The Courtesan and the Samurai

The Courtesan and the Samurai PDF Author: Lesley Downer
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1409095452
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
1868. In Japan's exotic pleasure quarters, sex is for sale and the only forbidden fruit is love ... Hana is just seventeen when her husband goes to war, leaving her alone and vulnerable. When enemy soldiers attack her house she flees across the shattered city of Tokyo and takes refuge in the Yoshiwara, its famous pleasure-quarters.There she is forced to become a courtesan. Yozo, brave, loyal and a brilliant swordsman, is pledged to the embattled shogun. He sails to the frozen north to join his rebel comrades for a desperate last stand. Defeated, he makes his way south to the only place where a man is beyond the reach of the law - the Yoshiwara. There in the Nightless City where three thousand courtesans mingle with geishas and jesters, the battered fugitive meets the beautiful courtesan. But each has a secret so terrible that once revealed it will threaten their very lives ...

The Courtesan and the Samurai

The Courtesan and the Samurai PDF Author: Lesley Downer
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1409095452
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 481

Get Book

Book Description
1868. In Japan's exotic pleasure quarters, sex is for sale and the only forbidden fruit is love ... Hana is just seventeen when her husband goes to war, leaving her alone and vulnerable. When enemy soldiers attack her house she flees across the shattered city of Tokyo and takes refuge in the Yoshiwara, its famous pleasure-quarters.There she is forced to become a courtesan. Yozo, brave, loyal and a brilliant swordsman, is pledged to the embattled shogun. He sails to the frozen north to join his rebel comrades for a desperate last stand. Defeated, he makes his way south to the only place where a man is beyond the reach of the law - the Yoshiwara. There in the Nightless City where three thousand courtesans mingle with geishas and jesters, the battered fugitive meets the beautiful courtesan. But each has a secret so terrible that once revealed it will threaten their very lives ...

Yoshiwara

Yoshiwara PDF Author: Cecilia Segawa Seigle
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824814885
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Drawing on both historical and literary sources, examines life in the pleasure houses of Japan during the Edo period from the early 1600s to 1868. Among the topics are the origins, illegal competitors, the cost of a visit, the treatment of the courtesans, traditions and protocols, Yoshiwara arts, th

The Courtesan and the Samurai

The Courtesan and the Samurai PDF Author: Lesley Downer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780857572905
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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The Blade of the Courtesans

The Blade of the Courtesans PDF Author: Keiichiro Ryu
Publisher: Vertical Inc
ISBN: 1647292484
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
This Naoki Prize-nominated historical thriller marked the auspicious debut of late-blooming author Keichiro Ryu, who in five years made a name for himself as a master of period novels. In The Blade of the Courtesans, a young samurai by the name of Seichiro Matsunaga, trained in swordfighting by non other than the legendary samurai Musashi Miyamoto, finds himself in Yoshiwara (the pleasure quarters of old Tokyo), per Miyamoto's dying wishes. In Yoshiwara, Seichiro finds himself defending its denizens against what may be spies from the Yagyu Clan, including one young woman named Oshabu, whose story runs deeper than still water suggests. The Blade of the Courtesans is at once a quiet ode to human liberties in the face of political warfare and edge-fo-your-seat swordfighitng, a Japanese counterpart to the romantic adventures of the medieval knights whose chivalry is rivaled only by their prowess at battle.

The Last Concubine

The Last Concubine PDF Author: Lesley Downer
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1407033514
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
Japan, 1865, the women's palace in the great city of Edo. Bristling with intrigue and erotic rivalries, the palace is home to three thousand women and only one man - the young shogun. Sachi, a beautiful fifteen-year-old girl, is chosen to be his concubine. But Japan is changing, and as civil war erupts, Sachi flees for her life. Rescued by a rebel warrior, she finds unknown feelings stirring within her; but this is a world in which private passions have no place and there is not even a word for 'love'. Before she dare dream of a life with him, Sachi must uncover the secret of her own origins - a secret that encompasses a wrong so terrible that it threatens to destroy her ....

The Nightless City

The Nightless City PDF Author: Joseph Ernest De Becker
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Prostitution
Languages : en
Pages : 506

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The Shogun's Queen

The Shogun's Queen PDF Author: Lesley Downer
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0593066863
Category : Courtesans
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
Only one woman can save her world from barbarian invasion but to do so will mean sacrificing everything she holds dear - love, loyalty and maybe life itself . . . Japan, and the year is 1853. Growing up among the samurai of the Satsuma Clan, in Japan's deep south, the fiery, beautiful and headstrong Okatsu has - like all the clan's women - been encouraged to be bold, taught to wield the halberd, and to ride a horse. But when she is just seventeen, four black ships appear. Bristling with cannon and manned by strangers who to the Japanese eyes are barbarians, their appearance threatens Japan's very existence. And turns Okatsu's world upside down. Chosen by her feudal lord, she has been given a very special role to play. Given a new name - Princess Atsu - and a new destiny, she is the only one who can save the realm. Her journey takes her to Edo Castle, a place so secret that it cannot be marked on any map. There, sequestered in the Women's Palace - home to three thousand women, and where only one man may enter: the shogun - she seems doomed to live out her days. But beneath the palace's immaculate facade, there are whispers of murders and ghosts. It is here that Atsu must complete her mission and discover one last secret - the secret of the man whose fate is irrevocably linked to hers: the shogun himself . . .

The Tokaido Road

The Tokaido Road PDF Author: Lucia St. Clair Robson
Publisher: Forge Books
ISBN: 1429935995
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 643

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Book Description
After the execution of her father, the young and beautiful Lady Asano is in grave danger from the powerful Lord Kira. In order to save herself Asano must find Oishi, the leader of the fighting men of her clan. She believes he is three hundred miles to the southwest in the imperial city of Kyoto. Disguising her loveliness in the humble garments of a traveling priest, and calling herself Cat, Lady Asano travels the fabled Tokaido Road. Her only tools are her quick wits, her samurai training, and her deadly, six foot-long naginata. And she will need them all, for a ronin has been hired to pursue her, a mysterious man who will play a role in Cat's drama that neither could have ever imagined. . . . At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Enter a Samurai: Full text and illustrations

Enter a Samurai: Full text and illustrations PDF Author: Joseph L. Anderson
Publisher: Wheatmark, Inc.
ISBN: 160494367X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 597

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Book Description
Looking back to the last years of the nineteenth century, veteran producer-director Joseph L. Anderson draws upon a monumental body of research gleaned from libraries and archives in seven countries to introduce the Japanese theatrical impresario Kawakami Otojiro. In 1899, Kawakami, his wife -- the inspired dancer and actress Sadayakko -- and his troupe went on epochal performance tours of the U.S. and Europe, introducing audiences to new forms of dramatic art and dance previously unseen in the West. Possessed of boundless energy and limitless imagination, Kawakami was a pioneer who quite literally viewed the world as his stage. In the closing decade of an all-too-brief life, Kawakami introduced major reforms of Japanese performance and the theatre business. Scholarly, witty, and filled with fascinating insights into the culture and conventions of fin de siecle America, Europe, and Japan, Enter a Samurai opens a door into a little-known, yet vitally important era of modern theatrical history. About the Author Joseph L. Anderson has been enjoying Japanese and American plays and films for over seven decades. During the 1950s and 1960s he wrote for and was an editorial board member on many little film magazines. Later, as professor of film in the Ohio University College of Fine Arts and adjunct in its Comparative Arts doctoral program in the early 1960s, he pioneered university-level studies of Japanese cinema. He has a BA in history from Antioch College and an MA from Ohio State University, and he was a language student at ICU, Tokyo. Anderson is the principal coauthor of The Japanese Film: Art and Industry (in print for fifty years). Anderson was chief advisor for the Tokyo Broadcasting System academic program in Japanese Broadcasting, Media, and Culture and taught at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. He has been an assistant director and dialogue coach on American feature films shot in Japan as well as a director of documentary films, a Variety stringer, and a writer of subtitles for Japanese films. In Hollywood and at WGBH Boston, he developed computer-generated subtitles for feature motion pictures (the technique in use today). During his career, he directed two independent American feature films, was an outside producer for ABC and CBS news specials, director of special projects at the [American] Art Theatre Guild, Mid-West producer for the Candid Camera Company, a puppeteer, a neophyte comedian in burlesque, an actor in lesser touring companies, director of a children's theatre, and an English language benshi (live narrator of Japanese silent films). In his teens he was a professional scenic artist, stage carpenter, and minor actor with several Equity summer stock theatres. Anderson is now a retired vice president of WGBH Boston, the organization that for several decades has produced more than a fourth of the television programs seen nationwide on PBS. In 1989, he received the Japan Prize (Nihonsho) for WGBH and was a Japan Foundation senior fellow in 1975.

The Courtesan's Arts

The Courtesan's Arts PDF Author: Martha Feldman
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 9780195170290
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
Courtesans, hetaeras, tawaif-s, ji-s--these women have exchanged artistic graces, elevated conversation, and sexual favors with male patrons throughout history and around the world. In Ming dynasty China and early modern Italy, exchange was made through poetry, speech, and music; in pre-colonial India through magic, music, chemistry, and other arts. Yet like the art of courtesanry itself, those arts have often thrived outside present-day canons and modes of transmission, and have mostly vanished without trace.The Courtesan's Arts delves into this hidden legacy, while touching on its equivocal relationship to geisha. At once interdisciplinary, empirical, and theoretical, the book is the first to ask how arts have figured in the survival or demise of courtesan cultures by juxtaposing research from different fields. Among cases studied by writers on classics, ethnomusicology, anthropology, and various histories of art, music, literature, and political culture are Ming dynasty China, twentieth-century Korea, Edo and modern Japan, ancient Greece, early modern Italy, and India, past and present. Refusing a universal model, the authors nevertheless share a perception that courtesans hover in the crevices of space, time, and practice--between gifts and money, courts and cities, subtlety and flamboyance, feminine allure and masculine power, as wifely surrogates but keepers of culture. What most binds them to their arts in our post-industrialized world of global services and commodities, they find, is courtesans' fragility, as their cultures, once vital to civilizations founded in leisure and pleasure, are now largely forgotten, transforming courtesans into national icons or historical curiosities, or reducing them to prostitution.