Catarina Migliorini

According to research by anthropologist Liza Dalby, mizuage was an important initiation to womanhood and the geisha world. Mizuage gave way to the next stage of training, the senior maiko. Once the mizuage patron's function (of deflowering the young maiko) was served, he was to have no further relations with the girl. Mizuage was not considered by geisha to be an act of prostitution. The money acquired for a maiko’s mizuage was a great sum and it was used to promote her debut as a geisha.
Mineko Iwasaki, a geisha that Arthur Golden met while writing Memoirs of a Geisha described mizuage in her autobiography as being an initiation party, symbolized on the geisha-to-be by a change in hairstyle rather than the loss of virginity. It is a celebration of the passage of girl (maiko) to woman (geisha).
• In fiction
Arthur Golden's novel Memoirs of a Geisha portrays the mizuage as a financial arrangement in which a girl's virginity is sold to a "mizuage patron" or hymen lover.