Eroshenko
by Lucy May LennoxPublish: Feb 10, 2025 Historical FictionBook Overview
Tokyo, 1915While WWI rages, half a world away, Tokyo is a hotbed of radical ideas, as cosmopolitan intellectuals and activists from around the world cross paths in a rapidly modernizing city. Socialists and anarchists, musicians and artists from Japan, China, Korea, India, and Russia all passionately advocate for a more just and equal world.
Blind Ukrainian Vasily Eroshenko is drawn to Tokyo in search of greater opportunities and respect for blind people. At a salon for radicals on the second floor of a bakery, he meets the anarcho-feminists of Bluestocking magazine, fearless women fighting for bodily autonomy and free love.
Kamichika Ichiko is a contributor to Bluestocking and the first woman reporter at the Tokyo Daily News. She is most at home among the Bluestockings who dress like men and engage in “sister” relationships. Yet she is drawn to Eroshenko and helps him publish his political fables.
As Eroshenko becomes a celebrated writer and public speaker, he becomes more outspoken in advocating for socialism, feminism, and disability rights, but the authorities will not long tolerate this disruptive foreigner.
Based on extraordinary, heartbreaking true events, Eroshenko is a wild fever dream of utopianism, polyamory, artistic creation, jealousy, and persecution, unfurling against the backdrop of Japan’s belle époque, called Taishō Romanticism. When high and low, East and West, old and new intermingled, these activists dreamed of a better world, trying to stem the tide of growing fascism.
