Since this book is about to get a lot of attention soon doing to being announced for the Cherry Blossom 2026 readalong, I thought I'd alert others to this article that outlines the similarities between her life and wholly fictitious Memoirs of a Geisha by white US American Arthur Golden, and its key differences. Iwasaki naturally also discusses the differences at length her autobiography. This article does contain spoilers for Iwasaki's book and Memoirs of a Geisha, but I think it may be useful to know what Iwasaki was responding to in writing her autobiography. She was already ostracized for breaking the silence on her profession by giving interviews that "informed" Memoirs of a Geisha, where Golden thanked her by name despite her speaking to him on a promise of anonymity. Golden, for his part, claimed that he had multiple interviewees, but no others were named nor did any step forward (they would have also faced considerable backlash), leading to the impression that Memoirs of a Geisha was her story. Yet he essentially added child prostitution to it and many other lurid elements. Note: I chose this particular article because a similar article I found, written in The Guardian in 2004, still managed to come off as very Orientalist.

Further, I want to note that the movie was directed and produced by white men (Rob Marshall and Stephen Spielberg), and cast actresses of Chinese descent in main roles, which lead to controversies in both China and in the Asian American community in the US at the time. It was felt that conflating a Chinese woman with Japanese sex workers (which, again, according to Iwasaki she was not) brought back memories of Chinese civilians being forced into prostitution and brutalized during the Sino-Japanese war. I can recall conversations in Asian American spaces centering around concerns about treating Chinese and Japanese as interchangeable, a frequent mistake and concern that persists to this day.

Geisha and their role in the preservation of traditional arts in Kyoto are still often misunderstood/conflated with sex workers by tourists, due to Western conceptions of East Asian women being submissive and sexualized. This fascination with geisha has lead to harassment toward them in real world to the point where the government of Kyoto had to step in recently.