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BOOK: The Japanese Art of Sex: How to Tease, Seduce, and Pleasure the Samurai in Your Bedroom
By Jina Bancarr (238 pages, $16.95 - Stone Bridge Press)
Reviewed by Holly Day
After reading this book and trying out many of the suggestions contained within, I am not convinced that it’s worth my time to make my man feel like a samurai, or at least not much more than once or twice a year, like on his birthday and/or Christmas. There is just too much work involved in pretending to be a geisha, especially when there are kids to take care of and laundry to attend to. I suppose this is why geishas aren’t married with children.
I did set aside a couple of days to act the part, however, because I, like many other housewives out there, do sometimes feel like maybe we’re a little inadequate in the art of elegant seduction, especially since husband-wife sex consists so much of accidentally rolling into each other in the middle of the night and moving on from there, quickly and sleepily and not quite sure who exactly the other person is for the first half of the act. So I took advantage of the kids being at their grandparents’ for the weekend and spent an entire morning meditating -- which I felt really guilty about, because really, it’s just sitting there, and dishes don’t wash themselves -- and thinking sexy thoughts about my husband’s butt, and my boobies, and flowers opening in the springtime, and rainbows and moonlight and leprechauns. After I got that out of the way, I continued to the bathroom, where I really tried to get into putting on my make-up, like the book suggests: "Put on your makeup foundation and feel the silky wetness... touch your cheeks, feel the width of your nose" etc., etc., but I really ended up putting on a lot more makeup than looked right -- we’re talking cheap after-hours corner prostitute makeup here--so I washed it all off and went with my usual lip gloss instead.
The next step was to clean the house and try to make the place look sexy and mysterious. No prob. I threw all the kids’ toys in their bedrooms, scrubbed peanut butter off the end of the sofa, did the dishes and hid the laundry. Perfect. What? No. According to the book, I needed some wind chimes and skylights and Japanese hanging lamps and mood music and perfume. Crap. I raced out into the back yard, grabbed some windchimes, hung them up in the kitchen in front of the window and threw on some perfume. Then I remembered my husband hates perfume, so I ended up washing that off, too.
The bubble bath was nice. I even shaved my legs. Baths usually consist of a quick shampoo and rinse at this point for me, so to have an excuse to give myself a 15-minute salt scrub and soak, take a couple different baths of different water temperatures, soak tea bags in the water, and really, really take my time for a change, was nice. The book even recommended lying down and relaxing after the bath for another 15 minutes, which I thought was a great idea, too. I didn’t get a chance to take the sake bath, since all I had around the house was Jack Daniels and beer, but that sounded like a lot of fun, too.
I tried, I really tried, to get my husband to take a bath himself when he got home. I told him all he’d have to do was get in the tub and I’d do all the work myself, but he seemed to think sitting in front of the television eating peanuts and watching the sports wrap-up would be more relaxing than getting all soaped up and massaged. His loss -- if it’d been offered to me, I’d have been naked and in the tub in about ten seconds flat.
The best part about the book, of course, was the long-awaited chapter on sex. It would have been even better if I could have gotten my husband to read some of the sex tips, too, but he’s an expert on everything, so I didn’t push the issue. I did leave the book in some really obvious areas around the house, with the bookmark conspicuously stuck in the oral sex section, but like I said, he’s an expert on everything. Myself, I learned to deliver a really killer blowjob -- again, something to save for Christmas and/or birthdays -- that won me some scary sideways glances afterwards and some pointed questions about how I’d spent my day. The rest of the stuff -- various sexual positions with elegant names like "White Tiger Jumping," "Fish Eye-to-Eye," "Humming Ape Embracing the Tree," and masturbation tips were old news to an old broad like me, but could, I suppose, be helpful to a young couple just starting to explore this thing called love.
© 2007 - Holly Day