永井荷風

Nagai Kafū

1879–1959

A devoted flaneur of old Tokyo, he turned the city's fading geisha districts, riverbanks, and back-street tenements into the great subject of his fiction. Trained partly abroad in America and France, he carried home a cosmopolitan eye and a lifelong taste for Edo culture, blending the two into a refined, melancholy prose style. Works such as Bokuto Kidan, Sumidagawa, and Udekurabe linger over courtesans, musicians, and the slow erosion of a vanishing world. Aloof from literary fashions and quietly defiant during the war years, he kept a famous diary, Danchotei Nichijo, that stands among the finest in modern Japanese letters.