Последняя гейша (Did they or didn't they?)

[Guest Чатский]

Kiharu Nakamura

Jan 22nd 2004

From The Economist print edition

Kiharu Nakamura, a geisha, died on January 5th, aged 90

THE question was one familiar to Kiharu Nakamura: what exactly was a geisha? In television interviews, at lectures and in her books she would explain that the word was composed of two Japanese characters, sha meaning entertainer and gei meaning artistic. Artistic entertainer: was that all? All? Miss Nakamura would list the accomplishments of a successful geisha: she would have to play musical instruments with feeling, usually the shamisen, a type of guitar, and the tuzumi, a small drum; she would have to sing and dance well and, most important, be a good conversationalist, with a ready flow of stimulating repartee.

What about sex? Miss Nakamura considered the word carefully. Perhaps, she said, the questioner was thinking of the oiran? Like a geisha, an oiran was a cultured woman but would be available to spend the night with a man for a high fee. The two professions were often confused by westerners. That said, it would be misleading to suggest that a geisha never had sex. She might form a relationship with a client and sex would follow naturally. But the distinguished men Miss Nakamura entertained, many of them important politicians and industrialists, were often too tired for sex or too old to bother with it. What they wanted was for their cares to be lifted for a few hours, to be soothed and perhaps gently amused. A geisha, she said, “knew how to handle men”. They might boast to their friends that they were real dogs, but Miss Nakamura knew different. And of course she would never betray a confidence.

The idea that geishas were tarts seems to have been spread by soldiers from America and other victorious countries who occupied Japan after it was defeated in 1945. The girls who serviced the soldiers were happy to call themselves geishas and often wore geisha costumes, as many still do today. Geisha culture continues to be studied by Japanese historians. But for Miss Nakamura the war had ended a profession that dated back hundreds of years to a time when only men were considered to have the accomplishment to be geishas (just as today men still play the female roles in kabuki theatre). In old age she saw herself as one of the few surviving classical geishas, perhaps the last one.

The rebel

She must have been a handful as a daughter. Her parents had assumed that she would have an arranged marriage: that was the way things were in the Ginza district of Tokyo, where her father was a doctor. But the teenager had other ideas. She was fascinated by Tokyo's apprentice geishas as they paraded around town, and she copied their fancy costumes and heavy make-up. She stamped her little clogs and eventually her parents gave way.

At 15 she entered a school for geishas run by teachers who were honoured as “living national treasures”. She in turn became the treasure of the school. Her teachers were charmed by the quavers she put into her voice and her ability to walk with her feet together. She tolerated subjects she found boring, such as flower arranging. The name she had been born with, Kazuko, was changed to Kiharu, which means happy spring. She says she managed to avoid the ceremony of mizuage (deflowering) by conversing with the guest who had paid for the privilege until he fell asleep.

She was one of the few geishas to learn English. Visitors to Japan who were curious about geishas were brought to see her. Most are now forgotten, but they were famous at the time: baseball's Babe Ruth, William Randolph Hearst, the model for “Citizen Kane”, and Jean Cocteau, a French writer and artist who was smitten and wrote a poem about Kiharu.

Japan's secret service, perhaps influenced by stories of Mata Hari, a dancer who became a spy in the first world war, asked Miss Nakamura to spy on a foreign client. Understandably, she was a reluctant agent: Mata Hari had been shot at dawn. But no doubt she did her patriotic duty. When Japan went to war in 1941 she travelled to India, carrying a message from the Japanese government of support for an anti-British movement.

At the end of the war, Miss Nakamura felt that the geisha profession, like Tokyo itself, had been destroyed. She was 32, she had some savings and a baby son from a brief marriage. She worked for several years as a translator in Japan, but the future, she decided, was America. Her new life there was, in its way, a typical immigrant's success story. She had something to sell, her experience as a geisha and of Japanese culture, and she worked hard to market it. When the Metropolitan Opera did “Madame Butterfly” they employed Miss Nakamura as an adviser. Puccini's story might be ridiculous, but at least she could ensure that the costumes were correct.

Her ten books, memoirs and novels brought her into contact with universities. Perhaps her best known work, “The Memoir of a Tokyo-born Geisha”, has been translated into eight languages. Miss Nakamura's lectures at Princeton, Columbia and other institutions were packed out. She would entrance her audience with the same verve she had shown when she entertained her clients as a geisha. “Now, another question, please, preferably not about sex.”

[Witch]

Spasibo, bilo ochen interesno, osobenno mne

[minamoto]

"Мемуары гейши" - кстати, отличная книга, которую стоит прочитать даже не потому, чтобы узнать - а они "того-этого, или не того-этого"... Как говорится, не в этом суть.

[Wir]

А есть у кого в виде печатного издания ( тяжко в компьютерном варианте читать) эти Мемуары? С удовольствием бы почитала!

[Guest Чатский]

"Мемуары гейши" - кстати, отличная книга, которую стоит прочитать даже не потому, чтобы узнать - а они "того-этого, или не того-этого"... Как говорится, не в этом суть.

Откройте словарь на букву "А"...

[TS133T]

Did they, what?

[Diana-]

Did they, what?

I guess, did they sleep with clients for a fee?