Starting in the seventeenth century, many major Japanese cities included spaces that catered to pleasure seekers, where a consumer could purchase sex and more significantly the fantasy of pleasure and beauty outside of the strictures of everyday life. Quarters dedicated to entertainment and erotic commerce, such as the Yoshiwara in Edo, were known not only to the customers who visited but more widely through vivid evocations in the visual arts, on the kabuki and bunraku stage, and in prose fiction. The pleasure quarter's proximity to theaters was no accident, for both existed on the fringes of proper society and offered engagement in stories apart from the quotidian. The pleasure quarter as an urban space persisted through the mid-twentieth century, though with an altered relationship to the city and society in the modern era. From the Meiji to the present, the notion of a demimonde has continued to draw in many artists and writers, such as Higuchi Ichiyō and Nagai Kafū. Cynthia Gralla's book The Demimonde in Japanese Literature explores artistic engagements with the Japanese demimonde in modern Japanese literature, film, photography, and dance. The book offers close readings of artists and thinkers as diverse as Kuki Shūzō and Murakami Ryū, as the author discovers shared themes of contested boundaries, liminality, eroticism, and aesthetics in their pursuit of this place or state of mind called the demimonde.

Through the twentieth century, the karyūkai (the Japanese term that Gralla uses to designate the areas of the city) was sometimes resonant with nostalgia for the aesthetic and social fantasy of the Tokugawa pleasure quarters, and, at others, regarded as a source of contamination to bourgeois and national values. Gralla is interested in the demimonde as “a peripheral space of concentrated, commodified, staged eroticism” but also features the people who “embody such a fringe erotic lifestyle” and embrace transgression (p. 11). Other aspects of the demimonde thus broadly understood are “a malleable temporality” that tends to the circular rather than the linear, and the shift away from an “actual space” to an “imaginative space,” a space that “plays on a dialectic of otherness and containment” (pp. 7, 11). The author regards the cultural expressions related to these conceptions as part of the demimonde and its “subculture of resistance” (p. 12). This broad conception of the demimonde allows Gralla to include in her study everything from Nagai Kafū's nostalgic Tamanoi to the prostitutes working so vividly in burnt-out ruins of Tokyo in Tamura's The Gate of Flesh, and the closed world of a rundown geisha house in Kōda Aya's Nagareru. Other Japanese works that Gralla brings into the category of demimonde include Tanizaki's Naomi, Murakami Ryū's Almost Transparent Blue, and his film Topāzu. At points, she comments on the tension between performances and imagination of the demimonde and the Japanese empire's odious practice of “comfort women.”

Gralla proves herself a careful and astute reader and critic of works in a range of media. To her credit, she includes a significant comparative component by reading Japanese novels against European, American, Middle Eastern, and Chinese literary works. The author also delves extensively into critical and theoretical stances on the demimonde, eroticism, taboo and transgression, trauma (national and personal), nostalgia, the city, and the figure of the flaneur.

One of the most interesting and original chapters is “Dancing the Interior Demimonde,” which offers analysis of writer and controversial cultural figure Mishima Yukio (and photographs of him by Hosoe Eikoh), and an especially intriguing reading of butoh performer Ohno Kazuo as “demimondaine” (pp. 211–32). In her commentary on Ohno's renowned work “Admiring La Argentina,” the author clarifies her broad use of the concept of the demimonde in terms of space, gender, and art, noting that Ohno “dragged behind him, in his lace train, a theatrical space filled with the essence of multiple artistic and erotic subcultures” (p. 229). Also compelling are her reading of Murakami Ryū's controversial novel Almost Transparent Blue (1976), in which drugs “facilitate the creation of a personal demimonde of heightened physicality and imagination” (p. 171), and her careful analysis of space and interiority in Kōda Aya's novel Nagareru (1955).

While much of Gralla's literary and cultural analysis is thought provoking and thorough, some of the chapters suffer from repetition and would have benefited from an editor's firm hand. One also wishes for greater engagement with the work of Japanese scholars and theorists, beyond the easily accessible and translated work of premier critics such as Isoda Kōichi and Maeda Ai.

The Demimonde in Japanese Literature will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative literature and Japanese studies.