Geisha's memoirs 'tarnished' by Golden portrayal  

By HILLEL ITALIE
NEW YORK
Thursday 26 April 2001

A former geisha who helped inspire Arthur Golden's million-selling novel
Memoirs of a Geisha has accused him of tarnishing her reputation and 
wrongly portraying aspects of her life, including the loss of her 
virginity.

Mineko Iwasaki is suing Golden and his publisher for breach of contract 
after they allegedly violated a verbal confidentiality agreement and 
distorted her life story in promotional events. 

Published to great acclaim in 1997, Golden's novel documents a geisha's
rise from a Japanese fishing village to life in high society. 

In papers filed this week in the United States District Court in Manhattan,
Ms Iwasaki says Golden wrongly declared she was sold into the geisha world
and that her virginity was auctioned to the highest bidder. 

At a 1999 reading in Providence, Rhode Island, Golden said Ms Iwasaki was 
proud of having set a record for the amount of money her virginity was sold
for - approximately $A1.69 million.

Golden has said there was no confidentiality agreement and that she agreed
to let him tape their discussions, during which she spoke of losing her 
virginity. 

According to the court papers, Ms Iwasaki is seeking an amount "no less" 
than an "appropriate percentage" of what she believes are almost $A20 
million in sales for the novel. Also cited as defendants are Golden's 
publisher, Alfred A Knopf, and Random House Inc, Knopf's parent company. 

Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House Inc, said yesterday that the
allegations were "totally without merit".

Golden, a Harvard and Columbia graduate who spent several years researching
the book, interviewed Ms Iwasaki a number of times in 1992 and has thanked 
her often. 

"She turned my understanding of the life of a geisha on its head," Golden 
once said. 

Ms Iwasaki, now 50 and a resident of Kyoto, retired in 1980. She says she only
met Golden on the condition that her identity remained protected. There is no
written contract. "In the course of my extensive research I am indebted to one
individual above all others ... Mineko Iwasaki," Golden wrote in the book's
acknowledgments.