Our tale begins with an unassuming manuscript, bound in a simple black cover, lacking both a title slip and any indication of a title or the name of an author inside the book. Small in size, measuring merely 14.5 × 19.2 cm in a horizontal (yokohon 横本) format, the handwritten text sprawls across no more than 22 folios, the monotony of the black-ink brushwork interrupted at intervals by ten color illustrations, which closely follow the narrative inside. It is the designation "top secret" (shinpi 深秘) in the handwritten colophon on the final page, dated Shōtoku 4 (1714), that first alerts the modern reader to the "classified" and risqué nature of the contents.

Although now cataloged at Yale under the provisional title Shudō tsuya monogatari 衆道通夜物語 (A Boys' Love Tale of All-Night Prayer), the manuscript would perhaps not have been known to contemporary readers by this name. It was also not the concept of shudō (love of youths) per se that would have made its content offensive and "secret" in early eighteenth-century Japan, where stories of male same-sex love circulated freely in the popular fiction and theater that emanated from the large urban centers.

So why then this rhetoric of secrecy and air of the forbidden surrounding this manuscript? To discover the reason, we need to delve into the world of its story.

As such, the story takes us to a specific place at a specific time and features a set of characters with whom the writer may have been familiar. Penned at the beginning of the year Shōtoku 4, the manuscript captured the events in writing a mere couple of months after Genta's untimely demise in the tenth month of the preceding year (1713). The setting is Yonezawa domain in the northwestern province of Dewa (present-day Yamagata Prefecture), a fiefdom of roughly 150,000 koku ruled by the illustrious and once powerful Uesugi family. The Uesugi had found themselves on the wrong side of history opposing the victorious future shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu at the decisive Battle of Sekigahara in 1600.

With the Tokugawa family solidifying their position as the architects of the early modern landscape of power, the Uesugi were reduced to an eighth of their original income with nothing more than this northern fiefdom plagued by harsh climatic conditions, low agricultural productivity, and poor connections to national transportation routes. Yonezawa domain is known to modern historians for its highly successful economic reforms in the late eighteenth century, which revived domain finances through an emphasis on sericulture and silk reeling. Yet at the time of our story in the early 1700s it was a financially struggling fief, in which its rulers had to regularly reduce and "borrow" from the stipends of its samurai retainers (such as Genta), the lower ranks of whom could barely subsist on their meager incomes.