Arthur Golden’s novel Memoirs of a Geisha starts with a ”translator’s note” explaining how one Jakob Haarhuis (hair-house?) came to meet a retired geisha and record her life story. Of course, it’s a fake translator’s note — Haarhuis is as fictional as the geisha of the title. But, unlike JM Coetzee in Dusklands, who prefaced his ”translation” of an ancestor’s tale with a kind of authorial disclaimer, Golden is not playing a postmodern game with the conventions of narration and the status of historical truth.
This is made clear in the afterword to the book, in which Golden is at pains to point out how much research he did to make his geisha’s ”memoirs” as accurate as possible. ”Although the character of Sayuri and her story are completely invented,” he writes, ”the historical facts of a geisha’s day-to-day life … are not.” Golden’s chief informant was former geisha Mineko Iwasaki, who later sued him for breach of contract and defamation because he had named her in the book’s acknowlegements. She had expected her anony-mity to be protected, and took action only after the Japanese-language edition of the book appeared — she didn’t read English. The publishers settled out of court. And then, her anonymity having been destroyed, Iwasaki went on to write her own memoir. At any rate, there is some resonance between Golden’s experience and that of the fictional Haarhuis (minus the trauma).
Golden studied Japanese art at Harvard and took 15 years to write the book. He threw out his first draft after meeting Iwasaki. The earlier version, he told CNN, was ”based on a lot of book-learning”. Iwasaki was ”so helpful”, said Golden, ”that I realised I’d gotten everything wrong.” Interestingly, the decision to put the story into the first person, and thus to present it as a ”memoir”, came only at third-draft stage.
But that must have helped turn the book into the massive bestseller it became after publication in 1997. The promise of a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the secretive life of the geisha, told as if by the geisha herself, must have appealed to its many readers. Golden certainly provides a lot of information in his rather plodding novel. This is high-class cultural tourism. But then the geisha has long exerted a certain fascination: she is one of those exotic Far Eastern figures that haunts the Western imagination, offering the promise of stylised sexuality and the opaque rituals of a fascinatingly foreign culture.
In fairness, Golden demystifies the geisha somewhat, pointing out that she is not a mere prostitute — though she is available for some sexual favours. The sale of Sayuri’s virginity to the highest bidder, for instance, forms a key part of the tale, and much revolves around who will be her danna (essentially the man who owns her and turns her into his permanent mistress).
Golden’s novel has sold well over half a million copies and is now back on the New York Times bestseller list in the movie-tie-in edition, featuring Ziyi Zhang’s gorgeous face on the cover. In fact, that was another controversy to erupt around Memoirs of a Geisha: Zhang, like the others cast as geishas, is Chinese and not Japanese. This touches on a sore point in Sino-Japanese relations: the Chinese are still upset about Japanese prostitution of Chinese women during World War II. The film was duly banned in China. On the other hand, many Japanese were annoyed at the use of Chinese actors to play quint-essentially Japanese roles, and consider the movie a travesty of their cultural traditions.
That, of course, won’t have bothered audiences in the United States. Nor will it have bothered them that the people in the movie speak to one another in breathy, heavily accented English instead of Japanese, which rather reduces the film’s believablity — as well as making all the performances rather stilted and flat. Sub-titles can take a few million dollars off a movie’s box office in the US.
Not that it has done very well there. Budgeted at about $85million, Memoirs of a Geisha took some $57million in the US, though it apparently did better elsewhere, earning another $100-million or so. It was nominated for six Oscars, and won three: for cinematography, art direction and costume design.
The film certainly looks great. Yet, as a whole, or as a story, it disappoints gravely. It’s as though the filmmakers spent so much energy getting it to look good that they didn’t get around to giving the characters any real, living complexity. Perhaps it’s the same problem that Martin Amis found in Tom Wolfe’s novel A Man in Full — over-researched and under-imagined.
Or maybe it’s the tone the movie takes. The geisha’s stultifying world is presented with a high-gloss shimmer; this is oppression in soft focus. Yes, we’re meant to feel sorry for the girls kidnapped into slavery, and to sympathise with Sayuri as she makes her often difficult progress into the world of the geisha. But that is to make the story about individual suffering and final triumph rather than a social evil.
Either way, it feels superficial. As the Australian newspaper The Age put it, it comes across a bit like Desperate Housewives in kimonos.
Memoirs of a Geisha opens on Friday May 5
Geishas in print
GEISHA OF GION by Mineko Iwasaki (Pocket)
The true life story of Arthur Golden’s main informant for Memoirs of a Geisha.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A GEISHA by Sayo Matsuda (Vintage)
Though barely literate, Matsuda decided to tell her life story — and won a magazine competition with her account.
GEISHA by Liza Dalby (Vintage)
Dalby, an American anthropology student, went to Japan to live as a geisha to gain an insight into their world.
GEISHA by Kyoko Aihara (Carlton)
A study of the world of the geisha.
GEISHA: THE SECRET HISTORY OF A VANISHING WORLD by Lesley Downer (Headline)
A study of geishas and their history.
MADAME SADAYAKKO: THE GEISHA WHO SEDUCED THE WEST by Lesley Downer (Headline)
A companion piece to Downer’s general book on geishas, this traces the story of one particular woman.
GEISHA: A UNIQUE WORLD OF TRADITION, ELEGANCE AND ART by John Gallagher
A richly detailed guide to the geisha world and the special wigs, clogs and so on that they use.
GEISHA: THE LIFE, THE VOICES, THE ART by Jodi Cobb (Random House)
A photographic journey through a little-documented world.