She has some hard lessons about life, about family, about money and about the mutual obligations that form such a big part in Japanese culture. The girls find their own metier, and Mineko found that her skill was dancing, and she gives some fascinating descriptions of her training.īecause of her seclusion, she was very naive about the world. Whilst all the girls are growing up and learning their skills together, it is also a competitive world, as they know that only the best will ultimately be successful, so there isn’t much mutual support. It is a world set apart, and for years she rarely set foot outside it.ĭuring her training, she was frequently full of doubt, and it is, by her account, a harsh life. Geisha houses are generally in special districts called karyukai, and she spent most of her life in just such an area, the Gion Kobu in Kyoto. The majority of the book concentrates on Mineko’s early life, going into great detail about her mindset, her training and the world in which she lived. The author compares the intensity of training to that required to become a ballerina or opera singer in the west, and it seems a fair comparison. The Japanese themselves do not use the term geisha, the girls start out as maiko, who have endured years of training and are considered ready to perform publicly, who go on to become geiko if they are good enough. The break with her family is almost total, and she only sees them occasionally after the move (although there are one or two family surprises along the way). She is adopted at a young age by a family who run an okiya, the traditional place where geisha live and train.
This book is the story of one geisha Mineko Iwasaki, one of the most successful of her era. Arthur Golden’s novel ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ only muddied the waters, and was mostly panned in Japan, but more of that later. From visions of heavily dressed and theatrically made-up girls performing the tea ceremony right through to sex workers, most of us have little knowledge of what they actually are. The term ‘geisha’ still has a certain ambiguity outside Japan. Geisha of Gion by Mineko Iwawsaki ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 6/10
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