Mineko Iwasaki was a queen among the geisha of Kyoto, Japan, in the 1960s and 1970s, the kind of girl, connoisseurs said, who comes along once every 100 years.
When she talked, powerful men listened. When she danced, corporate chairmen fell into ecstasy. When she inclined her head and fluttered her fan, men sighed with unrequited yearning.
Her fame and beauty were such that the government hired her on state occasions to entertain prominent guests, among them the Queen of England, President Ford, Prince Charles and the ubiquitous Henry Kissinger.
Her kimono-clad figure decorated posters and postcards across Japan.
Arthur Golden was a first-time novelist interested in Japan. He wanted to write a novel about a geisha, and in 1987, he began his research.
Five years later, Golden met Iwasaki, then retired, in Kyoto. In the course of a number of days, they talked about everything from makeup to kimonos to geisha training. Golden felt so enlightened that he tossed out his first draft and started over.
Today, three years after the release of Golden’s phenomenally successful book, “Memoirs of a Geisha,” Iwasaki and Golden are no longer friends.
Instead, the two are involved in a feud reminiscent of the outcry that greeted Saul Bellow’s “Ravelstein,” allegedly about the late University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom, and Joyce Carol Oates’ “Black Water,” a fictionalized account of Sen. Edward Kennedy’s 1969 Chappaquiddick accident.
Critics blasted Bellow for betraying his friend Bloom’s memory by having the book’s title character die of AIDS, when it was unclear if Bloom succumbed to the virus. Oates faced criticism for capitalizing on a tragic story that involved the death of a Kennedy campaign worker.
Iwasaki claims she has lost face — 20 years after she hung up her wig and kimono, wiped off the last mawkish mask of a geisha’s makeup and retired to quiet domesticity with her artist husband Jinichiro.
Iwasaki says she opened her home to Golden, a scion of the family that owns the New York Times, after he was introduced to her through two dear friends, Akio Morita, the late Sony Corp. chairman, and Koichi Tsukamoto, the chairman of Wacol, the Japanese lingerie giant.
She claims Golden promised her confidentiality, then broke that promise by thanking her in the book’s acknowledgments. She says people now believe she inspired the book’s main character, Sayuri, a pale-eyed beauty who is born poor, sold to a geisha house, and eventually becomes a legend in Gion, Kyoto’s geisha district.
Worse, she says, friends were annoyed that she had blabbered out too many trade secrets and may have provided unintended clues to the possible identity of her most famous clients during the two weeks the author spent as guest in her home in 1992. And she fears people may believe that Golden’s description of how Sayuri lost her virginity to the highest bidder, a Japense custom called “mizuage,” was based on Iwasaki’s life.
For his part, Golden says he never promised Iwasaki confidentiality. The story of Sayuri, who rocketed to popularity and success in Gion before World War II, is wholly fictional, he claims.
Furthermore, the novelist offers written “proof” that Iwasaki wanted to be publicly associated with the book, so much so that she planned to start a business capitalizing on the novel’s success.
The controversy surrounding “Memoirs of a Geisha” may end as a footnote in literary history. It is, however, a reminder to authors that when they mingle one form of writing with another — with a “fictional biography,” or in Golden’s case, an “invented memoir” — they risk attracting ire.
The writer must make his intentions clear to readers and sources, says Richard Stern, a professor of English at the University of Chicago.
“There will be this continual mixture of genre, but that doesn’t mean that the rules of engagement of writing aren’t more or less the same,” Stern says.
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In an interview in her stately home in Kyoto, Iwasaki made it clear she feels betrayed.
“The fact that my name is in the book is smearing our lives,” she says. Golden “has damaged my honor.”
A geisha who once earned $4 million a year, entertaining as many as 10 customers simultaneously at $1,000 an hour, Iwasaki, 50, says she will sue the author for using her name without her consent.
She also plans to mobilize her formidable connections to prevent the production of the film, which Steven Spielberg plans to direct.
“You can just imagine what kind of film it’s going to be,” she huffs. “I don’t think Spielberg will be able to make it because he must get approval to use all the locations and items from Gion Kobu (the Gion Geisha Association) and the teahouses. We have many powerful customers, and I’m sure they can stop the production.”
(Sources close to the production say they don’t expect Iwasaki’s objections to affect the movie. However, partly because Spielberg has other commitments, Columbia Pictures has not set a production schedule for “Memoirs.”)
“In any field, especially my profession, I have a duty to keep secrets,” Iwasaki says. “I asked Arthur not to identify me or my husband.”
Golden paid tribute to Iwasaki in the acknowledgments: ” . . . I am indebted to one individual above all others. Mineko Iwasaki, one of Gion’s top geisha in the 1960s and 1970s, opened her Kyoto home to me during May 1992 and corrected my every misconception about the life of a geisha. . . . To Mineko, thank you for everything.”
After the book’s release, the author mentioned Iwasaki in interviews, and said her mizuage had set a record of 100 million yen, or about $850,000 today. In the book, Sayuri’s mizuage also sets a record.
“I did not sell my virginity the way it was told in the book,” Iwasaki says. “In fact, I had my first experience at 21, out of my own free will and no money was involved.
“It happened in the Astoria Hotel in New York. I couldn’t say at first whether I was in love with this person or not, and I wasn’t sure if he was serious or not. So I said: `Let us wait for three years.’ And every day for three years he came to see me in Gion. He was married and could not get divorced and we had to be very discreet.
“So we flew to New York from different directions and we met in the hotel. That is the way it was, and that is why I am very angry.”
Golden maintains that Iwasaki told him about her mizuage — and that he has her words on tape.
“I think she was boasting,” he says. “I’ve been talking about it just as she talked about it.”
Iwasaki also expresses her fear that clients feel betrayed by her. Many of them, she says, are important people, who now must field questions like: “Were you the chairman figure in the book?”
“People feel I betrayed their trust so I thought about killing myself,” she whispers. “But then I thought, if I kill myself, who will be there to tell the real story?”
And the story will be told. She is writing her own memoirs.
The 11th child of a kimono-painter, Iwasaki began dance training in Gion at the age of 6 and moved into an Okiya, a kind of geisha cooperative, when she was 8. Like most famous geisha, she specialized in dance, turning her body and hands into subtle tools to enchant and entertain wealthy men.
Iwasaki says she read “Memoirs of a Geisha” late last year when it was translated into Japanese. She complains Golden’s work is a literary mishmash that failed to distinguish between the A and B divisions of the geisha world — one pure, the other trading sex under the false guise of geisha.
Iwasaki has a simple explanation why sex would have disastrous consequences. For starters, a geisha’s reputation as untouchable constitutes a large part of her mystique. “If I had 100 customers and if I had an affair with one of them, I would lose 99,” she argues. “It’s obvious which is the better business.”
With her memories, she plans to expunge the bad taste left by “Memoirs of a Geisha,” a book she charges “crushed” Japanese culture and reinforced Western prejudices that a geisha is no more than a glorified prostitute.
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Fictional memoirs have long been an accepted form of literature. Rousseau’s “Confessions” had many elements of fiction. “Fanny Hill” was an underground classic. Clancy Sigal’s 1992 novel, “The Secret Defector,” is a more contemporary example of how authors often blend reality and fantasy. Today, the memoir movement in general has become more popular.
“The novel has always poached on reality and has often blurred the lines between fact and fiction,” says Peter Brooks, a professor of humanities at Yale University. “What may be new is the way we react to it, that maybe we want to hold writers to a more careful distinction between fact and non-fact.”
Golden’s final draft incorporated one genre in another: It’s a fictional story about a geisha written as a first-person memoir. To enhance the illusion, Golden even added a fake translator’s note at the beginning of his book and moved the acknowledgments and dedication to the back.
Book reviewers loved it, and so did readers. The success stunned and pleased Golden, but in retrospect, he wonders if his tactics worked too well. Many readers believe Sayuri really existed, he says.
“If Iwasaki says people confuse her with Sayuri, I believe that, but that doesn’t make it true,” Golden says.
Therein lies Golden’s defense against Iwasaki’s accusations: The book — no matter how real it sounds or how well he, an American man, captured the thoughts of a Japanese geisha — is still fiction. The information Iwasaki gave him was only used to fill in details of the geisha lifestyle, he says.
And Sayuri has only two significant points in common with Iwasaki, Golden says. Both were sold to geisha communities when they were young, and both, according to his notes, had record-setting mizuages.
“I didn’t expect that it would be likely that Iwasaki would read the book and have absolutely no misgivings about it,” says Golden. “If someone writes about your `family,’ the closer it is to the truth the less you’re going to like it. “The thing I’m really frustrated by is her reversal, her sudden attitude that I betrayed her. There’s no question of a promise of anonymity. She wanted to be the beneficiary of this. She said to me, `Put my face out there a bit more.'”
Golden, 43 and working on his second novel, lives with his wife, Trudy, and their two children in Brookline, Mass. He’s related to the Sulzberger family, which owns the New York Times.
Golden attended Harvard University and received a master’s degree in Japanese history from Columbia University. He lived for a while in Tokyo, editing an English-language magazine and fine-tuning his Japanese.
After meeting a man whose mother was a geisha, Golden started to work on a novel based on the illegitimate son. But soon he gravitated toward the topic of geisha instead.
Golden extensively researched geisha history but found little that told him about the details of geisha life — how they dressed, when they slept, or even how they applied their makeup.
Iwasaki proved to be a treasure trove. She answered his many questions and gave him pictures, he says, adding that the conversations were recorded with her consent.
“I realized that I had gotten absolutely everything in my first draft wrong,” he says.
Golden insists he consciously avoided asking Iwasaki about her personal history and her clientele. He says he did not want to “pollute his imagination” and transpose Iwasaki’s life upon Sayuri’s.
He also says that he tried to distinguish between lower level geisha who sold sex and upper level ones who didn’t. The character Satsu, the less attractive sister of Sayuri who falls into prostitution, partly serves that purpose, he says.
After Golden’s 1992 visit, he says, he and Iwasaki remained friends, sometimes exchanging faxes. Iwasaki was pleased about the novel’s popularity, he contends, and wanted to benefit from it.
In one letter purportedly faxed by her to Golden, a copy of which Golden provided to the Tribune, Iwasaki — through a translator — states that she was planning to start a business taking advantage of her contribution to the book. Coverage in the U.S. media could persuade the Japanese media to tackle the story, too, enhancing her reputation, according to the letter, which is dated February 1999.
(Subsequent to the Tribune’s initial interview with Iwasaki, the newspaper made several attempts to reach her by phone and fax to comment on the letter she purportedly sent to Golden. These attempts were unsuccessful.)
In 1999, “Memoirs” was published in Japan, and that same year, Iwasaki’s friendly attitude began to evaporate, Golden recalls.Then interviews with Iwasaki began to appear in papers around the world, claiming that the book was filled with inaccuracies about what geisha do, and that the story of Sayuri had left her reputation soiled.
Golden admits there may be some inaccuracies in the book, but he contends they are minor.
“This is a novel. It’s a novel! There are inaccuracies in every novel,” he insists. The story is “so believable that people think I stole it right out of Gion. But the final test for me as a writer was, `Could this have happened? Is it believable?'”
Will the war of words affect the value of “Memoirs of a Geisha” as a piece of literature? Not likely, says Stern, the University of Chicago professor, who adds that “usually though there are no legal grounds in pursuing the author of the novel.”
Even “those novels which are based — as so many are — on actual people nonetheless remain novels,” Stern says. “And if a novelist is a person of gifted power and invention then only those actual people who feel they’ve been portrayed are betrayed. The reader is not.”
