Blog

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

4 May 2010

Have just finished David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which I reviewed for the Literary Review. Total fabulous (unsurprisingly), a firework of a book that sparks and crackles along. You’re totally gripped from the very first page! Something that other readers might not know is that it’s also based very firmly in [...]

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Sadayakko, Debussy and the BBC Proms of July 24 2009

30 October 2009

Even before Japan opened to the west in 1853, westerners were beginning to discover Japan’s extraordinary culture. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth Japonisme was hugely in vogue. Across Europe and the United States, people filled their houses with fans, screens, blue and white porcelain, netsuke and samurai swords [...]

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Concubines, courtesans and geishas

9 November 2008

A reviewer of The Last Concubine in the highly respected Literary Review wrote: ‘The author, who lived in Japan for many years, has published non-fiction accounts of the lives of the geishas, and capitalises on recent Western interest in their esoteric, vanished world with her detailed depiction of Sachi’s life in the rarefied harem.’ I’m [...]

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Why are people so fascinated by geisha?

6 March 2008

The word geisha means ‘arts person’ – gei is ‘art or arts’, sha is ‘person’. Geisha are performers who spend five years – as long as a university course – learning to sing, dance, play musical instruments, act and make charming conversation. They are as strictly trained as ballerinas in the west. But they are [...]

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How do you fall in love when your society has no word for it?

15 February 2008

Various journalists have been phoning me up and asking me how it’s possible that in Japan up until the late nineteenth century there was no word for ‘love’. ‘Can that be true?’ they ask. One of the most fascinating things about Japan is the way in which it makes you question everything you’ve taken for [...]

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The Shogun’s Harem

28 January 2008

Not many people know that the fifteen shoguns had a harem much like a middle eastern seraglio (and, if truth be told, so did the emperors up until Hirohito).  The words every young woman in the shogun’s harem hoped to hear were ‘What is her name?’ – the code to indicate that the shogun wanted [...]

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