Shōson Nagahara’s Lament in the Night – Being Japanese, Down-and-Out and in Los Angeles in 1925

My thanks to the website of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop for revealing the work of Shoson Nagahara to me – a writer of whom I had previously been blissfully ignorant. Nagahara was Japanese, born in 1901 and came to America in 1918. He appears to have lived a hand to mouth existence on the streets of LA, and he wrote about it. You can read a fragment of the novel he produced Lament in the Night (published 1925) here. It is quite remarkable, as indeed is the entire book. Nagahara’s LA is one of unemployment, cold lodging houses, bummed meals and scraped together pennies. It is by turns both noirish in a way that prefigures the trend of much Californian writing at the time, though is an early example, and a particularly rare one by a non-American. It is also reminiscent of Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier, though those masterpieces would not appear until 1935 and 1937 respectively. Lament in the Night is, in short, a remarkable piece of work….please do check out the Asian American Writers’ Workshop site for the excerpt and a brief biography of Nagahara…it’s not every day you discover a great writer you were completely unaware of previously, but those days are good days!!