A Woman Scorned
By Velisarios Kattoulas/Kyoto
Far East Economic Review
dated June 22, 2000Mineko Iwasaki inspired 'Memoirs of a Geisha,' but now she fears the book will tarnish her profession's legacy
IT IS MAY 1992, and Arthur Golden arrives in Kyoto at the home of Mineko Iwasaki, a legendary retired geisha.
The way Iwasaki tells it, Golden spends two weeks with her, quizzing her about geisha life. Sitting in her cavernous living room, she explains the geisha code of secrecy to him and he agrees to keep what she tells him confidential.
By his reckoning, Golden, then a struggling writer, spends less than a week at her home, interviewing her for about 19 hours in his halting Japanese. No mention is made of whether she is speaking on the record or off.
Wherever the truth lies, Iwasaki's insights into the karyukai--the "flower and willow world" of the geisha--proved invaluable for the book Golden was writing. Based on what he learnt from her, he threw out an 800-page first draft and started again. Two more drafts and five years later Memoirs of a Geisha arrived to critical and popular acclaim.
The New York Times called it "a finely observed picture of an anomalous and largely vanished world." Director Steven Spielberg bought the film rights. And readers loved it. To date, the book has sold over 4 million copies in English and has been translated into 32 languages.
Today, however, Iwasaki no longer shares in the adulation. At first, she was intrigued by Golden's plan to set his first novel in the Kyoto geisha quarter of Gion. But now she feels he repaid her help and hospitality with betrayal that brought her only heartbreak and dishonour. She is angry at being linked with a book that she feels represents geisha as little more than prostitutes, and at Golden's public discussion of her private life. More worrying, she fears Memoirs could forever shape popular understanding of the vanishing geisha world.
Although doubts about the book had already begun to form in Iwasaki's mind, it was not until October 1999 that she was actually able to read Memoirs for herself. She does not understand English, but that month a galley for the Japanese edition arrived in the mail. She was stunned by what she read: "I thought of killing myself, of committing hara-kiri."
To begin with, she was unhappy about the inclusion of her name in the acknowledgments. Even in retirement, geisha are expected to live by shuhi gimu, a code of secrecy that bars them from sharing their secrets with outsiders. Since word of Iwasaki's involvement in Memoirs surfaced, she has found it hard to show her face in Gion.
But what upset her even more was Golden's portrayal of the karyukai. She understood from Golden that he was writing a novel that would go beyond misperceptions of geisha as exotic prostitutes. She imagined a book about the art that geisha consider the core of their tradition: the classical song and dance, the tea ceremony and the flower arrangement.
To Iwasaki's eye, however, Golden wrote a frothy potboiler, and fulfilled neither his hopes nor her expectations. Golden, for his part, denies any wrongdoing. "I don't want to have a war of words with Mineko," he says.
Although Golden vs. Iwasaki might sound like a storm in a teahouse, she fears that with Spielberg slated to direct Memoirs the movie, Golden's first novel could become the de facto last word on the 400-year-old geisha tradition.
Her concern is not without logic. So little of the geisha tradition remains that even in Japan few people could judge the accuracy or otherwise of a movie version of it. "My generation of geisha could be the last," says a 23-year-old Kyoto geisha who asked not to be named. "The tradition is already half lost." Most telling, the number of geisha has dwindled from 80,000 in the 1920s to as few as 8,000 today. In Kyoto, where the tradition was born and remains most vibrant, there are just 250 left.
What's more, given Hollywood's track record of portraying Japan, it's probably unrealistic to expect much more than cliché, simplification and misrepresentation. Take Shogun, based on James Clavell's eponymous best-selling novel. Its mix of violence, exoticism and nudity made it a major hit and convinced a generation of Americans that the samurai of yore were bloodthirsty barbarians. Many were, but as history Shogun was off the mark. Most notably, it glossed over the samurai code of Bushido, the Way of the Warrior, which emphasized honesty, loyalty, and kindness. Instead, it stuck mainly to battles, swordplay, and brutality.
Fearful that Memoirs will represent geisha the way Shogun portrayed samurai, Iwasaki plans to sue Golden in the United States for breach of contract, defamation and invasion of privacy. She wants to embarrass him, and assuage her detractors in Gion. Most of all, she wants to smash Western stereotypes of geisha as stylized prostitutes and convince Japanese and Westerners alike that the fast-disappearing geisha tradition was--first and foremost--about art. "Geisha are not prostitutes," she insists. "They are performance artists, improvised one-woman shows."
Since geisha first appeared some 300 years ago, they have spent most of their time working in the formerly government-licensed brothel quarters of Kyoto and Tokyo. Yet, as the American anthropologist Liza Dalby wrote in her 1983 book, Geisha, while the women plied their trade alongside prostitutes, sold their virginity and often took danna, or sugar daddies, they were not prostitutes.
"The fact that legal prostitution was abolished in 1957, but geisha were untouched, indicates a basic sense that geisha--in some true or best sense of the word--are not prostitutes," Dalby wrote. To geisha, the distinction is that they have sex with men voluntarily rather than for money.
Born in Kyoto in 1950, Iwasaki first encountered the flower and willow world when she was still a child. To lighten their financial load, her father, a struggling artist, and her mother, a disowned aristocrat, entered Iwasaki into a geisha house at the age of four. Over the next quarter century, she became a legendary entertainer, and by the time she retired at the age of 29 in 1980, she was famous among wealthy Japanese.
Golden first took an interest in the geisha tradition in the early 1980s. Now in his 40s, he is a scion of the Sulzberger newspaper dynasty that runs The New York Times. For a while he toyed with the idea of working in the family firm but in the end decided he wanted to write. He started Memoirs in 1987, after meeting the son of an industrialist and a geisha in Tokyo in 1982.
He met Iwasaki through Reiko Nagura, a friend of his grandmother. Iwasaki, for her part, insists she met Golden through two former customers, the late Koichi Tsukamoto, the founder of Wacoal, a lingerie-maker based in Kyoto, and the late Akio Morita, the founder of Sony. In any case, Iwasaki and Golden agree he travelled to Kyoto in May 1992, they spoke at length and got along well.
For at least a year Iwasaki was happy for the success of the book, which tells the story of an old woman recounting the cruelty and decadence of her life as a geisha. But in November 1998, doubts began to set in. That month, Golden sent her two articles mentioning her role in the book alongside photographs of her that she had given him as keepsakes. Later, she learnt of an interview in which Golden chatted about her mizuage, her deflowering ceremony, and said she had sold her virginity for 100 million yen. She flatly denies this ever happened.
Golden first heard about Iwasaki's anger in April 1999, when he visited Kyoto for the first time since 1992. In a telephone conversation before he arrived, she chastised him for using the photographs and discussing her private life in interviews. She was also upset by the book's acknowledgment, "Mineko, thank you for everything." The feeling was definitely not mutual. "He promised to protect my identity," she says. Yet what inflamed her most was his portrayal of the karyukai. To her, Memoirs is all about Western male fantasies of geisha as high-class tarts.
Golden is surprised by her accusations. He denies that Iwasaki suggested their conversations were confidential. He also says he never asked whether he could use her gifts and discuss her virginity to promote Memoirs because she had shown "eagerness to capitalize on the publicity surrounding the book." He refuses to speculate on why she now wants his blood.
Nagura, by contrast, who has known them both for a more than a decade, is strident in her criticism of Iwasaki. Golden's words in the acknowledgment "were not satisfactory for Iwasaki," she wrote in a letter defending Golden. "She was after something else, and I leave that to your imagination."
But not everybody takes his side. Yori Oda, a lecturer at Harvard University who taught Golden in the 1970s, met Iwasaki last year. Oda suspects her former student knowingly invaded Iwasaki's privacy to establish the credibility of his book and drive up sales. "I think he knows he needs to be very guarded," Oda says.
These days, Iwasaki spends much of her time assembling a legal team to challenge Golden in court. It's not clear whether she will actually sue him, or whether she would win if she did. But whatever happens, it's unlikely any court decision could ever fully restore her standing with the karyukai.
On a spring afternoon Iwasaki clip-clops through the Gion geisha quarter in a lilac silk kimono. A former geisha runs over to her to say she has heard that Iwasaki helped Golden with Memoirs. The woman is not hostile, but to Iwasaki her words are reminders of Gion's feelings about her role in the novel. Her voice begins to tremble and, after the woman is out of sight, her eyes fill with tears. "Do you know what shame means to a Japanese?" she asks. "Unless we atone for it in life, it stays with us in death."
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