A precise portrait of sexual enslavement that tends more toward primer than immersive plot.
The experiences of a country girl sold into prostitution in 1903 lay bare the established system and financial exploitation of the Japanese pleasure industry.
Shinonome is known to be the classiest brothel in Kumamoto, on Kyushu Island, and also, as was customary, became the name of the highest-earning, most desirable courtesan among the 80 under its roof. Fifteen-year-old Aoi Ichi has just arrived from a rocky southern island, and she’s placed into Shinonome’s mentorship and service. In debt to the bordello both for the money paid to her father and for everything she wears and consumes on site (at inflated prices), Ichi must learn her trade—to attract and please customers—as thoroughly as possible in order to earn her freedom. Murata, an award-winning Japanese author whose books have never before been translated into English, traces Ichi’s education and training in clear, simple prose, laying out the big picture—practices, punishments, financial underpinnings—and the more quotidian details: depilation, feminine hygiene, etc. Slowly, Ichi is transformed from an ingénue into a skilled escort, though never entirely shedding her bold instincts. Literacy is another important skill, and Ichi attends the Female Industrial School, where Akae Tetsuko, an impoverished woman of good breeding, offers a wider intellectual perspective. Taking on her own clients, Ichi finds continuing support among her peer group. But the brothel is essentially a harsh prison, and some of the girls, including one who fell pregnant, take flight, threatening its discipline. Then Ichi’s father increases her debt burden, and with strikes taking place in Japanese industry and the police changing their policy on enforcing brothel rules, the girls rebel and go on strike themselves. A mass exodus follows, drawing the line under a tale based, unsurprisingly, on true events.
A precise portrait of sexual enslavement that tends more toward primer than immersive plot.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9781640095793
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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