If you want to make Sayuki angry, mention the movie Memoirs of a Geisha, or worse, the best-seller on which it was based. 'It is a ludicrous, totally fictional book that came out of a white, middle-aged American male's imagination,' she says. 'I hope you're not going to write about that.'
Unfortunately for Sayuki, who claims to be Japan's first foreign geisha, contemporary western perceptions of the so-called flower and willow world have been deeply shaped by Arthur Golden's million-selling kimono-fest, and the exquisitely packaged but trite Zhang Ziyi movie it spawned.
So what was it she disliked so much about the movie? 'The dance in the middle for one thing,' she says. 'Geisha don't dance like that! And the whole movie revolves around sex. The world of geisha is very different.'
Sayuki (her professional name, which means transparent happiness) isn't the only person to have sat squirming through the movie about the rise of the beautiful geisha Sayuri. One critic, particularly offended by her fairy-tale romance with the mysterious chairman, called it a 'blast of bull**** orientalism'.
The book so infuriated the woman on whom it was loosely based, Kyoto geisha Mineko Iwasaki, that she wrote her own to set the record straight. 'Everything about it is wrong,' she says. 'Maiko [apprentice geisha] are not beaten with coat hangers and we do not sell our virginity to the highest bidder.' Iwasaki is suing Golden and others associated with the project.
Sayuki, who hails from Australia and whose birth certificate bears the less exotic-sounding name Fiona Graham, says she can do better.
