A temperate breeze swings through the surrounding willow trees as I pass jewel-encrusted ball gowns in the display windows of Ginza Takaraya, near Shinbashi Station in Tokyo. I'm scouting out Konparu-dori, a street named for the eponymous noh troupe that was gifted land here by the Tokugawa shoganate in the early 1600s. Konparu performers owned the neighborhood until the early years of the 1870s.

At the street's entrance, I discover a small monolith of soft orange bricks. An attached plaque informs me that, in the decade following 1872, much of Ginza — this area included — was transformed into a town of Western-style brick buildings designed by Irish-born architect Thomas James Waters. I recall that in 1872 a destructive fire ripped through Ginza — perhaps the government thought it wise to invest, as the plaque claims, nearly 4 percent of the country's annual budget, to rebuild Ginza with "modern" and supposedly fireproof materials. However, "Bricktown" was reduced to rubble and ash in the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, leaving only a small collection of intact bricks as mementos.

Entering the street, I try to imagine the demimonde world described in Kafu Nagai's 1918 novel "Ude Kurabe" ("Rivalry: A Geisha's Tale"), an age when Konparu geisha, borrowing their name from the noh troupe, entertained the city's elite. Modern concrete edifices, however, offer little reference to the gas lamps and romance of that time.