Geisha of Gion

"I believed that self-discipline was the key to beauty."

Mineko Iwasaki successfully sued Arthur Golden for modelling his novel Memoirs of a Geisha on her life. I can't really blame him. This memoir gets three stars solely due to how fascinating it is to see what it takes to become the most successful Geiko* of a generation.**

Geisha of Gion is far from a perfect read. My gripes, in no particular order:

1) Other reviewers suggest that Iwasaki had a ghost writer. If she did, she was robbed. There was no natural flow between her anecdotes. One sensational incident after another, with little insight to how in made her feel or how it affected her life.

2) I don't believe all of her stories. She claims to have slept only three hours a night for years on end. She claims to of had a premonition of a friend's death. (She has a lot of foreboding premonitions that turn out to be spot on.) This memoir begins when she is three years old. She claims to have an acute memory but it's a bit too much to swallow. I can't remember what happened last week as clearly as she recounts the events of her early childhood.

3) Her eldest sister (literally and symbolically) Yaeko is a cartoon villain. She must of been seriously unhinged. Why did the mother of the household hand her such an important responsibility over Mineko? It is never explained.

4) Mineko Iwasaki is easy to dislike. Being groomed from a young age to be a heiress must warp your personality somewhat, I'll admit. She was such a precocious child (and precocious adult) and she can't understand why she has no friends. She is often self-important and sanctimonious. When she is sitting next to Queen Elizabeth II at a dinner Iwasaki notices that she doesn't touch her dinner:

"I always try to eat whatever my host has been kind enough to serve me. To refuse would be discourteous and, if I were a visitor of state, it could even be construed as an affront to the nation, to say nothing of all the people who have worked so hard to prepare the meal."

Iwasaki avenges her nation (and the chef) by flirting with the Duke of Edinburgh. Cut her some slack, Mineko. She's just flown half way around the world to be at some boring state dinner. Japanese cuisine is an acquired taste. Especially in the 1970's when even sushi was completely exotic to the British palette.

5) Iwasaki always happens to be the best at everything and will tell you so herself. She takes up golf:
"I took private lessons for a few weeks and was soon scoring in the 80s and 90s. No one could believe it"

Whenever she visits Gion: "When I tell them my name is Mineko, they invariably fly into a tizzy and ask, 'Are you the real Mineko? The legend? It is wonderful to spend time with them."

No wonder all her peers had tall poppy syndrome.

6) While she goes into some detail about her dancing and the importance of kimono, sometimes she just throws a piece of info at you without context. For instance, once she was adopted she suckled her elder sister's breast to go to sleep... she continued to do this until she was over 10 years old... excuse me? Was this normal in Japan at that time? Or was it unique to Mineko? Why did everyone in your adopted family just go with it? Some elaboration would have been fantastic. At another point, she goes to get her face shaved which she has done regularly since she was a child. Is this still done in Japan? To what end?

Mineko Iwasaki is a formidable woman and her achievements are extraordinary. I just wish her tale was in the hands of an experienced biographer who could breathe some life into her story.

*Geisha can refer to men or women and simply means artist. In Kyoto, the term Geiko is used to describe what those in the West would describe as a Geisha.

** It also gets three stars because n  boon the patriarchy. n  Yay!n for women telling their own stories.

Never read anything like this before, and i really got into it. I know it wont be everyone's cup of tea, but it's a brilliant and informative insight into the life of a geisha.
The Japanese words went right over my head though.

A very enchanting story. Not finished yet but I will finish reading it later.

"Geisha: A Life" is the autobiography of the woman in Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha. Liza Dalby's Geisha is however said to be more forthcoming about the reality of geishas' lives. Maybe read Dalby's and Iwasaki's together, to get a more accurate picture!

This is a very insightful book into the lives of the Geisha. It also clears up some of the mythperceptions about the practice of being a Geisha.

I had a hard time putting this book down and I recommend it to everyone.

I don't really know what I could say about this book. In general, it left me somewhat confused, and overall pretty disappointed.

I picked this up some years after I read Memoirs of a Geisha, excited to find out the truth and see just how awful a thing Golden did... now kind of I feel like maybe he listened to the story, didn't find anything interesting, and decided to just say "fuck it", and use whatever means to make what he had entertaining. Not saying he went about it the right way because I still think it was a scummy thing to do, but... yeah, he didn't have a lot of truth to work with. Now, I kinda get it.

The main thing is that while Memoirs of a Geisha is historical fiction, Geisha: A Life is literally a memoir. By a woman who is sort of unpleasant. Thus, it reads like an old, somewhat unpleasant and haughty woman telling stories of her youth exactly the way she remembers them. And like listening to your less pleasant grandma talk, unless she had an incredibly fascinating life, it's rather boring.

The thing about writing a memoir is that it's only as entertaining as a reading experience as you are as a person, and I'm getting the feeling that Ms. Iwasaki is... just not a very fun person to hang out with. I'm sure that as a geiko she was an exceptional entertainer, but just being herself, telling her thoughts the way they were at the time, discussing what interests her and what she remembers... it didn't make me want to pay for her company. In fact, it made me look at the page count a couple times, just to see how long I still had to go.

While I get it that this was an attempt to correct an image that was unflattering and false, this is unflattering and false on the whole other end of the spectrum.
Most of this book is straight-up gloating. It's full of namedropping, pettiness, and basically just people treating Iwasaki as the big shot, super-talented, amazing person she is, how hard she works, and how she put everyone in what she thought was their place.

But the biggest problem with this whole book, in my opinion, was the writing. It's just so vague. In everything, but the kimonos, it is so, so vague, and boring, and that is exactly why it reads like an old woman just talking AT you (not to you, at you), because very little that is actually interesting is being talked about (maybe the love affair and her kidney disease?). How she met her husband is basically an afterthought in the last chapter, there was a suicide attempt that was only discussed in three sentences (yes, I counted), and the one thing that I actually remember, the breakup, is... underwhelming. I felt no emotion, and that's a problem.

Personally, while it really is a raincoat after the storm type of situation, Iwasaki should have been credited as a consultant and co-author on Golden's book, which should have been marketed as fiction from the very start, with this book summarized into an afterword by Iwasaki. Then she would have gotten her comeuppance, neither her nor Golden's image would have suffered, and no offense, but I wouldn't have had to buy and read 360 pages of such a boring book.

Ši autobiografija tai atkirtis Arthur'o Golden'o knygai "Geišos išpažintis".

Mineko Iwasaki (Masako Tanaka) buvo geriausia savo kartos geiša. Ji prisidėjo rengiant, tiksliau davė interviu, A. Golden'o knygai su sąlyga, jog jos įsitraukimas liks konfidencialus. Tačiau autorius sulaužė šį susitarimą ir padėkos žodyje atskleidė M. Iwasaki tapatybę. Po "Geišos išpažinties" išleidimo M. Iwasaki sulaukė labai daug kritikos ir net grąsinimų bei pasikėsinimų dėl tradicinio geišos tylos kodekso išniekinimo. Žymioji geiša buvo įžeista dėl A. Golden'o kūrinyje pateiktų išgalvotų įvykių, detalių ir netikrų faktų, kaip pavyzdžiui teigimo, jog geišų nekaltybė buvo parduodama aukcionu ir pan. Taip pat minima, jog "Geišos išpažinties" pagrindinės veikėjos gyvenimo įvykiai buvo paraleliai sugretinti su M. Iwasaki gyvenimu. Dėl šių priežasčių ji autorių padavė į teismą ir nusprendė vakarietiškam pasauliui atskleisti tikrąjį geišų gyvenimą.

Kas galėjo pagalvoti, jog už šios knygos slypi tokia skaudi pačiai autorei patirtis, slegiantys sunkumai bei smerkiantys tiek savų, tiek svetimų šalių žmonių žvilgsniai. "Geišos gyvenimas" tapo bestseleriu bei sukėlė milžinišką ažiotožą pasaulyje. Netenka dažnai į rankas paimti biografiją, tačiau ši pateisino visus lūkesčius. Net nekalbant apie kitos kultūros pažinimą, geišų gyvenimo supratimą, visada smagu skaityti tikrą žmogaus istoriją. Tiesa, knygoje neapsieita ir be sąvokų. Mano nuomone, jų buvo šiek tiek per daug. Tačiau labiausiai įstrigo tai, jog pačiame Gion Kobaus rajone geišos savęs nevadino geišomis (tai reiškia "meno meistrė"), mieliau buvo pasirenkamas žodis geiko, kuris reiškia "menininkė". Taip pat buvo išskiriama sąvoka maiko - jaunosios šokėjos, kurios sulaukosios tam tikro amžiaus gali tapti geiko. Šie terminai (ir begalė kitu) lydi visą istoriją. Dėl šios priežasties knygos nevertinčiau stipriu 5, labiau 4.5 į gerąją pusę. Vis dėlto ši autobiografija turi visus geriausius puikios istorijos bruožus, priedo net autentiškas nuotraukas.

Rekomenduočiau pažintį pradėti būtent nuo šios knygos. Juk tiesą išgirsti pirmą visada smagiau.

When I hear the word 'geisha' my mind wanders to beauty, exquisite and exotic beauty that is restricted to the eastern parts of the world. A part of the world that by itself is alluring and mysterious to people from the west.
The western world has no counterpart to the geisha, maybe that is why these 'women of art' are so mysterious to us. Maybe that is why we so easily belive in the myths surrounding them. This book is good because it offers fact, where we previously only had myths and tales spun by the media. Mineko Iwasaki is clearly an extrordinary woman of art and I truly enjoyed the tale of her life.

However this book could be so much more, it could be a stroll down the streets of Gion, a gateway to another world, it could be something truly great. Unfortunately having a story to tell, a good story even, is not enough to write a great book. If what you want is a straight foreward history lesson, then this book is excately what you're looking for. However if you want to understand this world, to dive into it and expand your horizon, this book will not help you. If a glimpse of the beauty is what you're seeking then sadly the best part of this book is the picture on the cover.