kafū’s understanding of modernity was substantially shaped by his stay abroad–he spent five years in the U.S. and in France (1903–1908)–and his extensive reading of Western, in particular French literature. Fair-Weather Clogs is considered a work reflecting discourses on urban development and the experience of urbanization, as well as new modes of representing the city and capturing modernity in literature and the arts that traveled around the world from Paris, London, and Berlin, and became entangled with Japanese discourses. Building on that, I discuss aspects of the visual environment and identify ways that European and Japanese discourse on the visual arts in the early twentieth century were interwoven. In drawing on Charles Baudelaire’s (1821-1867) reflections on the flâneur and Walter Benjamin’s (1892-1940) and Asja Lacis’ (1891-1979) notion of porosity in their essay Naples (1924/1925) special features of the work will be highlighted. Finally, I conclude by connecting Fair-Weather Clogs to contemporary discourse on urban life and the city and look into how the work is perceived today.
