Susaki Paradise

First published in Japan in 1955, Yoshiko Shibaki’s Susaki Paradise is a collection of six interlinked short stories revolving around the ramshackle Bar Chigusa and its no-nonsense landlady, Tokuko. This outpost on the edge of the canal leading to Susaki Paradise—once an illustrious pleasure quarter, and now a patch of dilapidated broth- els—is a meeting place for those teetering on the edge of desperation and ruin, including a newly-recruited fifteen-year-old whose girlish innocence is shattered in a matter of days, a former prostitute who yearns to own her own brothel, a barmaid torn between a suicidal boyfriend and a lothario with a motorbike. What unites the women in these stories is the uncompromising urgency with which they go about their lives amid the challenges of the post-war period. A bracing look at the dreams of those whose profession it is to sustain the fantasies of men, the stories in this collection formed the inspiration behind Yūzo Kawashima’s Suzaki Paradise: Red Light and Kenji Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame (both 1956). In the hands of Yoshiko Shibaki (1914–1991)—the second woman to win Japan’s esteemed Akutagawa Prize—these precarious, transient women living on the outskirts of society are handled with a disarming and devastating combination of realism, lyricism, and savage humour. This book marks the first appearance of Yoshiko Shibaki’s writing in English.

With an introduction by Moeko Fujii
Translated by Polly Barton