One of the biggest films to come out over the holiday period will be the film version of Arthur Golden’s novel Memoirs of a Geisha. Like the book, which spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list, the film – produced by Steven Spielberg – is set to be a huge success. The first big Hollywood movie to have an entirely Asian cast in the lead roles, it has all the ingredients of a blockbuster: big-name stars, an award-winning production crew and a wonderful Cinderella story. It is a beautiful-looking film and there is already talk of Oscars. But unfortunately the film has another classic Hollywood touch: a disturbing disregard for cultural accuracy.

What made the novel so successful was its apparent realism. People believed they were reading an actual memoir. The story of a young girl named Chiyo who is sold to a geisha house by her impoverished parents, Memoirs charts her troubled metamorphosis into the geisha Sayuri. It is so convincingly told that even today some readers believe Sayuri existed.