A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity (review)

Whitney Otto's A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity is a visual and literary treat. Illustrated with beautiful reproductions of woodblock prints by eighteenth century Japanese artist Utamaro, the story takes place in San Francisco's North Beach in the early 1980s, and revolves around the lives of patrons of the Youki Singe Tea Room. As Utamaro depicted the Floating World of his time—the pleasure quarters that existed for the pursuit of music, food, sex, fashion, and theater—this novel gives us a world of young people, most of whom do not work at the jobs for which they had been educated, drifting through life without commitment, except to parties (lots of pot, cocaine, heroin, and booze), passion for art and books, and friendship with one another (although betrayal is not unusual). Eulodia Parker, one of the Tea Room devotees, writes of the imagined intimate lives of the circle in her self-styled "pillow book," named after a journal kept by Edo courtesans.

Elegantly composed, in the style of the delicate "inner" sensibility of Japanese women writers of the eighteenth century, this mosaic of finely detailed portraits explores the interconnectedness of the characters' search for love. While the writing is aesthetically pleasing and the structure creative, the thematic range is limited by the self-indulgent values that characterized the floating world of San Francisco's North Beach in the 1980s. Nevertheless, the book is masterfully crafted.