During the middle to late years of the Meiji Era, factories, cement works and commercial shipyards began to spring up like noxious mushrooms along the embankments of Tokyo's Sumida River. Despite the smokestacks and coal skulls spilling soot into a river where fishermen had until recently drawn water to brew their tea, an exquisite culture of taste was still possible along its eastern banks.
The best teahouses served as venues for the powerful and wealthy, hosting statesmen, business elites, and industrialists. Restaurants and teahouses also played a key role in the cultural life of the city, developing carefully nurtured affinities with the world of kabuki actors, bunraku puppet masters, koto performers, the better off gidayu chanters, and the idly elegant. One of the most celebrated of these establishments was Mistress Oriku's Shigure Teahouse in Mukojima.
In Kawaguchi's novel, structured around a series of linked stories, we learn the degree of Oriku's roots in the capital's floating world, having been sold into a Yoshiwara brothel at the age of 18. Rejecting the flesh trade, she rebuilds her life at 40 with the construction of the Shigure Teahouse, an establishment as historically real as Kawaguchi's main character. The enterprise gives her a new lease on life and love. Atypical of her age, she frankly admits that "there are times when I want a man, and at my age I see no reason not to indulge myself." Urbane in matters pertaining to the arts and popular entertainment, Oriku's straightforwardness sweeps away the stifling proprieties that thwart female desire.