Strength in Words
Kiyoko Murata’s first novel to be translated into English explores the world of sex work in early-20th-century Japan.
WHEN AOI ICHI LEARNS that her father is coming to visit, she is delighted. The young woman — a child, really — hasn’t seen him since the previous year, when she left their village on the southern Japanese island of Iojima for a mansion in the city of Kumamoto. “There are lots of men/ but only one I love/my one and only pa,” she writes in her journal. She buys gifts for him to take to her mother and older sister and sweeps the street in front of her workplace with gusto. But he comes and goes without seeing her, “afraid to look his daughter in the eye.” He’s there only to sign a new promissory note with her employer borrowing more money against her labor, which is sex work.
Such quiet devastation weaves through “A Woman of Pleasure,” the first book to be published in English by the venerated novelist Kiyoko Murata (translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter). Like many of the women in this unflinching and humane portrayal of prostitutes in early-20th-century Japan, Ichi comes from a poor rural family; she is the daughter of a sea diver mother and a fisherman father — the latter of whom, desperate to make ends meet, sells her into prostitution when she is 15.
In a brothel in Kumamoto’s licensed quarter, Ichi finds herself under the wing of its highest-earning courtesan, or oiran, the impossibly elegant Shinonome. Tasked with training the younger girl in makeup, manners and grooming, Shinonome finds herself alternately frustrated and charmed by Ichi’s strong will, eventually developing a grudging respect for “the monkey child from the island.”
Before Ichi can begin to entertain customers, though, she must attend the Female Industrial School, where another veteran, Tetsuko, teaches the women of the “pleasure quarter” how to relinquish their “dreadful” regional accents and write elegant letters to clients. One of the novel’s more sympathetic characters, Tetsuko understands the stakes of these lessons: The better her students perform their duties, the sooner they can work off their debts and earn their freedom.
The depictions of life in the brothel are simple, merciless and deeply affecting. New workers are corralled daily into a room nicknamed “the inferno” where they are trained to please men, practicing on the house’s young, unwilling manservants as their peers look on. “Never in her life had she suffered as much as then,” Murata writes of Ichi’s turn. “Her vision had gone cloudy, her eyes seeming to shoot sparks as something inside her burned and charred.”
But even as the brothel takes Ichi’s innocence, the school empowers her with a means of self-expression: a journal whose blunt, poetic entries punctuate the story with private revelations of anger, grief and hope. In Tetsuko’s classroom, the novel also nimbly shifts into a broader register, exploring the larger forces shaping these women’s lives.
One example is the Livestock Emancipation Law, which technically granted prostitutes freedom using the language of animals, though it was never enforced. Like cows or horses, it reasoned, sex workers could not be expected to repay their debts. Even “New Greater Learning for Women,” an 1899 book by the writer and philosopher Fukuzawa Yukichi that extolled the study of physical education and physics for both sexes, contained a classist caveat: Working girls are “excluded from discussion because they are not human to begin with.”
This novel, of course, is committed to the opposite principle. Small rebellions bloom as the prostitutes grow more confident in their rights. Ichi and her peers find hope in organized resistance, with their collective humanity in the face of brutality forming Murata’s irrefutable and beautiful argument.