Today when the summer thrush
Came to sing at Heron’s Nest
I crossed the Bridge of Dreams.
Have decided on the title for my new book: Across a Bridge of Dreams. The ‘bridge of dreams’ is an incredibly resonant concept in Japanese culture – it’s our short human lives, a bit like the Anglo-Saxon concept of human life being like a sparrow flying out of the darkness outside into the Great Hall with its warmth and comfort and almost immediately flying out the other side. In the same way the image of the ‘floating bridge of dreams’ is an image of human life, as insubstantial as a bridge over which we pass from one state of existence to another. In Japanese culture it’s a very famous image. The Floating Bridge of Dreams is the title of the last chapter, Chapter 54, of The Tale of Genji (the world’s first novel, written by a Japanese court lady around 1000AD), though the words are never actually used in the text. To Japanese of that time the words would have immediately evoked the transience of human life.
The phrase was echoed in a wonderful poem by Fujiwara Teika (1162 – 1241):

On a spring night
The floating bridge of dreams
Breaks off:
Swirling round the mountaintop
A cloud drifts into the open sky

And in the sonorous opening lines of The Tale of the Heike, the great 14th century Japanese epic:

The proud ones last but a little while; they vanish like a spring night’s dream.

And it’s the title of a short story by Tanizaki Junichiro, The Bridge of Dreams, which begins with the lines I quoted at the beginning of this blog. Just to say ever since I came across these words and this image I’ve been haunted by them – and wanted to wrote a book evoking that frailty and sense of transience. In fact my new book is a love story, a tale of hopeless love set at the time of the Satsuma rebellion, sort of Romeo and Juliet crossed with The Last Samurai …

Heading for home after 3 weeks in Japan, just as the cherry blossom starting to fall. Chickened out and didn’t go north – though many friends have. It’s long exposure one needs to worry about. A short trip is fine. Instead went south twice – to hotsprings of Beppu, temples of Kyoto, and south again to Kagoshima with spectacular Sakurajima (volcano in bay) belching ash. Leaving the land of super efficient (and fast) trains, super clean streets, super friendly people and the world’s greatest grilled eel. Last meal of eel tonight!

In Kagoshima you can’t escape the enormous looming presence of Sakurajima, the craggy volcano which dominates Kinko Bay. It spews out black ash which hangs in the air above it; when the wind blows west it blows it over the city, when it blows east it blows it away from the city. There’s ash heaped in corners, blowing into nooks and crannies. It’s prime evidence of Japan’s incredible geological volatility. In fact what everyone was worried about was not an earthquake but Mount Kirishima, near here, which has been erupting for months.

To English eyes this geologically young landscape is quite thrilling – flat plains abruptly ending in sheer crags clothed in dense jungle-like foliage; and hot springs pour out of the earth. Spend my time morning and evening soaking in mineral rich water. Today remembered the rule that ‘hot is better’. The indoor pool was quite hot, enough to make me sleepy. But the outdoor pool – the rotemburo – with steaming water pouring out of the rocks, was so hot I had to have a think and take a deep breath before I dared put my foot in. I edged the rest of me in – fast is better – until I was sitting up to my neck, barely moving. If you move it scalds. Felt really wide awake! Tsukare toru, they say – it takes away your tiredness.

Back in Japan at last to research my next book – but what a time to be here! All the newspapers back home were writing of radiation risks, of water with radiation levels millions of times higher than they should be, and when I e mailed Tokyo friends one at least declared he was on his way out of the country pronto. Bankers fleeing, embassy staff being evacuated, airlines no longer flying here – and the UK Foreign Office Advisory scaring the wits out of me, saying essential travel only advised. Researching for book is not essential travel.

Decided to come anyway – after all Tokyo is a long way from Fukushima, 140 miles or so. And very glad I did. Tokyo is quiet, subdued but normal – though very sadly I did cancel my trip to Aizu Wakamtsu, which is very close to the crippled reactors.
Now in Kagoshima where the second half of my new book will be set. Also almost as far as it’s possible to be from the nuclear reactors – though every night on television there are harrowing scenes from up north. Photographs rescued covered in mud, car parks full of broken cars, people keeping up a brave face. It’s been freezing in Tokyo – and up north they have no heating. And have lost everything. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

So instead today have been exploring places associated with the Last Samurai – Saigo Takamori – who will form part of my book (though, as I’m writing fiction, I’ll change his name). He’s a total hero here, his huge bull-like presence everywhere. Saigo’s birthplace, Saigo’s house, the cave where he hid on his desperate last stand, the place of his death. I hope I’ll be able to communicate something of his enormous presence.

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 historical fact. It’s set – to begin with, at least – in Dejima, a fan-shaped island the size of a football pitch, just off the city of Nagasaki. Dejima simply cries out to be the subject of a novel. Twenty merchants lived there, theoretically all Dutch, though, given that the Japanese never saw any other white foreigners, other nationalities could easily have slipped in; and the kind of men that lived out their lives abroad tended to be men who had been pressganged as urchins and stayed alive by their wits. The Dutch East Indies Company ship which arrived once a year from Batavia (now Jakarta) was these men’s only link with the outside world. And when something went on out there in the big wide world – such as the Napoleonic Wars, when Holland was taken over by France and ceased to exist for more than ten years – the men marooned on Dejima had no idea what was going on. They only knew that the ship hadn’t turned up and therefore they had nothing to trade, no income and no escape.

Mitchell brings this all magnificently to life! It’s a wonderful book and I highly recommend it.

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 like the one that inspired WS Gilbert to write the Mikado. Fashionable women wore kimonos and were painted in them. As well as poets and artists, musicians too were inspired by Japanese culture.

Right at the height of the vogue for all things Japanese, an exquisitely beautiful ex-geisha named Sadayakko arrived in the US. She toured from the west coast to the east, then crossed the Atlantic and performed in England. At the Paris Expo of 1901, she was acclaimed as the star of the entire show. Debussy went to see her perform and shortly afterwards composed La Mer. She went onto be the inspiration for Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, along the way being painted by Picasso, admired by Isadora Duncan and dining with Tsar Nikolai II.

This July the Proms featured a programme of Japanese and Japanese-inspired music and asked me to talk about Sadayakko, the embodiment of Japonisme. Here is what I said.

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 very grateful for the review – but I have to point out that my book has nothing to do with geishas. A Spanish journalist also wrote to me: ‘Your book “Madame Sadayakko” was a success. Now you return to the topic of the geishas. Why are you so fascinated about this world?’ and ‘How was the life of a geisha in the Palace of the Women?’

Geishas and concubines have absolutely nothing in common other than being Japanese women.

The Last Concubine is about the concubines of the shogun, who were usually aristocratic ladies chosen to be the shogun’s ‘second wife’ or ‘third wife’ and hopefully to bear a son for him to be the future shogun. To be a concubine was a highly coveted honour and concubines were formally recognised in a ceremony much like a marriage.

Geisha and courtesans on the other hand were (and are) part of the demi monde. Geisha are entertainers – the word means artistes – who performed dances and songs to private gatherings usually of men. In old Japan they were at the very bottom of the social system (like actresses in the Victorian west – think ‘Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington.’) Traditionally they were not supposed to sell sex. That was the courtesans’ job and they were prohibited from stealing the courtesans’ clients. If they married they had to stop being geishas – geishas and wives were like opposite sides of the coin.

In other words, geishas, concubines and courtesans were entirely different, not just a catch all term for Japanese women, and not to be confused.

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 parlour performers – they perform not before huge audiences but at teahouse parties, in small intimate settings. It’s a tradition that we don’t have in the west. They are, if you like, celebrities – and like celebrities they may also have a love life. Yet for some reason westerners find the concept of geisha endlessly titillating. Whenever I give lectures on geisha and describe the rigours of their daily lives there’s always someone in the audience who gets up and asks if they’re prostitutes. Yet our celebrities can have a wild love life without being tarred with that brush. Another case of cultural misunderstanding?

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 granted and assumed was human nature. Is love, for example, ‘human nature’? Or is it a cultural concept?

Three points:

1 In the west the concept of romantic love was not developed until the middle ages, when troubadours sang the stories of knights in armour fighting for the favour of a beautiful lady.

2 In Japan conversely when western novels were introduced into Japan the translators struggled to get the right word for this strange concept ‘love’. Initially they phoneticised the word: ra-bu. (Say it fast and you get ‘love’ in a Japanese accent.) Eventually they put together old words to make one new one: reai. But to this day when you say to someone in Japanese ‘I love you’, you say ‘suki desu’. The same word as if you said ‘I like … toast’, or whatever.

3 It’s not that people in old Japan never felt that feeling – that madness. But they regarded it as just that – a madness, to be avoided at all costs. They didn’t hope and yearn to fall in love or even expect to fall in love. And it certainly wasn’t a condition for marriage. It was nothing to do with marriage.

So … ‘The Last Concubine’ is a love story – but I’ve tried to write it without ever using the word ‘love’. The characters do fall in love but they don’t know what’s happened to them. They only know it’s something strange!

Writing the book in this way has made me too think about love. People talk about it so glibly. But what is it?

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 to spend the night with her.  For more – much more – look out for my article in the Sunday Times Magazine on February 17th.