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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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