Women of the Pleasure Quarters: The Secret History of the Geisha - Lesley Downer - Hardcover - 1 ED

chapter 1 japan before the geisha High-class Courtesans and the Culture of Desire Because they fall we love them the cherry blossoms. In this floating world, does anything endure? Ariwara no Narihira (823880) The City of Purple Hills and Crystal Streams More than a thousand years ago, long before geisha were even thought of, Kyoto was the center of an extraordinarily effete, decadent, and promiscuous culture which transformed love into an art form and beauty into a cult. Centuries later, when pleasure quarters were built where men could transcend their everyday lives and imagine themselves noblemen of leisure, the courtesans and geisha modeled the dreams which they sold on the romantic culture of the Heian princes. The Heian period lasted from 794 to 1195, the time of the Vikings, King Canute, and William the Conqueror. It began with the construction of a beautiful new capital in an auspicious location, a wide bowl-shaped valley surrounded by tree-clad hills, with sparkling rivers bordering it to each side. The official name was Heian-kyo, the Capital of Peace and Tranquility. Poets called it the City of Purple Hills and Crystal Streams; we know it as Kyoto. There a city grew up of vermilion-painted palaces, slender-pillared temples, and spacious mansions of wood with wattled roofs. Noblemen and princes rumbled up and down the broad mud-paved boulevards in the shadow of the overhanging willows, in lavishly decorated oxcarts attended by retinues of liveried outriders. Under the rule of the emperor and his all-powerful ministers of state, the Fujiwara family, the country basked in three centuries of peace and prosperity. For the pampered aristocrats of the Heian court, it was a time of unending leisure which they filled with the pursuit of art and beauty. They spent their days moon-viewing, mixing incense, writing poems, and playing the game of love. In this strange hothouse world, women lived their lives away from the sight of men, hidden in a kind of purdah in windowless unheated houses, shadowy by day and lit with oil lamps and tapers by night. When men came to visit they received them sitting behind latticed screens draped with silk curtains or opaque hangings. When they went out, they traveled concealed behind the closed window blinds of their ox-carriages, though they made sure that there was always an exquisite silk sleeve trailing outside to hint at the beauty within. For within their secret world, the Heian noblewomen were articulate, literate, and highly educated. One, named Murasaki Shikibu, was the author of the world's first novel, The Tale of Genji, written around the year 1000, which recounts the romantic adventures of the charismatic Prince Genji. Several of the court women kept diaries in which they recorded their thoughts and feelings in extraordinary detail, leaving us very intimate accounts of what life was like for the aristocrats of those days. This was probably one of the most lax societies the world has ever seen. Promiscuity was the norm. Following the Confucian precepts which governed society, marriage was a purely political affair arranged by the parents to create an advantageous alliance between families. Love and marriage had nothing to do with each other. A court lady was more likely to suffer censure for a lapse of taste in the colors of her robes than for her numerous lovers. But what made the Heian period most extraordinary was the way in which art and the cult of beauty were bound up with love. For more than sexual desire or gut-wrenching passion, love was an art form, an opportunity to put brush to paper, to immortalize the moment in a small literary gem. Having heard that a certain lady was very beautiful or, even more titillating, had beautiful handwriting, a nobleman would sit down to compose a waka, a thirty-one-syllable poem, and brush itDowner, Lesley is the author of 'Women of the Pleasure Quarters: The Secret History of the Geisha - Lesley Downer - Hardcover - 1 ED' with ISBN 9780767904896 and ISBN 0767904893.