The Courtesan and the Samurai
Japan, 1868: in the floating world of Japan’s pleasure quarters, sex is for sale and the only forbidden fruit is love.
Hana is just seventeen when her husband goes to war, leaving her alone and very vulnerable. When enemy soldiers attack her house she flees for her life across the shattered city of Tokyo and takes refuge in the Yoshiwara, its famous pleasure quarter. There she is sold into a brothel and forced to train as a courtesan.
Yozo, a traveller, adventurer and brilliant swordsman, returns to Japan after four years in the Victorian West to discover that the world he left behind him has been destroyed. Travelling north to join his rebel comrades, he is captured during their final battle. Escaping, he makes his way south to the only place where a man is beyond the reach of the law – the Yoshiwara.
There in the Nightless City where three thousand courtesans mingle with geishas and jesters, the battered fugitive meets the beautiful courtesan. But each has a secret so terrible that once revealed it will threaten their very lives …
Lesley Downer
Lesley Downer’s great passion is Japan. Her mother was Chinese and her father a professor of Chinese, so she grew up in a house full of books on Asia. But it was Japan, not China, that proved the more alluring. She has lived there on and off for a total of some fifteen years and written many books about the country and its culture. It has been an ongoing love affair. Read more…
