CHOISY (Maryse). & SAKAI (Kiyoshi) translator.

Gokuchu seiai kiroku. [A Record of Love in Prison].

First Japanese edition. 12 plates (10 photographic) 8vo. Original flexible boards in colour lithograph dustjacket. A fine copy preserved in the original publisher’s cardboard box (okuri-bako). 246pp. Tokyo, Fuzoku Shiryo Kankokai, 1931.

£650.00

Maryse Choisy (1903-1979) was a modernist French writer, a fighter for the emancipation of women, who in the 1930s took a strong interest in esoteric subjects and the occult. The present work is translation of L’Amour dans les Prisons [Love in Prisons], first published in 1930. Subtitled a ‘Reportage’, it is a study of the effects of prison-life on prisoners - in particular on their sexual lives - based on Choisy’s own observations. It is extraordinary that the book was translated into Japanese only a year after the Paris publication. In Japan it contributed to a popular genre in the 1930s that was characterised as ‘ero, guro, nansensu’ (erotic, grotesque, nonsense). Very rare. Only one copy in OCLC.

Stock No.
251137