Review | A sex tour through Tokyo’s ‘pleasure district’ from the 1960s is a tale of sake and sordid reality
- Geishas and the Floating World is an ode to sex and Japan in the 1960s through an American’s eyes – a world where glimpses of glamour still exist
- Co-author Stephen Longstreet doesn’t shy away from the dark side of Yoshiwara, while depiciting it mainly as a sex factory behind satin curtains
Geishas and the Floating World: Inside Tokyo’s Yoshiwara Pleasure District, by Stephen Longstreet and Ethel Longstreet, Tuttle, 4 stars
The mid-20th century comic strip Terry and the Pirates, as cringeworthy as its artless racism is, tells us as much about Americans of the era as it does about the Chinese. In a similar way, Stephen and Ethel Longstreet’s Geishas and the Floating World is a delightful artefact for seeing Japan through the 1960s American gaze. However, this gaze is so ineluctably male that it’s hard to identify what Ethel’s contributions might have been.
Still, Stephen Longstreet is the perfect American to reflect on the Yoshiwara pleasure district. A painter, jazzman, Hollywood screenplay writer, equally at home in Tabu in Saint Germain des Prés and the Cotton Club in Harlem, he instinctively identifies life in Yoshiwara as an Eastern vie de bohème.
It is one of around 100 books Longstreet wrote, so readers will not pick it up expecting the literary insight of Donald Keane’s translations of Japanese literature or the erudition of Ivan Morris’ The World of the Shining Prince.
Yoshiwara, like many other pleasure quarters across Asia, was organised by a government keen on social control and tax revenues. Set in a former marshland, it soon extended over many acres of tea houses, baths, theatres and courtesans’ villas.