AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A GEISHA
By SAYO MASUDA
Translated by G.G. Rowley. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 216 pages, $24.95

reviewed by Susan J. Napier

In the 1960s, John Ball, the American writer best known for In the Heat of the Night, published the novel Miss One Hundred Thousand Spring Blossoms. In it, Richard Seaton, a mild-mannered engineer from Boston, travels to Japan on a business trip and falls hopelessly in love with the eponymous geisha of the title. To Seaton, the geisha epitomizes the ultimate woman: bewitchingly feminine, beautiful, kind, and sexy, she is everything he could dream of. She is also, of course, the ultimate Other. They share neither language nor culture, and this distancing makes her all the more entrancing both to Seaton and no doubt to the contemporary reader.

Some forty years later, Americans are now being given the chance to see the world of the geisha from her own perspective, and this perspective is very different from that of the enchanted American male. First came the success of Arthur Golden's novel Memoirs of a Geisha, in which the writer traced a top-class geisha's life across the complexities of twentieth-century Japanese history. The novel did an excellent job of providing the reader with what seemed like backstage access to a fascinating world, a world that was still exotic but was made accessible through the appealing character of the protagonist. Next, Mineko Iwasaki, the model for Golden's novel, published her own autobiography, which helped to illuminate the realities of a geisha's life through a less romanticized lens than that of Golden. Now, in 2003, we have another version of a real-life geisha, Sayo Masuda's Autobiography of a Geisha, and this book is perhaps the most illuminating and affecting of them all.

Originally published in Japan in the 1950s, Autobiography of a Geisha is a remarkably fresh and personal account of a life that is a far cry not only from the Eastern exoticism of Ball's book, but also from the upscale and at least sometimes glamorous lives depicted in Golden's and Iwasaki's work. In all three cases, the geisha were sold as young children into geisha houses, but thereafter Masuda's story differs markedly. Rather than the (at least technically) refined environment of the Kyoto teahouses, which was the setting for the other books, Masuda's world is a seedy hot-springs resort in Nagano. Although she learns the geisha arts of dancing, singing, and amusing men, it is clear that her most important role is providing companionship, sexual and otherwise, for her danna, or patronin this case, a small-time criminal nicknamed Cockeye, for whom she feels not the slightest trace of affection. Money rather than romance or even aesthetics was the only important currency at the resort, and geisha had to accept that reality, as is clear from Masuda's unemotional account of how her virginity was sold at a high price not only to Cockeye but also again, several more times, to a variety of other patrons anxious for first access to a young girl. The fact that Cockeye is a decent provider makes her at least acquiescent, although she acknowledges a fleeting desire to know real love.

The very lack of self-pity with which Masuda describes the many painful events in her life ultimately makes the book all the more moving and even shocking. Masuda interweaves her story with that of the other young geisha in her teahouse, and we share their sense of entrapment and despair as she describes how her friend and mentor Tsukiko kills herself after being rejected by a potential danna or how a new geisha, Sennari, sleeps with any customer who wants her in order to hide her feelings of rage and humiliation from being raped by her employer at the age of fourteen.

Ultimately, Masuda left the geisha business only to encounter the exigencies of trying to survive in immediate-postwar Japan, a situation complicated by her need to look after her little brother. This last third of the book is also powerfully moving, especially Masuda's typically straightforward account of her brother's suicide. The book is not all bleak, however. Perhaps its most affecting scene is when Masuda describes how she and a fellow geisha would get away from the teahouse and the customers by climbing to their secret place, in a large pine tree on the grounds of an old estate. Ensconced high in the branches, the two would look down at the beauty of the city lights, safeat least for a little whilefrom the realities of the geisha world.