Book description
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 ...
Lesley Downer's
mother was Chinese and her father a professor of Chinese, so she grew
up in a house full of books on Asia. But it was Japan, not China, that
proved the more alluring and it was there that she lived for over
fifteen years. She has written many books about the country and its
culture, including
Geisha: The Secret History of a Vanishing World
, and
Madame Sadayakko: The Geisha who Seduced the West, and
has presented television programmes on Japan for Channel 4 and the BBC.
She now lives in London, but still makes sure she returns to Japan at
least once a year.
