Memoirs of a Geisha

Cafe Society
1

I ordered the DVD for **Memoirs of a Geisha ** from Columbia House last month. I had heard it was mediocre or at best “pretty good,” but it was a free funcash deal and I figured that I could at least watch three of my favorite actresses strut their stuff even if the story didn’t grab me.

The book seemed to have its fans, so I decided to read the book first to get the “real” story and then watch the film. Everyone knows that 99% of the time, the book is better.

Oh. My. God. This was one of the best books I’ve ever read in my life! Easily in the top five. The words just jump off the page. I can’t believe that it was written by an American man (and his first published novel!). His first person narrative from the eyes of the young Japanese girl rings so true I still have a hard time comprehending how he wrote it. You, as the reader, *live * the life of the girl and experience what she has to face as she grows up. This book is magic.

Of course the movie could not touch it. Sure, we get this scene and then that scene, but it was like watching a two-dimensional outline. No depth. I rated the movie 3 out of 5 stars because comparisons notwithstanding, it was well-acted and very visual.

For anyone who enjoyed the movie at least somewhat, I highly encourage you to read the book. You can thank me later.

2

I’ve read this book at least twenty times. Sayuri is believable as a geisha because she’s so captivating and charming. I haven’t liked a character this much in a while.

After the book came out, I heard that Speilburg had optioned it. I wish he had done the movie. Perhaps justice would have been done to it, and then again, perhaps not. It really is a very simple love story, Good Guys versus Bad Guys. It’s the backdrop against which the story is played and Sayuri’s voice which makes it a great book. It’s almost impossible to portray some of the nuances which are essential to it. I don’t know if two-and-a-half hours could immerse the viewer into Japanese culture the way Goldman does in the book.

3

I haven’t seen the movie. I liked the book. I thought of it as a sort of Japanese Great Expectations.

4

I love the book, and I really like the movie. I don’t know why people panned it so badly - I thought it was true to the book and the acting and cinematography was great. What is it that people don’t like?

5

Loved the book, but the movie was just okay. I didn’t like the way they changed some aspects of the story. It seemed like they were going for more drama and it wasn’t necessary. I think the problem for myself, and probably others, is that once you have a picture in your mind of what it should be like after reading the book, it’s hard for a movie to live up to that.

6

My issues with the movie were all relatively minor. Sayuri’s “dance” comes to mind, and the hair was all wrong. (Would have been right for The Tale of Genji, but not* MoaG*.)

The movie* couldn’t *have been as good as the book. As I said before, a 2.5 hour movie can’t immerse the viewer into the culture of the “floating world” and the book was mostly about Sayuri’s training and all of the work/scheming that goes into making a great geisha.

The movie lacked several points which I think were important to explaining the characters and their motivations. We don’t see the desperation of Sayuri’s father during the time her mother is dying (nor do we learn that he was crushed by a similar loss once before.) Thus, his decision to sell his children to Mr. Bekku seems to come out of nowhere. I also regretted not seeing what was one of my favorite scenes in the book: when Sayuri recieves a letter from the father of the boy with whom Satsu escaped and Auntie’s chilling words of comfort.

Sayuri’s training in the film flashes by in an instant. We never see the geisha school. (I know it was crucial for me because I never realized the incredible precision which is required in dancing. It made me see the geisha as highly-trained preformers, rather than just companions.) We don’t see the endless hours of practice that Sayuri did while she was unpopular which made her an excellent dancer. Instead, we see Mameha showing Sayuri how to bow properly and a few seconds of proper fan swinging and then she’s ordering Sayuri to make the delivery boy drop the tray.

The war scenes also lose some of their poignancy. Another of my favorite scenes is when Sayuri drops a leaf into a brook and imagines it floating down to the river, where it may pass the Chairman’s window and make him think of her. She grows a lot during this time, takes a lover of her own choosing and learns that she can survive outside of Gion, but that it’s where she *wants *to be.

We didn’t really get to see Hatsumomo’s misery in the film-- she comes across as simply a cartoonishly evil woman, not–as in the book-- a woman whose unhappiness and fears made her cruel. Nor did we see the slow fade of Pumpkin and her envy, which explains why she betrays Sayuri to the Chairman.

Nor do we see why Nobu loves Sayuri. Their brief interractions in the film don’t really explain it. Why does he think that Sayuri different from all of the other geisha when we never see how she draws him from her shell?

7

If you liked the book, try The Tale of Murasaki, by Liza Dalby. Its “based” off the women who wrote “The Tale of Genji” (which I have at home and haven’t read - mostly because I can’t carry it anyplace).

8

[QUOTE=Dangerosa]
If you liked the book, try The Tale of Murasaki, by Liza Dalby. Its “based” off the women who wrote “The Tale of Genji” (which I have at home and haven’t read - mostly because I can’t carry it anyplace).
[/QUOTE]

I didn’t like this book. I found it dry and uninteresting.

Dalby has written some very good books. I have her Geisha which is sort of a coffee table book about the Floating World. One of my favorite parts of it is a five page transparency series of the layers of a geisha’s clothing. Very helpful for when you’re reading a book set in that era-- you can refer to the diagrams and see how the item works with the other layers of clothing.

Dalby was reportedly also the only Western woman who trained and worked as a geisha.

9

I liked the book a lot. The first hour of the movie was engaging, but the rest was a long, dull slog for me.

10

[QUOTE=Athena]
I love the book, and I really like the movie. I don’t know why people panned it so badly - I thought it was true to the book and the acting and cinematography was great. What is it that people don’t like?
[/QUOTE]

Certainly the movie was enjoyable. I’m glad I have the DVD. I look forward to going through the bonus features and such.

But as **Lissa ** and some others have mentioned, there’s just something missing. For me, its not so much the details of the kimono or the setting (Gion or otherwise), although these do provide a depth of scene. Moreseo, it is the motivations and thoughts behind the characters’ actions. We get so much more about the cruelty of Hatsumomo. Chiyo/Sayuri’s reactions and inner thoughts regarding life at the okiya. The dynamics of Mother/Auntie/Grandmother/Pumpkin are better understood. The build-up to the misuage and the thoughts about a danna. And what about Nobu? His character really gets short shrift in the film.

I guess it boils down to, in the film we *see * Sayuri and what she does. In the book we *know * her and who she is.

My point in bringing the topic up is not to complain about the film. It’s just a friendly reading suggestion to those who maybe have seen the film (or not) to pick up the book and be ready for a wonderful read.

11

I loved the book and have read it twice. How about the converse: will I enjoy the movie at all, or should I just skip it? I’d been looking forward, in a low-grade way, to seeing the costuming and sets. How accurate are they?

12

As I said in this thread, my experience was:

13

[QUOTE=Lissa]

I didn’t like this book. I found it dry and uninteresting.

Dalby has written some very good books. I have her Geisha which is sort of a coffee table book about the Floating World. One of my favorite parts of it is a five page transparency series of the layers of a geisha’s clothing. Very helpful for when you’re reading a book set in that era-- you can refer to the diagrams and see how the item works with the other layers of clothing.

Dalby was reportedly also the only Western woman who trained and worked as a geisha.
[/QUOTE]

Dalby’s writing does focus a lot more on accuracy in details and tying in The Tale of Genji and a bit less on character development than Memoirs of a Geisha. However, it all depends on what you’re looking for in a book. I like a lot of “way back when” type historical fiction, and enjoyed the book. (However, I also enjoyed Empress, which was a fictional piece based off of one particular Chinese empress (probably from 600-900 CE; it’s been a long time since I read it).)

I’ll agree with you that Dalby’s Geisha is a really well-done book if you need visual reminders while reading Memoirs of a Geisha; there’s a lot of info to help fill in on how things work, but there’s a lot of photos to give you an idea of how the role of the geisha changed visually from the late 1800s to the late 20th century. Dalby’s more of an academic (IIRC, she’s an anthropologist) personality, and sometimes that doesn’t always mesh well with the reader’s expectations of an engaging story with lots of character development. Other authors can do historically-based fiction well (Tiffany Grace’s novel, The Turquoise Ring, is a great example-- it’s based on Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, but focuses on making a more human portrait of Shylock via the women in his life. Best $2 I’ve spent in the past six months.), and incorporate details and elements from their academic studies without making it dry.

14

The book was fantastic, but the movie was just OK. However, the cinematography was unbelievable, justifiably winning the 2005 Academy Award. The featurette on the DVD, Building the Hanamachi is excellent. Apparently, they built an enormous set of Kyoto’s Gion district in Thousand Oaks, California. They spent some serious dough on this movie.

I was impressed on how the managed to make Gong Li look unglamorous.

15

I love the book. It’s one of those books I can pick up at any point and read a few pages of. It’s a story I could live.

16

I’m one of those naysayers who hated the movie. My book group had just finished the book (book was fine); we rented the DVD to watch together. I’m sorry to say I ruined the night by giggling uncontrollably at some of the dialogue (“the snake wants to get into the cave…”) and moaning “oh no, more rain” numerous times. In short, I thought the movie was badly directed and paced, with awful dialogue, and a “what’s the point?” feel to the whole enterprise.

17

[QUOTE=Ellen Cherry]
I loved the book and have read it twice. How about the converse: will I enjoy the movie at all, or should I just skip it? I’d been looking forward, in a low-grade way, to seeing the costuming and sets. How accurate are they?
[/QUOTE]

The costumes were wonderful, from what I could tell (I’m no expert in kimono, but it meshed with the book.)

There were issues with the hair. (Who could forget reading the scene where Sayuri gets her hair waxed for the first time into a geisha’s style?) The hair in this film is treated in a modern fashion: it hangs loosely when the geisha are in the okiya as if all it took was removing a couple pins for it to unravel.

As I said before, the styles would be perfect for The Tale of Genji (judging from the woodcuts), but the’re innacurate for this movie. Undoubtably, it was a stylistic decision because the actress playing Hatsumomo looks gorgeous with her hair half-clipped-up-and-half-dangling, but it’s not accurate.

I was also dissapointed in the Cherry Blossom Festival scenes. The dance that she does in the film is more suited to a hard-rock music video than to the Gion stage. The precison of the dances described in the book is abandoned for flashing lights and trashing about in unbound hair. (Remember the scene where Sayuri is dancing in the teahouse and wants to see how the Chairman is reacting but she can’t look at him because the dance requires that she have her eyes fixed in a certain position?)

I’m of the opinion that the actress they chose to play Mameha was too old, or they made her look that way. In the book, Hatsumomo and Mahema are about the same age, and when Sayuri first meets her, Mameha was the incarnation of the perfection every geisha wants to attain. It’s only later in the book that she assumes a matronly aspect. I think that the producers wanted to stress the mentor theme, and Western audiences sort of expect for a mentor to be older, whereas in Gion, one could be an “older sister” just as long as she had even one day’s seniority.

There were other inexplicable changes. In the book, Mameha decides to introduce Sayuri to Dr. Crab by having him examine a cut on her leg. She calls the cook into the room, bearing a knife and the two of them order Sayuri to lie still while they make the incision. In the film, Sayuri is handed the knife and cuts the leg herself. (I wonder why they decided to do it that way?)

Hatsumomo setting the okiya on fire? The book’s scene where she had a breakdown in front of her patrons was much more effective, but I suppose it would be impossible to convey on film the enormity of what she had done when she attacked the Kabuki actor at the party.