Lesley Downer’s personal blog
Starting a month of lectures with a talk for the Japan Society North West in Liverpool. An enthusiastic audience with lots of interesting questions. I spoke on The New Japan and the Last Samurai, the real life background to Across a Bridge of Dreams – the extraordinary modernisation of Japan in the mid nineteenth century … Read more
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 … Read more
KanikakuniGion wa koishi Neru toki mo makura no shita no mizu no nagaruru No matter what they sayI love GionEven in my sleepThe sound of waterFlows beneath my pillow 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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more