The year is 1853, and a young Japanese girl’s world is about to be turned upside down. When black ships carrying barbarians arrive on the shores of Japan, the Satsuma clan’s way of life is threatened. But it’s not just the samurai who must come together to fight: the beautiful, headstrong Okatsu is also given […]
Historia Q&A: Lesley Downer
Lesley Downer is a novelist and journalist who has written numerous books, both fiction and non-fiction, about Japan and Asia. She is the author of The Shogun Quartet, four novels telling the stories of four different women who are caught up in the cataclysmic events when the shogunate collapsed and Japan leapt into the modern western […]
Hokusai: Beyond The Great Wave
Lesley Downer visits the new Hokusai exhibition at the British Museum. The British Museum Hokusai exhibition is full of dazzling works yet The Great Wave still leaps out. Its strong, rhythmic, instantly recognisable lines have made it quite simply iconic. The froth of the waves, as Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, is […]
Desert Island Books: Lesley Downer
If I were stranded on a desert island I’d want to have five enormously long books, all worth reading, so gripping that I’d stop worrying about whether I’d be rescued, books that would cheer me up if I felt depressed about being stranded and that I’d want to read again and again. I’ve often thought […]