There's a long-standing tradition among Japan specialists of insisting that geishas were high-class entertainers most of whom would never allow the men they entertained to lay a finger on them. This is a long way from Kafu's view, and he was in an ideal position to know. Indeed, the description of one particularly outrageous senior geisha, Kikuchiyo, is so replete with sexual detail that I had to read it twice before I could believe my eyes.
But Kafu was no smut-peddler. At heart he was a lover of ancient Chinese poetry, like the writer Kurayama Nanso in the novel. Indeed, one of the characters he mocks most vigorously is Yamai, the editor of a new magazine specializing in pornographic photos. But then one of the attractions of this wonderful book is its range, even given its relative brevity and concision. There are as many different types of character, and of emotion, as there are in Tolstoy, even though Kafu's true masters were probably Maupassant and Turgenev, social realists with a sympathetic eye for subtleties of situation and nuances of feeling.
Kafu was an aesthete fascinated by sex, and predictably he had his own theory of desire. Whereas men of old sought to prove their masculinity in war or hunting, in the modern world they seek to do it by success in the fields of business and sexual predation. Yoshioka is his prime example of this, a handsome married man possessed of "an endless repertoire of obscene tricks," adept at concluding affairs, and endlessly seeking out new conquests "from girls of sixteen to women past forty." He finally finds his match in the frankly sensual Kikuchiyo.
Stephen Snyder is to be thanked both for translating this half-forgotten novel at all, and for doing it so compellingly. He is, incidentally, also the author of a critical book on Kafu entitled, appropriately enough, Fictions of Desire.
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