Advertisements

Debauchery and desperation

THE PRIVATE PAPERS OF EASTERN JEWEL
By Maureen Lindley
304 pp. Bloomsbury $14

Reviewed by Dawn Kingsbury Attean

Eastern Jewel—Dongzhen in Chinese—was only eight years old when she caught her father, Prince Su, having sex with a fourteen-year-old girl. Disgraced, he banished Jewel to Japan to be raised by a political ally. Described as a wild and uncultured girl who was openly interested in sex, capable of cruelty, and rebellious to the point of stupidity, Jewel is sent away with the hope that she would be taught the manners fit for her station in life, which, though high, is still only that of a woman.

Maureen Lindley’s The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel, the fictionalized account of a Manchu princess nicknamed the Eastern Mata Hari, describes a life on the edge. Jewel is adopted by her Japanese host family and her name is changed to Yoshiko Kawashima. She desperately yearns for the love of her foster mother, who is unfairly cruel to this unwanted Chinese child. On her fifteenth birthday, she is raped by her foster grandfather. Yoshiko begins to understand that sex is a commodity and she barters with her foster brothers and their friends for sake and cigarettes. Before long her foster father is also taking advantage of her, and inviting his fellow soldiers and mercenaries to sample her charms. He is rough and abusive, and Yoshiko learns to associate the pain with enjoyment and security, which dramatically shapes her future sexual encounters.

Despite this tumultuous adolescence, Yoshiko falls in love with Japan and embraces it as her home country. She also falls for a handsome Japanese soldier who is among her gentleman callers. When she tentatively brings up the subject of marriage, he tells her he does not love her; she is too brazen to be his wife. To marry her would bring shame on his father’s house and break his mother’s heart. He also reveals that she has been promised in marriage to a Mongolian prince, and she is the last to know. Her grief is palpable:

I sank to the floor. A few minutes before I had been truly happy, now I was only too aware of how thin the membrane is that divides bliss from misery. In that terrible moment all the pain I had suppressed in my life flooded my body and I was wracked with sobs. In Yamaga’s rejection I relived the separation from my mother and my father’s abandonment of me. I had always believed I was happy to be beyond the conventions of society, but now I knew that I was a victim of them. The wounds I had seemed to suffer so lightly in the past came back to burn like vitriol, and I felt that I would never recover.

Brokenhearted, Yoshiko is shipped off to Mongolia to marry the itinerant prince. She is miserable with his nomadic lifestyle, living in tents among beasts of burden, and she schemes to run away and return to Japan. She succeeds, landing in Tokyo under the wing of a madam she met on the ship that took them to Japan. She employs Yoshiko, now grown and beautiful, to entertain the richest and most handsome men. As her reputation as a woman of royal blood, talented in the art of lovemaking grows, Yoshiko gets more requests from eager men than she can possibly fulfill.

Eventually, Yoshiko moves to Shanghai, where she becomes the mistress of a Japanese military attaché and intelligence officer who uses her contacts with the Manchu and Mongol nobility to expand his network, eventually serving as a spy for the Japanese Kwantung Army.

Private Papers has been criticized by some as being mispackaged “erotic fiction. ” Yes, there is a lot of graphic sex in this novel, and it comes in all forms—group sex, homosexual sex, oral sex, S&M. Yoshiko winds up in bed with nearly every man—and a few women—who cross her path. Likewise, there is a lot of drinking sake and excessive opium smoking. Readers might want to consider their own sensibilities before proceeding, but in my opinion, such debauchery not only entertains the reader but also serves to underscore Yoshiko’s desperation, the time in which she lived, and to what lengths she was willing to go to achieve her own ends.

Though Lindley’s work is clearly billed as a novel, there has been much debate over its historical accuracy. Lindley says Jewel is the daughter of Prince Su, yet other scholars report that Su is her grandfather. One thing most critics agree on is that the real Eastern Jewel’s life is shrouded in mystery. She is the target of sensational rumors; one can’t be sure if Jewel was a transgender or merely had a penchant for men’s clothing. I wasn’t too bothered by the apparent liberties Lindley took in her novel, which is similar in style to Lisa See’s Snow Flower and the Secret Fan or Su Tang’s Raise the Red Lantern. There is much enjoyment to be found in this book if one approaches it as a novel and not a historical treatise.

---

Dawn Kingsbury Attean works as a litigation paralegal to support her literature addiction. When not reading, Dawn also enjoys international travel, languages and linguistics, vegetarianism, animal welfare and motorcycling. She lives in coastal Virginia with her 'tweenaged son and four cats.

Copyright © 2009 by Internet Review of Books
Webdesign by Jasper van der Meer webdesignstudio | XHTML