Geisha in Rivalry, first published as Udekurabe in 1918, has a secure place among Kafu Nagai's masterpieces. Set against the backdrop of Tokyo's Shimbashi geisha district, a company of vivid characters play out their drama of illicit love, shady intrigue, and unrelenting rivalry. In the forefront are the geisha: some powerful and spiteful like the imperious Rikiji, some crude and obvious like the gaudy Kikuchiyo, some naive and pathetic like the heroine Komayo, and all engaged in finding a place for themselves in a world that offers no easy route of escape from their profession. Here, too, are the patrons of the geisha: the playboys, the actors, the successful businessmen, and the "upstart gentlemen" of late Meiji society. And here, again, are those who make the machinery of this world function: the geisha house proprietors, the teahouse mistresses, the actors' retainers, the servants. And, finally, here are the parasites of the demimonde, who live off its other denizens through guile and deceit. Through this often sordid but fascinating pageant move the figures of the geisha Komayo, her lovers, and the women who conspire to steal them from her.

Komayo is a former geisha who, upon the death of her husband, returns to the "world of flower and willow" to escape poverty. A chance encounter with an old patron, Yoshioka, leads to a potentially profitable relationship: Yoshioka believes Komayo can restore his lost innocence; Komayo uses Yoshioka's patronage to compete in elaborate music and dance performances. As Komayo considers Yoshioka's offer, she falls in love with Segawa, a young actor who promises to turn the talented geisha into the finest dancer in the Shimbashi quarter. Komayo is eager to become the lead performer among her peers. Her ambition even tempts her to assume a third patron known as the "Sea Monster," a repellent but wealthy antiques dealer. As she grows to realize a glittering career, Komayo becomes the target of her three lovers' bitter rivalry, which leaves her both thrilled and exhausted, brutalized and redeemed. Nagai Kafu's captivating tale moves from the intimate corners of the geisha house to the back rooms of assignation, from the dressing areas of the great kabuki theaters to the lonely country villa of a theater critic and connoisseur of Shimbashi women, detailing one woman's absorbing quest to find fame, affection, and financial security.

Komayo is a former geisha who, upon the death of her husband, returns to the "world of flower and willow" to escape poverty. A chance encounter with an old patron, Yoshioka, leads to a potentially profitable relationship: Yoshioka believes Komayo can restore his lost innocence; Komayo uses Yoshioka's patronage to compete in elaborate music and dance performances. As Komayo considers Yoshioka's offer, she falls in love with Segawa, a young actor who promises to turn the talented geisha into the finest dancer in the Shimbashi quarter. Komayo is eager to become the lead performer among her peers. Her ambition even tempts her to assume a third patron known as the "Sea Monster," a repellent but wealthy antiques dealer. As she grows to realize a glittering career, Komayo becomes the target of her three lovers' bitter rivalry, which leaves her both thrilled and exhausted, brutalized and redeemed. Nagai Kafu's captivating tale moves from the intimate corners of the geisha house to the back rooms of assignation, from the dressing areas of the great kabuki theaters to the lonely country villa of a theater critic and connoisseur of Shimbashi women, detailing one woman's absorbing quest to find fame, affection, and financial security.

The author, an American anthropologist, describes her experiences during the year she spent as a Japanese geisha, and looks at the role of women, and geishas, in modern Japan

Nagai Kafu is one of the greatest modern Japanese writers, but until now his classic collection, American Stories, based on his sojourn from Japan to Washington State, Michigan, and New York City in the early years of the twentieth century, has never been available in English. Here, with a detailed and insightful introduction, is an elegant translation of Kafu's perceptive and lyrical account. Like de Tocqueville a century before, Kafu casts a fresh, keen eye on vibrant and varied America—world fairs, concert halls, and college campuses; saloons, the immigrant underclass, and red-light districts. Many of his vignettes involve encounters with fellow Japanese or Chinese immigrants, some of whom are poorly paid laborers facing daily discrimination. The stories paint a broad landscape of the challenges of American life for the poor, the foreign born, and the disaffected, peopled with crisp individual portraits that reveal the daily disappointments and occasional euphorias of modern life. Translator Mitsuko Iriye's introduction provides important cultural and biographical background about Kafu's upbringing in rapidly modernizing Japan, as well as literary context for this collection. In the first story, "Night Talk in a Cabin," three young men sailing from Japan to Seattle each reveal how poor prospects, shattered confidence, or a broken heart has driven him to seek a better life abroad. In "Atop the Hill," the narrator meets a fellow Japanese expatriate at a small midwestern religious college, who slowly reveals his complex reasons for leaving behind his wife in Japan. Caught between the pleasures of America's cities and the stoicism of its small towns, he wonders if he can ever return home. Kafu plays with the contradictions and complexities of early twentieth-century America, revealing the tawdry, poor, and mundane underside of New York's glamour in "Ladies of the Night" while celebrating the ingenuity, cosmopolitanism, and freedom of the American city in "Two Days in Chicago." At once sensitive and witty, elegant and gritty, these stories provide a nuanced outsider's view of the United States and a perfect entrance into modern Japanese literature.

Nagai Kafu was one of the most important Japanese writers of fiction during the first half of the twentieth century. He is best known for his evocative descriptions of the moods and fancies of Tokyo: its gardens and canals, its streets and alleys, its people, and above all its women - especially the kept women, geisha, and prostitutes. During the Rains and Flowers in the Shade, which appear here in English for the first time, are set in the Tokyo of the 1930's. Most of the seedy neighborhoods that Kafu so lovingly describes have long since vanished, either in the bombing raids of 1945 or in the rebuilding that followed. Kafu's sympathies are clearly with the women that figure in these stories. A man wedded to the past, happy only in retrospect, Kafu saw in the world of the demimondaine the last tattered vestiges of the old Tokyo, when it was called Edo. He also saw in their day-to-day life the only honest way to live, the love with the least falsehood, in a materialistic, hypocritical society. During the Rains (1931) is the story of the vicissitudes of an amiable and lascivious Ginza cafe girl. It is considered to be among Kafu's masterpieces by many writers, critics, and scholars, including Donald Keene: "One of Kafu's finest achievements....The exceptional praise that During the Rains won from discriminating critics was occasioned chiefly by the novelistic interest. The detached analysis of a group of people makes the story read like a work of French Naturalism, though a few passages...evoke the beauty of place and season in the typical Kafu manner." Flowers in the Shade might almost be called a continuation of During the Rains. Its hero, kept by a wealthy woman in his student days, ends up in his forties being supported by a prostitute. Donald Keene says that Kafu "makes us see and all but smell the dingy rooms he describes, without ever allowing us to pass judgment on them or their inhabitants. Kafu neither approves or disapproves of his characters, and if he tells us in detail about their past it is not in order to demonstrate how environment and heredity have determined their lives...but to assuage our curiosity as to how Jukichi came to live off women, how a particular woman happened to become a prostitute or a procuress, and so on." The present volume contains a Preface by the translator that briefly summarizes Kafu's life and career.