Much of Asia can still be rightly described as displaying a "massage culture." Sex, nominally disguised as massage, is offered by the attractive but impecunious young to the better-off males in establishments that have, to local eyes, nothing disreputable about them. European men discovered this age-old phenomenon with a sense of disbelief - its equivalents had long been banished, certainly in Anglo-Saxon countries, under the various manifestations of Puritanism. Thailand went on to built a tourism industry on its immemorial leisure-time habits, while in Japan the ancient structures were modified only by the arrival of general affluence. This has led to nostalgia there for the old ways, and in particular a fascination with the lifestyle and traditions of the geishas.
Rivalry: A Geisha's Tale, fresh from Columbia University Press in an English version by Stephen Snyder, is the first ever translation of the full text of the masterpiece of the early 20th century novelist and short-story writer Nagai Kafu. An earlier translation was only of a commercial edition that didn't include long erotic passages added later by the author for a private printing - he knew in advance that they'd be unacceptable to the government censor.
Nagai Kafu is a fascinating figure. Originally an editor of literary magazines specializing in the newly-fashionable French naturalism, he abandoned that work in order to embark on a life investigating Tokyo's erotic underworld. This was partly done, no doubt, for its own sake, but it was also undertaken in a spirit of devotion to the ethos of the old, pre-modern Japan, the traditions of which Kafu felt were in part preserved in the teahouses and theaters around which the geishas and other women of the night circulated.
Rivalry is a wonderful novel, with clearly distinguished characters, a swift narrative style, rich descriptions and incisive analyses of feelings and motives. It's set around 1912, and evokes a capital city already equipped with telephones, newspapers, cigarettes and trams. There are stockbrokers, new sessions of parliament and year-end sales. But still defining the life in the pleasure quarters are the ways of the Edo period which had ended over 40 years before, so that geishas continue to preside over the tea ceremony, dress with astonishing formality, and entertain rich businessmen, initially at least with performances on the shamisen.
Kafu understands perfectly well that differences of money, and hence of power, lie behind the sexual games his characters play. The geishas are contracted to the houses they work out of, and one of their main ambitions is to find a patron who will pay off this debt and set them up in financial independence. But at the same time they are young and sensual beings, falling in love with kabuki actors of their own age even while conducting by no means platonic affairs with their older clients. This is part of the rivalry of the title, and it's the main character's love for a young actor that triggers the fury of her patron, Yoshioka, even though he's by this time become tired of their sexual relationship and is looking around for new pleasure elsewhere.
It's strange that a novel as good as this has remained unpublished in English in its complete form for so long. It's true that for many decades after the extended edition was published in Japan (in 1917) passages from it would not have been permitted in, for instance, the UK. There are by no means disapproving references to oral and anal sex, for example, and the writing in general has an open-mindedness about it that is extremely refreshing. Even so, it has been through Arthur Golden's 1997 bestseller Memoirs of a Geisha - also a novel, though cast as an autobiography - that most modern readers have gotten to know about the geisha traditions. Kafu's older classic, by contrast, will please aesthetes and lovers of genuine literature far more.
There's a long-standing tradition among Japan specialists of insisting that geishas were high-class entertainers most of whom would never allow the men they entertained to lay a finger on them. This is a long way from Kafu's view, and he was in an ideal position to know. Indeed, the description of one particularly outrageous senior geisha, Kikuchiyo, is so replete with sexual detail that I had to read it twice before I could believe my eyes.
But Kafu was no smut-peddler. At heart he was a lover of ancient Chinese poetry, like the writer Kurayama Nanso in the novel. Indeed, one of the characters he mocks most vigorously is Yamai, the editor of a new magazine specializing in pornographic photos. But then one of the attractions of this wonderful book is its range, even given its relative brevity and concision. There are as many different types of character, and of emotion, as there are in Tolstoy, even though Kafu's true masters were probably Maupassant and Turgenev, social realists with a sympathetic eye for subtleties of situation and nuances of feeling.
Kafu was an aesthete fascinated by sex, and predictably he had his own theory of desire. Whereas men of old sought to prove their masculinity in war or hunting, in the modern world they seek to do it by success in the fields of business and sexual predation. Yoshioka is his prime example of this, a handsome married man possessed of "an endless repertoire of obscene tricks," adept at concluding affairs, and endlessly seeking out new conquests "from girls of sixteen to women past forty." He finally finds his match in the frankly sensual Kikuchiyo.
Stephen Snyder is to be thanked both for translating this half-forgotten novel at all, and for doing it so compellingly. He is, incidentally, also the author of a critical book on Kafu entitled, appropriately enough, Fictions of Desire.
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
There is a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plot to put millions at the mercy of the CCP using just released AI technology. This isn’t being overly dramatic. The speed at which AI is improving is exponential as AI improves itself, and we are unprepared for this because we have never experienced anything like this before. For example, a few months ago music videos made on home computers began appearing with AI-generated people and scenes in them that were pretty impressive, but the people would sprout extra arms and fingers, food would inexplicably fly off plates into mouths and text on
On the final approach to Lanshan Workstation (嵐山工作站), logging trains crossed one last gully over a dramatic double bridge, taking the left line to enter the locomotive shed or the right line to continue straight through, heading deeper into the Central Mountains. Today, hikers have to scramble down a steep slope into this gully and pass underneath the rails, still hanging eerily in the air even after the bridge’s supports collapsed long ago. It is the final — but not the most dangerous — challenge of a tough two-day hike in. Back when logging was still underway, it was a quick,
US President Donald Trump’s threat of tariffs on semiconductor chips has complicated Taiwan’s bid to remain a global powerhouse in the critical sector and stay onside with key backer Washington, analysts said. Since taking office last month, Trump has warned of sweeping tariffs against some of his country’s biggest trade partners to push companies to shift manufacturing to the US and reduce its huge trade deficit. The latest levies announced last week include a 25 percent, or higher, tax on imported chips, which are used in everything from smartphones to missiles. Taiwan produces more than half of the world’s chips and nearly all
RSS