Geisha call their world the karyukai, the world of flowers and willows. In the old days the ‘flowers’ were the flamboyant colourful oiran courtesans in their lavish kimonos; in woodblock prints they’re the ones with their hair bristling with combs and hairpins and ornaments. The geisha were the modest low key ‘willows’. But in the end the oiran disappeared and the geisha survived. There really is a geisha world still, separate from the world of everyday life. I was surprised to discover that the geisha I know in Kyoto and Tokyo know each other. Manami-san in Kyoto (see last blog post) asked me to send her regards to Shichiko in Asakusa, in Tokyo, and spoke with admiration of Kiyoha, in Shimbashi.

Please click on thumbnails below to scroll through the gallery:

With Shichiko-san, a taikomochi or ‘drumbearer’, a sort of jester, and an important part of the Tokyo geisha world.

With Shichiko at the entrance to the Nakamise, the long road leading up to Asakusa Kannon Temple, flanked by guardian deities.

With Kiyoha-san, a famous and beautiful geisha in the Shimbashi district whose speciality is Kiyomoto singing, just after she had performed at Tokyo’s National Theatre.

This beautiful poem was written by Isamu Yoshii.

I was happy to be in Kyoto to see the plum blossom. On my last night there I met Manami-san, until recently a famous geisha, at the rather high class restaurant which she now runs with her husband, Takanori Kajihara, who is a fine chef. They’d been together ten years but while you’re a geisha you can’t marry. If a geisha marries she has to give up being a geisha – which Manami-san did. While I was there one of those wonderful butterflies of the night that one sees flitting by on the street came in – 16-year-old Mamé-chan, Manami-san’s ‘younger sister’.

Please click on thumbnails below to scroll through the gallery:

Thrilled to have a chance to visit Aizu, which features large in Across a Bridge of Dreams. I’d wanted to come when I was in Japan last year but Aizu is in Fukushima Prefecture and not that far from the Fukushima Dai chi Reactor and – more to the point – the Aizu friends I was going to stay with advised me not to come, so I decided not to. But this year nothing was going to stop me! Having been freezing in Kyoto, I was just beginning to warm up in Tokyo. But the farther the train got towards Aizu, the deeper the snow. It’s Snow Country up here. We went to see Tsuruga jo – Crane Castle, Aizu’s beautiful white castle – in driving snow, and the house of Saigo Tanomo, one of the chief retainers of the Aizu lord. We also visited my friends’ grandfather. To reach the front door we had to climb through snow as high as the roof. I’d been told about it but never seen snow that deep before. Tourism here is right down. Even Japanese won’t come. The word Fukushima puts people off. But according to my friends radiation can’t cross the mountain ranges that divided Aizu from the power plant and it’s perfectly fine. It also has fabulous sake and great pottery!

I’m sitting at a low table in a tatami room in the little old geisha house where I normally stay, in Miyagawa-cho, just down the road from Gion. It’s somewhat low class – the lowest class of the five Kyoto geisha districts – and therefore friendlier. Every time I come to Kyoto I discover all over again how magical it is – the old wooden houses with bamboo blinds swaying and red lanterns glowing all the way down the road and geiko and maiko clopping by on high wooden clogs and tantalising little alleys snaking off between the houses. Last night I went to see an old Gion geiko called Fujitoku who was once a very famous maiko. Being in a geisha house is a bit like a pub – all the customers are regulars. In fact there’s a famous geisha phrase, ‘ichigen-san kotowari’, which means ‘no strangers’; if you don’t have an introduction you won’t get in, no matter how rich or famous you might be. Some of the geisha I know from my previous visits here to research my book on geisha, but in the case of Fujitoku the 90 year old lady at whose modest little inn I stay took me along, so I had an introduction.

I’m eager to find out what the area was like at the beginning of the Meiji period, when Across A Bridge of Dreams is set, when Gion was full of dashing young rebel samurai and geisha risked their lives to hide them from the shogun’s police; but it’s so long ago no one seems to know. I’m glad to see that nothing seems to have changed since I was last here – though it’s a poignant time to be here, just approaching the anniversary of the dreadful earthquake and tsunami.

Il Giappone e le sue tradizioni: una storia di amore e dedizione

Intervistare Lesley Downer, affermata autrice di saggi e romanzi di ambientazione nipponica, contribuisce a sfatare il mito-maledizione secondo cui il più delle volte l’immagine che ci costruiamo di un autore che abbiamo amato va a cozzare inevitabilmente con la realtà, facendoci uscire dall’incontro un po’ frustrati e disillusi. La Downer sorprende invece per la disponibilità e il desiderio di farci entrare nel suo mondo alla scoperta di una passione sconfinata per la cultura nipponica, a cui ha dedicato i suoi lavori.

Nata a Londra da madre di origini cino-canadesi, ha ben presto scoperto l’amore per l’Asia che dopo un primo viaggio in Giappone nel 1978 si è tradotto in una passione che non si è mai esaurita.

Tra ricordi, chiarimenti e anticipazioni del prossimo libro, ci conduce così in un viaggio dentro il mistero del Sol Levante. [...]

Interview by Debora Lambruschini

First published on 20 February, 2012

Click here to read full article on the Critica Letteraria blog

Lesley Downer: il fascino misterioso del Giappone – Invito alla lettura

[...] L’universo femminile è il cuore di tutte le opere della scrittrice inglese, un mondo popolato di donne caparbie e coraggiose che nei suoi romanzi lottano contro avversità e destino, siano esse concubine dell’ultimo shogun o cortigiane del quartiere di Yoshiwara. In un mondo dominato dagli uomini, le sue eroine trovano la forza di non arrendersi, di combattere per l’amore o per la libertà, nel cuore del turbinio della Storia. Romanzi quindi che non mancano di restituirci un affresco del Paese, della storia, delle lotte e delle abitudini quotidiane, colto sul finire di un epoca e di un mondo, per lasciare spazio a nuovi equilibri. [...].

By Debora Lambruschini

First published on 25 January 2012

Click here to read full article on the Critica Letteraria blog.

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 …

Forthcoming lectures:

Sunday July 17th

Festival of Living History, Kelmarsh, Northants.
11.40 – 12.40

‘WHAT WOMEN WORE – AND WHY’
Panel with Hallie Rubenhold and Laura Wilson – and re-enactors in costume!

http://www.thehwa.co.uk/content/festivals
http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/events/festival-of-history-2011/

Watch this space!

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.