In Sakuran, courtesans seek out money and love in a beautiful, cruel world.
By Ruth Folorunso
Anime is here to stay. Whilst not mainstream per se, Japanese animation and - to a lesser extent - comics have never been so visible and accessible in the ten years that I’ve been a fan. Megan Thee Stallion makes references to Naruto in her lyrics. I watched the adaptation of Jujutsu Kaisen in cinemas, and the room was packed. I can enter my local Waterstones and see shelves full of manga, which people are unashamedly browsing through. People come up to me now to talk about the anime and manga that they read and watch, not the other way around. It’s weird. Nice, and weird.
But my love of Japanese popular media has matured with increasing awareness of the context these works are produced in. Naruto and Jujutsu Kaisen are both shounen manga - manga aimed at boys and young men. They are published in the biggest shonen magazine in Japan, and are prioritised for translation. Their animated adaptations have garnered incredible amounts of international promotion and popularity. But this popularity - as fun as these shows are - doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and the industry’s hype of works for men (by men) is significantly more substantial than whatever it is they give to women artists who create for women. There’s a suspicious lack of girl’s and women’s manga - shoujo and jousei respectively- that receive the same amount of adaptations, promotions and notoriety; and fans and critics of manga believe the medium to be essentially male. There are no women in manga, so they like to say. There’s exceptions - Sailor Moon, the works of Ai Yazawa (Nana, Paradise Kiss), and Fruits Basket are very popular, but we’ve been talking about them for ages and I’d like us to move on.
And rather than moan, I’d like to recommend one that I’ve fallen for recently: Sakuran (2002), by Moyoco Anno. It’s legally translated, easily accessible in e-book format and a single volume long. It was published in a seinen magazine (adult male demographic), but Anno is a jousei author first and foremost, and Sakuran is entirely about women. It’s a serious period piece about oiran, 18th century courtesans, and no, it has nothing to do with Memoirs of a Geisha. Anno is one of the most esteemed comics artists in Japan, but very little of her work is translated, so let’s cherish what we have.
In Sakuran, the titular sakuran is an elision of sakura, the blossom, and oiran, the whore. In the 1750s, the oiran was the highest-ranking courtesan in Japan, trained in all its traditional arts. She could be found in three red-light districts: Yoshiwara, Edo (now Tokyo); Shinmachi, Osaka; Shimabara, Kyoto. She was expensive and rare - she had privileges that were denied the average prostitute - she could choose her clients and she often chose judiciously. But the oiran, opulent and dreamy as she was, could never leave Yoshiwara or Shinmachi or Shimabara. All the commodities in the redlight districts were to be contained within, to prevent the vices of the wealthy merchant classes from spilling out onto the streets. And in the walls of the pleasure houses, the oiran lived, died and one day, ceased to exist altogether. The real meaning of sakuran - as a word, not a pun - has nothing to do with flowers or women or sex. Sakuran (さくらん) is simply this: derangement.
This derangement is expressed through the highly contradictory, ironic world the oiran and her fellow sex workers operate under. The majority of the manga’s narrative unfolds in a “teahouse” in Yoshiwara, where Kiyoha, a high ranking courtesan, reminisces about her life and her path to becoming an oiran. In these memories, the business of casual sex is strictly hierarchical, guided by spoken and unspoken customs that dictate the interactions between client and worker. The oiran herself is elegant and cultured, but her world is violent. In Sakuran’s first chapter, a courtesan attempts to commit murder-suicide with her lover, who kills her instead because “he won’t die with a whore”. Beautiful young women are flogged for stepping out of line. And despite the oiran’s glamour, she is essentially a slave, bought and sold into the pleasure districts as a child. She earns a lucrative income, but this adds to her burdens - she must support the teahouse not only directly, but through sponsoring and training other bought girls into the profession, perpetuating the cycle of exploitation that she was raised in. Her money also makes her a target for men - oiran frequently take lovers who fleece them for their money and flee. She can only be freed when she is “bought out” - when a wealthy patron likes her enough to pay the teahouse to marry her. After the oiran’s death in the first chapter, the brothel turns to its other high-ranked worker to lead it and keep the cash coming. This woman is Kiyoha - rude, aggressive and vocal about her dislike of the pleasure district. But despite her protests, the first chapter ends with the prophetic words of Kiyoha as “the top oiran in all of Yoshiwara ''. And it is at this point that Anno turns backwards, into the past, and there we stay, right up to the last page. Kiyoha’s story is a circle, a closed line.
Before the brothel, she is nameless. When she is bought in as a maid, she is Tomeki; as an apprentice, she is O-rin; as a courtesan, she is Kiyoha; as an oiran, she is Higurashi. Tomeki bathes with the older prostitutes and abruptly realises that their naked bodies have a gender, and that their bodies will one day be her body, and she will be made to service men with it. So she runs, is caught and flogged. O-rin, only 12 years old, makes a friend in O-some, a fellow apprentice from another brothel. O-some is courteous where O-rin is crude, but both girls, stifled by the stoicism their job demands, promise “to cry only during those times when we are together”. O-some doesn’t live long - she soon dies of “plague” or suicide, and when O-rin weeps, she is told to save her tears for the clients. Even your private grief has net-worth and soon, Higurashi’s world-weary smile sends shivers down men’s spines. Tomeki runs, O-rin tries to escape through sisterhood, but all paths lead to the same conclusion. Seth Hahne, an illustrator, describes Kiyoha’s initiations as depetalling - rather than the more immediate, one-and-done deflowering - and I like it. Depetalling: the flower blooms, you strip it, it blooms again, you strip it again, and again, and again. Tomeki, O-rin, Kiyoha, Higurashi - again and again, endlessly remade for the purposes of business and men.
Kiyoha’s community, if it can be called that, is made of sex workers, children who will soon be sex workers, and their clients. These men are some of the most repulsive you will ever find in a piece of popular media because their repulsiveness is so banal. Many of Kiyoha’s clients knew her as a young girl; they have “invested” in her upbringing and are eager to “reap the rewards” when the time comes. They’re just regular old men; their demeanours aren’t monstrous. Kiyoha’s feelings towards them are never purely antagonistic and it’s this mundanity that makes them hit too close to home. The oft-heard sentiment, “she’ll be a beauty when she grows up”, becomes violent in the context of men given free rein to shape a world around their desires. This isn’t unique to the pleasure districts - when all has been stripped down to the skin, there is no more need for pretence.
But although the men in Sakuran are vile, the courtesans manage to love them anyway. The pleasure district is not a place for sisterhood. These women are in fierce competition for business, and companionship between them is fragile and fleeting. But they must find solace in their lives, so they turn to love - loving their clients, which goes as well as you would expect. The courtesans pursue doomed relationships with men who simply don’t love them. And in reaction, they make dramatic proclamations of devotion. Kiyoha smashes off the finger of a colleague, who sends it to her errant lover as a pledge of adoration. But the gesture is futile: he never returns to her. Kayleigh Hearn, a critic, describes these gestures as “performance, painful and ultimately empty”. But I disagree. The women know that they are commodities - that they would mutilate their bodies, their only source of income, to show their love hints less at a lack of genuine feeling and more at the desire to partake in love. And they cling onto it desperately when an aspect of it, even as a simulacrum, appears in their lives.
“Without love, you cannot live”, Kiyoha says. It’s a painful truth - but there is no recourse for the pain, no consolation and no happy ending, except acceptance and the onwards-motion of life. By designing the story around a foregone conclusion, Anno emphasises Kiyoha’s destiny - but also the inevitability that a woman will experience abject cruelty, and will live on. There is no other way. Kiyoha is told that her status as a slave won’t change in the outside world, and eventually comes to believe this. Her life is miserable and there is no escape to be found anywhere; all she can manage is dignity in the face of subjugation. And this double-bind resonated strongly with me - Anno saw enough similarity between the lives of 21st century women and the lives of 18th century courtesans to bring it to us. That these similarities still persist after all those years - to me, that is madness.
Sakuran is a story I return to because I find its frankness compelling. This trait is one of Anno’s many similarities with her mentor, Kyoko Okazaki. Okazaki wrote shrewdly and darkly about the lives of young Japanese women in the 1980s and ‘90s, during Japan’s bubble economy. Her manga were massively influential to the development of josei and it is in Anno, her protégé, that you see the clearest inheritance of that legacy. And I say this to stress that Anno’s work doesn’t exist in a bubble - she’s brilliant, but not necessarily an exception and there is a rich cohort of women thriving in Japan’s manga industry who are writing thoughtfully about their position in society. There’s Fumi Yoshinaga’s All My Darling Daughters (2003). For more recent examples, there’s the work of Akane Torikai (Sensei’s Pious Lie (2013-17)). Less provocative and more sweet are the works of Keiko Nishii and Mari Okazaki - but good luck finding them! None of Nishii’s works have been translated into English and Okazaki has one translated work that is incomplete. The historical disinterest of English-language publishers in licensing shoujo and josei artists affirms the stereotype - intentionally or not - that manga, as a medium and an industry, has no capacity for female voices. The works of these women are significant - Anno is practically a celebrity - and reading them is necessary to craft a fuller picture of manga as a whole.
Theoiran is no longer real. She was subsumed by the geisha (cheaper, solely entertainers) somewhere in the late 19th century, especially as her reputation devolved from that of an entertainer of culture and refinement to a sex slave bonded to her chattel house by debt and disease. Beyond Higurashi, there is little chance of a future. And yet, in the final chapter, Kiyoha refuses to mourn. After her last great escape, she is brought back and tortured for “three days and nights by water and fire”. But, defiant to end, she declares,“They didn’t catch me. I came back of my own accord.” In this moment, Kiyoha is speaking to the reader, looking them straight in the eyes and daring them to say otherwise. The narrative’s text is surrender, but Kiyoha resists. Don’t you dare pity me, is the story her body’s gesture tells.I struggled with the ending, with its melancholy, with Kiyoha’s eventual acceptance of her life. I struggled watching women tear apart themselves and each other over men. But even in that ending, there is understanding. Everywhere, women are fighting. We are always fighting, we have always been fighting. Our future often echoes our past back into us, and still we persist. What else can we do? Our lives are madness - yet still, we persist.
This is so interesting, fantastic piece!