Word: geishas
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Chiyo's career as Sayuri begins when her elderly father, distraught over his ailing wife, permits her to be placed in okiya, or training houses for geisha, at the urging of a rather dubious local entrepreneur...
...Japanese geisha, Arthur Golden '78 explains, take great care with their makeup. The lengthy and complicated process of adding layers and layers of precisely applied makeup is almost ceremonial, yet a geisha will leave a border of naked skin around the edges of her face, heightening the theatricality of her appearance. The rim of exposed skin supposedly reminds men of the rest of the geisha's well-concealed skin...
Golden's new book is a sort of makeup remover. Memoirs of a Geisha starts at that bare rim of skin and gradually dissolves the entire facade of Gion, Kyoto's geisha district, during the 1930s and 1940s. The story of young Chiyo's transformation into the geisha Nitta Sayuri is not merely the tale of one woman but the chronicle of a particular place...
Cinderella led a life of relative ease and comfort when compared with Chiyo's existence in the okiya. Chiyo carries out a grueling round of chores fueled by rations scarcely sufficient to sustain life, tormented always by the dominant geisha, Hatsumomo, who sees the beautiful Chiyo as a threat. A failed runaway attempt cuts short her training, but then the famous geisha Mameha takes a sudden and surprising interest in Chiyo and her unusual blue-gray eyes. Chiyo is permitted to resume her training, becoming the geisha Sayuri and beginning her slow ascent to the heights of Gion...
...love duet in the Met's Butterfly, Pinkerton begins stripping his bride, who throws back her head in ecstasy. On opening night, the sequence was loudly booed by another member of opera's aristocracy, former diva Licia Albanese, who in Mario's day played Butterfly as an elegant geisha. Albanese ``looks at the opera from the moral viewpoint of the '40s,'' shrugs Del Monaco. ``But Pinkerton was an ugly American who was drunk and excited...