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" Yet geisha today are living anachronisms. The style of beauty they preserve is more and more out of synch with modern ideals. The film Memoirs of a Geisha has a problem with this that the novel did not. In their mind’s eye, readers can imagine the characters in the novel as beautiful. The image they conjure up may or may not be culturally accurate, but it doesn’t matter—we know that Sayuri is head-turningly gorgeous. But the film has to show that she is beautiful. At the very least, the director and producers have to believe it themselves in order to make their audience believe it. The problem is that a real geisha’s beauty is something of an acquired taste, and try as they might, they just couldn’t acquire it. Exotic? Yes. Alluring? No.

At one point during filming I overheard a couple of the light and sound crew debating whether they would want to kiss a mouth that looked like that tiny red rosebud on a white mask. They both chuckled and said they would pass. This made me think. All along I had been arguing strenuously for a more authentic geisha look in hair and make-up, but this was the moment when I realized that could not happen. For this film to work, the most important thing was that the geisha be beautiful to blue eyes, not to tea-eyes.

Much has been made of the fact that three of the major roles are played by Chinese actresses rather than Japanese. To my mind that is not an issue. The fact that the film is in English is the major leap from verisimilitude. Everything else is secondary. These are great actresses—had they been dressed in accurate kimono, worn true geisha make-up and hairstyles, they could certainly have been made to look like real geisha. But that was the problem.