Japanese geisha dead at 90

[Gestalt]

A Famous Geisha gone..

[Taro Toporific]

A Famous Geisha gone..

Kiharu Nakamura: "The Memoir of a Tokyo-born Geisha."

Real Audio - Voice Monologue from Kiharu Nakamura - http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/people/features/mycentury/audio/wk08d2.ram

Pix here: http://www.toshin-net.co.jp/kiharu/purofhi.html

[Mulboyne]

Kiharu Nakamura
TownOnline.com: Memoirs of real-life geisha
In 1994, several years before Arthur Golden's "Memoirs of a Geisha" became a best-selling novel, aspiring New York filmmaker Artemis Willis met Kiharu Nakamura, a compelling 84-year-old Japanese woman who had been living in the United States for more than four decades...The upshot, more than a decade later, is the completion of Willis' film "Smoke and Mirrors: A Geisha Story." At first blush, the title "Smoke and Mirrors" seems to reflect a Western obsession with the "exotic" Orient. But, as the film explores Nakamura's lives and legends, it becomes clear that it is considerably more than that...Little is known about Nakamura, and much of it is of dubious authenticity. Records indicate that she was born in Hokkaido. In the film itself, however, she insisted she was born in the Shimbashi district of Tokyo, near Ginza, where her father - a doctor, she said - treated the neighborhood's prestigious geisha and kabuki actors...she entertained...many well-known foreigners (Babe Ruth and Charlie Chaplin among them, she claimed)...she appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show," lectured at Princeton University, and was a consultant to Anna Moffo and other well-known sopranos while they prepared for their role as Cio-Cio-san in Puccini's "Madame Butterfly."...Willis began her film as a biographical portrait of Nakamura. "But at a certain point, as my understanding for her deepened" she said, "I had to abandon all my former assumptions." Part of that new understanding may have come from Willis' correspondence with Liza Dalby, an American anthropologist who actually became a Kyoto geisha as part of her Ph.D. studies and wrote a book about her experiences. "I sent some materials to Liza, and she wrote back something to the effect that, if geisha are supposed to represent the grace, poise and elegance of Japanese culture, Miss Nakamura was simply a travesty - a strange, exotic plant that had lost contact with its roots."