Kiyoko Murata’s A Woman of Pleasure is a story of Japan’s pleasure quarters in 1903 and 1904. Fifteen-year-old Aoi Ichi grew up on a rocky volcanic island, “the sort of place where stumbling upon a folkloric demon would come as no surprise”. She always expected to grow up like her mother, a strong swimmer and diver who supports her family with the fish and shellfish she catches. But now, to support a loan to her impoverished family, she has been sold to an exclusive brothel in Kumamoto, a regional capital along an inland sea on Japan’s southern island of Kyushu.
While Ichi is the central character, the narrative sometimes shifts to the perspectives of her two mentors—the brothel’s top courtesan and its namesake, Shinonome, and her teacher, Testuko. Ichi’s diary entries, addressed to Tetsuko and in Ichi’s almost incomprehensible dialect, add color to each chapter.
English readers are more likely to be familiar with the world of Japanese pleasure districts through American author Arthur Golden’s 1997 novel Memoirs of a Geisha or the 2005 film based on the novel.
Life in Japan’s pleasure quarters had changed in the 65 years since the Meiji Restoration fundamentally reshaped Japanese society. The 1872 Prostitute Liberation Law was supposed to outlaw human trafficking, enslavement, and abusive contracts as violations of human rights. Brothels responded by adding new incentives for their workers to stay, including educational opportunities and bonuses for high earners. (According to translator Juliet Winter Carpenter’s note, the Kumamoto brothel owners’ association really did establish a school like the one portrayed in A Woman of Pleasure in 1901.) As a disincentive, brothel owners also set up intimidation campaigns against women who attempted to leave.
Ichi’s school teaches reading, composition, and calligraphy to enable the prostitutes to communicate eloquently with clients. (Ichi’s teacher, Tetsuko, adds that literacy allows the women to read their own promissory notes to keep track of their own debts to their brothels.) Ikebana, Japanese artistic flower arrangement, promotes their appreciation of beauty. Sewing helps them maintain their elaborate wardrobes. Morality is an expected part of women’s education in Meiji Japan. The school also conducts monthly examinations for sexually transmitted infections.
As Ichi’s teacher Tetsuko reflects, if the rustic women in her class had not become prostitutes, “they would have gone their whole lives not knowing how to write, never straining to find words to express the beauty of flowers.” A year into her stay at the Shinonome, Ichi realizes the new set of initiates don’t know yet that the Earth is round or that it orbits the sun. But despite the advantages of education, beautiful clothes, and full bellies, these women are—despite the law—trapped. Anyone who tries to run away is viciously hunted down. No one will admit what happens to the women who are caught. The brothel that holds a runaway’s debt will often retaliate against her family, sometimes by taking a younger sister in her place.
A Woman of Pleasure is everything Memoirs could have been and more.
English readers are more likely to be familiar with the world of Japanese pleasure districts through American author Arthur Golden’s 1997 novel Memoirs of a Geisha or the 2005 film based on the novel. Although it begins about 25 years later than A Woman of Pleasure and in Kyoto rather than Kumamoto, the elements of both books’ plots and settings have a good deal of overlap. A daughter is sold into a house of prostitution to cover her family’s debts. She lives in a city’s red light district. Contemporary political events change the world around her even as she struggles to come to grips with changes in her own circumstances.
Both novels are also rich in details about life in Japan’s pleasure quarters. A Woman of Pleasure, for example, details the naming systems of brothels, the ranking of various courtesans, and the minutiae of the women’s daily lives. It even describes the humiliating way new arrivals are inspected and placed within the brothel’s hierarchy.
Swiftly [a male staff member] toppled [Ichi] onto her back and with fluid motions parted her thighs, thrust a warm finger inside her, and then his hot sex. Ichi opened her mouth and softly cried out. It hurt.
The man moved his hips as if counting, one, two, three… and withdrew when he reached nine or ten. Then he motioned with his chin for her to leave. This was the inspection imposed on all girls purchased by the brothel.
Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha, though, is a deeply flawed story. He mixes the elevated world of geisha—who are primarily performance artists rather than sex workers—with the world of courtesans more like Ichi and Shinonome. Worse, Golden famously divulged the identity of the former geisha he used as a source, despite his promises to protect her privacy. Golden’s story also leaves its protagonist adrift in her own story, in which events happen around her, completely outside of her control.
A Woman of Pleasure is perhaps the best novel about Japan’s pleasure quarters available in the English language.
A Woman of Pleasure is everything Memoirs could have been and more. It is a feminist tale about empowerment and solidarity under difficult circumstances, built on real historical details.
The women of the Shinonome are treated as objects, yes. But they teach each other sexual “special techniques” as a means of maintaining their own agency. A courtesan can protect her physical, sexual, and psychological health by learning to guide a client as she wishes, rather than yielding to a client’s desires. At the Shinonome, the courtesans are taught to maintain the upper hand with techniques that are “precise, refined, delicate, and powerful”—utterly feminine and sensual, while also in control. Before Ichi begins work as a prostitute, Shinonome reminds her
Listen well. You mustn’t let a client do as he pleases with your body. Our bodies are our greatest possession. They are precious. Instead of having a client touch us, we touch him. And little by little, we lead him to paradise.
A Woman of Pleasure is also a story about solidarity between women put in a difficult situation they didn’t choose. They teach each other how to protect themselves. They wash each others’ backs in the communal baths. They pluck each other’s pubic hair to prepare for clients. At the novel’s climax, they plan for and execute a strike to protest not just unfair working conditions, but the very concept that they are property that can be bought and sold. ( “The Shinonome Strike”, too, is a real historical event. According to Carpenter, there is even a popular song written about it.) The futures the novel seems to promise for the escaped prostitutes are perhaps unrealistically happy—the novel’s only real flaw.
Beyond its historical and narrative content, A Woman of Pleasure also raises feminist concerns that were still relevant when the novel was published in Japan in 2013—and are still relevant today inside and outside of Japan. For example, Tetsuko is initially taken in by the ideas of Fukuzawa Yukichi, a historical Meiji-Era reformer who claims to support women’s rights. She enjoys his early assertions such as that girls, like boys, should study physics and other hard sciences. As she reads more of his work, though, she learns that he believes only a woman who “possess[es] refinement” deserves to be called “a proper lady”. He doesn’t include women who work in the pleasure quarters in his advocacy “because they are not human to begin with.” Even a man who claims to stand up for women’s rights can have beliefs firmly rooted in misogyny.
One of the higher class courtesans at the Shinonome becomes pregnant. Ichi spends much of the early part of the book wondering what it means to be a mother. For a superior prostitute, a pregnancy seems like “defeat” by “an ordinary man”. Perhaps pregnancy—sharing one’s body with another being—is always a defeat, although later seeing the courtesan affectionately cuddle her baby complicates Ichi’s feelings.
Finally, Shinonome and Ichi have a lengthy conversation about whether married women really have more dignity than prostitutes. Ichi’s mother is the primary breadwinner. She says to Shinonome
‘I’ll tell you this, my ma never asks for money from nobody.’ Her mother [is] not in bondage. ‘And she feeds my pa and us.’
Shinonome responds
Listen to me, [Ichi]. A prostitute entertains a client only for an agreed upon time… When that time is up, the client leaves. Then all there is for her to do is put away the futon in relief. The rest of her time belongs to her and so does her body. The way I see it, there’s nobody in the world as free as a prostitute…
Wives, on the other hand, have to wait on their husbands constantly. The husband pushes his wife down whenever he feels like it and doesn’t pay her a penny. She’s forced to bear children and work like a pack animal. Pack animals get no pay. All they get is a little food. How is your mother back home any different from a horse or a cow?
In Japan, where even today women spend an average of seven times as much time on housework as their husbands, Ichi and Shinonome’s argument is still relevant. (In the US, too, women spend an average of twice as much time on housework and caregiving.)
A Woman of Pleasure is perhaps the best novel about Japan’s pleasure quarters available in the English language. Filled with a cast of fully-realized women, it is a striking work of historical fiction. Many of the questions it raises are still as pertinent today as they were 120 years ago.