Author: Hanai Oume. Shuyotei Sofu.
Title: [Hanai Oume Suigetsu Kibun].
Description: Tokyo, Ishikawa Denkichi December 1887 (Meiji 20). Two volumes stitched together 18x12cm, colour wood covers by Utagawa Kunimatsu (the first a bit used with a small hole); two double page, two single illustrations at the front, four large illustrations through the text. Browning of the preliminary pages of volume one, a stain in the gutter at the bottom, still rather good. ¶ One of the prizes of the dokufu craze of the early Meiji. dokufu - poisonous women - are nothing new of course but the happy conjunction at the advent of mass circulation newspapers of a beautifully timed series of murders by unvirtuous young women set the sensation mongers and their readers all of a fever. Newspaper to book, lurid print to kabuki and back again, dokufu were all the rage for a couple of decades. Along the way crime fiction was born and, in a way, modern Japanese literature.Hanai Oume earned her place as one on the trinity of great dokufu for the murder of her employee for helping her sponging father muscle her out of her business - the teahouse Suigetsu. The famous umbrella was part of her defence.Of course nothing about cheap popular trash like this is going to be straightforward. The colophon here tells us this is a reprint but lists the first as November 1887 which must be a newspaper appearance. Keio university's copy which uses the same covers is a different printing from a different publisher (Mizuno Ikutaro) with a colophon listing nothing before December while Yamanashi University's copy, published by Yamazaki Matasaburo and dated the same day as Keio's, is yet another different printing with a different cover. None of this is helped by the book being titled by both variants in the same copy.

Keywords: social history crime women feminism c19th Japan progress dokufu literature fiction thrillers meiji