Mem[our]ies

What are our memories? Personal (chosen) moments or public (fragmented) dreams?

I saw Memoirs of a Geisha all alone the first time.  The theater was very crowded, and I had arrived after my friends; there were only single seats available, and I crawled to the very top, very right-hand edge of the row near the back.

By the end, I was secretly glad that no one else had watched it with me.  It had reverberated through my soul with a teeth-shaking, paradigm-shattering chord of beauty–the kind of beauty that is painful to behold and painful to not behold.

That winter, I became intensely depressed.  I read the book on which the film was based, and I was heart-stricken to learn it was nothing but a dime-store novel written for the cheap thrills bought by exposing exotic Others, transforming them into curiosities by laying them bare–quite literally–before the voyeuristic eye of people in power over them.  We beat Japan, by the way.  In the Second World War, we beat them.  All their mysteries, we stole them under the guise of “curiosity.”

The film (whether intentionally or not) acknowledges this selling-out in the pig-ish depiction of Americans after the war.  Sayuri and the Chairman are ultimately united because Nobu wants to impress the Americans with the hospitality of Japan through Sayuri’s performance as an entertainer–and then neither she nor him nor the Chairman are happy with the charade anymore.  They use it to their own ends, they shake the game board until the pieces fall–and Sayuri and the Chairman win.  The game, the performance, doesn’t actually change.

What I love about Geisha:

1. Sayuri’s bravery; she never lost her own courage, she shaped it to the practical realities of her circumstances.
2. Sayuri’s single-mindedness; she wanted.  She wanted the Chairman to be her danna.  (Ironically, that’s exactly what he was the entire time: they were just deprived of mutual knowing.)
3. Chairman’s kindness; nobody notices children, let alone remembers them.  It struck me recently that Sayuri wasn’t actually a genius geisha– “She” was created by Mameha’s attention.  Yes, Chiyo, must have had a certain innate ability to learn and apply, but if Mother was capable of seeing the belligerent Hatsumomo become a leading geisha despite her impertinances, then she wouldn’t have missed a talent like Sayuri simply because she was rambunctious and determined.

What scares me about Geisha:

1. Sayuri’s slavery; she never actually had a true choice because, to feed herself, she couldn’t say no (which is why any inability to say no, despite the celebrity, corporate, or commercial perks is to be a slave).
2. Sayuri’s smallness; her greatest dream was to have a man pay her to be his companion in pleasure?  Pleasure that she was responsible for creating on cue?
3. Chairman’s duplicity; he had CHILDREN!!  That means he had a wife…and was a father…and fell in love with someone that he knew when she was 9 and recognized when she was 15…Is this a cultural high-horse on my part?  Or is that something truly perverted?

All told, though, aren’t we all geisha at some level?  Convincing ourselves that we are selling our skills, forming relationships, deflecting ruin, flattering the powerful because it is an honorable profession, separate from our personal / private Selves?  And we want to be geisha: we want to be requested, seen, applauded for our accomplishments—recognized as a discrete object of value that occupies a position of power.  But the personal and professional, the private and the public: they can’t actually exist at odds with each other.  We can’t pretend forever.

Eventually, the masks come off.  The space of play collapses.  The Who that we are and the Who that people see, all the layers—the prostitute, the concubine, the courtesan, the geisha, the geisha-with-a-danna, the wife-who-captivates-like-a-geisha-but-who-isn’t-paid-in-coin, the queen—they implode.  Aren’t they all the same?  And therefore, does the single soul take on the properties of the lowest denominator or the highest?

I want to be a queen not a prostitute.  But thanks to the Curse (our insistence that we take the care and keeping of our Selves on our own shoulders), that distinction no longer exists.

I look forward to the day that we are One again: not sliced up layers that can be peeled away thanks to critical or cultural analysis, but real whole People whose parts are intact whether at the subatomic or metaphysical level.  When we no long play parts but simply exist as the true protagonists of our own stories, not piece-meal adaptations of collective clutching at the deep desires that we can never answer…