This is, I think, the first translation into English of a novel by a writer that Japanese think is one of their finest. Tokuda Shusei (1871-1943) was thought by Kawabata Yasunari to be the most Japanese of all modern novelists; Nakamura Murao stated that, after Saikaku, only Shusei portrayed the true characteristics of the Japanese people.
One of the reasons for this adulation may have been that Shusei was among the earliest modern writers to concern himself with "lower-class" characters, to abandon upper-class Meiji aspirations and to reflect the actual life, the "true characteristics," of Taisho/Showa people.
At the same time, this was the audience for whom he was writing -- a popular audience for whom he adhered to generic conventions. As translator Richard Torrance has explained, he "punished the rich and powerful and sympathetically portrayed the weak and oppressed."