Functions of the Japanese language inclusions in the novels of A. Golden's “Memoirs of a geisha” and M. Iwasaki's “Geisha of Gion”

The article deals with the linguistic analysis of the English language novel «Memoirs of a Geisha» by the American author Arthur Golden and the autobiographical novel «Geisha of Gion» by the Japanese writer Mineko Iwasaki. The aim of the research is to find out and analyze lexical units, grammatical structures and transcribed Japanese words (foreign language inclusions), functioning in the texts of the novels to represent the national diversity of the culture described, and such Japanese culture-specific element as a geisha, particularly. This article also considers techniques for creating the linguistic image of a geisha according to the Japanese and American national traditions, ways of life and mindsets, as well as linguistic means chosen by the authors for the representation of the geisha image according to their worldviews. In the article, we focus on the problem of asymmetric Japanese and American cultural-cognitive worldviews, which are represented linguistically.