Thanks for nothing says tea house diva

TOKYO - Even if you did not know exactly who she was and what she had been, you would realise immediately that Mineko Iwasaki is an unusual Japanese woman.

At first meeting, you might take her for a successful executive. She lives on the edge of Kyoto, with her artist husband, in a high, elegant house.

It is 20 years since she retired but even today in Gion, Kyoto's most famous and exclusive geisha district, Mineko Iwasaki is remembered as the greatest. At the height of her career in the 1960s and 1970s, people told her that she was the kind of geiko (the special Gion word for a qualified geisha) who came along once in a hundred years.

When foreign VIPs came to Kyoto, it was always Iwasaki who would be called upon, to dance for them, pour their drinks, and amuse them with the reverently witty conversation in which geisha specialise. She has entertained the Queen, Prince Charles and Prince Philip.

Until, that is, three years ago, and the publication of "that book," Memoirs of a Geisha by American Arthur Golden.

It has been translated into 21 languages and sold four million copies in English alone.

The book simply tells the story of one woman, Sayuri, who is born into poverty in the 1920s, sold into bondage in Gion, suffers a miserable apprenticeship, and finally triumphs as the greatest geisha of her generation. But, according to Iwasaki, the book is "wrong, wrong, all, ALL wrong." It is a betrayal.

Iwasaki should know, and not only because of her long and distinguished association with Gion. Readers of Memoirs of a Geisha have come across her before, in the acknowledgements at the back of the novel. "Mineko Iwasaki ... corrected my every misconception about the life of a geisha ... thank you for everything." But the association ended last year when Iwasaki finally read Memoirs after it was translated into Japanese.

"He says that it is fiction, but people do not read it in that way. They think it is my story, they think that I did all those things."

Iwasaki's fury is obvious, but it takes a lot of talking to pin down its precise causes. Despite its veneer of highly researched details, she claims that the book is riddled with errors. But her criticisms go beyond mere detail to the tone of the book and the behaviour of its characters.

What seems to strike all readers of Golden's novel, is how alive and earthy Sayuri and her geisha cronies are. But the book's colour, humour and cheekiness appals Iwasaki.

Geisha would never refer to the act of love, as Sayuri and her friends do, in terms of "the eel" swimming into "the eel's nest." "The eel's nest!" exclaims Iwasaki. "I was an apprentice and a geiko for 20 years and the first time I came cross that expression was when I read that book."

However, others in Gion agree that geisha are indeed far from the demure creatures of the popular imagination.

One is Kanna Okuda, a Gion dancer, who helped with the Japanese translation of the book. "Gion is a very closed place and they would rather not have people write books about things like mizuage."

Here we reach the heart of Iwasaki's complaint - the custom known in Gion as mizuage, which is crucial to the plot of Memoirs. Mizuage is the practice by which an apprentice's virginity is auctioned off to the highest bidder among her patrons. In the novel, Sayuri's mizuage fetches a record price and, despite emphasising the fictional character of Sayuri, Golden has said that this detail was borrowed directly from Iwasaki's experience. "$US30,000 dollars would sound pretty outrageous, but [she] sold [it] for 100 million yen which is $US850,000," Golden told American radio interviewer.

To a woman as proud and respected as Iwasaki, the mortification of such a disclosure is intense - especially, as she claims, she told him nothing of the sort.

This then, is what it all comes down to, both Mineko Iwasaki's anger and the book's amazing success: the fundamental question about geisha, the one thing that everyone wants to know - do they or don't they? To which the answer is: they do, and they don't.

A geisha is as far from a conventional prostitute as an accomplished orchestral musician is from a busker on a street corner - which is not to say that even the first violinist cannot indulge into a bit of busking every now and then.

- INDEPENDENT