Behind the snow- white faces

Women Of The Pleasure Quarters
The Secret History of the Geisha
By Lesley Downer
Broadway Books
288 pages
Available at Goodwill Bookstore

Like the cherry blossoms, beauty is all too fleeting; and this is what gives her story its poignancy. The beauty of women can drive men to distraction and to their deaths but in the end men get revenge: such women die old and alone. Komachi’s tragic end made her all the more the perfect precursor of the geisha. Like her they too came to be regarded with ambivalence. They were sirens, so beautiful that men could not resist them — yet to yield and fall in love with one was to court disaster.

Geisha. This at once conjures both the familiar and the mysterious. We know the look behind the word: flawless white faces, dainty scarlet lips, carefully arranged jet black hair, fabulous kimonos. But do we know the world behind the image? Following the international success met by Arthur Golden’s novel Memoirs of a Geisha (1997), Lesley Downer, journalist and author of several acclaimed books on Japan, immersed herself in laborious but inspired research, penetrating the remaining secretive geisha circles of modern-day Japan, to come up with a fascinating book that reveals, in an interweaving of the historical and the contemporary, the secret faces behind these captivating women that have become so much a part of Japanese tradition and culture.

One of the most interesting facets of Women of the Pleasure Quarters is Downer’s methodology: with patience, her knowledge of the culture (it helped that she lived in Japan for a decade), and perhaps a little luck, she managed to win the trust of several geishas (now rare in modern-day Japan, she found out) in famous, and infamous, geisha areas in Japan, and got herself invited to enter their carefully-guarded world. What she has in this book, therefore, is not just research, but first-hand accounts based on her very own observations and numerous interviews.

Downer clarifies a common misconception: there is a clear-cut distinction between a prostitute and a geisha, which translates as "arts person." Japanese women have to go through intense apprenticeships in dance and music, not to mention numerous rituals and a rite of passage, to become one.

Women of the Pleasure Quarters weaves together history and legend, poetry and song, tradition and custom, uncovering 400 years of history, most of which was cloaked, if not by misconception, by mystery: It traces, for instance, how courtesans evolved into geishas, reveals that the first geishas were male and for the most part describes the elaborate rituals and intricate arts practiced by geishas then and now. Moreover, and fascinatingly so, the book also explores why the way of the geisha continues to be captivating, despite the emergence of modern entertainment, naming it a living symbol of fantasy and romance.

Written in simple but creative prose, the book reads like a novel. It would make a good follow-up to Golden’s novel – but, with its solid research and unique insight, Women of the Pleasure Quarters also stands on its own. — Althea Lauren Ricardo