Shanghai

The novel «Shanghai» — one of the main modernist works of Japanese literature. In it, Riichi Yokomitsu applied all his theoretical and practical developments.

The book tells about the Japanese living in the foreign settlement in Shanghai (it lived by its own laws and had a special legal status) on the eve of the May 30 Incident of 1925 (when the police opened fire on Chinese demonstrators protesting against the dominance of foreigners in the torn-apart young Chinese Republic). 

Yokomitsu Riichi is not as well known in Russia as his famous contemporaries — Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, Yasunari Kawabata. However, during the 1920s and 1930s, he was considered in Japan the number one prose writer, the "king of the modern novel," and some contemporaries even called him a literary deity.

The action of his most famous novel «Shanghai» takes place in Chinese Shanghai, on the eve of the 1925–1927 Revolution. In that dangerous time, Shanghai captivated and attracted adventurers from all corners of the earth — Japanese, English, Americans, French, Indians, Russian monarchists fleeing from Russia. Among the characters of the novel are communists and Marxists, cosmopolitans and patriots, bandits, rebels, and executioners. In the boiling cauldron of this eastern Babylon, they trade and rob, feast and starve, love and kill. Anything can happen here — and it does...