Word: yamata
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Author Yamata (Lady of Beauty) is quick to admit that some geishas are merely beautiful dumb brunettes. But the trio whose authentic life stories she tells in her spare, grave and yet oddly debonair book, were bright, courageous women possessed of enough tragic dignity to become enshrined in Japan's human legend...
...Lonely Singer. Okichi, the first of Author Yamata's geishas, has a special interest for Americans as a kind of lively skeleton in the U.S. diplomatic closet. Just short of 100 years ago, it was Okichi's destiny at the age of 18 to be assigned as paramour to 50-year-old Townsend Harris, first U.S. consul to Japan. Indeed, Harris, a white-thatched descendant of Roger Williams, threatened to break off trade treaty negotiations with Japanese officialdom until the girl was installed in his living quarters near the seacoast town of Shimoda. Long before she caught...
Nowadays Shimoda stages an annual "Carnival of the Black Ships" celebrating the U.S. opening of Japan to the West, and an actress assumes the honored role of Okichi. But, says Author Yamata, U.S. ambassadors do not stay to acknowledge that portion of the ceremony...
...geisha may be disappearing with the swift-changing status of the Japanese woman. But whether she prove phoenix or fossil, the geisha has found a compassionate historian in Author Yamata, a writer who knows how to highlight her heroines against the backdrop of theatrical restaurants and teahouses through whose sliding bamboo panels these sad gay ladies of Japan move to their discreet, historic and bittersweet rendezvous...
...sleazy cabaret, an ex-admiral who checks shipments at a soap factory, a black-marketeering student with a nose for yen and a yen for such un-Japanese customs as holding hands and kissing. Like identical beads, these characters are threaded on the same theme another Japanese novelist, Kikou Yamata, recently used in her spare and superior novel, Lady of Beauty (TIME, Aug. 30). The theme: Japan isn't what it used to be. In traditional Japanese style. Author Osaragi frequently confuses his writing hand with the long arm of coincidence. He arranges no happy ending, but he does...