A diverse cross-section of Japan passes through the bar Lui, and the bartender tends to them all, with all their hopes and their fears. Underneath the black suits—whether crumpled or designer—and the cosmetics, they're all people on the way to somewhere else in Tokyo's glittering boom era. The bartenders and Mama-sans who keep everything running smoothly rely on their own camaraderie, night after night. Winner of the 1975 Naoki Prize. Translated by Jim Hubbert.

Ryo Hanmura (pseudonym of Kiyono Heitaro, 1933-2002), born in Tokyo's Katsushika Ward, spent thirty years moving from job to job, including manning reception desks at love hotels and bartending in cabarets. He debuted as an author in 1962, but was little heard-from until 1971, when his Seiun Award-winning novel Ishi no Ketsumyaku (Veins of Stone) reintroduced him as a pioneer in the denki shosetsu subgenre of dark, often historically based fantasy. In 1975, he became the first SF author to win the Naoki Prize, with this non-SF novel. Throughout the 1970s, he produced new works at a furious pace, and continued writing SF, fantasy, and historical novels until 2001, earning the Nihon SF Taisho Award in 1988 and the Shibata Renzaburo Prize in 1993.

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