Suguro is an eminent Catholic novelist, respectably married and on the cusp of old age. So when a drunken woman approaches him at an awards ceremony claiming to know him from his regular visits to Tokyo's red-light district, she must surely be mistaken. Yet with more sightings reported and a malicious journalist trying to expose him as a fraud, Suguro is forced to take a terrible journey into the city's seedy heart - and to confront his own long repressed desires. The Peter Owen Modern Classics makes available the finest work from an unrivalled international fiction backlist which includes Jean Cocteau, Shusaku Endo, Anna Kavan, Hermann Hesse and other stellar names of twentieth century literature.