Feb 08 2010
90-Day Geisha by Chelsea Haywood
I was surprised to learn that a young Western woman with little to no knowledge of the language and no special skills can find a well-paying job in Tokyo. No, it’s not in the industry you might have just thought of. It requires the looks of a model, the personality of a friendly bartender, the ambition to earn money of a Vegas cocktail waitress and the level of nonsense-resistance of a mental ward nurse. Add some babysitting skills, a good liver and an ability to keep very late hours, and you’ve got it. This kind of a job may never get a name in English, but in Japanese it is called geisha.
Of course Japan has drastically changed since the Edo era and a geisha’s job requirements have changed too, but the essence stayed the same. You entertain and pamper your guests, and you get rewarded according to your level of professionalism. A fashion model and a true journalist at heart, Chelsea Haywood decided to try the job first-hand and document her experience in a book 90-Day Geisha.
Imagine yourself at a table with several very drunk and very well-off guests. One of your new acquaintances introduces himself as “the guy of beans,” and better yet, pulls out a wallet and starts showing you the pictures of his wife and daughters, telling you fifteen times how cute they are. The rest of the group bellows out every Eagles song they can find in the karaoke book. You laugh, smile, comment, fill their glasses and light their cigarettes. You are a non-smoker yourself, mind you. Over one such evening you may get an offer to fly you to Hawaii in a private jet, pay for your college education in Japan, or take you on a yacht to a small island. And yet none of what is going on around you is quite real.
The merry-go-round of CEOs, CFOs, fashion designers, world-class surgeons and the like never slows down. As much fun as it seems, you better have the strength to withstand the bizarre routine of meaningless chit-chat, drinking, karaoke and endless promises, few of which mean anything at all. The ups of a hostesses’ job in Japan may be good money, free designer clothes, shoes and expensive vacations, but the downs are just as powerful. Consider having no control over what is happening to you, consider exhausting lies, constant lack of sleep and ridiculous demands of your customers that you have to deal with whether you want to or not. Not to mention that you might also drive your marriage to a disastrous end.
The entire endeavor may not have been worth it if not for those of Chelsea’s guests who happened to be amazing human beings – very rich, but also very intelligent and lonely and always in need of a non-Japanese outsider to keep them sane. It may not be right to call such people friends, since they enter your life only for three months, but what to call them if not that? I would absolutely love to make friends with someone like Shin, whom Chelsea’s husband very accurately nicknamed Tao-Te-Shin. Well, maybe I should stop providing spoilers right here and let you read all about it yourself. If you like literature about Japan, you will highly enjoy 90-Day Geisha.
Read more: 90-Day Geisha, Book Reviews, Chelsea Haywood, Japan, TokyoNastia was born in Russia, and probably that's the reason why she is so inexplicably attracted to the coldest parts of the world, such as Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Alaska and Canada. The more it snows out there - the better. Although would she be even thinking about all that cold if she hadn't first enjoyed Turkey, Bulgaria and Ukraine?
