Word: geishas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...quit offices to celebrate Osho Gatsu, the Japanese New Year. For five days virtually all work stopped while millions of Japanese slipped back into kimonos, and women spent painful hours at their beauty shops getting their hair pulled and greased in the old-fashioned style, now worn mostly by geisha girls. Although Japanese have celebrated Osho Gatsu for centuries, never since the war have so many poured out to the ancient Shinto shrines...
Nobuko, the lady of beauty, is fortyish, and lives in a fine villa by the sea near Tokyo. She is married to a wealthy financier, and possessively loves her young and only son. True, she must share her husband's affection with a common geisha in Tokyo, but she neither rants nor strays from the marital quilt. Proud of the firm body her husband neglects, she swims in the crashing offshore combers, or takes up the foils with her son's fencing master. Nominally a Roman Catholic convert, Nobuko finds her true religion in the classic No plays...
...foreclose the lady's world. Needing the gardener's quarters, she asks him to sleep off premises, and he commits suicide. The police curb offshore swimming, the No plays are closed down. To cap these indignities, when Nobuko's son falls ill, her husband's geisha flaunts her status by sending a get-well present for the boy. Nobuko, who almost never sees her husband any more, falls ill (tuberculosis of the bone). In nightly agonies of pain, she struggles with Death, "fighting like a child with only one weapon, talking to him in a lonely...
...half the prevailing wage scale, often as little as $10 a month. Yet, on the many occasions when Natsukawa's company has been haled into court, the girls have steadfastly refused to testify against him. Boss Natsukawa, a Buddhist who drives a Cadillac and gives the fanciest geisha parties in Tokyo, used to explain it all by the company policy he calls "K.S.E." (Kindness, Special Quality, Efficiency). "After all," he boasted, spreading his fat hands wide, "Ohmi has never had a strike...
...switch day, swarms of almond-eyed hostesses at Tokyo's splashy Kinbasha nightclub were offering their hard-earned MPCs for 10? on the dollar. One geisha house announced bitterly that henceforth it would do business "for the Japanese yen or the green American dollar only." An Army captain who had been trying for two months to sell his second-hand car for $2,100 was besieged by frantic Japanese car dealers offering him up to $5,000 in MPCs. In Korea the black-market price for $10 MPC dropped from 3,500 to 100 hwan by nightfall. Koreans pursued...