Even if you haven't read it, you will certainly have seen it, stacked high in bookshop dump bins or airport departure lounges. Until, that is, three years ago, and the publication of "that book". So it is a shock and a thrill to look from the photograph to the woman holding them, and to realise that they are the same person - Mineko Iwasaki, the greatest of the Kyoto geisha. For all her beauty, the woman within them resembles a creature from an earlier, lost age. The photographs might have been taken any time in the last 100 years. They show a young woman ( left), her body trussed in a magnificent kimono, her hair hung with flower-like ornaments, and her skin concealed beneath the thickest of white make-up.
The walls bear pieces of Japanese art, old and new, and a number of remarkable photographs in simple wooden frames. She lives on the edge of Kyoto, with her artist husband, in a high, elegant house of broad windows and tastefully distressed concrete. At first meeting, you might take her for a successful fashion executive, magazine editor or designer. She moves with the upright confidence of a trained dancer when she talks, she looks you in the eye and holds your gaze. Fashions among ladies of her age tend towards the frumpy, but Mrs Iwasaki's clothes - a black trouser suit and red sweater - are expensively simple. Even if you didn't know exactly who she was and what she had been, you would realise immediately that Mineko Iwasaki is an unusual Japanese woman.
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