Set in a former marshland far from Edo’s Nihonbashi district, it soon extended over many acres of tea houses, baths, theatres and courtesans’ villas. Yoshiwara, like many other pleasure quarters across Asia, was organized by a government keen on social control and tax revenues. Geishas is one of a hundred books Longstreet wrote, so one does not read it for either the literary insight of Donald Keane’s translations or the erudition of Ivan Morris’s The World of the Shining Prince. A painter, jazzman, Hollywood screenplay writer, at home in both Saint Germain des Prés’s Tabu and Harlem’s Cotton Club, he instinctively identifies Yoshiwara as the Chrysanthemum Vie de Bohème as he effortlessly conjures the kaleidoscope of senses which Yoshiwara offered its male visitors. Stephen Longstreet is the perfect American to reflect on the Yoshiwara pleasure district. In a similar way, the Longstreets’ Geishas and the Floating World is a delightful artifact for seeing Japan through the 1960s American, more especially male, gaze-so ineluctably male, in fact, it can be hard to identify what Ethel’s contributions might have been. The mid-20th century comic strip Terry and the Pirates, as cringeworthy as its artless racism is, tells us as much about the Americans of the era as it does about the Chinese.
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