The Edge of the City: Young People Who Lived on the Red Line in the 1950s.

The Edge of the City: Young People Who Lived on the Red Line in the 1950s.

Postwar Tokyo. The front streets were filled with the fervor of reconstruction, while in the back streets lurked a relationship of silence and dependence. The red-light district, including Yoshiwara, Suzaki, and Hato no Machi, was inhabited by young men who lived with prostitutes, commonly called "hoodlums" or "pimps.

They were neither members of the underworld nor workers protected by the system. In between day jobs and gambling, they would sit on a woman's earnings, sometimes violently, sometimes whispering sweet nothings to her. The man entrusted his food and clothing to them, while the woman entrusted her loneliness to them. The composition of co-dependence continued to oscillate between exploitation and protection.

In 1958, when the Anti-Prostitution Law came into effect, the streets changed, billboards disappeared, and women lost their jobs. The men, too, had nowhere to go and were either sucked into gangs or sunk to the bottom of the city.

Their shadows, dwelling outside the system, were soon forgotten, turned into words of scorn and satire. But there was certainly an equilibrium between desire and love, life and silence. In those days, in the back of a room with flickering lights, they lived on the margins of the city with women.