Word: geishas
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Hardly what one would expect someone to be saying to Arthur Golden '78, the celebrated author of Memoirs of A Geisha, the novel that just out in paperback after spending 60 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller List. When Golden incredulously asked his editor what had prompted such an epithet to come from her lips, she responded, "Well, you're walking through a hotel lobby talking on your cell phone about your movie deal...
Golden's debut novel, chronicling the lush andexotic life of a geisha in the Japan of the 30sand 40s, has been wildly successful. InMemoirs, Sayuri, an aging geisha recountsher youth spent in the Okiya, a cloisteredbrothel where women trained for the rigors of theGeisha art. Hatsumomo is the primadonna geisha ofthe Okiya, supporting a household of youngapprentices and aged ex-geishas. From the momentSayuri is sold into the Okiya Hatsumomorecognizes her as a challenge to her supremacy andspends the rest of the novel plotting Sayuri'sdemise...
Though Spielberg has a genuine interest in this chapter of history--as demonstrated by Schindler's List, Empire of the Sun and his next project, Memoirs of a Geisha, which will examine the war's disruption of traditional life in Japan--in this case he seems less concerned with history than with showing us, plainly, what war looks like. And it looks hellish. Still, one expects more from such an epic work, which should, ideally, be a springboard for discussion and contemplation...
...classic novel Snow Country, the Nobel prizewinning writer Yasunari Kawabata depicted the mountains of Japan's far north as the place where jaded urbanites could come to bathe in a forgotten innocence--symbolized by the cool Tokyo dilettante who takes up with a local geisha. At the book's haunting end, the man is returning to his wife in Tokyo, suitably refreshed, and the country girl, heartbroken, is left with only memories. Therein lies the promise, and the danger, of what promise to be splendid Games...
Golden would have written a different book if he wished to expose the ugliness of geisha culture; Sayuri ultimately leads a happy life and is satisfied with her lot as a geisha. Yet hints of that ugliness appear even during the most positive parts of his portrayal of geisha's life. The white makeup that transforms an ordinary woman into lovely geisha was once lead-based; this malignant makeup slowly poisoned generation of geisha. Similarly, the most expensive and coveted of a geisha's many beauty ointments is a face cream made of nightingale droppings. Golden has taken even such...