Yoru no Tsuru is Yoshiko Shibaki's novel set around a geisha house in Tokyo's Shitaya, tracing generations of women devoted to the arts and the emotional entanglements of mothers and daughters. Its careful view of downtown life and women's experience gives the prize-winning work its depth.

Through the years of women living around a geisha house, the novel quietly depicts kinship, art, and distorted affection.