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The novel enticed readers with its authoritative evocation of an alien, exotic world in which women served men less with sexual favors than by creating a simulacrum of the feminine ideal. But the book's real pull was its minutely researched take on a fairy tale familiar to every culture: poor girl meets rich man of her dreams.
This golden girl is first named Chiyo. Her fisherman father has sold her to an okiya, where she must learn to be a lady. A special sort of lady: a geisha, one of the "wives of nightfall" who for centuries have entertained Japanese gentlemen with delicacy, wit and a mastery of such arts as flower-arranging, calligraphy, singing, dancing and playing the three-stringed shamisen.
At 15, Chiyo (Ziyi Zhang) has these graces only in embryo; but a famous geisha, Mameha (Michelle Yeoh), sees how they might flower. She begins the girl's education sternly. "That is a perfect bow. For a pig farmer." "Rise. Not like a horse." And slowly the eager student with the "watery" gray eyes grows into a captivating woman known as Nitta Sayuri. "Now walk," says Mameha. "You are a magnificent geisha"—beguiling enough, at least, to attract the attention of the Chairman (Ken Watanabe), a powerful man whom Sayuri has adored since she was a little girl and he showed her kindness. Sayuri's rise doesn't suit Hatsumomo's ego. The reigning bitch-goddess of the okiya accurately sees Sayuri's promise as a threat. With magnificent hatred, she spits a warning at the girl: "I will destroy you."
Clear enough? Memoirs of a Geisha is the Cinderella story, with Sayuri as the young heroine, Mameha as the fairy godmother, Hatsumomo as the evil stepmother and the Chairman as Sayuri's prince charming. It could also be a backstage saga like the 1930s Hollywood classic 42nd Street—the one where, just before a big show is to open on Broadway, the temperamental leading lady can't go on and is replaced by a plucky ingenue, groomed to stardom by a showbiz veteran. Just the sort of parable to attract a Broadway choreographer like Marshall.
The cast is a dream team of A-list Asian actors, beginning with Gong Li and Zhang, who enjoyed her own star-is-born career splash at 21 as the airborne vixen of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which became the top-grossing foreign-language film released to that time in North America. Yeoh, another Crouching Tiger eminence, was Hong Kong's top female action star in the 1980s and '90s, and lent her high-kicking glamour to the James Bond series in the 1997 movie Tomorrow Never Dies. Watanabe earned an Oscar nomination as Tom Cruise's regal ally in The Last Samurai.
These are some of the finest, most attractive actors on the globe, and they will help sell Geisha to the Asian audience. (The film opens in Hong Kong on Dec. 9, for its regular run in Tokyo a day later, and in other Asian cities in early January.) But their name value means little at the U.S. box office—less, anyway, than the lure of seeing a cherished novel illuminated on the big screen. "I've gotta believe, in the job that I do, that when you give the audience something that they haven't seen before, they are going to like it," Amy Pascal, Sony Pictures' movie chief, says of her studio's $80 million investment, which is cheap for a film of such grand range, but a lot for one without bankable Western names. "I'm hoping the film appeals to people who have ever been in love."
Or in love with movies, for Geisha revives the sweeping spirit of old-fashioned film romance. It also recalls the bygone day when Hollywood believed it was truly the world's storyteller, and thus could put on the screen epics set in China or India, Java or Japan—so long as the indigenous characters were played by whites. One difference between Geisha and such venerable films of the mystic East as The Good Earth and Dragon Seed is that this one has Chinese and Japanese actors in the leads rather than Katharine Hepburn with Asian eye makeup.
Purists may complain that the three main geishas are played by Chinese women speaking English, which they were taught to intone in a lightly Japanese accent. It is a shame that a film with so specific a setting could not have leading ladies steeped in that culture. But there's a bald fact that is evident to anyone familiar with today's East Asian films: China is rich in top actresses, and Japan isn't.