Memoirs of the orient

Journal of Japanese Studies

Volumn 27, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 381-397

  Allison, Anne ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33745219948     PISSN: 00956848     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3591971     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. These quotes are taken from readers who wrote into the Memoirs website on amazon. com.
2. Viewing foreign peoples in pairs of opposites has a long history in the West. Columbus "saw" the Indians in the New World as both pure primitives and "dirty dogs" (Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other [New York: HarperPerennial, 1984]) and Ruth Benedict regarded the Japanese as "the most alien enemy the United States had ever fought" in terms both of "the chrysanthemum and the sword"
3. (Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword [Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1989 (1946)], 1).
4. The plot of Memoirs, in brief, is: Chiyo, a girl from a poor family in a fishing village, is sold to a geisha house (okiya) in Kyoto. For years she struggles as a maid in the okiya and is subjected to brutal treatment (largely at the hands of Hatsumomo, a senior geisha jealous of the pretty Chiyo). When a geisha from another house agrees to be her "older sister," things start to change and Chiyo, finally allowed to start training as a geisha, becomes an apprentice geisha at age 15 (when her name changes to Sayuri). The book is filled with description of Sayuri's training and the steps she goes through to become a highly successful geisha in Gion (including her mizuage, de-flowering ceremony). She takes on a danna (patron), becomes the "mother" of her okiya, and triumphs over Hatsumomo. Her "real" love is a man she met at age 12, the Chairman, with whom she finally consummates a relationship decades later. At the end of the story, the Chairman has become her danna and Sayuri moves to New York where she bears a son, sets up a salon, and outlives the Chairman by many years.
5. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
6. Richard Minear, "Orientalism and the Study of Japan," Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 30, No. 3 (1980), pp. 507-17.
7. For these women, romance novels were also enjoyed for the educational value (historical settings and backdrop) they provided. This insistence on "learning" in addition to enjoying a romantic fantasy was a reaction I also found with fans of Memoirs. Janice Radway's Reading the Romance has been a groundbreaking text in cultural studies for its incorporation of reader response and its analysis of the genre of Harlequin romances. As Radway showed, the readers of romance novels she studied use these stories as a form of fantasy escape to both endure and reimagine their conventionally heterosexual, family-based lives. Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
8. By "dominant listeners" Yoneyama means the dominant position one tends to assume when receiving, consuming, and reproducing knowledge about cultural differences. Lisa Yoneyama, "Habits of Knowing Cultural Differences: Chrysanthemum and the Sword in the U.S. Liberal Multiculturalism," Topoi, Vol. 18 (1999), pp. 71-80.
9. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Americans were riveted by the race to the Orient that was reflected in literary and scholarly texts on various "Oriental" countries. Though this race was first limited to merchants and missionaries, tourists began visiting Oriental destinations (Egypt, the Holy Land) in the 1830s. There was great interest in Oriental travel and travel writing in the nineteenth century; fascination with the Far East (particularly India) culminated in the 1850s and 1860s in the works of writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Malini Johar Schueller, U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790-1890 [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001]). At the turn of the century after Japan's emergence from the Tokugawa period and with its commercial and military involvements with the rest of the world, interest in Japan picked up, stimulating an aesthetic craze for woodblock prints and lacquerware, and a fetishization of the "oriental" love story, Madame Butterfly.
10. The Madame Butterfly story was first penned by Pierre Loti as Madame Crysanthème in the 1870s. John Luther Long next adapted it into a short story in 1898 changing the national identity of the naval officer from French to American. This story became the basis of a stage play that toured in the United States and Britain which Giacomo Puccini saw and made into an opera. It has subsequently gone through several iterations from a silent film in 1915 starring Mary Pickford to the brilliantly deconstructive play, M. Butterfly, written by David Henry Hwang in 1988 which inverted the national sex dynamic (and power) of the main characters. The main story is of an American naval official, Pinkerton, who visits Japan at the turn of the century and "marries" the geisha Cho-cho-san, whom he subsequently impregnates. When Pinkerton returns to the United States he officially marries an American woman and returns with her to Japan where Cho-cho-san has been waiting patiently for her husband. Asked to give up her child to the new couple, she does so by committing hara kiri. For Hollywood treatments of the Butterfly story, see Gina Marchetti, Romance and the "Yellow Peril": Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993);
11. for a sharp analysis of Hwang's play, M. Butterfly, see Dorinne Kondo, About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater (New York: Routledge, 1997).
12. Marchetti, Romance and the "Yellow Peril."
13. Minear, "Orientalism and the Study of Japan."
14. This quote and those in the following sentence are taken from postings at amazon.com.
15. Interview with a middle-aged, professional woman in Durham, North Carolina.
16. Many of the people I spoke to about Memoirs said they had not known much about Japan before reading Memoirs. One interviewee, for example (a middle-aged woman, office worker, Boulder), told me that "Japanese culture is not that widely known, not like other cultures."
17. These comments are taken from reviews of Memoirs and postings on amazon.com.
18. Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 52.
19. Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, 1986), p. 52. Ibid.
20. Golden received his B.A. at Harvard in East Asian art and an M.A. at Columbia in Japanese history.
21. This is a direct quote from a Japanese historian.
22. Said, Orientalism;
23. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
24. George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986);
25. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
26. Said, Orientalism.
27. Velisarios Kattoulas, "A Woman Scorned," Far Eastern Economic Review, 22 June 2000, pp. 65, 67.
28. Katherine Frank has discovered a similar pattern in U.S. strip clubs where dancers stage their identities (assuming made-up names, histories, personalities, interests) but are constantly quizzed by their customers as to how "truthful" they are being. The desire is for a performance that is both good and believable. Katherine Frank, "The Production of Identity and the Negotiation of Intimacy in a Gentleman's Club," Sexualities, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1998), pp. 175-201. Jennie Livingstone has recorded a similar dynamic in drag balls in her movie, Paris is Burning.
29. James Sterngold, "Spielberg Looks to the East," New York Times, 11 September 1998.
30. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 66-84.
31. The quotes here are taken from the Memoirs website on amazon.com.
32. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992).
33. Middle-aged woman, personal interview.
34. Sterngold, "Spielberg Looks to the East."
35. The queen in George Lucas's recent Star Wars: The Phantom Menace has also been said to be dressed as a geisha with kimono-like costumes and white paint on her face.
36. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Random House, 1980 [1976]).
37. Gina Marchetti has made this point as well regarding Hollywood-brand geisha movies (such as My Geisha and My American Geisha); with their fantasies of masquerade, they make explicit the notion of femininity as masquerade. This opens up the possibility of not only looking at gender as a (cultural/historical) construction, but also considering lesbian eroticism (Marchetti, Romance and the "Yellow Peril, " pp. 200-201).
38. Gabriel Brownstein, "A Japanese Cinderella," The New Leader, 3-17 November 1997, pp. 18-19;
39. John David Morley, "Working Woman," New York Times Book Review, 5 October 1997, p. 16.
40. There are many texts that differently weave the strands of identity, sexuality, knowledge, and power I explore here in terms of orientalism. One is the novel Silk by Alessandro Barcco (trans. Guido Waldman) (London: The Harvil Press, 1997) in which an Italian man, traveling to far-away Japan in the mid-nineteenth century, becomes infatuated with an exotic woman. The relationship barely develops, but the fantasy it triggers is a powerful erotic for not only the man but also his wife who inhabits the fantasy herself in order to win her husband back. What I call distant intimacy or otherness in this essay (being drawn to an object despite, and precisely because, s/he is exotically distanced) is central to the structure of fantasy in Silk and illustrates its importance to not only orientalism but also fantasy/desire more generally (and thus, the relationship between the two).
41. See Rani Kabbani, Europe's Myths of the Orient (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).