Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 147. Svetlana Boym also commented on the curiously parasitic relationship between past and present in nostalgia: “Nostalgics discover that the past is not merely that which doesn’t exist anymore, but, to quote Henri Bergson, the past ‘might act and will act by inserting itself into a present situation from which it borrows the vitality.’” The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 50.

10. Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 56.

11. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xv.

12. For a recent consideration of the state's control of contemporary sexual identity and practice, see Elizabeth Bernstein and Laurie Schaffer, Regulating Sex: The Politics of Intimacy and Identity (New York: Routledge, 2005).

13. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume One (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 4. It may, however, be more correct to say here that the demimonde was—at least according to the texts I analyze, particularly Kafû's Okamezasa—dislocated and circulated as a form of commodity, rather than contained and exploited for profit.

14. This was especially true by the interwar period, when the very genre of the Japanese novel was undergoing changes amidst the creative legerdemain of high modernism, which transformed it from a more or less strict, realistic form to an often fluid body of text without demarcations, so that the novel itself became a threatening agent for contagion.

15. Cecilia Seigle, Yoshiwara: The Glittering World of the Japanese Courtesan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993), 154.

16. Gregory Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 58.

17. Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York: Free Press, 1964), 141.

18. Ibid.

19. The term was first coined by Alexandre Dumas fils in his 1853 play, La Dame aux Camêlias.

20. Alan Tansman, The Writings of Kôda Aya: A Japanese Literary Daughter (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 2.

21. Miriam Silverberg, “The Café Waitress Serving Modern Japan,” in Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, ed. Stephen Vlastos, 217 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).