The ultimate price

Lesley Downer is one of the most unusual authors writing in English. Years ago, determined to become an expert on the Japanese geisha, ultra-sophisticated entertainers and hostesses who are neither prostitutes nor courtesans, she became a Kyoto geisha herself and wrote Geisha: The Secret History of a Vanishing World.

Now she has written her second novel (the first being The Last Concubine), the story of Hana, a young samurai wife in the late 1860s. She lives in Edo, soon to become Tokyo, the capital of Japan. The country is being ripped apart by civil war — vividly narrated here — and, no longer isolated, is adopting enough Western ways to escape the colonialism that afflicted most of the rest of Asia.

As in Downer’s previous books I noticed her careful research. But what we want are characters and a story. She shows us characters we come almost to love, while others are awful or ambiguous. Hana, only 17, is married to a ferocious samurai who beats and rapes her constantly, par for that world. Fleeing from her home to escape the colliding armies — her husband is far away, commanding one of them — Hana winds up in the Yoshiwara, Edo’s pleasure quarter where, at first to her shame, but soon to her own pleasure, she becomes a courtesan.

Before long, she is the most sought-after beauty in the Yoshiwara. She’s a vision. Thick with aromatic pomade, her hair is piled into ‘towering loops and coils, smooth and shiny as polished lacquer.’ Her teeth are a sexy black, soft white wax covers her throat, face and chest, and she is dusted with clouds of white rice powder. Only the nape of her neck is left naked, a reverse décolletage that drives men crazy.