The Nicholas Linnear Novels by Eric Van Lustbader

Author:Eric Van Lustbader [Van Lustbader, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4976-7782-1
Publisher: Open Road Media

TOKYO

AUTUMN 194?-AUTUMN 1963

IKAN LIVED WITHIN THE pale green and caramel walls of Fuyajo. The Castle That Knows No Night had been her home ever since she was eight years old.

That year, so long ago now, had been a time of ill omens and poor crops throughout the countryside. Bow-backed fanners had no money and little hope of making it through to the end of the year.

It is said in Japan that hard times are the best friend of tradition for it is during these periods that the people fall back most heavily on the ways of their ancestors.

And so it was with Dean’s family that year. Her father’s crops were no better than those of his neighbors, which was to say no good at all. It was as if the earth refused to release its nutriments that year.

The first Ikan suspected something serious was amiss was when she returned from the fields with a handful of reeds and saw her mother weeping.

The next morning Ikan was driven from the farm in a dusty, backfiring truck that smelled of cabbage and tomatoes, a small bag filled with the pitifully tiny pile of her possessions, the savior of her family destined for the precincts of the Yoshiwara.

Like many young girls throughout the ages before her, Ikan was to be sold into prostitution by her family in order to retrieve them from the indignity of bankruptcy.

Yet unlike the Western view, the Japanese view of prostitution was filled with nobility mixed with an odd poignancy. As he did with many other institutions, the Shōgun Ieyasu Tokugawa created the legitimate need for baishun, the selling of, as it is known in Japan, spring.

Because he was obsessed with his own power—the only force able to tame the multiple feuds of the regional daimyō that had kept feudal Japan in a constant state of civil war for years before his ascendancy—he required that each daimyō make a pilgrimage to Edo, now Tokyo, every other year, along with his samurai, where they would stay for a year. This sankinkotaiseido served two purposes. First, it cut into the daimyō’s solidification of his own power in his native ryochi and second, the long, often arduous trip helped deplete his coffers of accumulated wealth.

The daimyō and the wealthier samurai were able to avail themselves of the services of their mistresses. But the poorer samurai were forced to turn to prostitutes for, as Ieyasu himself said, prostitution was needed in order to negate the possibility of adultery.

In 1617, a year after the Shōgun’s death, a feudal lord in Edo petitioned the Tokugawa government to allow him to create a sanctioned area within the city for baishun. He found a desolate field filled with reeds, hence the name Yoshiwara. In the succeeding years, a different character was substituted for “reedy,” and the Yoshiwara became known as the happy field.

The original red-light sector was destroyed in a fire and in 1656 was rebuilt in the Asakusa district of Edo, where it remained until April of 1958.

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