What we have in front of us here is the private edition of 1937 of the novel.
Nagai Kafū wrote this story of
Ōe, a novelist who is having trouble finishing up a novel.
He traveled across the Sumida River, which is referred to
as the river in the title as the way I've translated it here,
to the other side of the bank, where there's a sort of brothel district,
a very, very small, shady sort of brothel district, which is fascinating to him,
because the way that the women who work there and who lived there,
reminds him of how sexual male/female relationships,
especially in the so-called demimonde, or the brothel districts,
the recreational districts of pre-earthquake,
the earthquake having occurred in Tokyo in 1923,
the pre-earthquake sort of remnants of the Edo period.
The author, as well as the protagonist, the novelist Ōe,
visits this very, very small area across the town, and relaxes there,
enjoys spending time with these women who were living very,
very sort of transient, unstable lives, but
who according to the protagonist at least, commit themselves,
dedicate themselves to their work, to their lives there.
The protagonist Ōe finds among these women sort of a way of life,
a way of looking at life, which is daring, independent,
and reminds him very much of the old Edo, so-called feudal,
or early modern ways that courtesans and prostitutes,
the whole sort of demimonde, rich culture of urban Japan,
how it's been lost along with
so many other aspects of culture during the militarization and
during the sort of industrialization of the early 20th century.
So, anyway, he visits this brothel, this area here,
to satisfy himself, to meet someone, but
also to deliver a sort of paean to lost culture in Japan as well.
In the months that Nagai Kafu was writing this novel,
the Japanese Imperial Army had invaded the Asian continent.
The war was on.
There was a great deal of censorship occurring within
the country itself, and in newspapers.
Not just official censorship, but self censorship.
In other words, newspapers and other journalistic media would sort
of predict what was safe to publish and not so.
Nagai Kafu was promised a place in one of the major newspapers
in Japan in order to serialize his novel.
He wrote it all and handed it over to them, but the newspaper sat on it.
They wouldn't republish it.
So he got very very frustrated and
decided that he would have to use his own money too create a private edition
of it to hand out to his friends in Ginza and all kinds of other sort of
interesting areas in the city where he would often socialize and so forth.
So he created what we're looking at right now.
The first private edition of this novel said to have been maybe a hundred or
so copies of it.
Here's the frontispiece to the novel.
We see in white letters the characters for the title.
It's a night scene, there's a window here with a light on, and beneath it
there are three buckets, probably filled with water in case a fire occurs.
Of course all of the buildings are sort of ratchety sort of two-story
wooden buildings.
It's a sort of slum area, which is populated almost entirely
by women who are waiting each night for men to cross the river, take sort
of a tram into the area and visit them and then go back before the morning.
But anyway, sort of shows the very sort of shady aspects of this area itself.