The film Memoirs of a Geisha did not fare well with many critics and reviewers. For example, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times writes of the film: “I suspect that the more you know about Japan and movies, the less you will enjoy ‘Memoirs of a Geisha.’ Much of what I know about Japan I have learned from Japanese movies, and on that basis I know this is not a movie about actual geishas, but depends on the romanticism of female subjection.” Eleanor Ringel Gillespie of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution writes: “Supersized budget and lustrous trappings aside, ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ is basically ‘Desperate Housewives’ with kimonos and fans …. For the most part this movie is part Douglas Sirk ‘50s melodrama, part the ‘World of Suzie Wong’…. The movie is also a Cinderella story, with its very own Prince Charming.” Manohla Dargis of the New York Times describes the film as a “lavishly appointed melodrama,” the story of “Japanese geishas swept up in jealous rivalries.” He goes on to acknowledge that “Geishas aren’t typical sex workers” then adds the caveat “but while serving a new customer every six months certainly sounds less untoward than, say, turning six tricks a night in a day-rate motel, who’s kidding whom?”

    Similar comments and conclusions about the film can be found across the board from the Boston Globe to the San Francisco Chronicle. Others berate the film for its lack of historical accuracy in depicting details of geisha life: “there is no ‘bidding’ for virgins”; “geishas do not spend their lives looking for a ‘danna’”, etc. And it has also been criticized for racial stereotyping of Asians: “the lecherous Oriental man”; “all Asians look the same”—evident in the use of Chinese actresses to play Japanese women, etc.

    These types of criticism of the film are puzzling. The notion that the story is a romanticism of geisha life is narrowly myopic as is criticism of the story for containing significant lapses of historical or cultural detail. It is also extraordinarily wrongheaded to pass judgment on the story for being in some way an endorsement of the life of a “sex worker.” Ebert is remarkably obtuse, for example, in acknowledging his guilt in having found some sense of enjoyment, despite its faults, in a film that “evokes nostalgia” for a way of life that, by his reckoning, glorifies the sex trade, the auctioning of virgins, and the conscription of underage girls. Putting it metaphorically, all these critics fall into the trap of failing to see the forest for the trees.

    Ebert starts out right enough with the assertion that “I know this is not a movie about actual geishas.” But beyond that, however, the film is a penetrating and beautifully wrought allegory of life. What more proof could be required that it is an allegory than that it is the story of a geisha written by an American male? How could a modern American male write a credible “memoir” of geisha life? The answer is obvious. He could not. Again, those who criticize it for its failings with regard to accuracy in its depiction of the geisha life and in other historical and cultural details of Japanese life of the period have misunderstood the nature of the art they are evaluating. It is not primarily an historical or period drama nor is it even a story about the geisha life, the sex trade, or a gender specific story relevant primarily to the lives of women. It is a story about “Everyman” or “Everyperson” and is in that sense relevant to everyone. Arthur Golden probably chose the context of Japanese pre-war geisha life because of his interest and familiarity with Asian and Japanese culture (he has a degree in art history from Harvard with a Japanese art emphasis) and his belief that this context would serve as a profoundly engaging root “metaphor” for life around which he could weave the story he wanted to tell.

    The crucial features of the drama center upon the structure and quality of the relationships and conflicts and the way in which character complicates the conflicts toward tragic outcomes. In this respect, much like a story of mythic quality, historical inaccuracy of minor details is largely irrelevant and the fact that Chinese actresses play Japanese women speaking English with a Hong Kong accent only contributes to the universality of the allegory. It is an allegory deeply accurate and complete in its representation of universal types of conflicts and predicaments encountered in life while also rising to the level of tragic drama. It presents the tragic vision of life, about which more will be said, the vision that while life contains suffering, hard lessons, and potential ruin, it is not thereby inevitably a kind of hell. Furthermore, Memoirs of a Geisha shows how to stay in the mix in a way that will maximize whatever chances exist for fulfillment. What more could one ask from drama?

    But the claim that so many have missed the mark in reviewing this story requires a demonstration of the case. Key characteristics, events, and turns in the story confirm that Memoirs of a Geisha is indeed an allegory of life in the tradition of tragic drama and preclude the possibility of rightly perceiving it as melodrama—a dramatic staging of polarized conflict between characters drawn in simplistic shades of hero and villain and right and wrong.

    Much, of course, could be said about what counts as “tragic drama” but for purposes herein it can be briefly summarized as follows: from Aristotle it is clear that the tragic protagonist is a person with whom it is easy to identify, a person of strong, but not flawless character, who encounters obstacles and conflicts on life’s path and who eventually meets great tragedy precisely through the very trait that was deemed to be the source of strength; Kenneth Burke contributes the notion that the tragic events turn upon conflicts with others that may be viewed by the audience in largely nonpartisan terms, inducing a measure of identification with both sides, all sides, of the central relational conflicts; and Robert Heilman offers the further qualification that the tragic plot brings the protagonist into profound inner conflict, producing an ongoing dilemma between competing choices that each have “authentic claims” of legitimacy or justification.

    In a broad sense, the story of the passage of the child Chiyo (Suzuka Ohgo) into the woman Sayuri (Ziyi Zhang) is a poignant and well chronicled dramatization of the difficult trial of crossing over from childhood and adolescent dependency and various forms of constraining, even destructive, subservience to a more open life of liberation and personhood and the ability to pursue a path more of one’s own making.

    Throughout the film Chiyo/Sayuri models an extraordinary resilience in response to cold and cruel behavior by others and to hard turns of fate. The course of these actions and events bring about three major crises for her. In the beginning sequences of the film she is torn from her family, then separated from her sister, and finally informed that both her parents are dead and that she will not see her sister again. This complete break with the family initiates the first great crisis of loss and separation in her life. Then she is lifted from her despair by her encounter with the Chairman (Ken Watanabe) who, without her knowledge, aids her in gaining entrance into the training to become a geisha. Maturing as a geisha, she gains power in the world of the geisha trade largely through the kindness and mentorship of Mameha (Michelle Yeoh), the woman chosen by the Chairman to help her. This power opens up for her an avenue of independence and potential she had not anticipated. She becomes a formidable rival for Hotsumomo (Gong Li) among the favored geishas and a possible successor for Mother (Kaori Momoi) as head of the geisha house. But as her ascendance into this role becomes certain—and along with it the potential for greater independence and freedom to direct her life—the war tears apart the fabric of this world and sends her back into a life that renews her sense of relative powerlessness, poverty, and subservience. This initiates the second great crises of separation. After the war, persuaded by the Chairman’s associate Nobu (Koji Yakusho), she chooses to renew her life as a geisha along with her hope of gaining the attention of the Chairman. But a triangle of tensions between Nobu, the Chairman, and Sayuri eventually leads to a self-destructive incident with an American financier and the death of her hopes of a future with the Chairman. This initiates the third great crisis of her life, powerfully symbolized in the film when she releases the Chairman’s handkerchief into the wind on the cliff above the sea. As she stands near the edge of the cliff she confronts the ultimate choice of suicide or resuming her life. Again she overcomes adversity and moves on.

    Each of these three crises represents a “loss of family,” a loss of connection (or the potential for connection) characterized by genuine and mutual trust and care in the company of another or others. And in each case Sayuri finds the strength to hang on, resurrect herself, and continue striving toward finding that connection with others—a connection represented most powerfully in the film by the Chairman. This persistent striving toward greater liberation functions as a primary theme in the film and is symbolically conveyed and emphasized when Sayuri’s nature is likened to that of water—a comparison first made in the film by Mother. Water has the ability, with time, to wear down stone or iron and will eventually find its way through the smallest crack in a pottery jar. But the combination of Sayuri’s water strength pitted against cruel behavior on the part of others and tragic turns of fate does not nearly suffice to place the film in the category of tragic drama.

    The structure of tragic drama begins to emerge in Sayuri’s conflicts with others. These conflicts reveal the sense in which this drama must not be confused with melodrama. There are no simplistic villains in this story and no abiding outrage is aroused toward any of the characters. They all elicit a measure of identification and forgiveness.

    Sayuri models this identification, for example, in her comments about Hotsumomo when she realizes, as Hotsumomo flees the house after the fire and their fight, that she too had lost a love—a loss in which Sayuri’s actions played a role. At that moment Sayuri wonders if she is on the path to become, like Hotsumomo, bitter and tormented. She begins to see that there, perhaps but for the grace of God, go I. In that flash of understanding she must also forgive Hotsumomo and so guides the audience to do the same in this extremely tragic and moving scene. The measure of identification Sayuri’s reflection initiates on the part of the audience opens up the character of Hotsumomo into a tragic complexity that precludes stereotyping her as a villain while prompting the troubling question: What creates the difference in one person’s pain and the way they respond to it from another’s pain and response?

    Similarly, Pumpkin (Youki Kudoh) does not descend to the role of a simple villain. While Pumpkin’s revenge against Sayuri near the end of the film is not admirable, it is understandable. Through experiencing, in that moment, the degree of Sayuri’s pain in her sense of the loss of the Chairman the audience is led to sense also the depth of Pumpkin’s loss—a loss that transpires when Mother appoints Sayuri to become the heir to head the geisha house. In that moment Sayuri also took from Pumpkin the one thing she most wanted in life. Seeing where revenge leads, Sayuri—along with the audience—lets go of resentment against Pumpkin and is left with dissipated blame and only a profound sense of tragedy. This blameless sense of the tragic is a deep and complex emotion and is far removed from the emotions aroused by melodrama as well as those aroused in fairy tales such as Cinderella (to which Memoirs of a Geisha has been disparagingly compared)—where at the conclusion the doves peck out the eyes of the jealous sisters in fulfillment of Cinderella’s vengeful wishes.

    Even the Baron (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), in his cruel assault upon Sayuri, does not fulfill the function of a villain in the story. Again Sayuri sufficiently overcomes the incident such that it does not become emotionally crippling for her to the point that she develops an obsession for revenge toward him. Consequently, the Baron does not emerge as an abiding outrage and villainous force in the story. Dramatically the incident with him serves the purpose of imposing upon the audience full recognition of the range of possibilities hanging in the balance for Sayuri between the Baron, the Doctor, Nobu, and the Chairman. These contrasts help to further appreciation for what the Chairman symbolizes for Sayuri and why she cannot give up striving for the kind of life and liberation he presents and represents.

    In portraying the actions and reactions of the main characters in ways that preclude seeing particular ones as simplistic villains, the story follows the pattern of development of tragic drama consistent with Kenneth Burke’s criterion that the conflicts of tragic drama elicit a significant measure of nonpartisan identification and alignment of sympathies on the part of the audience. This is not to say the audience is not inclined to identify with some characters more than with others but rather that identification transcends gravitating solely to one side and spreads inclusively outward such that none of the characters function primarily or exclusively as villains.

    In the film, as well as the book, the main lines of tension and conflict eventually emerge between Sayuri, Nobu, and the Chairman. These lines of external or relational conflict also mirror lines of great internal conflict within each of these characters, internal conflict characterized by opposing “authentic claims,” in Heilman’s sense, and the relative intensity and legitimacy of the competing motives.

    In the case of Nobu it becomes clear that he is an essentially good man who is nevertheless greatly troubled within because of his inability to give of himself due to his fear of loss in general and loss of control in particular. He feels a strong attraction to Sayuri but cannot abandon himself to that attraction any more than he can let go of his fear of loss of control in his world of business interests. But the war brings the realization of his greatest fear in the complete loss of his business. After the war, his attraction to Sayuri is clouded by his desperate need to rebuild the business. He comes for her partly because he has feelings for her but more because he needs her to help him manipulate the Americans into providing the financing necessary to rebuild. Because insecurity dominates his motives, his primary need is stability and so his first order of concern lies in the degree of control he can create through his career life. Sayuri represents the love he needs in his life but nevertheless she remains of secondary concern to him and so she functions for him more as a tool than a person. She senses this and knows that if she falls predominantly under his control she will likely continue to be used by him and thereby not gain the kind of liberation she seeks. Nevertheless, near the end of the film the conflict between Nobu’s need for love and his need for control—and the inability to negotiate the two—begins to tear him apart.

    From Sayuri’s point of view Nobu’s attention toward her creates a significant inner conflict because, on the one hand, she cannot trust him due to his divided nature, his dominating need, and thereby his inability to give in a way that looks out for her best interests and fulfillment. On the other hand, he has in fact possibly been instrumental in saving her life through his efforts to provide a safe place for her during the war and has in other ways shown her kindness and loyalty while never doing anything to hurt her or shame her—unlike many other persons in her geisha life. So she feels a sense of indebtedness to him that greatly complicates her desire to free herself from him in order to keep open the possibility of gaining the kind of liberation she has always sought. In this regard Sayuri’s relationship with Nobu symbolizes the broader ongoing conflict within her between greater liberation and ties of friendship, loyalty, and obligation.

    The Chairman’s enormous inner conflict does not become fully apparent until the end of the film when all of his motives and actions are more clearly revealed. But hints of his inner conflict are provided in an earlier scene where he tells Sayuri of the sense of indebtedness he has toward Nobu for having saved his life by shielding him from an explosion. From this and other actions on his part the Chairman shows that he sacrifices his own feelings for Sayuri in deference to his sense of obligation toward Nobu. These actions flow from his extraordinarily generous nature, but, because he does not realize Sayuri’s attraction to him, he does not know the pain that his generosity toward Nobu causes Sayuri. Nor does he fully realize the sense in which he is effacing and even betraying himself. His great strength of character, his generous heart, begins to function more as a weakness than a strength.

    This same irony of an admirable character trait leading to tragic loss occurs also with Sayuri. The inner struggle between her desire for liberation, which she sees as possible through gaining the Chairman as her benefactor, her “danna,” and her sense of obligation toward and reluctance to betray Nobu, leads her finally to a desperate and self-destructive decision—the decision to have sex with the American. This betrayal of her deepest sense of integrity ultimately shames her in her own eyes as well as in the eyes, or so she believes, of the Chairman. However wrong it would have been for Sayuri to become Nobu’s “danna,” the action she took with the American was a desperate mistake in the effort to find a way out of her dilemma. After Pumpkin’s treachery she quickly understands this. Her sense of her own failure, her own strength become weakness, as the root cause of her predicament helps prevent her from heaping blame and rage upon Pumpkin for her betrayal.

    In a parallel way Nobu’s inner conflict leads to the same irony of downfall through what initially appears to be a strength of his character. His great strength lies in his business acumen and his focus and determination to succeed in the world of commerce and in his sense of fairness and loyalty in transactions. But this strength is his undoing in the realm of human relations insofar as it overwhelms and obscures sensitivity to his own and others’ emotional needs and relational predicaments. He finds that he can function in the controlled marketplace of exchange, the marketplace of corporations and geisha houses, but not in the unpredictable and often unruly community of human suffering, resentment, joy, and surprise.

    It can be fairly claimed, then, that the love triangle between Sayuri, Nobu, and the Chairman presents characters that conform to the subtle criteria of tragic drama as set forth by Aristotle. They are all characters portrayed in ways that elicit a significant measure of identification and sympathy from the audience, each imbued with a particular kind of nobility of character, and each brought, through the fate of their mutual entanglement and character strengths, to a point of tragic collapse and despair.

    In the end, however, Nobu is unable to rise above this despair through his inability to let go, give, and forgive. He fails to discover that only by finding and creating connections with others—based upon the generosity of a genuine care and concern for the welfare of others—does it become possible to attain a degree of liberation that allows for making a life of one’s own. Sayuri possesses this kind of generosity of spirit, evident in her ability to rebound without resentment from the cruelty of others such as Mother, the Baron, Hotsumomo, and Pumpkin. But she also intuitively senses that she cannot attain the quality of life she wants without finding her way to another (or others) who can also genuinely care for her with a love free of control and manipulation. From the day she met the Chairman on the bridge she sensed that he was the kind of person who could offer that kind of connection and unconditional giving. In this regard, Memoirs of a Geisha transcends the level of a romantic love story to become a “love story” of and about human relations in general and the path to personhood, liberation, and self-actualization that can only be achieved through finding and creating genuinely caring connections with other people.

    Altogether, Memoirs of a Geisha is a story that must be seen as neither an historical drama about nor an endorsement of the geisha way of life (in the limited sense as a “sex trade”). Even after the tragic scene on the cliff where she releases the Chairman’s handkerchief into the wind, Sayuri’s decision to return to being a geisha, while being an affirmation of life, is neither an affirmation of (in the form of an endorsement) nor a resignation to the geisha way of life. It is only an acceptance of the circumstances of her fate and the fate of her geisha training with the recognition that through these circumstances she will go forward, like water, with a faith that life may, in some inscrutable way, still bring her fulfillment and liberation.

    But there is a sense also in which the geisha life serves expansively as a “metaphor” or allegory for life in general. Just as the geisha must not give her heart to a particular man, so also in life everyone may do well to remember that the heart must not be given up for possession by another. Ultimately the heart belongs to life and the deepest love must be love of life. And that love will bring with it the faith that life’s inexhaustible potential for value will find a way to bring fulfillment.

    The fact that the story ends happily does not transform it from tragic drama to a fairy tale. While in one sense the “heroic” Chairman “rescues” the threatened “damsel,” each more rightly rescues or liberates the other. In the film this is indicated in the last scene where both Sayuri and the Chairman confess a sense of shame in their actions and thereby acknowledge their tragic mistakes. Through their mutual confessions they create a good measure of equality and further mutual love and respect. In the book the mutual love and regard between the two emerges in a way that confirms Sayuri’s faith that the Chairman’s kind of love for her liberates her rather than constrains her. She decides that it will be best for both of them if she moves to America, and, although the Chairman is saddened by the fact that this will mean they see less of each other, he nevertheless supports her in the decision and helps her to make the move. And this move only furthers Sayuri’s growth as a woman into the personhood of making a life through choices of her own, a move enabled by the Chairman’s genuine care for her and what she believes is best for herself.

    Nevertheless, the hard lessons of the past bring with them awareness of the tragic potential that may always lie ahead and preclude the simplistic and complacent view that life is finally a fairy tale. The ending is instead a symbol that life remains potentially too harsh and unpredictable to be a fairy tale but nevertheless always offers within its inscrutable complexity and suffering the possibility for fulfillment and therefore the necessity for the tenacious and resilient perseverance of water-like natures. Even Aristotle understood that a tragic drama, like any life, need not end tragically.

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