Yoshiko Shibaki: Susaki Paradise

Another Gaze Editions, 2026, softcover, 226 pages, 12 x 18 cm

First published in Japan in 1955-a year before the introduction of an anti-prostitution law which subjected brothel owners, sex workers, and their customers to fines and imprisonment, 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 illustrious pleasure quarters, and now a patch of dilapidated brothels—is a meeting place for those teetering on the edge of desperation and ruin, including a barmaid torn between a suicidal boyfriend and a lothario with a motorbike, a newly-recruited teenager whose girlish innocence is shattered in a matter of days, and a former prostitute who yearns to own her own brothel. 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 Yuzo Kawashima’s Suzaki Paradise: Red Light and Kenji Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame (both 1956). In the hands of Yoshiko Shibaki, these precarious, transient women living on the outskirts of society are handled with a disarming and devastating combination of realism, lyricism, and savage humour.