Madame Sadayakko: the geisha who seduced the West by Lesley Downer

The geisha who became a Western icon

PIicasso portrayed her with dagger in hand; Puccini listened to her melodies to draw inspiration for Madame Butterfly; Henry Irving encouraged her; Sara Bernhardt disparaged her; Isadora Duncan shared a bill with her. In Europe and America, with their fascinated ignorance of things Japanese, she dismantled the stereotype of the submissive oriental woman and challenged their greatest actresses.

Yet, as Leslie Downer's perceptive biography reveals, Sadayakko's career was based on a careful manipulation of oriental exoticism. In 1899, when she sailed from Japan to America with her husband Otojiro Kawakami and their gimcrack troupe, she was far from being a famous actress. Though the ban on women appearing on stage had been lifted, female roles were still played by men. Once a well-known geisha and the mistress of a prime minister, Sadayakko had sacrificed celebrity to play the ambitious Otojiro's devoted wife, until he decided to exploit her classical training in music, dance and theatre to create a Japanese diva overseas.

Purveying authenticity, Otojiro bowdlerised, cut down and conflated Kabuki classics, inventing some new stories, to showcase his wife's beauty and talents. In England and France, while she enthralled the intelligentsia with her graceful, passionate performances, Sadayakko also honed her craft with tools acquired on Western stages.

Downer's biography explores Sadayakko's rise as a geisha, but its core focuses on her Western triumphs, in particular the construction of her persona as a style icon. Her luminous presence in the intense atmosphere of metropolitan Europe in the early 1900s is brilliantly evoked. Indicting critics for their dismissal of Japanese theatre art as naive and primitive, Downer is at pains to point out that, while Sadayakko's performances subverted passive stereotypes, they may have perpetuated others: such as the vengeful oriental concubine. Sadayakko herself had a predilection for dramatic roles; in Japan, she chose to perform plays by Sardou, such as Tosca, and other hand-me-downs from the great Bernhardt, including The Lady of the Camellias.

Back in Japan, the Kawakamis reversed their cultural mix-and-match, adapting Shakespeare for local audiences. Sadayakko, accompanied by the legend of her Western success, became a trailblazer, training and inspiring women to take to the stage.

Downer touches on the development of modern Japanese theatre and the Kawakamis' seminal, though neglected, contribution to its history. The chapter on their Japanese years is, however, disappointingly short, compressing a decade into a few pages. Perhaps because she came late to it, Sadayakko's feminine stardom was a passing phenomenon, as Downer's account of public responses to her in the roles of Salome and Aida implies.

As a widow, Sadayakko retired with a former lover to a country property, adopted children and reared animals. When the time came, in another gesture of renunciation worthy of a Kabuki heroine, she sent her lover to his wife's home to die, turning to her family and her Buddhist faith for consolation while new generations created new stars.

'Turqoise', the reviewer's collection of stories, is published by Saqi