The Shortest History of Japan
From Mythical Origins to Pop Culture Powerhouse—The Global Drama of an Ancient Island Nation
The story of a small Asian country with extraordinary aesthetic traditions that avoided colonization and overcame the devastation of World War II to become a highly prosperous modern force, while preserving its unique spirit and culture.
In recent decades, Japan has been, in Lesley Downer’s words, ‘the embodiment of cool’. Cultural exports such as manga and anime have triumphed in the West. Yet how much do we know about Japan’s long and turbulent history? This concise volume brilliantly fills the gaps in our knowledge.
Downer covers a vast amount of territory […] shamans and shoguns, geishas and courtesans, samurai warriors and hard-headed businessmen, and shows how Japan became a ‘successful modern nation while also nurturing its ancient traditions, customs and culture.’
NICK RENNISON, Mail on Sunday
On the Narrow Road to the Deep North
‘Summer grasses –
All that remains
Of mighty warriors’ dreams.’
Lesley’s beloved first book now has a new lease of life in this handsome Eland edition – published under a new name, incorporating her mother’s maiden name to acknowledge her Chinese roots: Lesley Chan Downer.
In 1689 Japan’s greatest poet, Matsuo Basho, set out on a journey to the country’s remote northern provinces. Three hundred years later Lesley Downer followed in his footsteps. Walking and hitchhiking towards the Sacred Mountains with their legendary priests, she found herself in a world which many Japanese believe vanished centuries ago. On the Narrow Road to the Deep North was filmed by Channel 4 and WNET as ‘Journey to a Lost Japan’ and was the basis for a film by NHK, the Japanese national broadcasting corporation, entitled ‘Journey of the Heart.’ Shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book of the Year Award 1990.
The Shogun’s Queen
A woman’s Game of Thrones, set in Japan. The true story of Atsu, forced to leave the man she loves to marry the shogun and rule over the Women’s Palace, where three thousand women live in claustrophobic luxury and only one man can enter – the shogun. She is caught up in intrigue and jealousy as the world she knows begins to fall apart.
Lesley Downer’s romantic novel of 19th-century Japan is a brilliant blend of fact and fiction. The Shogun’s Queen is both gripping and historically accurate.
JONATHAN MIRSKY, The Spectator
And the sex is good, too.
The Last Concubine
Shortlisted for Romantic Novel of the Year 2009, translated into 30 languages.
‘From long ago
Though I had heard to meet
Could only mean to part
Yet I gave myself to you
Forgetful of the coming dawn.’
How do you fall in love when your society has no word for it? The Last Concubine is an epic love story closely based on historical events, chronicling nineteenth-century Japan’s extraordinary change from a medieval to a modern country. This is the story of a shogun, a princess and the three thousand women of the women’s palace – all of whom really existed – and of the civil war that brought their way of life to an end.
The Courtesan and the Samurai
‘Living only for the moment, giving all our time to the pleasures of the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms and the maple leaves; singing songs, drinking sake, caressing each other, just drifting, drifting; never giving a care if we have no money, never sad in our hearts, only like a gourd bobbing up and down on the river’s current; that is what we call ukiyo – the Floating World.‘
1868: In the Floating World of Japan’s exotic pleasure quarters, sex is for sale and the only forbidden fruit is love.
Hana is just seventeen when her husband leaves for war, leaving her alone and very vulnerable. When enemy soldiers attack her house she flees for her life across the shattered city of Tokyo and takes refuge in the Yoshiwara, its famous pleasure quarter. There she is forced to train as a courtesan.
Yozo, a traveller, adventurer and brilliant swordsman, returns to Japan after four years in the Victorian West to discover that the world he left behind him has been destroyed. He travels north to join his rebel comrades, but is captured during their final battle. Escaping, 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 …
Across a Bridge of Dreams
In the brave new Japan of the 1870s, Taka and Nobu meet as children and fall in love; but their relationship will test the limits of society.
1873. Taka, the daughter of a famous general and his geisha mistress, is just thirteen when Nobu, an impoverished lad from a defeated enemy clan, comes to work as a servant in her house. Sensing he is more than he seems, she is drawn towards him. But Japan is heading for a bitter civil war, driving them apart and threatening to turn all their lives upside down. She realises that she will have to make a dreadful choice – between her family and the man she loves …
A Geisha for the American Consul
My first ever short story e-book available NOW on Amazon.
The story of Townsend Harris, the first American Consul, who demanded a woman and was given Okichi, the most beautiful geisha in the little port town of Shimoda, where the shogunate had forced him to set up his consulate back in 1858. But how did Okichi feel about being billeted with a hairy smelly meat-eating barbarian who had no knowledge of the ways of love …?
Madame Sadayakko: The Geisha who Seduced the West
‘She is an opium hallucination of the Far East, elegant and fragile like an Utamaro print.’
The extraordinary story of the geisha who was the model for Madame Butterfly. Japan’s first actress, she became an international star in the United States and Europe at the turn of the last century. She danced before Edward Prince of Wales and President McKinley, was painted by Picasso and admired by Rodin and Gide and dined with the last Tsar of Russia. Puccini modelled Cho-cho-san on her, borrowed her music and reshaped his opera after he had seen her.
Geisha, actress, mistress – this is the story of a life lived passionately.
Geisha: The Secret History of a Vanishing World
‘When I see the first new moon
Faintly in the dusk
I think of the moth eyebrows
Of a girl I saw only once.’
To research Geisha: The Secret History of a Vanishing World, Lesley spent six months living among the geisha, shared their lives and slowly but surely felt herself being transformed into one of them.
This is the last record of a dying tradition and the definitive work on geisha, told through stories of historical geisha and the many geisha she befriended.
The Brothers: The Saga of the Richest Family in Japan
‘Talking about business – you have to go right to the gates of prison …’
The epic story of Japan’s rise to become one of the most prosperous and technically advanced countries on earth, seen through the lives, loves and rivalries of its most glamorous business dynasty. This is the story of two generations of the Tsutsumi family, famous in Japan as much for their hatred of each other as for their fabled wealth: the roguish father who built the family fortune, the illegitimate son who inherited it and the spurned legitimate son – rebel, poet, one-time communist.
The Brothers was named as one of The New York Times ‘Books of the Year’ 1995.