Okoi the First

A famous geisha, an actor’s wife, a prime minister’s mistress: Okoi has been seen and judged through every role. In this literary portrait, Hasegawa Shigure moves from remembered glamour and public rumors to a meeting with the woman herself at the Café National in Ginza.

Okoi and her younger sister describe money withheld, children to raise, and influential men determined to control her future. Her refusal to promise lifelong chastity or surrender her freedom gives their conversation its sharpest force.

Published in 1921, the work also survives with a 1935 appended note, included here. Theater, fashionable shopping streets, café workers, and family losses frame a portrait at once sympathetic and questioning.