Peking, 1914. Eight-year-old Eastern Jewel, daughter of Prince Su’s last concubine, peers from behind a carved screen as her father makes love to a bound-footed servant girl. Overhead the gathering clouds foreshadow the end of peace, and the start of Eastern Jewel’s own tumultuous story. Eastern Jewel is an intoxicating heroine—a feisty, rebellious woman who refuses to accept mutely the docile, subservient role that early 20th-century Chinese society prescribes for her. Her early sexual curiosity sees her banished as a young girl to live with distant relatives in Tokyo, then forced into a passionless marriage in bleak, freezing Mongolia. Increasingly isolated, at night she is plagued by disturbing fantasies and unsettling dreams. But she is a bold, rebellious woman who refuses to be pinned down by anyone—least of all a man—and in the dazzling city of Shanghai she puts her thrill-seeking nature to work spying for the Japanese, spurning her Chinese heritage and everything she once held dear. Based on the real-life story of Yoshiko Kawashima, a fascinating but contradictory heroine who battled to juggle her extraordinary public life with her private paper demons, this is a stormy, vivid, and an utterly intoxicating tale of sexual manipulation and self-discovery that spans three countries and a world war.
The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel: A Novel
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Based on the life of a Qing dynasty princess, this engrossing debut gives the rebellious Eastern Jewel a sensuous, unsentimental voice that draws admiration despite remorseless selfishness. In 1914 Manchuria, the curious, headstrong eight-year-old is sent to live with her father's blood brother Kawashima, who adopts her and renames her Yoshiko. She settles into her new life as a second-tier family member, at odds with the stepmother she secretly longs to please. Precocious, rebellious and beautiful, Yoshiko loses her virginity to her adopted grandfather at 15 and is seduced by her adopted father a year later; her further sexual adventures eventually leave her sterile. Inevitably, Kawashima marries her off, to a Mongolian prince. Unhappy in Mongolia, Yoshiko escapes to Tokyo, where she becomes a professional mistress, and then to Shanghai. As Japan and China tumble into war, one of Yoshiko's new lovers recruits her as a spy; American reporter Jack Stone soon arrives to further complicate matters of loyalty and righteousness. This lush, challenging portrait of a woman who dared to make her own choices—bad though they were—in terrible, oppressive times also makes a steamy historical beach read. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Review
'Riveting - Maureen Lindley brings Eastern Jewel and her world vividly to life with a wealth of fascinating details in this captivating novel' Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans 'A breathtaking account of a ruthless and beautiful princess who betrayed her heritage to spy for the Japanese' Adeline Yen Mah, author of FALLING LEAVES
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Eastern Jewel's Private Papers should have stayed private.,
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This review is from: The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel: A Novel (Paperback)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
In `The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel' Maureen Lindley has managed to take the life of a real Chinese-princess-turned-Japanese-spy and turned it into a tawdry jumble of sexual escapades and self-centered whining. To take a life as interesting as Eastern Jewel's and render it into little more than a celebration of Oriental exoticism is disappointing, to say the least.
The first major problem is Lindley's narrative doesn't quite ring with authenticity. Her descriptions of people and places have a strange detachment; objects and clothing might be detailed exquisitely but people and their personalities come across as flat and two-dimensional. I feel like there were very few attempts to understand the Chinese, Mongolian and Japanese cultures, and really bring them to life in the novel. Instead, Asia serves an exotic background that enables the author to unleash one sexual fantasy after another. Eastern Jewel, later called Yoshiko in Japan, is too modern and too European in her ideas, so that one has to wonder how this personality would come about if she was raised first in a Chinese palace and later in a lax-but-still-thoroughly-Japanese household. She doesn't make sense in her settings and surroundings. She insists from the very first page that she is unique, an individual, an outsider, and different from other women. This book, supposedly a memoir she wrote while jailed for spying, has Eastern Jewel showing off her "worldliness" and sense of style, and it comes off as both arrogant and annoying. For example, as she speaks of servant: "Every day I sent her to the market for fresh flowers, as I hated to see even the smallest sign of decay on the lilies and the sprays of orange blossom that I favoured. I cared nothing for the extravagance and in any case I think that Miura sold on the day-old flowers to the nearby hotel that rented its rooms by the hour. As far as I was concerned she was welcome to the few coins she made from the transactions. I have always thought it a good policy to be a generous mistress. Envy and deprivation are the enemies of loyalty, after all." I don't know. To me she comes off as picky, spoiled, and utterly obnoxious to be around. It's really hard to get into a character who thinks she is so wonderful and wise, and also refuses to see any flaws in her approach to life. If I can't warm up to the character, and the plot has been shoved so far behind the main character's personality that it barely appears...well, I just can't enjoy the book.
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An Inward Journey,
By
This review is from: The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel: A Novel (Paperback)
This is very much a psychological exploration of a woman who is both formidable and vulnerable. I felt acutely Eastern Jewel's sense of loss and abandonment and her combination of tenacity and impotence.
I see that the reviews for this book are generally unfavorable, but I think I know why. The blurbs for this novel indicate that it is an historical epic about a Manchu Princess who was also a spy. This is true, but also misleading. The author's approach is very internal and tightly focused--I am not surprised that author Maureen Lindley was trained as a psychotherapist. The character of Eastern Jewel is viewed through her psyche. It is very much a character exploration through a personal and Freudian lens. When Eastern Jewel is banished from her own home in Peking as a child for spying on her father's sexual congress with a young girl, the seeds for her loss of identity are planted. She is sent to Japan, which becomes her beloved adopted country. She is then removed from Japan and sent to the harsh, frozen climate of Mongolia to marry a man against her will. By this time, she has already been forced to fornicate with an old man and her adoptive father in Japan, who is both brutal and sadistic. However, she learns to appreciate it, and to enjoy the power of her sexuality. Through sex, Eastern Jewel discovers her capacity to manipulate men in order to navigate through an otherwise circumscribed life. There is much pathos in this Princess of moral ambiguity who is determined to do more than survive. In a world where men reign and woman are second-class citizens, she vows to live a liberated, independent life and achieve a sense of personal identity. Additionally, her contradictory feelings toward the mother figures in her life are both heartbreaking and tender. She is a very complex woman with a passionate, vital nature. The erotic scenes in this story are not pulpy and vulgar--it is not a bodice ripper. Rather, her sexuality is her survival. The prose is sensuous and lyrical and never disingenuous. The fluidity of the narrative keeps the pages turning and the story compelling. This novel is not for everyone. It is not a detailed historical epic of many lives and it is decidedly not similar to Memoirs of a Geisha: A Novel. Rather, it is a profile of one rebellious woman's inner journey to survive and ultimately thrive by using her sexuality and her skill of spying to eclipse the constraints of her life.
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Soft eroticism by way of China and Japan,
This review is from: The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel: A Novel (Paperback)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Sexually repressed Westerners have a long tradition of imposing their fantasies on the East. To those who have not spent time there, the Asian countries are seen as a magical land, one of drifting clouds of opium smoke and smooth red and blue silks covering smoother skin, a land where everything is permissible and the darkest, forbidden desires can be acted out with abandon.
It was this same fantasy that caused Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres to paint his famous circular portrait of the harem of the Turkish Baths, a sight he had never seen and in truth lived only in his imagination. The technical term for this, as supplied by Edward Said, is Orientalism. Maureen Lindley's first novel "The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel" is dripping with Orientalism. Although claming to be based on the story of an actual historical figure, Aisin Gioro Xianyu AKA Kawashima Yoshiko AKA Dongzhen which translates into English as "Eastern Jewel," Lindley's versions of China and Japan are as much a fantasyland as Narnia and Middle-Earth. Many Western authors of Asian-themed titles tout their credentials in the author's biography, their expertise in Asian cultures and time spent living there. Lindley is simply listed as "Born in England and raised in Scotland," currently living in Wales. More tellingly still, in her acknowledgments section there are few if any Asian names (A single person named "Lee" is the only possibility), showing that "The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel" is merely a British woman's fantasy of a lifestyle and location she has never really known. Lindley admits she was first inspired to write about Kawashima during a brief glimpse of her in the Bernardo Bertolucci directed The Last Emperor. It is really too bad, because Kawashima Yoshiko was a fascinating character who deserves better. Adopted from her royal Chinese family at a young age, she was raped by her step-father and then, after a failed suicide attempt, began wearing men's clothing. A failed marriage to a Mongolian General's son ended in divorce after two years, after which she was recruited as a spy and propaganda agent for the Japanese. At one point, Kawashima was head of a cavalry of 5,000 reformed bandits, and lead charges against the Chinese insurgents gaining her the title of "Japan's Joan of Arc." As a champion of the Japanese military government, Kawashima was a villain to be sure, one who caused the deaths and downfall of many innocents in the name of Japanese ethnic cleansing and superiority, but she was an interesting villain to say the least. But all of this real-life drama was apparently not enough for Lindley, who cast Kawashima in the role of sexual adventurer, whose life is not defined by her accomplishments but by the long list of her lovers and the sensual nature of her clothes and lifestyle. "The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel" is pure housewife fantasy, almost a faux Asian version of Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, but with none of that books importance or impact. Lindley entirely fails to breathe life into any of her characters, who are mere one-dimensional stereotypes whose names are quickly forgotten. Anytime a male character is introduced by name, a sex scene soon follows. But even the sex scenes are too tame. Perhaps if Lindley had gone the distance and just written full-blown erotica, there would have been some excitement and pulse-pounding. But this is all euphemistic soft-core, with "snakes playing in caves" and other silly turns of phrases. Lindley's preferences are on display as well, as the male-male couplings and male-female couplings occupy several paragraphs while the single female-female tryst is barely commented on and then only in a perfunctory and obligatory manner. (All of the sex scenes do make for some incidental humor, however. While they take up a large percentage of the book, actual important scenes in Kawashima's life, such as when she became the head of the China Gold Mining Association merits only half a sentence, and is then barely mentioned again.) I could go on about this, as Lindley has written plenty to dislike here. Her writing style leaves a lot to be desired, and there are so many "I" statements (I went to..I wore...I saw..) that each use of the word "I" becomes like a little needle poking you in the head. But there are some little redemptions, so scenes that work and some imagery that is effective. The final paragraph in particular is striking, almost as if it was written by a different author. Readers who enjoy Oriental romance might enjoy "The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel." If all you are looking for is to be seduced by the fantasy of a world that never existed, one where you can smoke opium all day without becoming an addict, where the money never stops flowing and around every corner is a new book-cover man, perhaps a rough American journalist or a stern but understanding Japanese military captain, then this just might be the book for you. If you liked that other popular slice of Orientalism, Memoirs of a Geisha, but thought it needed a whole lot more sex and some guy-on-guy action, then this book should be right up your alley. If you are looking to learn more about the real-life Kawashima Yoshiko, I recommend Japan's Imperial Conspiracy. It is not the sensual pleasure palace you will find in Lindley's book, but real life never pleases in quite the same way as fantasy.
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