The Secret of the Little Room, Anonymous

An original character, charmed by an old assignation house, buys it and carries out some work on it. While scraping off the original wallpaper from the sliding partitions, he discovers a tightly written text. His curiosity piqued, he begins to decipher it, offering us an account of a night spent with a geisha. A Japanese man, returned from Europe, recalls a love affair that happened to him in Berlin. In a first-person journal, he confides the adventures of those few days and the two nights of love spent with a young German girl. Written in the early 1920s, banned by censorship and published secretly, these are two erotic tales attributed to major writers of modern Japanese literature, Kafû and Akutagawa.