Lesley Downer
Lesley Downer is an author, historian, and all-round Japan buff. Her mother was Chinese and her father a professor of Chinese, so she grew up in a house full of books on Asia. She ended up almost by accident in Japan and became fascinated by the country, its culture and its people. She lived there on and off for some fifteen years and often goes back. She has written many books, non-fiction and fiction, about it.
Lesley taught for four years on the MA programme in Creative Writing at City University, London. She was the historical consultant for Northern Ballet’s spectacular 2020 ballet, Geisha, and appears on Netflix in Age of the Samurai: Battle for Japan and in Pernel Media’s Sekigahara.
Lesley’s newest book, The Shortest History of Japan, is the gripping saga of 16,500 years of Japanese history, from the world’s first potters, through shaman queens, shoguns, samurai and the extraordinary Floating World of the Tokugawa Renaissance, to the dark valley of World War II and the economic boom that followed.
Her first book, One the Narrow Road to the Deep North, on her travels in the footsteps of the 17th century haiku poet Basho, has just been reissued by Eland Books.
Writing Unfamiliar History: the History of Japan
How to interest people in the history of a distant country of which they may know very little or nothing?
In her books, Lesley looks at Japanese history in different periods and different ways - as the background to travel or biography, brought alive as fiction and as more straightforward written history.
Lesley will talk briefly about the issues and challenges of dealing with history in these different ways, focussing on her newest book, The Shortest History of Japan, which pulls it all together. Along the way, she will introduce some of the qualities that make Japanese history different, such as the romance of failure, with stories of the heroes and heroines (and noble failures) who make Japanese history so seductive.