Izumi Kyōka’s Fukagawa

At the turn of the twentieth century, the novelist and playwright Izumi Kyka ( 1872-1939) set several stories in and around Fukagawa.It was a working-class district on the east bank of the Sumida River, very much a vestige of the old city of Edo, but from the Meiji era (1912-1925) onward, it was undergoing rapid industrialization and urbanization.A densely packed neighborhood of canals, wooden houses, lumberyards and factories, it would become the most damaged part of Tokyo in the Great Kant Earthquake of 1923.The air raids of 1945 further decimated Tokyo.Today areas like Kameid, Honj, and Fukagawa are scarcely recognizable from how they looked a century ago; the postwar efforts to expand the city limits into Tokyo Bay through landfill have pushed seaside districts like Susaki inland.One can catch glimpses of the old Edo east of the Sumida River in the fiction of Nagai Kaf ( 1879-1959), but Kyka's stories set there bring the district to life in a way like no others. 1 Below I provide translations of two of Kyka's stories set in Fukagawa, Katsushika Sunago ( "A Requiem to the River," 1900), and Sanjaku-kaku ( "Three Feet Square," 1899) and its sequel, Kodama ( Echo, 1901).Kyka also set a longer novel, Tatsumi kdan ( A Tale of Tatsumi, 1899) in the Fukagawa licensed quarter Susaki.Kyka was born and raised in Kanazawa.His father was a craftsman in damascene metalwork and his mother came from a family of noh actors and musicians.Tokyo (or Edo as it was known before 1868) was the birthplace of Kyka's mother and his adopted home from 1890, when he moved there to become a disciple of popular novelist Ozaki Ky (1868-1903).Except for a period from 1905 to 1909 when he lived in Zushi, close to Kamakura, and brief trips around Japan, Kyka would remain a resident of Tokyo until his death in 1939.During the brief period between 1897