Note 23 — Classes of Prostitutes.
Reading edition
Tsubone-jōro
were generally quartered in the second story.
Tsubone
,—the “women’s apartments” in the courts of princes and daimyō—was added to
jōro
to find an appellation for a daughter of Ichinomiya, a noble. She set out on a journey, so the story runs, to Hatake in Tosa, but was driven by stress of weather to Hiroshima, where poverty presently forced her to become a prostitute.
The country folk of that district possessed no word in their vocabulary, applicable to a jōro of such high social status, so they coined one and handed down to future generations in the Yoshiwara the name tsubone-jōro.