The Inn at Osaka

Mita, a Tokyo company clerk who writes fiction on the side, has been posted to Osaka, the smoky, money-minded city of merchants. Fleeing a grasping landlord, he takes a room at the Suigetsu, a small inn on the Tosabori River, and there he stays for a year and a half among maids, lodgers, a hard-drinking geisha nicknamed Uwabami, and the old man who tends the bath.

Small dramas fill his days: quarrels and reconciliations, a missing banknote, a maid who vanishes, a friend's lavish parties, a young woman from the mountain pleasure town of Ikoma who sets her heart on him. Minakami Takitarō, a lifelong businessman-writer of the Mita bungaku circle, paints Osaka with exasperation and affection in equal measure, and the novel ends at the station platform with a farewell to the city.

Translated complete and unabridged from the Japanese, with a translator's note, brief endnotes on places, customs and Osaka speech, and source information.