Living dolls

Born in Japan, growing up in America in the Sixties, Yoko Kawaguchi was perplexed by the persistence of what she felt to be an anachronistic image of Japanese culture: the geisha. ‘That mincing, simpering personification of female subservience to the male infuriated me,’ she writes in the introduction to Butterfly’s Sisters.

Her book explores the Western portrayal of Japanese women with emphasis on the geisha, from the mid-19th century to the present day, comparing perception with reality, misunderstandings compounded by prejudice. She details the geisha’s appearance from head to toe (tortoiseshell hairpin to wooden-soled geta), and the life, from the market in virginity to retirement and/or violent death, encompassing history, myth, literature and art.

The geisha emerged as a discrete class within the ranks of prostitutes and courtesans, from the brothel quarters and tea-houses. One translation of the word is ‘performing artist’, and there are similarities with the hetaerae of ancient Greece. Geishas were expected to sing and dance and play an instrument to a high level of skill. Sex, sooner or later, usually formed part of the deal. Harsh financial arrangements underpinned the picturesque exterior of a geisha’s life — one of indentured labour, with the girls working endlessly to pay off a crippling debt: the sum paid to their families, added to the cost of their training and lavish costumes. A geisha who failed to earn enough to repay her debt might be sold on, along with the debt, to another geisha house.

We in the West were fascinated by the topsy-turvy world of The Mikado: in the 1880s a Japanese exhibition drew a million people to Knightsbridge; Japonisme inspired European fashion and décor, and infiltrated the works of Tissot, Monet, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and others.

The fascination was ambivalent: Baudelaire, Beerbohm, Wilde — everyone had a view, and expressed it forcibly.