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.

A documentary filmmaker and academic with a doctorate in anthropology from Oxford University, she has just become what she says is the first non-Japanese in 400 years to debut as a geisha. She is recording her life on film as she trains in a geisha house.

She says the result will be a rare, scholarly inside look at one of the most closed societies in Japan. 'It will be unique,' she insists. 'Most westerners who have tried to write about the traditions have failed because they never really lived the life. I'm going to represent the society that I'm living in now, as it is.'

Training to become a geisha involves learning how to walk, talk and dress, and mastering skills such as the tea ceremony, the three-stringed shamisen and her own speciality, the Japanese bamboo flute. Then there are the rules of being in an okiya (geisha house), tough enough for young Japanese apprentices, let alone a western woman who's rapidly approaching middle age.

'Every girl in the community is my older sister until the next one comes in, so I have to drop to my knees and bow every time they come into the room, including to my 18-year-old elder sisters,' she explains. 'It's a very strict, old-fashioned hierarchical world and it doesn't make the slightest difference that I'm older than them. If I get anything wrong, my geisha mother will be told about it and I'll get a scolding. It's difficult to deal with but that's the way it is.'

Hardest of all, is sitting for hours in the seiza position with the legs tucked under her bottom. 'I thought I could do it but I was in excruciating pain for a very long time, day in day out,' she recalls. 'They don't use cushions, sometimes sitting on bare wooden floors.'

Graham first came to Japan at the age of 15 on an exchange programme from Melbourne, and graduated from a Japanese secondary school. She earned a degree from Keio University and has worked in Japanese companies and as a journalist. She says watching Memoir convinced her to try training as a geisha. She's the first western woman to attempt it since US scholar Liza Dalby in the mid-1970s. But Graham says Dalby never became a full geisha, despite taking part in the life.

'If you actually become a geisha you have to slot into the hierarchy, at the bottom. Even for me going through a Japanese school, it has been very difficult. Being accepted into the geisha house is just the start. I can't imagine many westerners doing it.'

It also involves significant expense: classes can cost up to 100,000 yen (HK$7,300) a month and a new kimono is about the price of a car.

Graham began training last April and was formally accepted as a geisha last month. The video of her debut shows her in a rickshaw being ferried around Asakusa, one of the oldest of six remaining geisha districts in Tokyo, watched by sometimes goggle-eyed spectators. Tall, wrapped in a million-yen kimono and face pancaked in thick geisha makeup, she cuts quite a figure as she introduces herself to about 100 tea houses and restaurants - her future clients.

Her duties will include attending parties at these venues, pouring drinks and entertaining guests with music, dance and small talk. She can expect to earn about 30,000 yen for a two-hour engagement.

'Everything is carefully rehearsed,' she says. 'When I open a sliding door I have to be on my knees, and stand up. Then close the door again on my knees. Learning what kimono to wear and when ... there are many, many little customs like that.'

Despite a year of training, she says she is still not confident about choosing the appropriate kimono to wear. It sounds a long way from her previous life as an academic and writer, but she insists that those who see geisha as weak or subservient miss an important point.

'They are strong, independent businesswomen who control their own lives. They were among the first independent women,' she says.

But Graham isn't about to make it a long-term career. 'I haven't worked out what I'm going to do yet, but I don't expect to do this my whole life,' she says.

'I'm going to try to depict the truth. We're living in a world where reality and fiction is blurred. So please, just don't compare me to that book. That would be like comparing apples and oranges.'