Europe and the United States regarded the non-Western world as the Orient, a place with people who that could be described as strangers, others, and outsiders. Said (1978) traces the current period of Orientalism to about 1870, when most colonial expansion into the non-Western and non-European world began, culminating in World War II. Japanese studies, Orientalism, Intercultural studies Orientalism and Fiction Their success not only signifies the success of these devices with the target audience but also tells us something about American cultural tastes for the Orient. In this article, I apply Edward Said’s (1978) idea of Orientalism to the study of the fictional devices Golden used in telling the geisha story in print and which Marshall used in translating the story to film, with the American/Westerner as preferred reader of these texts. Golden treated Japanese culture and geisha as an object to be sexualized, exoticized, and romanticized.
#Memories of a geisha movie#
The binary of fact and fiction used by book author Arthur Golden and movie director Rob Marshall made the story appealing to Western audiences. Western audiences found the story of the fictional geisha, Sayuri, believable while Japanese audiences were not as enthralled. The fictional Memoirs of a Geisha, published in 1997, and its movie adaptation, released in 2005, were received with greater popularity in the United States than they were in Japan. Orientalism and the Binary of Fact and Fiction in Memoirs of a Geisha Kimiko Akita
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