The text itself is fascinating. He's able to finally serialize it in the next year after he creates this private edition. And then shortly after that, we get the first public edition of it which is widely distributed, becomes a best-seller. And within that, there's an artist has painted pictures, there are prints, rather, of areas and different expressions of the town. The small area of Tokyo, which is called Tamanoi, where the story was set in. But anyway, looking through the private edition, we see that Nagai Kafu took a great deal of care in preparing it. This edition itself, we can see his signature right here. He's donating a copy of it to a man named Shibui Hiyoshi, who was an ukiyo-e specialist before the war. Anyway, going into it, we see in the pages, in between the story itself, the encounter between the novelist Ōe and Ōyuki, a prostitute who has her own sort of shop, her own sort of house that she sits in and waits for customers to visit. There's a sort of season between the summer into the fall where he goes almost everyday to meet her. They eat meals together, they talk together, they walk around the district itself, but she's never allowed to cross the river into central Tokyo with him. And he finally, at the end, abandons this woman very, very coldly, I would say. But the story itself is interspersed with these photographs, which Kafu actually took using a camera which he carried, he brought himself into the district when he was investigating. And he also went there to meet different women in the year or the two years before he wrote this one. Here's one photograph of a woman. She's sitting at her window in the second floor with her back out and with, and you can see perhaps right to the right of the photograph that there's a line of writing and he writes poems, tanka poems or haiku poems, attached to the photographs that he's made. This has very little to do with the story, with the timeframe or the plot of the story. He places these sort of snapshots of the town itself and then inscribes his own poems onto them. Of course, this is a metallic print edition, so he's not actually writing the words onto the photograph. But we have the photograph and then his poetic sort of dedication or impression of what he's captured in the image itself. Let's take a look at another one. This is, again, the picture, a little bit close up, you can see how the words are closely aligned with the picture itself. These are novels, they're metallic print novels. There's nothing handwritten on them at all so that the traditional way of writing onto the back of the photograph or perhaps writing across the photograph is not really possible here, because he's working in the modern or the modernist mode of the novel. So everything that looks the way that the novel is set up physically, the way that it's laid out, the print, the paper that he uses is very, very close to what a Western novel might be at this time or to other modern Japanese novels, which were very, very extremely popular and successful commercially as well in the 1930s. But still we see the juxtaposition between the image here of a woman with her back to us, her neck is exposed, which is a very erotic, very sort of personal sort of angle, to take a photo of her from. And then this line here, which is a 31-syllable poem, we can move along, see some other ones. Here we have the text, part of the text, one chapter of the novel sort of ending here. And then on the page opposite from it, we see a photograph of the town itself, the district. And then underneath it, sort of a 4-line, sort of separated, haiku poem of 17 syllables, with his name at the end of it. Let's take a closer look at that, here, it says, I'll read it for us in Japanese, it says ka-bashira no, kuzururu kataya, roji no kuchi, Kafū.
It says his name, gives us his name at the end of it, it is a very short poem. We see a woman in a very sort of domestic sort of outfit, she's wearing a white apron over her kimono so that the kimono doesn't get dirty while she's perhaps washing the dishes or preparing food or something like that. Moving through the alleys, these very, very small, unpaved alleys in the Tamanui District, Kafū probably took this photograph from the second story of one the brothels. In other words, he was already a customer, he was a client who'd walked into one of the brothels, was looking out. It might be a morning scene, I'm not sure. But he's got this sort of broad angle on this alley which extends and turns over to the right here, and then he adds on, he attaches this short poem to the image itself. I've translated, "Just where the mosquito swarm crumbles, an entrance to the alley." We have maps of how intricate and small but very, very densely constructed this brothel district was and it was also completely undeveloped as well, very, very unhygienic. We don't know that from the photograph, we can't really even tell the season from the photograph. But he uses the season word, mosquito swarm or literally in Japanese a pillar of mosquitoes, which usually you find when there's very little wind, people aren't passing through, mosquitoes will form this swarm around any sort of puddle or pond in the area. But the entrance to the alley, a lot of people are moving in and out. This is probably before the customers begin to arrive in the evening, so it's very, very sort of busy in the street and the mosquito swarm sort of crumbles up and then reassembles. So he's noticing this, he's observing this all from the second story. Once again, let's take a look at the photograph itself. The photograph, there's one woman walking through the alley and he describes in the poem that this is an entrance to the alley. He also gives us information which is essential to a haiku poem, the seasonal word, mosquito swarm, which we don't really see but we can imagine. That also gives us a sense of the season, of the heat, of the humidity, of the density of the population, probably in this area as well. And it kind of resonates very, very well with the story before and after it. But again, the poem is very, very short, concise, obviously haiku-like, one instant in the course of the day right here. We see during this decade in the 1920s and the 1930s, in Europe and United States as well, but again, in Japan, sort of modernist attempt to synchronize or juxtapose photographs with poetry. It's almost photo-journalism in a sense with a poem attached to it, something that modernist Japanese poets, as well as photographers, were very, very interested in, in this period. And Kafū sort of settles this into, sort of blends this into the context of a novel, the novel itself which is a very interesting experiment for him in the way that he's going to express and carry on the story outside, so to speak, of the timeline of the story itself. We see here that the association or the integration between the word and the image is very, very tight. They depend on each other, but again, we'd question whether that has the same synergistic sort of value, the same personal, often lyrical, reflective movement towards the image itself that we find in the words, especially the poetic words of men and women proceeding Nagai Kafū and his generation in the 19th century.