World of the Geisha

Yasunari Kawabata's crystalline novel Snow Country relates a love affair between an aloof dilettante and what is known as an onsen, or "hot-spring", geisha; and much of the novel's relentless melancholy arises from the onsen geisha's low place on the geisha totem pole. The dilettante is slumming, in other words, and his girl, though adept at the typical and treasured art of shamisen-playing, drinks and talks too boldly for a woman of her station.
The phenomenal success of Arthur Golden's novel Memoirs of a Geisha and now the recent movie release- has rekindled the public's interest in these secretive and seductive creatures, just as their species seem destined to receive the coup de grace suffered by so many things traditionally Japanese. No ear is so trained as that hoping to hear dying words.
For their part, some Japanese are not so keen on being identified with their wobbly, porcelain quasi-prostitutes. They would prefer to stand for artistic virtuosity or technical mastery. Yet there is no reason for Japan to be ashamed of this unique contribution to international culture. Where would the world be without The Mikado or Madame Butterfly?
Like many Asian countries, Japan has imported two extraordinarily unsuccessful ideas from the West. First, that marriage should be based on romantic love. Second, that marital infidelity is grounds for divorce if not damnation. Marriage, when it was not purely an economic contract between families, was based upon the necessity of producing and supporting children. The husband won the bread that the wife then distributed; and the husband was expected and even encouraged to seek amour and more elsewhere. According to the system's logic, no one woman can be an angel with the children, a maid in the kitchen, a whore in the bedroom, and a wit in the salon.
No doubt the system has its faults as a solution to the problem of the sexes. It scoffs at gender equality and tends to fester with ugly jealousies. But it also has its virtues. It accounts for the fact that men and women, for the time being anyway, are endowed with markedly different equipment and instructions for its proper use. And Asia has a far lower rate of divorce than the West.
The function of the geisha is to provide men with learned but carefree conversation, song and dance, and cup after cup of sake. Unlike the common lot of prostitutes, they are expected to receive rigorous training in their gei, or "art". Their dress is elaborate and expensive, and thus their services do not come cheap. And sex is not a service, or at any rate not the foremost service, that they offer. Though Western civilization has occasionally seen figures similar to the geisha - the Greek hetaerae and the French femmes savantes -- there is no modern Western equivalent.
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