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---
layout: post
title: Free Culture Book Club — Geiko Eien Ni
date: 2024-08-31 07:19:12-0400
categories:
tags: [free-culture, book-club]
summary: Discussing a story inspired by a single image
thumbnail: /blog/assets/2916308593_fa428042e9_o.png
offset: -7%
teaser: This week sees a Japanese-influenced short story set after the Singularity.
spell: geiko Eien maiko Leinir Turthra WhiteMantis Weasyl startrek Pling okiya nohnas Aumyr Zeitan Laangor Joi
proofed: true
---
* Ignore for ToC
{:toc}
This week, our [Free Culture Book Club]({% post_url 2020-05-02-freeculture %}) reads *Geiko Eien Ni --- Eternally Geisha*.
![A maiko (senior) and geisha dancing, facing away from the audience and camera](/blog/assets/2916308593_fa428042e9_o.png "The dance felt like watching paint dry, but without the paint...")
To give this series some sense of organization, check out some basic facts without much in the way of context.
* Full Title: *Geiko Eien Ni --- Eternally Geisha*
* Location: <https://www.pling.com/p/1316714>
* Released: 2019
* License: CC BY-SA
* Creator: [Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen](https://leinir.dk/)
* Medium: Short story
* Length: Approximately seven thousand, five hundred words
* Content Advisories: Death of a child
This should go without saying---even though I plan to repeat it with every Book Club installment---but *Content Advisories* do not suggest any sort of judgment on my part, only topics that come up in the work that I noticed and might benefit from a particular mood or head space for certain audiences. I provide it to help you make a decision, rather than a decision in and of itself.
## Geiko Eien Ni --- Eternally Geisha
The author describes the story as follows.
> In a future where sapient animal shaped people, both biological and robotic, share the world with humans, one young girl's terminal and degenerative illness leads to her mind being transplanted into one such body, with wide-reaching implications for her own future, and that of the declining community of highly trained artisans, the Geisha.
>
> This story was written by yours truly as a result of having received the artwork seen in the gallery here, which was created by the amazing WhiteMantis. It is set in the same world created for a series of books currently in the process of being written, but any knowledge of this world is not necessary to enjoy this tale of a young artisan finding her new place in the world after a traumatic experience.
>
> NB: The license pertains only to the written piece, but not to the accompanying artwork (which is copyrighted by the artist who created it), and not to the world in which the story is set.
The art in question shows as the "cover image" for the book, [commissioned on Weasyl](https://www.weasyl.com/~whitemantis/submissions/648307/commission-synapse) by the author. The artist has *not* released the image under a public license, however, and so you don't see it as the header image to this post.
## What Works Well?
To its credit, the story doesn't try to explain its world. It revolves around the [geisha](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geisha) (technically *geiko*, in this case) tradition, yet avoids detailing anything about it, because it has nothing to do with the story. We have a future world, but almost no indications of what has happened or when it takes place, again, because it has nothing to do with the story. You get the idea. It feels researched well enough that the author probably *could have* dumped piles of irrelevant information in our laps, but the story restrains itself.
Oh, speaking of the geisha tradition, the story also doesn't do the ignorant Western thing of grouping the tradition with sex workers. While certain Japanese governments have conflated the two groups before for various reasons, we in the West mostly make that mistake because American soldiers occupying Japan after the Second World War couldn't tell the difference between women in kimonos, so the sex workers started ironically using the term "geisha girl" to represent themselves.
Similarly, this sort of thing always comes down to taste, but the arc of the story struck me as affecting in ways that similar stories in popular culture haven't. The need for Curacao and her need for people to need her comes off as sweet, rather than anything fake. And it certainly fares better than the overwhelming majority of "character with a mechanical body has trouble expressing themselves" stories that we see across fiction.
## What Works...Less Well?
{% include lesswell.md %}
While I generally hate to bring this sort of issue up in a post, without a repository or other place to make suggestions, I only have this space to point out how much this story needs a proofreader. The first paragraph has a glaring typo. No, I don't mean the British-English spelling. A minor issue, in the grand scheme of things, but I do want to make sure that people prepare themselves going in.
Related, as we get to the end, the prose seems to turn into some kind of word salad, trying to make revenge (referencing the first line) a good thing that you do to "the future" instead of to people. It also actually ends with an incomprehensible...twist? Maybe it teases some future story? I have no idea. This fits with some of the writing, though, because it sometimes feels like decades should have passed, but then it talks about the past, but then it turns out that we've only moved through a few years during the entire story.
And...maybe I have this wrong, but I see the author's Western name and location, and even though everything in the story feels respectful in the moment---at least to somebody who knows nothing of the culture, other than skimming Wikipedia pages to make sure that I didn't write anything too terrible in this post---it still feels like Orientalism to have a story by a white guy exploiting Japanese culture. If I've done a poor job assessing the situation, I apologize, and I don't want to take away from the good aspects, but...yeah, it gives off an unpleasant vibe to potentially see a story use another culture for "flavoring."
Speaking of worries about exploitation and cultural appropriation, I wish that the story would have spent more time with the idea that people see Curacao's work as less creative than that of her peers. As I need to bring up with alarming frequency in [posts about a certain proprietary property](/blog/tag/startrek "Real Life in Star Trek post"), society has often leveled this kind of criticism against people of East Asian---particularly Japanese---descent, from dismissing their emotions as "inscrutable" to insisting that they play music too mechanically to the idea that they (expanding to all of Asia and people descended from people there) make good workers but don't have the people-skills for management roles. History in every field has proven these assertions false, but they persist, so it feels like a huge missed opportunity to not use our protagonist to explore that connection.
## Opportunities
[Pling accepts monthly donations](https://www.pling.com/support-predefined) by section of the "store," which they divvy up among the people who have uploaded projects in that category. I haven't investigated the mechanics behind it, such as whether the person who uploads a ton of existing public domain works gets more, less, or the same payout as someone creating one original work.
You can find the author's other projects, including a one-person consulting firm at their website, too, if you want to provide more support than that.
## What's Adaptable?
We have something like half a dozen members of the [*okiya*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okiya), and the mechanical lizard-like nohnas synthetic bodies.
## Coming Attractions
Coming up next week, we'll start reading the background book for **Aumyr**, a fantasy setting designed for role-playing games. It includes a lot of material, so we'll break it into four posts, with next week's covering the start until the section on the geography (chapter 5) of *Zeitan*. If you get to *Laangor*, then you've gone too far.
{% include fchelp.md %}
Anyway, while we wait for that, what did everybody else think about the story?
* * *
**Credits**: The header image is [Maiko and Geisha dance](https://www.flickr.com/photos/joi/2916308593/) by [Joi Ito](https://www.flickr.com/photos/joi/), made available under the terms of the [Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/) license.