Book Review: Women of the Pleasure Quarters
Women of the Pleasure Quarters: The Secret History of the Geisha
Lesley Downer
Look! A book about Geisha that is not Memoirs and that actually makes some sense! Wow, that IS new. Well, not really. Geisha have become something of an obsession amongst Americans and there are a number of books out there now about them. Most are bullshit. This one is not.
Downer tells the story of her time spent in Japan, trying to get into the secretive world of the geisha and the people she met there. She also tells the history of the geisha (and entwined around that, the history of sex workers) in Japan. While both are fairly interesting in their own right, her choice to tell the stories in interspaced chapters annoyed me. Just as an interesting part of her story was reached, we were interrupted by a chapter about geisha in the 18th century, and just as that was getting interesting, we are dragged back to Downer's own account, about which we have been urged to forget for the previous 20 pages. I see the point--no one would want to read the rather dry historical chapters on their own. Still, though, the approach was just so choppy!
The story itself is interesting, and Downer is to be congratulated for taking her subject seriously and writing about it with intelligence, compassion, and wit. She is lucky to have gotten the level of acceptance she had reached within the community, and it is good to know that, for once, a book about geisha is more research than sensationalism.
3/5
Lesley Downer
Look! A book about Geisha that is not Memoirs and that actually makes some sense! Wow, that IS new. Well, not really. Geisha have become something of an obsession amongst Americans and there are a number of books out there now about them. Most are bullshit. This one is not.
Downer tells the story of her time spent in Japan, trying to get into the secretive world of the geisha and the people she met there. She also tells the history of the geisha (and entwined around that, the history of sex workers) in Japan. While both are fairly interesting in their own right, her choice to tell the stories in interspaced chapters annoyed me. Just as an interesting part of her story was reached, we were interrupted by a chapter about geisha in the 18th century, and just as that was getting interesting, we are dragged back to Downer's own account, about which we have been urged to forget for the previous 20 pages. I see the point--no one would want to read the rather dry historical chapters on their own. Still, though, the approach was just so choppy!
The story itself is interesting, and Downer is to be congratulated for taking her subject seriously and writing about it with intelligence, compassion, and wit. She is lucky to have gotten the level of acceptance she had reached within the community, and it is good to know that, for once, a book about geisha is more research than sensationalism.
3/5