Having lived for 15 years in Japan, Lesley Downer has already written several highly informed books with Japanese themes. For her most famous, Geisha: The Secret History of a Vanishing World, she spent six months with those artful women who make every man they entertain with song, dance and chat feel adored, without — usually — going further than that. I found Downer’s novels readable but not especially memorable.
Now she has written a really good novel, suffused with the atmosphere of Japan in the late 19th century — when westernising influences were begin to penetrate its traditional culture — and populated with believable characters, whose fates are not settled until the last few suspenseful pages.
It opens with the end of the north-south civil war and the establishment of the western-facing Meiji regime, the emperor having moved from Kyoto to the new capital, Tokyo. Bitterness simmers between the victors and the vanquished. This is played out within the family of a retired (but still alluring) geisha, mistress of the commander of the victorious forces, and their daughter. The latter falls in love with a servant who, unknown to his employers, comes from one of the families defeated in the civil war.
The young couple’s prolonged and unconsummated affair is anchored in a world of samurai customs that is slowly being eroded. Keen to learn the new vogue, the two study English and French, eat beef — disgusting but modern — while with-it women abandon their once so sexy blackened teeth for white ones, and squeeze themselves into western clothes, tight and stiff compared to their flowing but outmoded traditional dress.
A fresh civil war breaks out when some of the victors, disgusted by the commercialism of the new regime and its loss of traditional values, turn on it.
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