What, beyond the Hollywood stereotype, is a real-life geisha? How come that what used to be teahouse hostesses in 18th century Imperial Japan—painstakingly trained in the arts of singing and dancing as well as in conversation and letter-writing—became conflated in the Western mind with the idea of the consummate prostitute?
In
Butterfly’s Sisters: The Geisha in Western Culture (Yale University Press, 336 pages), scheduled for release towards end-October, cultural writer-lecturer Yoko Kawaguchi makes a fascinating exploration of how in the West, Japanese women and geishas in particular have come to embody certain ideas about female sexuality, then examines how this world view—for both good and bad—has found expression in Western fiction, opera, the visual arts, and music videos.
In “The Call to Service,” an advance review of Butterfly’s Sisters in the October 13, 2010 issue of the online
The New Republic, Rachel Shteir says that Kawaguchi’s work is an exhaustive history of the East-meets-West romance that found its finest expression in Puccini’s magnificent opera, M. Butterfly, from where the book drew its title. Shteir says that Kawaguchi wrote the book out of her great irritation over stereotypes of the geisha as “mincingly passive and sexually voracious.” The “dream women that haunt the western imagination,” Shteir quotes Kawaguchi, reveal more about the West’s neuroses than about the geisha, who “reflects changing western anxieties regarding female sexuality in general.”
Shteir says that Kawaguchi is obsessed with how Western reformers, writers, and artists confuse prostitutes and geishas, and makes the insightful conclusion in her book that as opposed to how the West sees the geisha, to be a geisha really means to excel at “a profession which places more emphasis on being pleasant to and pleasing others rather than the importance of being independent-minded and assertive.”
“Kawaguchi is best when using history to explore what literature, with all its attention to narrative and character, misses,” Shteir says. “She is at her worst when she tries too hard to condemn Western intellectuals [for thinking so lowly about geishas].”
Read Rachel Shteir’s “The Call to Service” in the online The New Republic now!ANOTHER INTERESTING READING:In “How Handwriting Trains the Brain,” an article in the October 25, 2010 issue of
The Wall Street Journal, Gwendolyn Bounds writes about how researchers are finding that writing by hand is more than just a way to communicate. “The practice helps with learning letters and shapes, can improve idea composition and expression, and may aid fine motor-skill development,” she says.
Read “How Handwriting Trains the Brain” in online The Wall Street Journal now! THIS PAGE NO LONGER AVAILABLE ON THE WEB
