Nagai Kafu's "Rivalry," according to the late Edward Seidensticker, is "on the one hand nostalgic, lyrical, and reminiscent, and on the other a modern social novel, purporting to show how life for geisha really is."
Seidensticker's description of the novel, newly available as a paperback in English, is accurate. But while he believes that Kafu fails to convince us "to accept the geisha and her quarter as simultaneously an escape from crass reality and the embodiment of crass reality," in fact, the dance between Kafu's loving descriptions of a dying but still elegant demimonde, and the geisha's less elegant struggle for survival, makes the book richer than it would have been if it were limited to either unadulterated nostalgic effusion or gritty social commentary.
The grit that is present keeps the novel from floating off into the ether; the effusions, when they occur, are the high points of the book.