It is 1914 in Peking, China, and eight-year-old princess Eastern Jewel has just been shipped off from her household and sent to live with her father’s relatives in Japan and renamed Yoshiko Kawashima. She quickly begins to feel a part of this family, and falls in love with the beautiful country of Japan. When she is married off to a Mongolian prince, she quickly becomes fearful of the icy cold temperatures and the loneliness that overcomes her in this sad country, so she escapes her new husband and makes her way back to Peking, this time as a spy for the Japanese secret service. Her life is finally as she wants it – she is an independent woman, rich, and working for the country she so loves – but loneliness still plagues her and eventually, she may have to pay a steep price for her years of independence.

I have to come right out and say it: I did not like this book very much. There were aspects of it I enjoyed, but overall I was less than impressed. First of all, there was a lot of sex in The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel. I mean a LOT. Like, every couple of pages. I am not a prude by any means, and I can appreciate sex scenes when they are appropriate in the situation of the book and written well. I don’t even mind the inappropriate ones, usually, but in this book it was very much overkill. The abundance of sex took away from the experience of reading the novel, for me. It was just too much, and at a certain point I just felt like I understood that this woman has a lot of sex, but do I really need to read about every single encounter? I’d rather not, thank you. So that was one of my biggest issues with the book.

Another issue I had was the format of the novel itself. I think that it could have been MUCH improved by more dialogue, more interactions between the characters. As it was, Eastern Jewel/Yoshiko basically talked to the reader throughout the entire book, describing her life, and while it was interesting, it could have been extremely engaging, and much more gripping than it was. I mean, this woman is beyond fascinating. She had experiences that no Asian woman at the time was able to have. She had responsibilities and a career that were so rare for a woman to have, in any country, in that time period. So the story could have been much, much better than it was. Had it been written differently, in a different style perhaps, it had the potential to be another Nefertiti or The Other Boleyn Girl type book – historical fiction that is so captivating and compelling that you simply can’t put the book down. Unfortunately, that just wasn’t the case here.

All that being said, I was fascinated by Eastern Jewel/Yoshiko’s story. She really did live such an exciting life, and I enjoyed reading about her various escapades and daring way of living. She was cast aside by her own family, and instead of wallowing in her grief over it, she made herself a part of her new family. She loved and lost several men, and she just kept on with the knowledge that the only person who would ever truly take care of her and love her completely was herself. This is a lesson I still haven’t learned, and reading about a woman who embodied that spirit definitely inspired me to take better care of myself and to appreciate the wonderful person that I am.

Overall, the novel made me sort of sad for its lost potential. The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel could have been amazing, but it was only okay. I would only recommend this book for historical fiction enthusiasts who can tolerate a heavy amount of sex in their reading. If this does not describe you, I’d probably skip it. ( )

First, I wish this book had been billed as pure fiction, rather than 'based on a true story'. I'm not sure how much truth Lindley managed to include in her story - I'm not sure that very much truth is actually known about Eastern Jewel. While her life and story would be riveting to explore, this novel seems taken entirely from Lindley's imagination and relies far too heavily on the princess and her supposed sexual exploits to fuel every plot twist.

The book is well-written and was a fast and enjoyable read, but I'm left with a definite distaste for Lindley's portrayal of life in Asia during such a tumultuous historical period. Eastern and Western characters alike are presented as stereotyped caricatures of real people, while the placement of plot points in actual history seemed disjointed - time is skewed, as 'years passed' but Eastern Jewel had only aged one year.

I give Lindley 3 stars for her vivid descriptions and smooth, easy writing style, but I wish she'd chosen pure fiction and left claims to historical accuracy for another genre. ( )

Originally enthusiastic about reading a fictional rendering of the life of a Chinese princess turned spy against China, I quickly lost interest in the incessant accounts of sexual escapades of almost all of the characters. Such superficially narrated and emotionally devoid encounters dominate the writing. While most of the characters lack adequate dimension to be credible, the larger portion of the embellished narrative focuses on precisely described possessions.

Eastern Jewel (Aisin Gioro Xianyu, Chinese name at birth), a Manchu princess of the Qing Dynasty which also claims Pu Yi (the exiled Emperor on which the book, Empire of The Sun is based), is cast from her imperial household after spying on her father (Prince Su), during a sexual escapade with one of his concubines. The catastrophic consequence of such abominable behavior by a precocious young princess foreshadows her eventual and ultimate fate.

Initially distraught by her seemingly unjustifiable plight, sent to Japan and adopted by her uncle (Naniwa Kawashima), Eastern Jewel, now known as Yoshiko Kawashima tolerates her uncle’s meager household and adopted homeland. Ambivalent in her isolated surroundings, Eastern Jewel struggles to gain acceptance and unconditional love in a social order that exploits women as vessels of pleasure, discarded when no longer young and beautiful. When acceptance and unconditional love emerge from an unlikely source, she rejects it, and Eastern Jewel’s enigmatic life spirals out of control.

The chronological epilogue was the most fascinating portion of the book.

NOTE:

Eastern Jewel was born in Beijing, China in 1906.
Yoshiko lived in Matsumoto, Nagano, Japan from 1914 until 1927.
Arranged marriage (for political alliances), to Ganjuurjab, a Prince of Mongolia in 1925. Lived there until 1926. After her escape from Mongolia, she lived in and loved Shanghai, and began her spy missions for the Japanese in 1931.
Captured in Peking in 1945. ( )

Eastern Jewel was the daughter of a Chinese prince and one of his concubines. After spying on her father having sex with a servant girl when she was 8, Eastern Jewel is sent to live with a friend of her father's in Japan, where she was raped at the age of 15 by her adoptive grandfather and shortly thereafter by her adoptive father. Yes, she was willing (disturbingly so), but she was a teenager and these men were her adoptive family! She then proceeded to have sex with just about anything that moved, before becoming a spy for Japan against her native country during World War II.

Okay, did we really need to read about - in detail- EVERY sexual experience that Eastern Jewel ever had? About how she enjoyed the pain her adoptive father liked to inflict, or how she later realized that she liked brutal men because she was secretly lusting after her father? No, I don't really think that we did. Maybe some of it was necessary, since it did lead into how she got her job as a spy - although, interestingly, not how much of her spying was conducted - but literally the first 2/3 of the book were entirely consumed by her sleeping her way through her life.

I was really very interested in Eastern Jewel's life as a spy, but if only 80-100 pages were needed to tell that part of her story, perhaps this book didn't need to be 300 pages long, maybe 150 at the most. I will say, though, that Lindley is a talented author. Her writing and storytelling ability made the first 2/3 of the book at least somewhat bearable for me. Still, though, this would have been a 'did not finish' if I had not been reading it for the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program, because 2/3 of the book seemed to have very little to do with the overall story and were just salacious for the fun of it. The last 1/3 of this book was interesting enough to almost make the whole thing worthwhile, but not quite. ( )

Based on a true story of a young Chinese princess turned spy, the story takes place in 1914 in Peking. The eight year old princess Eastern Jewel is a continuing disappointment to her father, as she struggles to follow the rules expected for a young girl. Being precociously curious and contrary she is caught spying on her father during his sexual copulation with a fourteen year old girl. Her father is so enraged with her behavior he sends her to live with a family in Japan. As the story unfolds she is renamed Yoshiko Kawashima and she acquires a deep love for Japan that will define her loyalty and challenge her future. Yoshiko ultimately becomes a valuable spy, always seeking danger and yearning sexual excitement with illusion and eroticism. Opium and a life of lavish luxury fuels her ambitious drive and need for power.

I was disappointed with this book. The beginning was engaging but somehow fell off towards the mid point of the book. I really didn’t like the character of Eastern Jewel. I felt no empathy for her and found turning the pages to finish the book tedious. I thought the writing was very good, but the subject lacked spark. I just didn’t care about this person and what she did with her life and who she slept with. ( )