Prostitution is a thing one has to go looking for to get even a glimpse of in Australia. Since I first travelled, I realised how aberrant this is, and I became fascinated with the implications of making what for many of us is sacred into something transactional. Prostitution, certainly in Asia, where its relationship with ‘normal’ society is more complex than in the West, and where great economic disparity can mean it is a thing that may be both enslaving and freeing, is a fascinating subject for fiction, and one my work has often taken up.
The Tale of Kieu is an early 19th Century epic poem and the cornerstone of Vietnamese literature. Adapted from a 17th Century Chinese novel, it is the story of a beautiful, well-to-do young woman forced into prostitution to save her family from destitution in a time of great government corruption and civil unrest. The poem is so revered in Vietnam that there is a popular branch of fortune-telling that uses it for predictions, and Kieu’s sacrifice is seen as mirroring the sacrifices Vietnamese have made in times of war and hardship, even across the centuries before the poem was written. The poem is bejewelled with beautiful lines, and presents a unique depiction of a woman who retains her dignity despite the many who try to rob her of it.
The Tale of Kieu is an epic poem in Vietnamese written by Nguyen Du (1766-1820), and is widely regarded as the most significant work of Vietnamese literature. In 3,254 verses, written in luc bat (6/8) meter, the poem recounts the life, trials and tribulations of Thuy Kieu, a beautiful and talented young woman, who had to sacrifice herself to save her family. To save her father and younger brother from prison, she sold herself into marriage with a middle-aged man, not knowing that he is a pimp, and was forced into prostitution.
Maupassant’s story takes its name from the chubby prostitute at its centre, nicknamed ‘Bowl of Fat’. At the time of Prussian occupation of France, a group of petty bourgeoisie, upper bourgeoisie, noble and religious people encourage her to offer herself to a Prussian officer in return for the freedom to travel through an occupied town to Le Havre. Through this short novel, Maupassant reveals the hypocrisy and moral poverty of those who sit in the layers of society above such outcasts as ‘Boule de suif’ and, by contrast, both the moral solidity and even innocence of the ‘fallen woman’ herself.
Henry-René-Albert-Guy de Maupassant est un écrivain et journaliste littéraire français né le 5 août 1850 au château de Miromesnil à Tourville-sur-Arques (Seine-Inférieure) et mort le 6 juillet 1893 à Paris.Lié à Gustave Flaubert et à Émile Zola, Maupassant a marqué la littérature française par ses six romans, dont Une vie en 1883, Bel-Ami en 1885, Pierre et Jean en 1887-1888, et surtout par ses nouvelles (parfois intitulées contes) comme Boule de suif en 1880, les Contes de la bécasse (1883) ou Le Horla (1887). Ces œuvres retiennent l’attention par leur force réaliste, la présence importante du fantastique et par le…
Yasunari Kawabata is one of the masters of Japanese minimalism, and his House of Sleeping Beauties is by far the strangest book on this list. It concerns a special kind of prostitution: a house where men pay to sleep beside girls – not with them – while the girls themselves are drugged to ensure they do not wake. Curiously, such houses do now operate in Tokyo (they are called ‘cuddle cafes’, though the young women, naturally, are not drugged). Old Eguchi frequents the house of Kawabata’s imagining, hoping to die while embracing a beautiful, sleeping young woman. The ending is extraordinary, and Kawabata’s ‘house of sleeping beauties’ sits on a precipice between beauty and ugliness, reality and dream, and at last heaven and hell.
Three surreal, erotically charged stories from Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata.
In the three long tales in this collection, Yasunari Kawabata examines the boundaries between fantasy and reality in the minds of three lonely men. Piercing examinations of sexuality and human psychology—and works of remarkable subtlety and beauty—these stories showcase one of the twentieth century’s great writers—in any language—at his very best.
I’m cheating a little here, as technically Kipling’s On the City Wall is a long story rather than a book itself, though I notice it’s recently been published as a standalone, and can be found in both Kipling’s Collected Stories and the original collection it appeared in, Soldiers Three. The story concerns a beautiful Punjabi courtesan called Lalun who welcomes ‘guests’ from all strata of society to her house on the ancient city wall of Lahore. Unlike the commonly depicted ‘fallen woman’, Lalun is a woman of significant wealth, great influence, and, especially, power over men. The story is full of wonderful comic ironies, lavish descriptions of a historical city, and the relationship at the heart of it, between Lalun and a fawning British official, is an enthralling study of matters romantic, spiritual and political.
On the City Wall is a short story by Rudyard Kipling. Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936 was an English short-story writer, poet, and novelist. He wrote tales and poems of British soldiers in India and stories for children. He was born in Bombay, in the Bombay Presidency of British India, and was taken by his family to England when he was five years old. Kipling's works of fiction include The Jungle Book (a collection of stories which includes "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi"), the Just So Stories (1902), Kim (1901), and many short stories, including "The Man Who Would…
I was originally put off this book by some of its critics – apparently, it was a lowbrow, sensationalist romance, full of idealised notions of beautiful prostitutes and East Asia. Today, when our literature is so heavy with fashionable cynicism, I welcome any attempt to celebrate beauty, and an ideal is a subject worth examining, as much as ‘reality’ (though I find the devotees of ‘reality’ typically put forth their own fantasies, the chief difference being that these latter are duller). The World of Suzi Wong offers a rich portrait of Hong Kong at one of the most romantic ages of the city. Also, the novel is a beautiful, simply told, humane story about the love between a man and a woman who come from two different worlds, the sacrifices love demands, and the redemption it offers.
Penguin Books reintroduces the timeless story of the love affair between a British artist and a Chinese prostitute.
Robert is t he only resident of the Nam Kok hotel not renting his room by the hour when he meets Suzie at the bar. She becomes his muse and they fall in love. But even in Hong Kong, where many white expatriates have Chinese mistresses, their romance could jeopardize the things they each hold dear. Set in the mid-1950s, The World of Suzie Wong is a beautifully written time capsule of a novel. First published more than fifty years ago, it…
The Darkest Little Room concerns a jaded journalist living in Saigon, who makes money out of blackmailing government officials, and who reluctantly follows rumours of abuse to a nightclub. At the club, he initially finds no evidence of anything extraordinary, but he meets a girl there who recalls a lost love. This girl becomes an obsession for him, especially after the night she comes to his room with wounds of the kind he was warned about when he began his investigation, only to have those wounds disappear shortly after.
I confess, I have always felt a little bad about the fact I set the book in Vietnam. The ‘darkest little room’ was a real place, but it was in Beijing, not Saigon – even then I cannot verify the abuses that were rumoured to go on there – I only heard about these in the talk of students when I was studying at Beijing Foreign Studies University. The one justification I can give for my choice is that I wished to re-create the mix of beauty and ugliness, of fantastical wealth and grim poverty, that I found in Saigon. So I set a story there that was not native to the place, but that seemed to me to leverage some of these essential qualities.
The Pact is a contemporary fiction novel about Australian sisters, Samantha and Annie, who are doubles tennis champions. This story amplifies the usual sibling issues and explores their professional partnership and personal relationships – similarities, differences, motivation, competition, abandonment, and grief – and how they each respond to the stress of constantly being under the media spotlight.
What happens when, at the pinnacle of fame, it all falls apart?
With dreams shattered and egos destroyed, how do they cope?
I have an older sister and although our rapport isn’t as dramatic, or as close, for that matter, I was able…
