January 26, 2003

One of the most talked about books at the moment is Geisha, a life by Mineko Iwasaki with Rande Brown. Iwasaki, who was the most famous and sought-after geisha of her day, tells her story amid the controversy and litigation surrounding Memoirs of a geisha, Arthur Golden’s novel inspired by Iwasaki’s life.

Golden’s hugely successful and multi-award winning novel took the literary world by storm when it was released in 1997. The supposedly fictional novel (despite its misleading moniker) was hailed as a rare glimpse into the life of a geisha. Readers were memerized as much by the topic matter as Golden’s dynamic prose, and at one point, Steven Spielberg planned to direct a film version.

In 2001, Iwasaki sued Golden for breach of contract and tarnished reputation. Iwasaki, who is thanked in Golden’s acknowledgements, is furious at the sex-for-money implications in the novel, and the notion that a geisha is a prostitute. Furthermore, she claims that the fact that Golden credited her as a source in his acknowledgements was a violation of his promise to keep her identity a secret.

While this case is still pending, Iwasaki has released Geisha, a life, her life story. The biography is a fascinating look into the life of a woman who in her heyday in the 1960s, was earning $500,000 and entertaining world leaders and celebrities including Prince Charles and Aldo Gucci. She also carefully describes the origins of Kyoto’s Gion Kobu district and the geiko system’s political and social nuances in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Iwasaki was only five years old when she left her parents’ home and moved for training into an okiya, or geisha household. She debuted as a maiko, or adolescent geisha, on February 15, 1965, at the tender age of fifteen. She held the coveted position of star geisha of the Gion obu of Kyoto until retirement at the age of twenty-nine. For almost twenty-five years, she lived a life filled with atypical professional demands and sometimes, even more unusual rewards. Now, at the ripe age of 52, she boldly tells the private details of her life and the safely guarded secrets of her profession: “No woman in the three-hundred-year history of the karyukai has ever come forward in public to tell her story,” she explains.

“We have been constrained by unwritten rules not to do so, by the robes of tradition and by the sanctity of our exclusive calling ... But I feel it is time to speak out.”

Her success did not come easily. Determined and ambitious, she worked industriously, refusing to take a single day off for five years. However, by the time she was twenty she was lauded as the most famous geisha in the world. Her large following of high-profile clients were willing to pay top dollar to see her play the shamisen at trendy and lavish soirees held at ochaya, famous Japanese teahouses. Appearing and entertaining at as many as ten parties an evening, she would dance for ten minutes at each and earn tens of thousands of dollars for the night’s work.

Dancing was Iwasaki’s favourite part of being a geisha. In fact, at one point she reveals, “The dance is what kept me going when the other requirements of the profession felt too heavy to bear.”

Iwasaki ‘s extraordinary story dispels western myths about the geisha as a prostitute and describes a demanding life as a highly trained artist, dancer, and expert on the elements of beauty and appearance, including the secret art of wearing a kimono. Iwasaki weighs only 90 pounds, and a full kimono with hair ornaments can easily weigh 40 pounds. With her typical flair for understatement, she simply states, “It was a lot to carry.”

In her introduction, the geisha invites, “Please, journey with me now into the extraordinary world of Gion Kobu.” Yet, unless you’re a geisha aficionado, this book is set at a disadvantage when placed against Golden’s novel. Her writing style, refreshingly candid at first, is far too dispassionate to sustain the entire story. Her lack of reflection and tendency toward mundane, mechanical description make the work more of a manual than a memoir.

She shares, “I walked down the street, I pet a dog, I bought a pen.” At times, Geisha isn’t a book, but an itinerary. Lacking here are the velvet prose, the vibrant characters and the vivid emotions that were all elements of Golden’s book. Even though Memoirs is fiction, Golden’s gift with words adds a magic to the life of a geisha that Iwasaki’s arid albeit accurate account is sorely lacking.

Geisha: a life
By Mineko Iwasaki & Rande Brown
Atria Books
Available from website: www.ebooks.com 
ISBN: 0743444329
368pp.

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