Synopsis "skivvy girl"
Skivvy Girl: The Love of a Post WWII Japanese Pleasure Girl reveals the sordid life of a young prostitute in graphic detail: the loss of her virginity to a drunken brute, the physical abuse by sadistic men who view her, not as human being, but as an object existing solely for the their pleasure. This novel tells with seamless authenticity and brutal realism the life of Japan's young post war prostitutes, known as "skivvy girls" in military jargon, as seen in the composite protagonist, Matsuyama Yoshiko. Her story begins in a tiny farming community in 1945, when as a seventeen-year-old girl she is awakened to the harsh reality that her father was lost in the war leaving her and her mother destitute and on the verge of starvation. She, a sexually inexperienced virgin, is driven to prostitution in the rowdy, roiling naval port city of Yokosuka. She arrives penniless, alone, and with no concept of the callous world she is entering into. Taken in by a "mama-san" of a skivvy house, she endures a rigorous regimen on accommodating her clients. After training, she suffers the brutal treatment of pitiless, often drunken, sailors hungering for sex after months at sea. After despairing of a better life, an American sailor visits Yoshiko's skivvy house and treats the young girl with kindness and respect. They bond and enter into a two-year relationship overcoming language and cultural problems and the drastic vicissitudes of nature. When the sailor's assignment is over and he must leave Japan, Yoshiko abandons the life of a skivvy girl and returns to her home village. The sailor revisits Japan eight years later hoping to find his former lover. Through a lucky happenstance, they reunite and begin a blissful life together only to meet a cruel fate that they cannot overcome. .
