A Woman of Pleasure (2024) by Kiyoko Murata

 Book Review

A Woman of Pleasure (2024)

by Kiyoko Murata

Translation by Juliet Winters Carpenter

  This is the first English translation of a book by Japanese author Kiyoko Murata, over there she's well known as the 1987 winner of the Akutagawa Prize, which is just about as old as our Pulitzer Prize.  What will be shocking to any reader outside of those extremely well versed in Japanese history is that this careful portrait of life as a traditional Japanese prostitute takes place in the 20th century.  The promotional copy emphasizes that this is base on real historical events, though it is equally hard to imagine a reader thinking that Murata was somehow making things up.   Murata's protagonist Ichi is a 17 year old girl from Okinawa who is sold to a brothel by her fisherman father.  She is then compelled to work off her father's debt as property of her father.  If that sounds like slavery to you, well, yeah, it sounded like that to many Japanese, and A Woman of Pleasure depicts the end of the period when women were forced to remain in debt peonage, even when they tried to leave and even after the national legislature/Emperor passed laws supposedly emancipating these women.

  Linguistically, much is lost in the English translation, since Ichi, a girl from the south (Iwo Jima as we know it in the US), speaks a dialect that is borderline incomprehensible to the main-islanders where her brothel is located.  Much of the activity in this book centers around an industrial school where the prostitutes are allowed to attend in order to learn to read, write and perform simple math.  Her teacher, herself a retired prostitute, also plays a protagonist level role in the plot and the scenes set in the school are narrated from her point of view.  Thus the culturing of Ichi- the process by which she is indoctrinated in the proper way to talk and write, is lost in the English language translation.

   What is left is a very good example of ways in which contemporary Japanese literature wrestles with the moral ambiguity of the Japanese past- this is a major theme in Japanese literature but rarely does Japanese fiction focus so squarely on the lives of such an oppressed class.  It's also true of Japanese literature that women authors have lagged behind in domestic and international recognition, so Murata finally getting one of her books translated into English is a good step in that direction.