And the colossal relevance to my own life
***3/3***
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
This book has been around quite a while and was even made into a popular film. I have not seen the film. Do you find that books are pretty much always better than movies? That’s because our minds, our imaginations touch us more deeply than a passive visual feast.
This book landed with a bit of controversy. The author was said to have abused trust to gain access. Others have said he was selective and inaccurate in the representation of things he heard and told. I sympathise with those criticisms, as well as the accusation of cultural appropriation that went with it.
But I have still given the book top marks. Why is that? Because there are few books on this topic, and none so vivid in detailing the life of a now extinct world. The author artfully conveys the Japan of the dying days of this culture, pre Second World War. The flavour of Japan, the old streets of Kyoto, the staid structures of society, the glorification of aesthetics, the life devotion to a trade, a craft, an art form. The utter seriousness of Japanese in their assiduous application to the learning and style that they have set for themselves.
As a book on Sex Work, it has also really captured the essence of what I understand at this point in my life to be that line of work. The peculiar emotional space of trading on intimacy, of cultivating intimacy, of surrender without surrender. The geisha is a fundamentally submissive style, and yet, even here, at its heart, there is real power. It speaks of how submission as an art form, a peculiarly female and sexualised art form could find its ultimate expression in the feminine arts. That a successful geisha had access to the rich and powerful. That through beauty, accidents of low birth, and assiduous training, a woman could rise to the highest position available: a consort to the wealthy and powerful.
While the book itself does not go into this power dynamic in an explicit fashion, the explorations it makes, the descriptions of how power plays out against a backdrop of humiliation, desperation, the thrusting need of all humans to rise, whether in competition or co-operation, sheds light on what sex work is and always has been.
Sex work is the world’s oldest profession because patriarchy is the world’s oldest governing system. In many ways, sex work is the response of a strong woman who had no other options to rise up. Today, circumstances are changing, and in the world I occasionally visit, the world of the dominatrix, the dynamic is more explicitly different. It is more consciously a world of self-empowerment.
But how many professionals in this world, even the dominant women, are doing anything more than marketing for the male gaze, catering to male desire? In other words, we cannot erase the reality that we still “live in a world created by men, for men,” as Simone de Beauvoir said in Second Sex.
Why do I feel comfortable exploring such delicate terrain? Because I am the third sex. I was born in the third sex. And whatever else my third sex brothers and sisters share, it is this life that is neither male nor female, that is both male and female. It is no wonder that in cultures where the third sex has been allowed to flourish, that we gravitate towards sex work and shamanism.
I return to this topic often for many reasons. It is core to my lived experience. It became core to my Ivy League education. According to my wife my degree was in “women’s letters”, her not-so-kind way of saying I studied sex, gender, and politics in the arts. Given my life’s arc, it should be none too surprising. It equipped me well.
This book speaks to me on a personal level for many, many reasons. Let’s explore.
My first conscious memories of beauty came to me as a child. I lived in Japan. My white skin and large size, flaming red hair, stood out like an insult in my Japanese nursery school. The red shoes that my mother sent me to school in had personality, something which was taboo in conservative Japanese society. I was a peg that didn’t quite fit, my head was already over the parapet, and I suffered for it. Punished daily for being unable to conform. How could I? I looked different.
I was the only foreign child in my school, which was a traditional Japanese kindergarten. We were taught in Japanese. I was four years old. It was the first time in my life where I was of an age that I became conscious of the world around me. My first memories in life, visual, scent, situations, come from this time in Japan.
It was the only time that I ever lived with my father as a child. I discount the time where he may or may not have been at home when I was a little baby, because I have no recollection. I could not hear his voice, I do not see him, I have no memory of him. I recall instead his menacing presence. A shadow. Violence.
I can remember my parents’ bedroom, and the steel escape hatch in the wall that allowed you to climb out and down the building on metal u-rungs which ran all the way down the building. I remember my older siblings who were much older than me fighting with squash rackets, and how I cried that the sibling I liked might get hurt by the eldest, who was a bully, and who I already didn’t like.
I had a Japanese nanny who lived with us, and it was she who occupies all memory. I remember a little of my mother other than her distance, her beauty, and how her blonde and meticulously curled hair caught on fire one night as she attempted to cook. She was never much of a domestic Goddess. My nanny doubled as the cook, and so I lived in the kitchen with her when we weren’t out for walks.
I lived in Japanese. Insofar as a child’s vocabulary is small, perhaps half of my language was Japanese, baby Japanese, and half English.
I also remember living in a peculiar silence. I was a rambunctious child, filled with hot pepper, but I remember mainly a stillness inside of me, as if a great river passed by, so quiet and stealthy you could barely see it move, until something floated along with it on the surface. This is a physical and spiritual feeling that I have carried in me my whole life. It is the essence of submission. I’m not being flippant.
When I am with someone it feels safe to submit to, or to be submissive with, then I can feel that river very close to the surface. All consuming. This comes to me in life even in my daily interactions with people who make me feel safe. Friends. It has happened very often with male friends growing up and all through my school life and is made possible because they direct without agenda. I didn’t want anything, they didn’t want anything, but they led. I wonder if that makes sense to any of you. Is it a feeling you know.
It is not a sexual feeling. It is a feeling of calm. It is a feeling of silence. I first felt it in Japan. It represented a source of immeasurable strength. It was the sound of silence, the feeling of silence. There was a boy who strangled me with some regularity in school. He would rise and walk all the way around the classroom. The two teachers would look on with passive eyes as he came up behind me and would strangle me. He expressed some form of rage and I represented the object of that rage. He would stop when I handed him the lollipop that we were given at the end of every school day. They were really delicious lollipops, I am not sure I got to eat many of them.
The placidity on the faces of the teachers echoed the feeling of the river coursing through me as I was strangled. I was perplexed, but also just silent. There was a stillness to everything. Why do I dwell on this? The world of the Geisha that Arthur Golden describes in this book reminds me of it. Nostalgia for me tastes like this.
When we left Japan my nanny came with us. She no longer lived with us, but she kept alive my connection to Japan for the two years after we went to the US to live, my parents divorced, my father remarried, and with his new wife, moved to Italy. I remember him taking me to the zoo a few times. He didn’t know what to do with kids. The zoo was an experience that required little to no effort from him.
The silence that I felt, lived, tapped into in Japan, my love of Japanese food, and the aesthetics of Japan, informed my life and stayed with me. So much of the décor in our house, wherever we were, was infused with Japanese objects, words, snippets of Japanese culture. Japan became for my mother, a critical touchstone which informed the rest of her life. She was involved in creating Japanese gardens in America, raising money for them, in getting art exhibits to flow from Japan to the US to foster understanding, to sponsor sister cities. She would host Japanese dinners in our home, where our guests would kneel Japanese style on tatami mats. We had room with sliding paper screens, tatami, and Japanese furnishings. It was a beautiful room, kept for special occasions.
There is a wonderful book by a Japanese crime fiction writer Akimitsu Takagi called The Tattoo Murder Case. If there is a genre of fiction which to me is like crack cocaine, it is Japanese crime fiction. Self-styled on 1950’s American pulp crime blended with the Japanese sense of precision and doggedness, and you get some of the most compelling whodunits and intricate plotlines. Best of all, I can feel and hear that sensation of silence running through the story.
I mention that book as there is a passage in it which describes a tattoo. The incredible detail that goes into it, how it transforms the body of the woman on whose skin it is etched, and the multi-generational skill of the artist who creates a life masterpiece. Her skin dances and comes to life, her ultimate physical expression is born when the tattoo is done and heals. The seductive power of her energy is undeniable to any who bold her naked body. When it is unveiled, a murmur passes through the room as all who behold it are stirred, moved, such is its beauty.
The woman is murdered and skinned by someone who wishes to possess this tattoo forever. If you are interested in tattoo art, there is no passage that has ever been written which describes more lavishly the beauty of tattooed skin.
When I read it, I wanted to be her. We could skip the murder part. I thought about it for decades. I have been tattooed since I was 20, just not well. Thankfully that work is not bad and not much bigger than my open hand. My wife hated it and categorically vetoed any further work. Along with separation came freedom.
I have dreamt of being tattooed over my entire body ever since reading that passage, and probably before. I find the tattoo to be utterly sexy. Utterly and completely. But I never found an artist up to the job. I have thought of going to Japan and spending the time to find one. The Economist, of all newspapers, ran an article with examples of brushwork style tattoos, like black ink wash, a technique which spoke to me.
Two years ago, I found her. I was in a studio in New York looking at all the artists who worked there and their portfolios and found one whose work had a softness and precision to it which I had never seen before. I didn’t know, but really top tattoo artists are celebrities in their own right. It’s impossible to see them, impossible to make an appointment, impossible to get them to do any work or share ideas with you before your paid time, and they are colossally expensive.
“Would it be possible to meet her at some point, to have an appointment just to see if we gel?”
“She’s actually here right now. She’s working. She usually doesn’t see people, but I can always ask.” This would be an instance where being a being of light comes in handy. I waited in silence in the reception. And then she was there, right next to me, and her energy was washing over me and caressing me. Her eyes were playful, indulgent, kind.
“Tell me,” she said.
“I’d like to give you my whole body,” I said. “One piece. A work of art. Delicate, feminine. Like your work. Tell my story on my skin.” I told her how much I admired the brushwork technique she used, her flowers, her faces. Japanese landscape painting.
“I give you complete artistic license. I will not say a word. I give you freedom to decorate me in the spirit of what I describe, in the way you feel most.”
She told me that she would need about 10 days, done in two-day sessions, spread over 18 months or so. She asked me to send her images, my thoughts, to give her some ideas. I spent a lot of time putting something together and sent it to her—10 pages of what was going on in my life, what I liked, what was important to me, how I imagined the tattoo.
Six weeks later I was back, and we were to begin.
“Thank you for this,” she said placing down a print of the document I had sent.
“I hope it wasn’t too much,” I said.
“Not at all. It was very helpful.”
“Good.”
“I have one word that comes out of all of this. One word that encapsulates everything you wrote. All the images. The feeling. The essence of the tattoo I want to do.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Geisha,” she said. And my heart melted. “I will adorn your body as I would adorn a geisha. This is who you are.” I didn’t need to know anything else.
For the next three hours I stood naked in front of her. Naked. I moved for her, so she could see me, see my skin, see my body, see my dance, my muscles, my skin. And she drew on me. Drew, wiped it off, drew again. She laid out the entire thing and watched me move with it, until she was satisfied. I put on my panties and stood and went out from behind the screens she had set up to preserve my dignity in the middle of the studio and saw my reflection in the mirror.
There was absolutely nothing of what I had given her in the brief on my skin. Nothing. None of the images. But what was there instead was exactly her interpretation of what she had read. It was already a work of art.
She stood behind me and held my arms, pointing out curves and detail. I was silent.
“Yes,” I whispered. “Geisha.” And then I let her do.
Over nearly two years, I lay for her as she adorned me with her art. When I think of how much this tattoo expresses my inner world I cannot fail to love it. When I lie nearly naked on the beach, or when I wear a revealing dress, it is there for anyone to see. It is a work of art. It tells the story of my life. It is a transformation. It mirrors this process I go through now.
Finally, it is complete, finished a few months ago. It has healed, and I can comfortably say that there is no tattoo anywhere in the world that looks remotely like it. And it makes me feel beautiful. It makes me feel happy about my body in ways that I never dreamed. And yes, it says ‘geisha’.
I was in Florence recently. I was looking for a book, one which they didn’t have, but which the child who was with me remembered and procured it later for my birthday. There was an elegant older woman there who asked in English for a book which I knew and loved.
“That’s a lovely book,” I said. She turned to me. Rare is the woman who looks at a trans woman and sees my essence as a companion, but I could see that in her eyes. She spoke. French. Educated. Elegant. Lonely.
I invited her to dinner with my extended family, somewhat randomly, and she came. As I came to perceive her that evening, and in subsequent contact, I could be a geisha for her. There is another woman like this in New York. They like to be out with me because I am exotic, a kind of eye candy, and I am happy to dress for them to please them. I can be presented at parties as an exotic treat.
And you know what? It ticks every gosh darn box for me. To be a geisha in this way, to meet the needs of a wealthy woman, to present for her the way she wants, to be intimate, it is what I am made for. I have a lifetime of finishing school behind me. I can blend into any environment. And I am submissive. When such a situation arrives with an elegant woman, every part of me years to please her, to fuss over her, to make her feel like a queen. I am not ashamed of it. I celebrate it. I love to be told what to wear. And I love to feel how I feel when I can see that I make them feel like queens.
In the front row of a Broadway play with a well-known New York producer, I could tell that she was getting off on how the world-famous lead actor was staring at us. And I found myself thinking how I yearned to kneel by a large claw foot bathtub as she luxuriated in the warm bubbles and I gently washed and caressed her body, kneeling beside her. The mutual pleasure is real.
And by being a geisha, not just in fantasy but for real, all of this becomes accessible. To be paid to live my fantasy too.
As a trans woman I offer something which I am discovering is desirable to many women of all ages. Having no penis removes the perception of potential violation from me. That I don’t have it, or that it is dead, means I am safe. And being safe means that they can let themselves go with me in a way that they could never do so easily with a man.
It also means that when I become aroused, there is no end, or goal, or objective, because the penis isn’t a part of it. What happens instead is an endless exploration of sensual pleasure. This is what I discovered practicing Shibari. This young woman who was my partner, whom I had never met before, was able to surrender to the room and melt into my arms and allow for her spirit to fly free as I caressed her. Her arousal was beautiful and palpable, as was mine, but somehow the removal of the male sex organ from the mix made it what it was. Innocent. Tasteful. Just plain sexy.
We were not alone. Couples who knew each other well were all around us. The purring sighs of my partner were noted by the women close enough to hear and observe. Men are not threatened either. It is not gay to be touched by me, for I am not a man. It is not jealousy inducing for their partners to look at me and desire what I give, because it is unclassifiable. I can just be sexy, and be a dispenser of sensual and sexual energy with no threat. As the hours wore on, in that course, the women around us winked at me, smiled at me, and rejoiced in being tied by their partners as they watched us.
“You are so comfortable and confident,” my partner breathed as she relaxed her bound body into mine. I think of the energy work I do as a Reiki practitioner. I think of the somatic therapy I am training in. And I think of what I do with the FSSW that I care for so much, or of the very small number of dommes I have cherished, and it is to crawl inside female pleasure, to be permitted to give pleasure, to be taught the art of giving to a woman, and to do so without taking, and in so doing, becoming a source of pleasure, and deriving one’s own pleasure by successfully doing that.
The first time I ever saw an FSSW (full service sex worker) I was dressed as a geisha. I mean it. The obi I wore, the ornamental sash that is tied tightly around the waist, so tightly that the movements are restricted, and the bow that is so large at the back that it makes it hard to sit down, was once the obi of a very well-known geisha. The obi, and the kimono, were very prized possessions, of incredible value to a geisha. This aspect of geisha culture is beautifully described in this book.
We met in public at a sports bar of all places. She is and was truly gorgeous. I was all six feet plus of geisha, wearing a silk kimono to my ankles and a very tightly and professionally tied obi that made it hard to breathe.
“I’m submissive,” I said as we stepped into the hotel suite she had booked. She smiled.
“I know,” she said sitting on the edge of the bed and looping her fingers inside my sash, pulling me forward.
“Will you show me how to touch you?” I asked as she began to undo my robe. We were quiet and then I was naked, my kimono falling from my shoulders. She guided me to my knees between her legs, and her long hair fell over my face as she leaned in and gently pulled my lips with hers.
And for the next several hours she guided me with touch, without words, across the sensual landscape of her body, showing me how to touch her, to please her, to respect her.
I was mortified when I realised how much over time we were, scared that she would think I had pushed for advantage.
“It’s so late,” I said, “I have to go.”
“This was beautiful,” she said.
“Will you see me again someday?”
“Yes, I’d like that.”
She helped me back into my outfit and I returned home to the place I stayed. As I walked into the building, a Japanese was entering too. He looked me up and down.
“Very interesting,” he remarked with Japanese-accented English. I smiled.
“Do you know the significance of the clothes you are wearing?”
“Yes, I do.” He stood back and held the door open for me.
“Very interesting,” he repeated as I stepped down the hall to the elevator and disappeared.
Why did I love this book so much?
The essence of silence that I have described is of a vanishing world. This book is about just such a vanishing world. We know through these words the privilege it is to taste of it.