Word: geishas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Decades before a white-faced Ziyi Zhang performed her electric dances in Hollywood's Memoirs of a Geisha-and years before the Arthur Golden novel of the same name ushered millions worldwide into the private corners of Kyoto's geisha quarter-an anthropologist from Stanford traveled to Japan's ancient capital to become the first foreigner to live and work along its narrow streets as a full-time geisha. Liza Dalby's experiences inspired several books, including her memorable and elegant Geisha, published in 1983, a book on kimono and a novel about Japan's first novelist, Lady Murasaki...
...such passing curiosities, what Dalby is really doing is reminding us that Japan and California are on much the same latitude, and are almost the same size. You can buy Californian oranges in Japan nowadays as easily as Japanese persimmons in California. Sometimes-as in the Memoirs of a Geisha movie, on which Dalby worked as a consultant, and where classic Japanese forms had to be adapted to suit modern tastes-the cross-pollination produces what Dalby calls a "sushi sandwich." But often, as in the "Brie-cheese maki" she puts inside her daughter's Berkeley lunch-box, the cultures...
...might be expected of a onetime geisha, Dalby has a keen and subtle feel for textures and shadings. ("Nothing in the world," she knows, "is as soft as mole fur. Venetian silk velvet perhaps comes closest.") Yet as with any geisha who sticks in the memory, she's clearly no shrinking violet. She went on book tour once, she confesses, with blackened teeth, to see how the old Japanese custom would play in contemporary America. Attending a conference on Lady Murasaki, she dyed her hair purple because murasaki in Japanese can mean "purple...
...Paris was so spectacular. The designer, who seemed to have been languishing lately under directives to create salable clothes, let his wacky imagination soar again--this time from the couture ateliers of Paris all the way to the cherry-blossom-filled gardens of Kyoto. One after another, models in geisha makeup and with orchids and ikebana arrangements caught up in their hair emerged in glorious confections that recalled hand-painted kimonos, origami folds and even the bark of a bonsai tree. Backstage, the designer described the show as Christian Dior meeting Puccini's Madama Butterfly...
...Twenty minutes, even the 20 shown at the Martinez, do not make a movie. There's no telling how the entire film will play. But the Friday-night tastes were savory. It was apparent that the film, designed by John Myhre (X Men, Chicago, Memoirs of a Geisha with special lighting by Broadway legend Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer, looks fabulous. Choreographer Fatima Robinson put the non-dancing actors through brilliant moves. As someone who saw the original show five times, I would not have thought that a movie could have equaled my Dreamgirls memory, but what I saw might...