Author: Takeda Korai.
Title: [Yamato Rasha Yokohama Bidan].
Description: Tokyo? Kinjudo 1881 (Meiji 14). Three volumes 18x12cm, publisher's colour woodblock wrappers; 18 pages in each volume, illustrated by Chikanobu throughout with three frontispieces, a single page and a double page plate in colour in the first volume. Understandable thumbing but rather good with a laid down, chewed but mostly complete colour woodcut outer wrapper (fukuro). ¶ Slight maybe but there's a novel, or a play at least, just in those front covers. Yamato Rasha is, I'm told, a soap of women's lives with western men in Yokohama. Even I can tell, from the pictures, that they were lives filled with conflict, devious schemes, jealousy, violence by footwear ... busy indeed.There is a modern reprint but I find only one entry in worldcat for the original outside Japan.

Keywords: literature fiction c19th Japan westernisation modernism graphic art illustration feminism women thrillers meiji