On a December morning in 1925, a newspaper journalist reported receiving 25 different handbills in an hour's walk in downtown Tokyo, advertising everything from Western-style clothing and furniture to sweet shops, charity organizations, phonograph recordings, plays, and films. The activities of advertisers, and the new entertainment culture and patterns of consumption that they promoted, helped to define a new urban aesthetic emerging in the 1920s.

This book examines some of the responses of Japanese authors to the transformation of Tokyo in the early decades of the twentieth century. In...