Lesley Downer | Contributors to Slightly Foxed literary review magazine

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Lesley Downer is the daughter of a Chinese mother and Canadian father. She is a journalist, author, Japan specialist and inveterate traveller. Her books on Japan include Geisha: The Secret History of a Vanishing World, Madame Sadayakko: The Geisha who Seduced the West and four novels, The Shogun Quartet, set during Japan’s mid-nineteenth century civil war.

She has written for the Sunday Times Magazine, Wall Street Journal and FT and contributes to the Spectator US and the TLS. Lesley gives frequent lectures plus TV and radio appearances and is consulted on all matters to do with Japan. She presented the BBC2 cooking series, A Taste of Japan, lectured on The World, a vast residential ship, and recently lectured in Japan in Japanese. She was the historical consultant for Northern Ballet’s spectacular 2020 ballet Geisha and features in the Netflix series Age of Samurai.

www.lesleydowner.com

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

articles by, [21] 72; [70] 55; [74] 43

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Of Captains and Khans

Lesley Downer on Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game

Many years ago, when it was possible to do such things, I hitchhiked to India. I travelled through Iran and Afghanistan, saw the Great Buddhas at Bamiyan, and rode through the Khyber Pass on the roof of a brilliantly painted truck with my hair blowing in the wind. Later, as the world changed and carefree travel became more difficult, I came across Peter Hopkirk’s The Great Game (1990) and was thrilled to read about the adventures of the first western travellers to those regions in the nineteenth century.

Unravelling Burushaski

Lesley Downer on E. O. Lorimer, Language Hunting in the Karakorum

When I was young I thought I knew exactly where the real Shangri-La was. It was the land of Hunza, in north-west Pakistan, or if not, then Gilgit or Chitral, and those magical names remained with me as I grew up. Years later I was clearing out my father’s things and discovered a worn, spineless, much-used book on his shelves. It was called Language Hunting in the Karakorum. More years passed before I discovered where and what the Karakorum are and where my identification of Hunza with Shangri-La had come from.

All about Love

Lesley Downer on Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji

I grew up on the outskirts of London with a Dad who sat in a deckchair and read books in oriental languages while other dads mowed their lawns or fixed their houses. Our house was certainly in dire need of fixing, but it did have a lot of books in it. The rooms were lined with shelves of Chinese and Japanese volumes printed on rice paper, bound with silk and fitted into boxes, along with some translations. Among them was The Tale of Genji, ‘the world’s first novel’, as my Dad told me. The translator was Arthur Waley, a shy awkward man who never actually visited the East but who translated magnificently from many Asian languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Ainu and Mongol.

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