From ivanlan@callware.com Sun Mar 12 19:45:19 2000 Received: from mxu1.u.washington.edu (mxu1.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.09/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id TAA28948 for ; Sun, 12 Mar 2000 19:45:17 -0800 Received: from callware.com (mail.callware.com [63.64.27.75]) by mxu1.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with SMTP id TAA07134 for ; Sun, 12 Mar 2000 19:45:16 -0800 Received: from callware.com ([63.11.186.187]) by callware.com; Sun, 12 Mar 2000 20:45:08 -0700 Message-ID: <38CC6009.C9430AEE@callware.com> Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2000 20:27:05 -0700 From: Ivan Van Laningham X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (Win98; I) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: classics@u.washington.edu Subject: Re: Query: hetairai & geishas References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hi All-- David Lupher wrote: > My local Sunday paper reprints a Washington Post article about a > retired Kyoto geisha, Mineko Iwasaka, who served as a major source > for Arthur Golden's novel "Memoirs of a Geisha," which was on the > NYT bestseller list for 58 weeks. She objects that "the book is all > about sex. He wrote that book on the theme of women selling their > bodies. It was not that way at all." And later she is quoted as > saying, "In the field I was in, there was some sexual involvement, > but it was not the basis of our work." Meanwhile, Mr. Golden (whose > book I have not read) is quoted as saying that there are two myths > about the geishas: "One myth is that geishas are prostitutes. That > myth is wrong. The other myth is that geishas are not prostitutes. > That myth is wrong, too." I have read the book, twice. I think it's an exceptional book, on several levels. I am sure that SJ Willet will have plenty to say regarding your other questions, so I won't inject my own ignorance. I think Mr. Golden does make it very clear that geisha, as any other segment of humanity, span a broad spectrum of behaviour. Low-status geisha were selling sex. Modern-day prostitutes often claim to be geisha to gain a little status, but real geisha, even the low-status ones, received considerable training in the cultural arts, primarily conversation. A lot depended upon the houses to which young girls were either sold or apprenticed themselves; low-status houses often had one upscale geisha and several who picked up the slack. Geisha of high status lived in a very different world. Their training, I think, might best be likened to several years of military school, with little if any chance of withdrawal. Houses would invest, in modern equivalents, thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in high-end training and kimono. They would expect and require repayment of such investment before they would be willing to release geisha from their contracts. Given all that, it's quite surprising that the requirement for sexual services was really so small as one moved up the scale. The major imposition, apparently, was that the owner of the house would sell a geisha's maidenhead to the highest bidder. They could get enough to keep the entire house running for a year using only moderately competent bargaining practices. After that, as Golden makes clear, geisha did not have to give sex. It was not a requirement of the reputable houses--geisha could, and did, make their own arrangements with customers, but what the house required and what the customer bought was entertainment, companionship and cultured (or uncultured, if that was what was desired) conversation. I think Golden does a admirable job weaving all this, and more, into his story. It's a sympathetic story, and it is told well. It is not "all about sex." It's about a woman of pre-war Japan who is sold into a way of life against her will, what she does to stay alive, what she does to better her position. What she does is often surprising, but never illogical, given the highly stratified and sexist society she is living in. Mr. Golden's descriptions of what sex there is in the book is quite discreet. He never tries to make one _feel_ what the geisha is feeling, only what she is thinking. He said on an interview on NPR some months ago that he spent three years writing the book in third person, only to throw it all out and spend two years re-writing it in first person, because it wasn't right any other way. I can respect that. It's also hard to say if Golden is himself a feminist, because he tries so hard to put you inside the woman and her times. It could, like _Tootsie_, be a feminist story written by someone who wasn't at all trying to write one. It's an awfully sympathetic book, one that I think fails mostly in that it can immerse the reader too deeply in the time and place. I rather suspect that he, like Dorothy L. Sayers, fell at least somewhat in love with his hero. Which really, is not that bad a thing to have happen to one. -ly y'rs, Ivan ---------------------------------------------- Ivan Van Laningham Callware Technologies, Inc. http://www.pauahtun.org and http://www.foretec.com/python/workshops/1998-11/proceedings.html Army Signal Corps: Cu Chi, Class of '70 Author: Teach Yourself Python in 24 Hours .