Pathway to Japanese Literature
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| Original Title | 地図にない街 |
|---|---|
| Author | 橋本 五郎 |
| Genre | Detective & Mystery |
| Author Type | Male Author |
| Summary | A disgraced young man adrift in Tokyo’s shadows encounters a cryptic old vagabond who offers him food, shelter, and a tantalizing glimpse into the city’s hidden underbelly. Guided through back alleys and secret haunts, he sheds his identity like soiled clothes, drawn into a surreal world where meals materialize from union cafeterias, fine garments are traded at knifepoint, and nameless streets harbor lovers who vanish like smoke. But every gift carries invisible strings. As the old man’s “lessons” escalate—from petty cons to a week-long entanglement with an erudite beauty in a phantom neighborhood—the protagonist’s reality fractures. Years later, a chance theater encounter reveals his former benefactor and lover as aristocrats, their earlier personas mere masks in a cruel social experiment. Now confined as a madman, he unravels a web of manipulation spanning class divides and bloodline obsessions, where truth dissolves into power. Who orchestrated his fall? Was his forbidden romance genuine or engineered? And in a city that erases inconvenient lives, can madness itself be a carefully constructed prison? The answers lie buried beneath Tokyo’s cheerful facades—where every kindness might be predation in disguise. |
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