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glyptodonsneeze 's review for:
Geisha of Gion: The Memoir of Mineko Iwasaki
by Mineko Iwasaki, Rande Brown
The important lesson is that the child who spends her free time hiding in a cupboard isn't well-suited to spend her life as a professional social butterfly. Mineko Iwasaki is adamant that she spent her childhood hiding in very big cupboards, but the lesson holds. This book sat uncomfortably with me and I didn't like it. My first problem was that Mineko's parents farmed her older sisters out to an okiya. That seems so deeply wrong to me. Mineko was the eighth child in her family and sending her off seems less cruel, since the family is already huge and how much time do you have for that kid anyway?, but how do you give up your first two children? Mineko firsts meets them at the okiya and has no idea that these two sisters even existed. And her parents send her off unweaned. What in the hell? Granted, she's an obstinate three-year-old who refuses to give up breastfeeding, but then she breastfeeds for comfort until she's ten. That's weird. Other cultures are different and such, but I'm pretty sure that's weird. Mineko is ripped apart by her love of her family and her love of dance, and the love of dance means forsaking her family and pledging herself to the okiya, and dance is her passion, but I said that too dramatically. This book is written in a, "This happened and then this happened and then this happened and then this happened," format and everything is bleak and monotonous, although it might be supposed to evoke other moods? Occasionally, Mineko will say something like, "My friends and I had fun together," but without this information sprinkled in, one would assume that she had no friends. Same thing for being the most popular maiko in Japan for several years. If she didn't say, "I was the most popular maiko in Japan," every once in a while, a reader would assume that her unending slog of classes, dance performances, and attending private events was not associated with incredible celebrity that she, as a naive teenager, was weirdly unaware of or unaffected by. The minutia of being a geiko is where this book shines, but it's still written in a dry way. One assumes that Mineko Iwasaki could write volumes about traditional hairstyles, for example, and that would be great if one were seeking that information, and Iwasaki probably should have written those books instead, but the writing style isn't engaging enough for me to pay attention to how an older maiko puts her hair up in such a way that it's different from a younger maiko's hair. I'm going to put this in a Little Free Library but I wouldn't recommend pulling it out of there.