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.