We begin our course with a multimedia presentation (maps, photographs, cartoons & film clips) that illustrates the history of geisha.  We discuss how the changing position of the geisha embodies the fantasies and anxieties of different eras in Japan.  We ask how her image might compare or contrast with American icons such as Miss America, Marilyn Monroe and Jennifer Lopez.
 
• Pleasure quarters and courtesans in Tokugawa Japan
• Geisha in Imperial Japan
• Postwar Geisha
• Contemporary geisha
• Geisha in comparison with icons of the feminine in the U.S.

Recommended Film: The 1999 documentary The Secret Life of Geisha provides useful background.  It is available at the UNC-Chapel Hill House Undergraduate Library Media Resources Center; 
call number:65-V758.
 

The geisha of Japanese art and literature is inseparable from the concept of the floating world (ukiyo).  In this session, we look at the arts of the floating world as developed in  the Tokugawa period (1600-1868), discussing what kinds of pleasures the geisha represents.

• Geisha characters in the Kabuki and Bunraku (puppet) theaters 
• Geisha in fiction written for popular audiences 
• Geisha in woodblock prints
• Filmmaker Mizoguchi: A modern artist's depiction of geisha

Recommended Film: The 1953 film A Geisha by Mizoguchi Kenji is available at local video stores. 
 

Fascination with the geisha in Europe and the U.S. began in the mid-19th century.  It was enhanced by travel accounts and photographs, and later by orientalist novels, fashions, and productions such as Madame Butterfly. Popular postwar films and novels such as Sayonara by James Michener renewed the idea of the exotic Japanese woman.  In this session, we ask how East and West were imagined as radically different from each other in popular culture.

• Victorian travel, photography and fascination with geisha
• Geisha and the Impressionists
• The popularity of Madame Butterfly in the early 1900s
• Geisha in American film and fiction in the early postwar

Recommended Films:  You might be interested in checking your local video store or the UNC NonPrint Library for such postwar films as My Geisha (1962) starring Shirley MacLaine; Teahouse of the August Moon (1955) starring Glenn Ford; Sayonara (1957) starring Miyoshi Umeki, Red Buttons, Marlon Brando.
 

Geisha continue to fascinate readers outside of Japan as the international popularity of the Arthur Golden novel, Memoirs of a Geisha, attests.  What is the allure of geisha in our contemporary world?
 
• What do Amazon.com readers say about Memoirs of a Geisha?  We begin our session by looking at reader responses to this internationally popular novel.  What do these responses tell us about readers' expectations for a popular novel?

• What themes emerge most strongly in this novel?  How do these themes compare with other geisha narratives we've discussed?

• What other representations of geisha are available to English-language readers today?  Participants, divided into groups according to the book you choose to read, present brief reviews of your selection.

Readings:  All participants will read Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden (Vintage Books, 1997).
All participants should also choose one of the recently published books in English by or about geisha to read and present to the group.  These include:

• Downer, Lesley. Women of the Pleasure Quarters: The Secret History of the Geisha.   Broadway Books, 2001.
• Downer, Lesley.  Madame Sadayakko: The Geisha Who Bewitched the West. Gotham Books, 2003.
• Iwasaki Mineko.  Geisha, A Life.  Washington Square Press, 2003.
• Masuda Sayo.  G.G. Rowley, Tr.  Autobiography of a Geisha. Columbia University Press, 2003.