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MADAME SADAYAKKO: THE GEISHA WHO SEDUCED THE WEST. By Lesley Downer. London: Review (Hodder Headline), 2003. xii + 336 pp.
For years I've thought that Kawakami Sadayakko deserved a full-length study in English-better yet, a movie. Since Spielberg has dropped Memoirs of a Geisha, maybe he, or Merchant and Ivory, would consider filming her story instead? It is a terrific rags-to-riches tale: young girl sold into geishadom finds love with a brilliant farm boy but is forced to leave him when he is married off to the daughter of the architect of Japan's modernization, Fukuzawa Yukichi; she loses her virginity to future prime minister Ito Hirobumi, then marries brash actor, "rap star," and would-be politician Kawakami Otojiro, with whom she embarks on a bumpy decade of popular success and financial fiasco complete with a crack-brained rowboat voyage with niece and dog that nearly kills them; she tours the United States and Europe, once again stepping ahead of creditors and even starvation, where she and her husband's gumption and hard work are finally rewarded by sold-out performances. Her tours abroad with Kawakami and their ragtag troupe read like a Who's Who of fin de siecle Western culture: Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller, Claude Debussy and Giacomo Puccini, Gustav Klimt, Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso, Andre Gide, and Arthur Symons, not to mention sundry kings, queens, princes, prime ministers, and presidents. Max Beerbohm wrote that if, like Paris, he had to decide which goddess of the stage he had to pick-Sarah Bernhardt, Gabrielle Rejane, or Sadayakko-he would choose the Japanese. Yet European adulation for Sadayakko never quite escaped orientalist condescension, and their countrymen slighted the Kawakamis' successes abroad and their efforts back at home to bring modern European theatre to Japan. After Otojiro's death in 1911, Sadayakko continued to perform until forced to...