THE `PERFECT' WORLD OF GEISHA, SEEN FROM THE IMPERFECT INSIDE

Author: By Lucinda Ballantyne

Date: SUNDAY, September 28, 1997

Page: F3

Section: Books

Sayuri does not operate with our raised consciousness -- Arthur Golden is fastidious in avoiding this. In these faux memoirs, a stunning first novel, the author goes for an airtight cultural authenticity. Sayuri thinks in Eastern nature imagery (at which Golden is quite good); she believes in destiny; she understands herself as a personality with much water, and water flows around obstacles, ``always finds a crack to spill through.'' She internalizes the system into which she was sold -- ``a geisha without [a danna] . . . is like a stray cat on the street without a master to feed it'' -- and she is obsessed.

Obsession can be a handy place for a novelist to stash subversive feelings that self-controlled narrators like Sayuri are loath to admit. Sayuri is obsessed with a powerful industrialist -- spoken of, in accordance with the geisha code, only as the Chairman -- who was kind to her years back and whom she sees now and then at parties. She wants to be his geisha: ``Nothing in life mattered more . . . than pleasing him.'' Sayuri is serious about this as love, and so is Golden -- there is no irony, no underlevel in this book. Her character is based on his research, including extensive and apparently unusually candid interviews with a top geisha of the '60s and '70s, Iwasaki Mineko. I suspect that when Mineko told Golden how a geisha thinks and feels, he took these as rather strict parameters to work within when imagining Sayuri's emotions. It is not thus that psychologically complex characters get born, but never mind -- this does not become a problem until late in the book, which is otherwise gorgeously written.

With Sayuri's story, Golden draws back the curtain on Gion, the famously discreet geisha district in Kyoto, and his sensitivity to the minutiae and nuance of this world astonishes. Before the gray-eyed peasant girl forced into pre-geisha maid slavery, the strange life ahead appears in glimpses, overheard conversations. She runs away, is caught and demoted to permanent maid slavery. Years later, she gets her break, and by then she has had longer glimpses, felt the thrill of men staring on the street, wants the glamour of life as a geisha. On the eve of her geisha apprenticeship she is ``like a ship encountering its first taste of ocean,'' she is ``brimming with excitement.'' The full reality of life in Gion begins.

About 800 geisha lived in Gion at this time, and there were 30 or 40 first-class teahouses, then hundreds of the lower rank, in which parties of men were entertained. The okiya where geisha lived with their handlers, who owned the expensive kimonos geisha needed to do their work, numbered in the hundreds. There was a district-wide support staff -- the music and dance schools, the theaters, the hair salons, the dressers, the clothing shops, the restaurants, the maids. How geisha operated within all this is complex. In one scene, Sayuri learns how to accidentally, demurely, expose the erotic underside of her arm as she pours tea by dragging the kimono ``a few finger widths above my wrist to give a view.'' In another, she listens to top geisha regale a group of men with raunchy stories. In the teahouses, geisha entertained politicians, foreigners, Kabuki actors -- but far more often it was middle managers out getting drunk with a supplier. Geisha danced, sang, played instruments, poured sake, got drunk in drinking games, walked men to the bathroom, served them dinner, put their shoes on for them, flirted with the hope of attracting a future danna, and talked in the indirect, generally flattering, impossible to offend geisha-speak.

How did geisha see themselves? Now and then the voice of Iwasaki Mineko comes clear -- proud, realistic, contradictory -- behind the veil of Sayuri's narration. Geisha were truly artists, she tells us; geisha were entertainers. In a geisha's work, dance was everything. But then, ``parties and so are all very nice; but the real money in Gion comes from having a danna.'' The exchange of sex for support ``will probably last six months or so, perhaps longer -- because of course, men tire of the same thing.''

That last quote is a cut to the chase: Geisha were working girls. Of course their spirits were damaged by years, decades, of keeping men untired of them; after so much faking, emotional torpor had to set in. To suggest otherwise seems more culturally condescending than it is culturally sensitive.

Unfortunately, Sayuri is a heroine of the plucky, indomitable-will school -- she is undamaged by her own trauma. She does have a 15-year unrequited passion for the Chairman, and for a long time I mistook this as emotional complexity, since it rang true as the kind of obsession such a powerless woman might work up to make her life tolerable. ``Sex will be different with the Chairman,'' she could tell herself while servicing her creepy danna -- nothing like obsession for avoiding pain and growth. Then suddenly, near the end, the Chairman from whom we have heard so little steps forward to tell Sayuri he wants her, has wanted her all along, only circumstances have prevented him, etc. They have a love that lasts a lifetime.

What a shock. ``Memoirs of a Geisha'' has been a romance all along. This makes Sayuri and the book simpler. It is true, Sayuri talks often about her acceptance of destiny as a reason her bad experiences have not left their mark on her psyche. Probably this is an echo of how geisha spoke of themselves when interviewed by Golden. But destiny is one of those words it is a novelist's job to dig around behind, no matter who uses it.