Pathway to Japanese Literature

Discover Japan's stories—across time, across language.

Cheap HeadAuthor: Koyama Kiyoshi

Original Title	安い頭
Author	小山清
Genre	Modern Short Fiction
Author Type	Male Author
Summary	In the bustling streets of 1930s Tokyo, Ryusenji Town thrived as a vibrant hub near Asakusa’s temples and Yoshiwara’s red-light district—a place immortalized in literature and layered with history. By 1937, a young man begins his journey as a newspaper deliveryman, navigating narrow lanes where shopkeepers, artisans, and families reveal the soul of a community bound by routine and resilience. Each dawn and dusk, he weaves through Chayamachi’s pottery stalls, tobacco shops, and sushi counters, forging unexpected bonds with subscribers: a barber haunted by loneliness, sisters with fragile beauty, and a sawyer’s family radiating quiet warmth. Yet beneath these daily rhythms simmers the encroaching shadow of war—a force that will reduce this tapestry of life to ashes by 1945. Through fragmented memories of mahjong games, air raids, and fleeting kindnesses, the narrator reconstructs a vanished world where even a “cheap head” could find dignity in humble work. Here, nostalgia becomes both elegy and invitation: to wander a lost Tokyo where every doorstep holds a story waiting to unfold.