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| Posted by Andrew on Thursday, April 01 @ 06:00:00 EST
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 Editor's Note: Today we begin a series of excerpts from Arthur Golden's critically acclaimed 1997 novel, Memoirs of a Geisha. We at ModelMinority.com are proud to affirm our commitment to bringing you the very finest in Oriental-American literature.
 By Arthur Golden
Excerpted from Memoirs of a Geisha
Random House, 1997
By the spring of 1946, we'd all come to recognize that we would live through the ordeal of defeat. There were even those who believed Japan would one day be renewed. All the stories about invading American soldiers raping and killing us had turned out to be wrong; and in fact, we gradually came to realize that the Americans on the whole were remarkably kind.
One day an entourage of them came riding through the area on their trucks. I stood watching them with the other women from the neighborhood. I'd learned during my years in Gion to regard myself as the inhabitant of a special world that separated me from other women; and in fact, I'd felt so separated all these years that I'd only rarely wondered how other women lived -- even the wives of the men I'd entertained.
Yet there I stood in a pair of torn work pants, with my stringy hair hanging along my back. I hadn't bathed in several days, for we had no fuel to heat the water more than a few times each week. To the eyes of the American soldiers who drove past, I looked no different from the women around me; and as I thought of it, who could say I was any different? If you no longer have leaves, or bark, or roots, can you go on calling yourself a tree? "I am a peasant," I said to myself, "and not a geisha at all any longer." It was a frightening feeling to look at my hands and see their toughness. To draw my mind away from my fears, I turned my attention again to the truckloads of soldiers driving past. Weren't these the very American soldiers we'd been taught to hate, who had bombed our cities with such horrifying weapons? Now they rode through our neighborhood, throwing pieces of candy to the children. |
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Re: Memoirs of a Geisha (Score: 1)
by ac2004 on Thursday, April 01 @ 11:02:26 EST
(User Info | Send a Message) | Editor's Note: Today we begin a series of excerpts from Arthur Golden's critically acclaimed 1997 novel, Memoirs of a Geisha. We at ModelMinority.com are proud to affirm our commitment to bringing you the very finest in Oriental-American literature.
Heh, heh, heh ;)
Kudos again to Andrew & Judy. Keep 'em coming.
-----------------------------
By the by, to whoever is giving the "1 star" score to articles on MM that expose racist Asian fetish, IR disparity, and negative stereotypes embodied by crap like Memoirs of a Geisha (coming to a theatre near you in a few years, I've heard), The Last Samurai, etc. ... stop wasting your pitiful life trying to hinder Asian & Asian American empowerment. Why don't you just enjoy your mail-order bride Asian girlfriend and leave us the hell alone.
And stop insulting our intelligence by pretending to be anything other than a White man with a RACIST Asian fetish. So who are you pretending to be today? A White 'woman' supposedly married to a Japanese man who comes on here to bash Asian men and tell ridiculous lies about Asia? An 'African American woman' who is opposed to minority empowerment and minorities standing up for themselves against racism by Whites? A 'South Asian' (who, strangely enough, knows less about South Asian culture and issues than East Asians like me) who comes onto praise sh*t like The Last Samurai or deny that the Asian fetish or IR disparity are real problems? An 'Asian American woman activist' who in one place criticizes Asian American men for allegedly saying negative things about AFs but then isn't particularly bothered when White fratboys, rednecks, geeks, et al. treats Asian/Asian-American women like whores, sex toys, or in other sh*ty ways?
Like I said, drop the charade and either confront us straight up and honorably or just leave us the hell alone. |
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Re: Memoirs of a Geisha (Score: 1)
by kimkam on Thursday, April 01 @ 13:01:59 EST
(User Info | Send a Message) | Could someone direct me to a critique of this book? As far as I know Memoirs of a Geisha was critically acclaimed, and universally. I heard no negative voices. Most people felt Golden, a white man, got inside the head of an Asian woman from another culture, time and era pretty well. Is there a reson I shouldn't recommed this book? This is the first time I've heard the fetishizing charge.
And AC, what can I say to you? There's a Japanese woman who wrote an interesting article on Lost in Translation. She actually saw it as a Japanese movie and had good things to say about it. No, she's not a sellout at all. I think she wrote for dissidentvoices. Not sure. the point is, people can disagree and not have ulterior motives. |
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Re: Memoirs of a Geisha (Score: 1)
by sir_humpslot on Thursday, April 01 @ 21:02:37 EST
(User Info | Send a Message) | http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A57556-2000Mar1
Pages Torn From a Geisha's Life
Once She Had a Respectable Career, But Now It's Another Story
Entirely
By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, March 2, 2000; Page C01
KYOTO, Japan –– The old magazine falls open to a page of timeless
beauty. The woman in the photograph peers over her shoulder with
dark, somber eyes. Today? A century ago? Her painted white face gives
no clue. Nor do the scarlet, doll-mouth lips. Her dress would be
coveted in any age; it falls in mesmerizing folds of gold-woven
brocade, a finely embroidered silk belt wrapped around her tiny waist.
The woman in the picture smiles wistfully as she closes the magazine.
That was her 28 years ago, she says, feigning embarrassment. She
knows the years have left her beauty and elegance intact. She is a
proud woman.
Mineko Iwasaki was a famous geisha in Kyoto's most prestigious geisha
district until her retirement in 1980. She was the source of much of
the rich texture in the descriptions of "Memoirs of a Geisha," its
author says.
"I am indebted to one individual above all others. . . . To Mineko,
thank you for everything," Arthur Golden wrote in the acknowledgments
of the English version of the book, a stunningly popular novel that
stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 58 weeks.
The feeling is not mutual.
"Basically, what is written in Arthur Golden's book is false," says
the retired geisha, in her first interview since the book was
published in Japanese in November and she was able to read it. "He
got it wrong."
Her indictment is of a novel that millions of readers found to be an
intimately knowledgeable story of geisha life in the 1930s and
1940s. "Memoirs" has become the favored airplane reading for
travelers to Japan, and for millions more a bedside escape into the
secret life of the exotic "painted dolls."
The book has sold 4 million copies in English and been translated
into 32 languages. Columbia Pictures has bought the movie rights,
Steven Spielberg is slated to direct the movie, and scouts for the
producer have combed Kyoto looking for the right scenery and dancers.
It is a story of a rural girl, sold to a geisha house in the 1920s,
who navigates jealous schemes and rigid rules of the geisha
world. "It's a very, very absorbing fairy tale told in a visual lost
time and lost world," says Douglas Wicks, who will produce the
film. "It is also about slavery and the underdog."
But Mineko, as she prefers to be called in geisha tradition, protests
that the novel portrays the artisans of the "flower and willow world"
of Kyoto and fabled Gion as prostitutes in silken finery.
"For me, personally, this is a libel, an infringement . . . also a
libel against Gion as a whole," she says in an angry written
outpouring of her complaints, which she brought to the interview.
Golden, in a telephone interview from Brookline, Mass., where he
lives, professes he is unsurprised at Mineko's wrath.
"I knew [these complaints] were inevitable," he says. "If someone
writes a book about your 'family,' the closer it is to truth, the
more you aren't going to like it."
A Geisha's Lament
In Japanese folklore, there is the tale of tsuru-nyobo, the beautiful
crane-woman who takes flight when her human husband violates her
warning and peeks into her closed room to see her as a bird. Mineko,
seeing the closed door of her beloved geisha world thrown open, has
taken flight from Arthur Golden.
But the bet
Read the rest of this comment... |
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Re: Memoirs of a Geisha (Score: 1)
by mungbeansoup on Friday, April 02 @ 03:53:24 EST
(User Info | Send a Message) | Give me a break. This article already has 11 replies, yet the article on Choi, the first Federal Court Judge gets 5?
Some of you folks replying to this article need to focus on postive contributions of Asian Americans. This geisha thing has been done a zillion times already--everyone on this site is knows this.
AA empowerment comes from being able to make and acknowledge productive contributions by AAs, not by wallowing in the dirt like this. |
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Tanaka's BBC interview and article on Geisha (Score: 1)
by Tomoyuki on Tuesday, February 21 @ 14:18:09 EST
(User Info | Send a Message) | Hi, Andrew & folks. TT
http://www.geocities.jp/tanaka_usa/PCracismGeisha.htm
=== BBC interview (mp3 from Jan 2006) ===
Tanaka says: "I like the film, but I must say I _despise_ the novel." -- (at 5 min 40 sec)
http://www.savefile.com/files/7470384 (mp3, 16 min, 8 MB)
Tanaka interviewed on Geisha on BBC Radio
Aired Jan 12, 2006 (the day before the film's UK opening)
______________________________
article (6,000 words) in ejcjs, January 2006
(Electronic journal organized by researchers in the UK and elsewhere)
http://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/discussionpapers/2006/Tanaka.html
Politically correct racism and the Geisha novel
--- The psychology of sophisticated racism mirrors that of ethnic jokes.
Abstract:
In Section 1, politically correct racism (PC racism) is defined as an act with racist intent, justified by righteous appearance, with popularity or near-total acceptance because of its righteous appearance.
In Section 2, after presenting a theory of jokes based on analyses by Sigmund Freud and Marvin Minsky, I show that the pleasure one derives from PC racism is similar to that derived from ethnic jokes.
In Section 3, I point out the inaccuracies and prejudice contained in the novel "Memoirs of a Geisha" by comparing it with the Japanese version.
Based on the study by Anne Allison of the American reception of the novel, I explain its surprising popularity using PC racism.
Pleasures of romanticized subjugation and pleasures of hating the Japanese are made acceptable by the politically-correct appearance.
Finally in Section 4, I characterize the geisha film as a watered-down version with the novel's most racist elements removed.
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