Kiharu Nakamura, 90; Ex-Geisha Consulted, Wrote on Profession

Kiharu Nakamura, 90, former Japanese geisha who wrote books and consulted on plays and movies about her profession, died Jan. 5 in New York City. She had been in ill health for several years and died in her sleep.

In prewar Japan, Nakamura entertained scores of men -- including Charlie Chaplin and Babe Ruth -- at teahouses in Tokyo. She wrote a book about her experiences, “Edokko Geisha Ichidai-ki (Biography of a Tokyo Geisha),” which was published in Japan in 1983 and has since been translated into German, French and Czech. A dozen other books followed.

In 1956, she moved to New York City, where she lived amid rice paper shoji screens and taught the samisen, a traditional stringed instrument. She worked hard to change popular misconceptions about what it means to be a geisha, a term meaning “practitioner of arts.”

Nakamura was a consultant on the 1995 film “Search and Destroy” and on New York theatrical productions of “M. Butterfly” and “Pacific Overtures.”