Kanno Masayo, Miss One Thousand Spring Blossoms, is the loveliest and most glamorous geisha in all of Japan. Dick Seaton is a shy, handsome American whose business takes him to Japan to close a very big deal. In violation of a timeless taboo, Dick and Kanno spend slow, tantalizing days falling in love.
Miss One Thousand Spring Blossoms can be read with enjoyment on several levels, as a romance, as a cultural odyssey, or even as a clever presentation of mid-20th-century industrial practices in Japan. It succeeds on all those levels, but my favorite theme is the growth of the American protagonist Richard Seaton. The gentle love story between an American engineer encountering a timeless beauty (the geisha whose working name is the title of the book) provides an artful camouflage for the way Seaton falls in love with Japan and its timeless culture. He arrives in Japan with a preconceived notion of a feudal, even primitive, Japan which seems to be garnered from the way his task was presented to him by his employers Stateside. The contrast between American and Nipponese engineering philosophies is an even greater surprise to Seaton than his first encounter with a public bath.
