Guess what--no Finger in the Throat Book Report this week. I guess you'll just have to satisfy yourself with Anne Ishii's Village Voice review of Memoirs of a Geisha. Check her out:
After I got used to the ESL pace of the story, my difficulty in following the dialogue turned into incredulity at the story. To sum up, the movie is an apology for sexism with two essential conflicts: the rags-to-bitches catfight for geisha supremacy, and the ill-fated love between Ziyi Zhang's Sayuri and Ken Watanabe's Chairman (who turns out to have been a pedophile: His initial attraction to Sayuri was when she was the ripe age of nine). Throughout, the film muses on what a geisha is exactly. Apparently, a geisha is not a hooker, but you can only become a geisha by selling your virginity. I guess the thinking is that if you only sell sex once you're . . . not a hooker?