In time Mameha, the proprietor of another geisha house, spots teenage Chiyo (played by Ziyi Zhang) as someone who might become the most desired geisha in Japan, that is, if she could handle her training and guide her social life to become the property of a rich man. Accordingly, Mameha makes an offer to train Chiyo, for a profit of course, and she is renamed Sayuri when her training has been completed. Luckily, one of the available rich men is The Chairman. However, he is a junior business partner of Nobu (played by Koji Yakusho), whom Mameha wants to bid against another rich man, Doctor Crab (played by Randall Duk Kim). To meet the doctor, Mameha makes a small cut in Sayuri's leg. To meet Nobu, she takes Sayuri to a sumo wrestling match. Later, Mameha takes Sayuri to other public events, where she meets The Baron (played by Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa), who tricks her into entering his house alone, hoping to rape her. Meanwhile, Hatsumomo is furious that Sayuri is attracting so much attention; believing that the okiya will be willed to Sayuri, she starts a fire one night that soon consumes the house. However, Allied airplanes soon begin to bomb Japan, so The Chairman arranges for Sayuri and other geisha to leave for the countryside, where they engage in ricegrowing and other forms of manual labor. When the war ends, Nobu invites Sayuri to return to town so that her charms can so impress an American military officer so that he will invest funds and then he and The Chairman can return to their former role as business executives. Now the plot thickens, as the American is clearly looking for sex before making the investment, Nobu wants Sayuri as his bride or perhaps courtesan, Sayuri is humiliated by Pumpkin (now played by Youki Kudoh), who has become a loose strumpet for the benefit of American GIs, and her goal of being sponsored or even marrying The Chairman seems to have failed. But of course the politics surrounding the geisha cannot end there, and the film tries to end on a happy note. What Memoirs of a Geisha presents, however, is an Orientalist view--the Japan that Westerners want to see. A notable lapse in the story is that the geisha provide much more intelligent conversation than the trite phases uttered by Sayuri, who otherwise would have learned to recite haiku poetry and much more. A more serious problem, which has provoked protests in Asia, is that Chinese actresses are selected for key parts. Japanese wonder why, whereas China has banned the film for painfully recalling the "comfort women" of World War II. MH

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden According to Arthur Golden's absorbing first novel, the word "geisha" does not mean "prostitute," as Westerners ignorantly assume--it means "artisan" or "artist."