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As is often the case with translated fiction, and especially from Japanese, this book left me frustrated because neither the publisher nor the translator bothered to put it in context or provide enough notes to illuminate the myriad allusions embedded in the text. Based on the innocuous title, I imagined it would be a more or less sentimental evocation of what is today one of Tokyo's most touristy neighborhoods. It is that, but it is also a very self-conscious piece of Modernist writing, which makes it more interesting but also a lot more heavy-going. Initially published as a serial in the daily Asahi, these vignettes depict the lower-depths of the capital in the 1920s, a time when Asakusa was full of riff-raff, prostitutes, street urchins, beggars and petty criminals. Roughly speaking, the first half revolves around a young girl called Yumiko and her suicide onboard a barge on the river Sumida. Seemingly, Yumiko chooses to resort to poison rather than have the same fate as her elder sister Chiyo, who was seduced and abandoned by a man who met her in the chaotic aftermath of the 1923 earthquake that left thousands of people homeless. At least, I think that's what happened. After the climax of Yumiko's theatrical suicide, the author reverts to a lighter style and concentrates on a variety of more or less colorful characters in the underworld of Asakusa. The book ends with the narrator encountering Yumiko again. Did she survive her suicide attempt? Was her suicide attempt faked? Or is this girl just Yumiko's double or look-alike? Although this book is too uneven to count as a masterpiece, it has all the hallmark of literary ambition and given the place of Kawabata in the canon, would deserve to be more carefully presented for foreign readers to appreciate.