Lesley Downer

My great passion is Japan. My mother was Chinese and my father a professor of Chinese, so I grew up in a house full of books on Asia. But it was Japan, not China, that proved the more alluring. I have lived there on and off for a total of some fifteen years and written many books about the country and its culture. It has been an ongoing love affair.  I’ve wirtten books on my travels in Japan. To research Geisha: The Remarkable Truth Behind the Fiction, I lived among the geisha and little by little found myself being transformed into one of them.  Madame Sadayakko: The Geisha who Seduced the West is the story of the turn-of-the-century Japanese actress who was the model for Puccini’s Madame Butterfly.  Ten years ago I started writing fiction. My first novel, The Last Concubine, is an epic tale set in the shogun’s harem of 19th century Edo, now Tokyo. It’s the story of a shogun, a princess and the three thousand women of the women’s palace - all of whom really existed - and of the civil war that brought their way of life to an end. It was short listed for Romantic Novelist of the Year 2010.  My second novel, The Courtesan and the Samurai, is set in the Floating World of Japan’s pleasure quarters, where sex was for sale and the only forbidden fruit was love. It’s the story of Hana, forced to train as a courtesan in the famous Yoshiwara pleasure quarter, and of the samurai who she meets and falls in love with. I’m currently working on my third novel.  Besides novels, I write regular book reviews for the New York Times Book Review and the occasional feature for the Sunday Times Magazine.