Fiona Graham, a 47-year-old Australian Oxford grad, somehow convinced an “okiya” (geisha house) in Japan to accept her for training. Enthralled by romantic notions of the profession, in which women train to learn how to be pleasant companions (not prostitutes) in tasteful settings such as dinner parties and tea ceremonies, Ms. Graham decided to take up the flute as her instrument of choice and to call herself “Sayuki,” meaning “transparent happiness.”

Problems started to become apparent when she decided that the judgment of her superiors at the geisha house, who felt she was not yet good enough with the instrument to perform for guests, did not apply to her. She began skipping practice, clashing with her fellow geishas, and declaring herself “good enough” to perform.

Soon, her disobedience escalated to tantrums and outright insubordination:

“She says she is a flute player but she does not go to lessons and said she was already good enough,” said the fellow geisha. “But to perform in front of guests is very important. You have to be good enough and you need to have permission.

“No-one would give her permission because she was not good enough – so she became hysterical, yelling at everyone. That is not our style. We have a traditional way of thinking and we have to obey our older ‘sisters’.”

Even worse in the eyes of afficionados, however, was her disregard for the conventions of the profession:

…Peter MacIntosh, a documentary maker who has studied the secretive world of geisha for 18 years, said: “I have refused to call her Sayuki. When she starts acting like a geisha, then I’ll call her by her geisha name.”

He pointed out that geisha did not normally wear the traditional white make-up after around the age of 30 and that “Western guests are not going to want to see a 47-year-old Western woman in makeup.”

[...]

One geisha noted that because the association would not permit Ms Graham to perform in front of customers, she began arranging her own events outside the geisha district.

“She organised these parties, but most of the other geisha didn’t go because we don’t think that she is a geisha,” she said, adding that as Ms Graham had no-one to accompany her flute playing, she used backing music from a portable music player.

“She played like that in front of the guests – we would not dare do that,” the geisha said. “It’s embarrassing, but she just does not understand that.”

Although there will always be adjustment issues when making the leap from one culture to another, traditional Eastern and contemporary Westen female culture are so profoundly different that it may simply have been too wide a chasm to span even with good-faith effort. Although most of us would probably find the idea that a middle-aged Western woman could pull off being a geisha preposterous, and we might find ourselves holding a derisive attitude toward Ms. Graham, the sad fact is that she’s probably better than the average Western woman. She was the only Western woman so far to have been accepted into an okiya, after all…

However, some traits are just too deeply ingrained in contemporary Western women to polish away, such as the eternal need for validation, the overestimation of her own value and the sense of entitlement even without corresponding accomplishment.

It is truly sad to see how Western women’s overinflated sense of self has reduced them, diminishing their capacity for introspection and robbing them of the ability to attain excellence.