Shinjuku Golden-Gai

This guide to Shinjuku Golden Gai in Tokyo opens in the 1980s, when land speculators tied to organized crime tried to burn this tangle of alleys off the map. It reaches back to 1945, when a black market took root here, through the sex trade that ran upstairs until a 1958 law shut it down and turned every stall into a bar, and into the 1970s scene of writers and editors, including two winners of Japan's top literary prize, who argued literature there until sunrise.