A lukewarm portrait of a red-hot international star of a century past.
Hot on the heels of Mineko Iwasaki’s Geisha (p. 1198) comes this biography of a once-renowned but now-forgotten Japanese courtesan, dancer, and actress.
It comes, however, with no clear argument for why modern readers should especially care. Downer (The Brothers: The Hidden World of Japan’s Richest Family, 1995, etc.) offers a by-the-numbers account of the life of Sadayakko, whose years matched those of Japan’s growth from feudal backwater to emergent and then defeated world power. About those profound social changes Downer has almost nothing to say, except to volunteer somewhat breathlessly that the arrival of Commodore Perry’s black ships occasioned the arrival in the West of the “myth of the exotic geisha. . . . The very word carried an erotic frisson. It conjured up a submissive almond-eyed Oriental maiden, the embodiment of all the seductive femininity and sexual freedom of some fanciful exotic East dreamed up in the fevered imaginations of repressed, frustrated Westerners.” In that spirit, the author concentrates on Sadayakko’s role in opening the hitherto all-male Japanese stage to women, as well as her achievement in bringing Japanese theater to a Western audience, becoming the Asian equivalent of a Sarah Bernhardt—or, as Downer has it, “more like Bernhardt combined with Anna Pavlova, a glorious dancer as well as an actress.” There isn’t much context here, so readers without grounding in that theater will have to imagine what all the fuss was about. Neither is there much insight into Sadayakko’s life, whose contours are rendered in invented dialogue of the Madame Butterfly school: “ ‘My name is Momosuké Iwasaki,’ the young man told her politely. ‘I am a humble student at Keiyo University.’ ‘I am Ko-yakko of the House of Hamada in the geisha town of Yoshicho,’ she replied, blushing prettily as she bowed in return.” And so on through apogee and eclipse, with precious little frisson to be had.
A lukewarm portrait of a red-hot international star of a century past.Pub Date: March 10, 2003
ISBN: 1-592-40005-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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