Murao sold the book across the counter, which is all a bookseller does; the man who bought it was a plainclothes officer, and that was enough to put Shigeyoshi Murao in a cell alongside Ferlinghetti. The poet wasn't charged. He rarely is. Obscenity cases land on whoever rang up the sale, because that's the person you can point at. Judge Clayton Horn cleared them both in 1957 — the gist of his opinion being that a book with any redeeming social importance can't be called obscene, and that you can't ask writers to swap every hard word for a soft one.
The object itself was small and cheap, the fourth of the Pocket Poets, black and white, meant to go in a coat pocket and come back out creased. I've two on the shelf at the moment; one's pristine and one's gone soft at the spine, and I know which I'd rather sell.
Horn wasn't an appellate grandee, Jun — a municipal court judge, writing for ordinary readers, and he set out his reasoning in a short list of points anyone could follow. The record shows the redeeming-social-importance test came straight out of Roth that same year, and he applied it about as plainly as it's ever been applied.
Customs grabbed the shipment coming in from England first, which is the best advertising budget nobody paid for. Nothing sells a small black-and-white pocket book like being told you can't have it.