I’m still recovering from con fatigue, so this installment will be a book that relies more on images than text.



Book’s cover courtesy of Deep Kyoto.com.

Geiko and Maiko of Kyoto by Robert Van Koesveld (ISBN 978-0-9944501-0-4)

Date of Publication: 2015 (did not ship until 2016)

Language: English

Availability: Can be purchased through the author’s website or from a previous Kickstarter campaign. Can also be found in some bookstores in Japan.

Price: $65 New

Errors: 14



I have to admit, when I supported the Kickstarter I had heard many great things about the photographer who put together this book and I was actually excited for it to arrive. I began to have my doubts about it when the first people who received their copies had started pointing out errors in the book. I brushed these off as maybe printing errors, but soon found that it was much worse than I expected.



To begin, the book’s layout is as follows: a gigantic wad of text with very few images, a TON of images with little to no captions explaining what they are, and then another mound of text each with an accompanying photograph of the subject. Personally, the only decent part of this book was the end part, but some things left a very bad taste in my mouth after reading.



The first part is, as I stated, just text. For a book that prides itself about focusing on pictures you will literally want to skip the text as it goes on and on and feels almost like a lecture. It also felt really odd reading about a person going on and on about maiko and geiko (and their knowledge of them) yet printing ridiculous mistakes that even Wikipedia can get right. The author tries to explain “kawaii”, which basically means “cute”, but then goes on to say that it’s a term of “everything that is acceptable and desirable in Japan” and then goes on to say that it includes sexiness! Kawaii is cute and innocent, but definitely not sexy! When they finally get to the text about maiko and geiko one of the first sentences calls the period before becoming a maiko “hangyoku” (which is the Tokyo term for an apprentice geisha) and a “minarai” (the period before debuting as a maiko) as the term for apprenticeship outside of Kyoto. Literally in the next sentence it says that all “hangyoku” (re: actually minarai) wear handara, or the half length darari, during their minarai phase. This is untrue as some districts do not wear the handara (Miyagawa Cho and Kamishichiken) but rather go straight to the full darari (although Miyagawa Cho minarai will wear handara on their first outing to do introductions as a minarai). It then goes on to talk about the misedashi being the rite of passage from a shikomi to a maiko and completely leaves out the minarai stage. Also noted under misedashi is the maiko’s “trailing ornaments” - maiko wear precious bekko (tortoiseshell) ornaments during their misedashi and these clearly do not dangle or flow. It also then goes on to state that only geiko can wear zori, which is ridiculous since maiko wear them too. It’s too dangerous to wear okobo when the pavement is wet so maiko will opt to wear zori when it’s rainy or many senior maiko will wear zori as a preference to okobo as a sign of their seniority. In an interview with an okobo maker he even expressly says that they do not wear them in the rain, yet somehow missed this much earlier on. He also says that, as of 2014, there were only 183 geiko and 58 maiko (241 total), yet the actual number is/was well over 300 combined. From there he made numerous spelling errors, like referring to former geiko Takamaru as “Takamura,” calling an obijime an “obijimi,” calling a pocchiri a “pocchiti” (which sounds like some tropical fruit), and spelled takamakura as “takamaruka” in the glossary.



As for the images, they’re nice, but nothing I’d consider spectacular. I feel as though the author is trying too hard to try and catch some sort of “mystique” in his photographs and the overt use of shadows and common poses becomes a bit dull.



As for the final bit of text, which is basically bios of the maiko and geiko in the book, I became really annoyed at the spelling and then completely betrayed by the text. At the start of the book the author chooses to Anglicize maiko Shouko’s name as “Syoko”, which, using the Japanese system of Romaji translation would be correct, but it is not how English readers would read the name as what should be “Shouko” ends up being pronounced as “Saioko” or “Seeoko”. Oddly enough, he includes a picture of one of Shouko’s hanameishi that shows the furigana (hiragana that shows how to pronounce kanji) and it spells it out as “しょうこ”(Shouko). This discrepancy in the Japanese or English style to Anglicize gets thrown out the window when the furigana is provided and was not well thought out for an English language book. He then spells Toshichika’s name correctly at the start, but then calls her “Toshichica” three times in the back. There is no need or precedence to change “chika” to “chica” and it makes it sound like she’s suddenly become Spanish. What hurt me the most about this section was the biographies of Toshichika and Katsuru - by the time this book was put together they had already been retired for at least two years, yet their biographies just talk about how they want to continue to work in the karyukai and, in Toshichika’s section, states that she’ll soon have to decide if she wants to become a geiko or not! This really felt like the author was taking advantage of people who know nothing about the karyukai and was instilling false hope that these ladies were still hard at work pursuing their gei. His use of the word “learnt” drove me crazy a few times.



All in all, the images were nice, but the price and the errors ultimately brought it down. Unless a book is absolutely fantastic I really can’t rationalize paying this much for one and I know that the $65 price tag will put it out of reach for many people.



Rating: ✪✪ (out of 5)

