What is a Geisha?
Geisha — those beautiful, mysterious creatures represent all that is most traditional in Japan. Interest in geisha has resurfaced with Arthur Golden’s book, Memoirs of a Geisha, and the movie of the same name. In Japanese, geisha means “person of the arts,” or a person skilled in traditional arts such as music, dance, singing and tea ceremony. Men were geisha at first, serving a purpose much like the traveling minstrels of medieval Europe. As the numbers of men taking up the arts declined, women took over. Some were probably former courtesans, but most were not. The tradition of geisha as women became entrenched, along with a strict code of conduct and hierarchy. Most geisha lived in a house called an okiya, owned by a woman who was usually a former geisha herself. Most okiyas had their prime geisha, apprentices and maids, often young girls training to become apprentices. Some girls were sold to okiyas, and the house mostly owned the girl until she paid off her purchase price as a popu
Closer to a courtesan than a prostitute, but also a kind of performance artist, a geisha is schooled in the arts of music and movement, service and conversation, decorum and adornment. Her uniform is a kimono, and her camouflage is white face make-up with cherry red lips. In other words, she represents a highly artificial feminine ideal – a fantasy figure whose allure is built on mystery. Simultaneously exoticising and at least nominally demystifying the oriental, Memoirs of a Geisha seems to have generated more excitement in anticipation than on the screen. A big, lavish, expensive period romance, directed by Rob Marshall of Chicago fame, Memoirs has run into flak for casting Chinese actresses as the three leading geisha, and you can see how that would rankle from a Japanese perspective, although it’s scarcely more offensive than casting an English actor as a German. In other respects the casting makes good sense. Firstly, Zhang is a knockout, though I would say that her two big dance
