"Art is bad," Guy Davenport posited, "when it is poor in news," and it is not surprising that a literary modernist such as Davenport would think so. The tremendous detail with which James Joyce recreates, in "Ulysses," the Dublin of June 16, 1904, is emblematic of how rich the modernist strand of literature is in information, and of how much denser in knowledge this type of writing can be than many works in the realist or naturalist traditions.
The sheer amount that we can learn about the Asakusa of 1929-1930 from Yasunari Kawabata's "The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa," along with the unconventional form Kawabata adopted to deal with the confusion of knowledge that modern urban life threw up, place this novel squarely within this tradition of which "Ulysses" is the paramount example.
The authors of such works seemed to believe that the standard first-this-happened-then-that-happened narratives were no longer adequate to capture the frenzy of modern city life, and this work suggests that Kawabata felt the same. As a simple portrait of Asakusa wouldn't do, he gives us instead a picture of a place that never stands still: a moving picture.