Geisha, A Life By Mineko Iwasaki, with Rande Brown

Geishas are not hookers.

I’d say they are more akin to models, but that is also unfair. Models are known almost exclusively for their looks. Geisha train extensively in the traditional Japanese arts, such as tea ceremony, dancing, and music, and are expected to entertain flawlessly in addition to creating a pleasant visual environment. In her autobiography, Geisha, A Life, Mineko Iwasaki, with assistance from Rande Brown, presents a wonderful peak into her cloistered life as a star of Kyoto.

The majority of Mineko’s youth was spent in an okiya, a geisha boarding house of sorts, run by an almighty proprietress known as the okasan. Fledgling geisha live in these establishments during their intensive, guildlike instruction period which runs seven days a week. These ladies debut as a maiko, or apprentice geisha, around the age of fifteen and serve in this capacity for approximately five years. Afterward, as a full-fledged geisha, the women are expected to have established their own clientele to hostess, thus ensuring the continued financial stability of the okiya and the okasan. This was the system to which Mineko devoted her youth from the age of five.

The protagonist’s fate was tied closely to destruction of World War II. Japan’s social order shifted dramatically, and Mineko’s family lost wealth and rank. Several of her sister proceeded her to the okiya in Kyoto. In many ways this was a rare opportunity for social advancement for young women without engaging in prostitution. Only in 1959, ten years after Mineko’s birth was born, did Japan outlaw the professional of zegen, men who went about the countryside buying girls to sell to brothels, along with criminalizing the sex trade. Other daughters of her era were sent to Shimabara, to work as oiran and tayu, serving men in licensed whorehouses.

According to the story, Ms. Mineko joined her okiya wholly of her own free will, compelled by the opportunity to dance, a respected and well-enumerated skill for geisha. Beyond love for her creative vocation, Ms. Iwasaki’s life was further blessed by circumstance. Every okasan requires a successor in place to run the okiya upon her death, and for various reason the house Ms. Iwasaki entered, Iwasaki, lacked one. Her purpose in being brought to the okiya, beyond the career of a geisha, was to inherit the underlying business and its assets.

Throughout her life Mineko successfully leverages her privilege, navigating mean girls and unruly horndogs with gusto. Her reward is both riches and an almost unparalleled independence as a woman in her day and age. Exhausted by the rigidity of her trade’s demands, Minkeo retires at 30, takes up golf, travels the world, and, finally, settles into domesticity with a painter. Hers is a beautiful story about a bygone time in a faraway place where people may pay for a glimpse of feminine perfection, but must be content to go home alone.


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