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Book The Courtesan and the Samurai

Download or read book The Courtesan and the Samurai written by Lesley Downer and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-04-13 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 ...

Book Yoshiwara

    Book Details:
  • Author : Cecilia Segawa Seigle
  • Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
  • Release : 1993-03-01
  • ISBN : 9780824814885
  • Pages : 352 pages

Download or read book Yoshiwara written by Cecilia Segawa Seigle and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1993-03-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Book The Courtesan and the Samurai

Download or read book The Courtesan and the Samurai written by Lesley Downer and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book The Last Concubine

    Book Details:
  • Author : Lesley Downer
  • Publisher : Random House
  • Release : 2008-09-04
  • ISBN : 1407033514
  • Pages : 482 pages

Download or read book The Last Concubine written by Lesley Downer and published by Random House. This book was released on 2008-09-04 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 ....

Book The Blade of the Courtesans

Download or read book The Blade of the Courtesans written by Keiichiro Ryu and published by Vertical Inc. This book was released on 2022-09-27 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Book The Nightless City

Download or read book The Nightless City written by Joseph Ernest De Becker and published by . This book was released on 1905 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book The Shogun s Queen

    Book Details:
  • Author : Lesley Downer
  • Publisher : Random House
  • Release : 2016-11-03
  • ISBN : 0593066863
  • Pages : 482 pages

Download or read book The Shogun s Queen written by Lesley Downer and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-11-03 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 . . .

Book The Tokaido Road

    Book Details:
  • Author : Lucia St. Clair Robson
  • Publisher : Forge Books
  • Release : 2005-11-29
  • ISBN : 1429935995
  • Pages : 643 pages

Download or read book The Tokaido Road written by Lucia St. Clair Robson and published by Forge Books. This book was released on 2005-11-29 with total page 643 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Book The Pure Land

    Book Details:
  • Author : Alan Spence
  • Publisher : Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
  • Release : 2007-12-01
  • ISBN : 0802197809
  • Pages : 436 pages

Download or read book The Pure Land written by Alan Spence and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “lively and epic . . . thoughtful and vivid” historical novel based on the true story that inspired Madame Butterfly and Miss Saigon (Publishers Weekly). The year is 1858. Thomas Glover is a gutsy eighteen-year-old in Aberdeen who grasps the chance of escape to foreign lands and takes a posting as a trader in Japan. Within ten years he amasses a great fortune, plays a huge role in modernizing Japan, and, on the other side of the law, brings about the overthrow of the shogun. Yet beneath Glover’s astonishing success lies a man cut to the heart. His love affair with a courtesan—a woman who, unknown to him, would bear him the son for whom he had always longed—would inform a tragedy so heartrending that it would become immortal. “Part thrilling adventure, part lyrical reflection, and characterized by Spence’s pure vision”, The Pure Land spans the feudal and the atomic ages, East and West, global history and the private passions of the Scottish merchant-turned-Nagasaki tycoon and hero (Sunday Herald). The result is “a page-turner of the first order. Not merely an engaging and vivid historical novel, but also a meditative work of art that is as finely honed as a samurai’s sword” (The Times, London).

Book Memoirs of a Geisha

    Book Details:
  • Author : Arthur Golden
  • Publisher : Vintage
  • Release : 1999-11-09
  • ISBN : 0375406786
  • Pages : 450 pages

Download or read book Memoirs of a Geisha written by Arthur Golden and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1999-11-09 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel tells with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha. Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the story of her life as a geisha. It begins in a poor fishing village in 1929, when, as a nine-year-old girl with unusual blue-gray eyes, she is taken from her home and sold into slavery to a renowned geisha house. We witness her transformation as she learns the rigorous arts of the geisha: dance and music; wearing kimono, elaborate makeup, and hair; pouring sake to reveal just a touch of inner wrist; competing with a jealous rival for men's solicitude and the money that goes with it. In Memoirs of a Geisha, we enter a world where appearances are paramount; where a girl's virginity is auctioned to the highest bidder; where women are trained to beguile the most powerful men; and where love is scorned as illusion. It is a unique and triumphant work of fiction—at once romantic, erotic, suspenseful—and completely unforgettable.

Book Samurai Rising

    Book Details:
  • Author : Pamela S. Turner
  • Publisher : Charlesbridge Publishing
  • Release : 2018-03-13
  • ISBN : 1580895859
  • Pages : 254 pages

Download or read book Samurai Rising written by Pamela S. Turner and published by Charlesbridge Publishing. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Minamoto Yoshitsune should not have been a samurai. But his story is legend in this real-life saga. This epic warrior tale reads like a novel, but this is the true story of the greatest samurai in Japanese history. When Yoshitsune was just a baby, his father went to war with a rival samurai family—and lost. His father was killed, his mother captured, and his surviving half-brother banished. Yoshitsune was sent away to live in a monastery. Skinny, small, and unskilled in the warrior arts, he nevertheless escaped and learned the ways of the samurai. When the time came for the Minamoto clan to rise up against their enemies, Yoshitsune answered the call. His daring feats and impossible bravery earned him immortality.

Book A Christian Samurai

    Book Details:
  • Author : William J. Farge
  • Publisher : CUA Press
  • Release : 2016-04-29
  • ISBN : 0813228514
  • Pages : 329 pages

Download or read book A Christian Samurai written by William J. Farge and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a close critical analysis of Baba Bunko's often humorous, but always biting, satirical essays a new picture of the hidden world of Christianity in eighteenth-century Japan emerges - a picture that contradicts the generally-held belief among Western historians that the Catholic mission in Japan ended in failure. A Christian Samurai will surprise many readers when they discover that Christian moral teachings not only survived the long period of persecution but influenced Japanese society throughout the Tokugawa period.

Book Sho  gun

    Book Details:
  • Author : James Clavell
  • Publisher : Blackstone Publishing
  • Release : 2023-12-12
  • ISBN :
  • Pages : 0 pages

Download or read book Sho gun written by James Clavell and published by Blackstone Publishing. This book was released on 2023-12-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic epic novel of feudal Japan that captured the heart of a culture and the imagination of the world, by the #1 New York Times bestselling author and unparalleled master of historical fiction, James Clavell After Englishman John Blackthorne is lost at sea, he awakens in a place few Europeans know of and even fewer have seen--Nippon. Thrust into the closed society that is seventeenth-century Japan, a land where the line between life and death is razor-thin, Blackthorne must negotiate not only a foreign people, with unknown customs and language, but also his own definitions of morality, truth, and freedom. As internal political strife and a clash of cultures lead to seemingly inevitable conflict, Blackthorne's loyalty and strength of character are tested by both passion and loss, and he is torn between two worlds that will each be forever changed. Powerful and engrossing, capturing both the rich pageantry and stark realities of life in feudal Japan, Shōgun is a critically acclaimed powerhouse of a book. Heart-stopping, edge-of-your-seat action melds seamlessly with intricate historical detail and raw human emotion. Endlessly compelling, this sweeping saga captivated the world to become not only one of the best-selling novels of all time but also one of the highest-rated television miniseries, as well as inspiring a nationwide surge of interest in the culture of Japan. Shakespearean in both scope and depth, Shōgun is, as the New York Times put it, "...not only something you read--you live it." Provocative, absorbing, and endlessly fascinating, there is only one: Shōgun.

Book Enter a Samurai  Full text and illustrations

Download or read book Enter a Samurai Full text and illustrations written by Joseph L. Anderson and published by Wheatmark, Inc.. This book was released on 2011 with total page 597 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Book The Strangeness of Beauty

    Book Details:
  • Author : Lydia Yuri Minatoya
  • Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
  • Release : 2001
  • ISBN : 9780393321401
  • Pages : 390 pages

Download or read book The Strangeness of Beauty written by Lydia Yuri Minatoya and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2001 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After several years in the U.S. a Japanese woman returns to Japan, taking along a niece raised in the U.S. The novel describes their adjustment to Japanese culture, different for each generation.

Book The Courtesan s Arts

    Book Details:
  • Author : Martha Feldman
  • Publisher : OUP USA
  • Release : 2006-03-23
  • ISBN : 9780195170290
  • Pages : 428 pages

Download or read book The Courtesan s Arts written by Martha Feldman and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2006-03-23 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Book Madame Sadayakko

Download or read book Madame Sadayakko written by Lesley Downer and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2003 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of Women of the Pleasure Quarters shares the story of the famous geisha whose life inspired Puccini's Madame Butterfly, from her training and participation in secret geisha traditions to her defection from her lucrative career to marry the penniless actor and political maverick Otojiro Kawakami and her rise to international celebrity. Reprint.