Books
Geisha, A Life
Mineko Iwasaki with Rande Brown
Geisha, A Life
(Atria Books, 2003)
So, what was is the life of a geisha really like? Not the made up fantasy of a Western man’s best seller on the subject, but an authentic geisha, or “artist” in Japanese. Mineko Iwasaki was a geiko, or “woman of art,” an “Iwasaki Atotori” successor to the house of Iwasaki, the most prestigious in Japan, starting at the incredibly young age of five.
The tradition, now in steep decline in Japan, was strictly regulated and formally stylized. When she was 29, and at the apex of her career, Mineko abandoned it for marriage and an ordinary life. She was exhausted from the stress and artifice it took to maintain the illusion of perfection in minutely detailed manners, costume, makeup, dance, rituals, and polite conversations with clients. Her life was a combination of a diva surrounded by adoring fans, a party girl, a little bit of a therapist, a breadwinner for the household, all portrayed as the embodiment of someone who always bends to the will of others. Yet, Mineko, stubborn at heart, desperately craved the one thing she was denied—solitude.
Her sisters were also trained to be geikos and they all endured a turbulent early separation from their parents. Thrust into an adult world of lessons, sponsors, and bosses, for years she suckled on the breast of her older sister in order to fall asleep, and when particularly stressed would hide deep inside a closet. The legal issues of her formal adoption into the house of Iwasaki and the problems and perks it created are a snapshot of a feudal society that valued a specific kind of woman so highly it could take her from her parents before she was properly weaned. Her story illuminates the daily life of both the senior geikos and their maids showing the kindness and cruelty of their hothouse life together.
The training at the Inoue School of Dance, the best of its kind, was imbued with the old-style way of life. The relentless discipline of her classical dance lessons left her exhausted with little over four hours a night sleep, but they were mandatory for someone of her station. Sexually innocent, she was almost raped by a cousin, who was discreetly moved to another part of town by Mama Masako, a frugal banker who oversaw how every yen was spent, a rare attainment in such a male-dominated society.
Mineko went from apprentice to a full-blown professional master of tea ceremony, banquet etiquette, conversation, and the costume attire of a Heian princess. Each kimono ensemble cost tens of thousands of dollars, and was accompanied by ornate hair accessories, fans, and purses. Yet in the end all this splendor and power was not enough. She fled to the refuge of normality and lack of title. But fortunately for all of us, with a tone of humility and regret she wrote a clear unencumbered memoir superbly translated from the Japanese by Rande Brown. Geisha, a Life paints a picture of an era, forever faded like parchment, into history.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Michael Brenson’s David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformative Sculptor
By Brandt JunceauDEC 22–JAN 23 | Books
This artists life stares back at the would-be biographer, like a gorgon. The author turned a mirror on it. The tale is made to tell itself, witness by witness, snapped off in an unblinking chain of hard short chapters, almost voice by voice. By conscientious decision, maybe a matter of self-preservation, Brenson is a laconic guide rather than interpreter and thankfully, no explainer.

Susan Bernofsky’s Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser
By Cigdem AsatekinJUL-AUG 2021 | Books
Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser (Yale University Press, 2021) is an affectionate, precise piece of writing that illustrates a man of complexities both personal and professional. It is an intimate portrait of an artist, soul-crushing in its realism, with all its valor and rigor.
Charles Baxter’s Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature
By Joseph PeschelSEPT 2022 | Books
The hardest part of being a writer is learning how to survive the dark nights of the soul, Charles Baxter writes about halfway through his new book, Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature. This isnt Baxters first book about writing and the life of the writer as an artist.
Francine Tint: Life in Action
By David EbonyNOV 2022 | ArtSeen
Mostly large canvases (up to 6 by 10 feet) painted within the past three years, in the midst of the pandemic, the works on view in Francine Tint: Life in Action appear as luminous and effervescent as any she has made. But within the parameters of the visual vocabulary she has established over decades, Tint reveals a highly nuanced range of emotional statesfrom exuberantly euphoric to introspectively pensive.