Eastern Exotica

Dance macabre: Ziyi Zhang as a geisha named Sayuri in Memoirs of a Geisha. Photo David James. Courtesy Columbia Pictures.

An adaptation of the best-selling novel by Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha seems, at first, to be a noble attempt to combine Asian star power and Hollywood production values. Zhang Ziyi — last seen as a Hong Kong call girl in Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 — plays Sayuri, who emerges from a Japanese fishing village to become one of the country’s most famous geisha, the beautiful women who cater to the Japanese elite. Sayuri is tutored by Mameha (Michelle Yeoh), who hopes to use her young charge to foil her glamorous and tantrum-prone rival Hatsumomo (Gong Li). Mameha knows that an annual springtime theatrical production is the perfect opportunity for Sayuri to strut her stuff before the men who will be bidding for her mizuage (i.e., the prize of deflowering her).

Arriving at the midpoint of the film’s 144 minutes, Sayuri’s society debut is meant to be a showstopper. It is — though perhaps not in the way director Rob Marshall intended. Performed amid dramatic blue light, fake snow and exquisite swaths of kimono, Sayuri’s dance seems better suited to a Paris couture show than a 1930s Kyoto theatre. It is a phantasmagoria of Japan-ness, stylized to the point of kitsch.

Since the scene in Golden’s novel is considerably more low-key, Marshall and production designer John Myrhe are the ones responsible for its visual opulence; indeed, the sequence wouldn’t have been out of place in Marshall’s Oscar-winning version of the musical Chicago. The extravagance of the scene is another example of Hollywood’s decades-long tendency to present Japan in the most outlandish terms possible.

It’s foolish to expect historical verisimilitude in the mainstream productions that entice audiences and Oscar voters this time of year. But it’s particularly disappointing in this case, because the movie has so little of the lightness and subtlety that distinguished Golden’s book. If it wasn’t depressing enough to see many of the Far East’s finest actors struggle with the leaden, English-language dialogue, we must watch Zhang flesh out a character that’s essentially another pretty Japanese doll. (It’s also dubious that none of the film’s three leads are Japanese by birth: Zhang and Li were born in China and Yeoh is Malaysian Chinese.) Yet portrayals of Japanese culture in Western films have often been plagued by the same tendency. Hollywood’s treatment of the Far East may have grown less overtly racist in the years since World War II, but it’s no more accurate. The old Orientalist fears and fantasies don’t die easy.

Anti-Japanese sentiment marked much of America’s movie output during World War II and its aftermath. Action pictures like Objective, Burma! (1945) and noir potboilers like Tokyo File 212 (1951) cast a wary eye on the enemy both before and after it was vanquished. The Japanese remained an easy object for ridicule through the ’60s. Contemporary viewers of perennial chick flick Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) cringe at the irate, buffoonish Japanese neighbour played by Mickey Rooney. Actual Japanese actors didn’t fare much better. Yujiro Ishihara, a movie and music idol often referred to as Japan’s James Dean or Elvis Presley, was reduced to playing a clumsy oaf in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965).

In most Hollywood movies, the Japanese typically fell into three categories: stoic kamikaze pilots; lightning-fisted martial artists; or, of course, alluring geisha girls (one of which would invariably show up in most James Bond adventures). Japan’s emergence in the ’80s as an economic superpower was reflected in the era’s movies. The fact that Japanese companies were buying up American studios fuelled new worries. While Gung Ho (1986) and Mr. Baseball (1992) presented a gently satirical view of Japan’s incursion into two traditionally American institutions — the auto industry and baseball, respectively — Black Rain (1989) and Rising Sun (1993) took a more flagrantly hostile tack. The cruelty and cunning displayed by yakuza gangsters and inscrutable Japanese businessmen shocked even their most hard-bitten Yankee adversaries.

American fears about Japanese economic dominance subsided with the bursting of Asia’s economic bubble in the late ’90s. As a result, Hollywood has deemed it safe to treat Japan as a fantasyland again, a mysterious place where ancient traditions and five-minute-old fashions are equally vibrant. Westerners regard both with awe and bewilderment.

Imported examples of Japanese pop culture are invariably presented as noisy, colourful and confounding to anyone too old for Pokémon. Instead of just watching shows that have been dubbed with English voices — or retrofitted with American actors and storylines, as was the case for everything from the first Godzilla flick to TV’s Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers — young viewers can now enjoy such pseudo-Japanese shows as The Power Puff Girls, Samurai Jack and Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi.

Fashion accessories: Singer Gwen Stefani performs with her Harajuku Girls at the 2004 Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas. Photo Kevin Winter/Getty Images.

Singer Gwen Stefani became the envy of young Japanophiles everywhere by hiring her own live-action cartoons to accompany her wherever she goes. Stefani’s videos and current live show feature four backup dancers known as the Harajuku Girls, named after one of Tokyo’s most fashionable areas. Stefani infamously requested that reporters not ask about the Harajuku Girls, explaining that she regards her companions as figments of her imagination. How I wish I were making that up.

Appropriating Japanese forms of cool is an equally common trend in American movies. Inspired by a range of European and Asian exploitation-movie sources, Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003) contained a grimly violent anime sequence and a Tokyo-set finale that was only marginally less stylized than Sayuri’s production number in Memoirs of a Geisha. The swordplay in the Kill Bill movies and The Last Samurai (2003) even caused a momentary boom in “sword aerobics” classes.

The Tokyo experienced by the glum American travelers in Lost in Translation (2003), on the other hand, is a neon blur of karaoke bars, kinky sex clubs and pachinko parlours. Even so, Scarlett Johansson’s heroine does find some peace and quiet in the Shinto temples. That religious sites and traditional rituals can co-exist in such close proximity to dens of pervy sleaze presents a fascinating dichotomy to Western artists and filmmakers. Drawing Restraint 9, the latest film by art-world superstar Matthew Barney, marks the most sincere effort by an outsider to understand the persistence of Shinto traditions in contemporary Japan. Just as the music by Barney’s romantic partner Björk incorporates Japanese styles, Barney’s visuals combine identifiably Japanese rites (tea and bath ceremonies, dances and parades) with the motifs the artist used in his much-lauded Cremaster Cycle (e.g. bodily transformation via makeup and prosthetic effects).

Anyone curious to see a more prosaic Japan, the one that lies between these extremes of old and new, must hunt hard. Japan’s own films are seldom released theatrically in Canada. Of the movies that do surface, the imports are more likely to be the ultraviolent action and horror fare beloved by the Tarantinos of the world, rather than more introspective fare like Nobody Knows (2004), Kore-eda Hirokazu’s acutely observed tale of four children abandoned by their mother, or Vibrator (2003), Hiroki Ryuichi’s subtly affecting love story about a lonely truck driver and an unbalanced young woman. The trend to Americanize Japanese horror films like Ringu, The Grudge and Dark Water ensures that the original works — many of which are stripped of specific cultural connotations — stay further out of circulation.

As a Hollywood production headlined by Asian stars, Memoirs of a Geisha does represent a breakthrough of sorts — the story does not use a white character as interloper or interpreter for the Western audience, as is so often the case. Yet it’s consistently marred by Marshall’s need to fetishize every aspect of Japanese culture, resulting in a film that is visually lavish but dramatically inert. Lost amid so many occidental fantasies, Japan could use a better translator.

Jason Anderson is a Toronto writer.