Maiko Masquerade: Crafting Geisha Girlhood in Japan by Jan Bardsley (review)

Jan Bardsley's Maiko Masquerade poses a significant question. In the globalizing, fast-forwarding world of the 2020s, can a centuries-old, highly culturally specific tradition retain much meaning? Can a tradition that privileges etiquette, aesthetics, and refinement still carry much cultural or even intellectual weight, especially for the rising generations of young people encountering challenges never dreamed of by their parents?

In this informative and stimulating book, the answer is a well-supported, "Yes!" In Bardsley's view, the maiko, or young apprentice geisha, is not some fixed icon of a very thin slice of traditional Japanese culture but rather a performative signifier interacting vibrantly with many of the hopes and anxieties of contemporary Japan. Perhaps inevitably, given the gender determination of the maiko, these issues tend to swirl around concerns about the role of women in a sharply changing society. Analyzing the current varieties and appeal of "the maiko masquerade," Bardsley creates a vivid conversation between an almost embalmed version of "old Japan" and the more complex realities of femininity in the twenty-first century.

As Bardsley acknowledges, maiko masquerade can inspire beyond gender and national boundaries. In the fall of 2019, I had the privilege of spending six weeks in Kyoto. Going out every day to enjoy the serene pleasures of Kyoto's temples and gardens, I would unfailingly confront hordes of tourists from all over the world. Equally unfailingly, a strikingly large number of tourists would be dressed as maiko. Costumed in gorgeous kimono, their faces covered with thick white makeup, and sporting jet-black wigs, they festooned the entrances to shrines, draped themselves around temple structures, and above all blocked traffic across garden bridges as they posed charmingly at the most picturesque viewpoints. As far as I could tell, most of these cosplayers were women, but Bardsley's book also includes a fascinating discussion of a "light novel" (a type of young adult fiction) about a young boy performing a very successful maiko masquerade. The popularity of the "maiko makeover experience" (p. 19) points to how what we might call "performing maiko-ness" extends across international borders and gender boundaries.

What is it about the maiko that captures such interest? Bardsley does not give us a single answer but offers a variety of examples of maiko performance, from mid-twentieth-century film portrayals of them as victims sacrificed to a world governed by the erotic demands of men, to contemporary manga depictions of them as resourceful young women entering a rich and fascinating alternative society. She also explores the attractive accoutrements of maiko lore—books on makeup and style and the sheer visual pleasures of pictorial depictions, such as the prewar tenugui (cotton hand towels) featuring all kinds of maiko activities and the "100 Maiko Illustrations" exhibition at the Kyoto International Manga Museum, which included some ironic or amusing takes on the maiko by women artists.

Clearly, the maiko, or at least the representation of them, still carry a strong cultural resonance both in- and outside Japan. Their significance is multivalent. According to Bardsley, the maiko provide, in their function as teahouse, dance, and musical entertainers, a visual and spiritual touchstone for a conservative backlash against modernity, and against anxiety-provoking modern women in particular. But, quoting filmmaker Mizoguchi Kenji, Bardsley shows how this reassuring role harks back to a deeply problematic social framework in its inherent acknowledgment of the inconvenient truth that much of Japan's vaunted traditional entertainment culture "rests on the exploitation of young women" (p. 118). At the same time, the contemporary maiko phenomenon is escaping these historical constraints to allow for potentially creative and even subversive forms of masquerade, as Bardsley shows with examples ranging from a maiko whose main interest is cooking to a boy successfully masquerading as a maiko before ultimately accepting a path of non-heteronormativity.

Although the book contains numerous examples with thoughtful analyses of how the maiko appear in varied contexts...