Edmond de Goncourt has written some charming chapters in his book about Outamaro, the Japanese artist, on the courtesans who live within the walls of Yoshiwara. He describes the quarter as containing fifty green houses within the walls and a hundred without the walls. They were established by the Emperor of Japan in the eighth century for the use of foreign princes, ambassadors, and wealthy merchants. The present walls were built in the seventeenth century. The girls, from all parts, are brought up like princesses, and taught writing, the arts, music, and the archaic language spoken by the court in the seventh and eighth centuries, which is now the language of the poets. The formalities of the suitors are three visits of ceremony, each with its ritual of good manners. A green house contains twenty first-class beauties and sixty second-class beauties. They sing, play, and write verses. These are a few translations which give some idea of their feelings:-- “It is only when both of us are looking at it that the moon is beautiful; when I am alone it makes me feel too sad.” “This evening who will share the sweetness of life, this floating body in the passing world?” “Oh, that the moonlight might shine brightly in the waters of this life [the courtesan’s], but the autumn moon on the other side of the clouds makes me long for it” [wifehood]. “Although I am nothing here, the moon lights up my heart with a ray of consolation.” “How often do I part from one whose shadow I shall never see again under the moon of dawn!” These little moon-women are not the only members of the sisterhood in Tokio. There are the geishas who dance and sing, and there are the old and abandoned; but the horrible sordidness of the red blinds and the draggled torn lace curtains one sees in the streets Charles Booth has coloured red in his maps of London, is absent.