WASHINGTON — Shizumi Manale is kneeling in a sea of brilliant silk. Yards and yards of costly hand-tinted and embroidered kimonos are spread before her on tatami mats. She has been unfolding them with devotional care; a flick of her wrists sends the fabric flowing across the floor. Even to an inexpert eye, the craftsmanship is obvious: One kimono of subtly textured ink-black is bursting with bright chrysanthemums edged in gold thread. Others in pastel shades feature patterns with delicately blurred outlines, as if the images were rising up from under water.

Shizumi picks up a corner, fondling its rose-petal softness. "You see — this is art," she says quietly. "It really is like a living thing. It's what we call the power of kimono.

"This is what Rob Marshall does not understand."

The quality and style of the kimono is just one element of Japanese culture that Marshall overlooks in his film "Memoirs of a Geisha," Shizumi says.

The movie "has nothing to do with geisha in Kyoto," where Arthur Golden's best-selling novel of the same name was set, Shizumi says. "It's very rude to us. To us, the world of geisha is our culture."

This isn't the first time complaints have been raised about Hollywood's portrayal of a specific culture or time period. But for Shizumi, the disappointment registers on a personal level.

Geisha life cut close to the bone for Shizumi. When she was 15, she discovered a photo of her father and a geisha he had taken as his mistress. In a fit of shame and anger, she says, she tore it up. Shizumi says her attitude toward geisha changed when she found out that the mother of a beloved great-aunt had been a geisha. Her curiosity piqued, Shizumi immersed herself in geisha history, eventually producing a documentary on the elusive women.

Shizumi has devoted herself to geisha arts, particularly traditional dance, which she has performed throughout the Washington area for years, and the tea ceremony. She has dedicated a room overlooking the backyard of her Silver Spring, Md., house to the meditative tea ritual. The room is peaceful and spare, like a temple; so quiet you can hear the gurgling of a little waterfall spilling into a pond outside. It is here, after sipping bowls of frothy green tea with a visitor, that Shizumi is taking some of her best kimonos out of their rice-paper wrapping. These are what a geisha would wear, she says; some of them are signed by their creators and cost more than $10,000. The one she is wearing is what she calls her "casual" kimono, for hanging around the house. She has kimonos for many occasions, including ones to wear for a dance rehearsal.

"Practice is respect; it's sacred," she says. "Even in practice you wear a nice cotton kimono. It's very important."

In his novel, Golden did a fine job of capturing the details and rituals of geisha life, she says. But though Shizumi praises the handsome settings of the film, she says it misses several key points. In a scene of the geisha rehearsing a dance, the actors are wearing loose garments "like a bathrobe." And many of the formal kimonos look too flimsy, lacking heft and luxurious details.

Nor does the dancing reflect the stillness and subtlety of traditional geisha dance, she says, particularly the solo for the central character Sayuri, an apprentice geisha who dons eight-inch- high zori — think lacquered platform flip-flops — and a thin white gown and whips herself into a frenzied expressionistic dance under a cascade of confetti.

Marshall, who directed "Chicago" to a best picture Oscar — and, for good or ill, pioneered making movie musicals without serious dancers in the lead roles — makes no apologies for his unorthodox approach in "Geisha."

"It was never my intention to do a documentary version of the book," he says by phone on his way to Rome for the film's premiere there. "What was interesting was doing an impression of this world."

He says his research was extensive. "I could write a thesis about the geisha world in great detail." And armed with the facts, he felt free to break a few rules. As in, for example, Sayuri's solo dance.

"I serve the story," Marshall says. "That's my job. So dance needs to do more than it does in the book." Sayuri's solo "needed to be an emotional dance and reflect her pain at not being able to express her love. I needed to create a dance that will make us feel for her. That's how it works."

Choreographer John DeLuca, who worked with Marshall on "Chicago," says it was those precarious wooden shoes, worn by courtesans (already a detail sure to inflame geisha purists), that inspired the dance: "I thought, 'God, I've got to use those shoes.'" Though based on kabuki, the solo sprang largely from his imagination.

Shizumi was approached, in fact, to be one of those experts. She flew to California for an interview as a dance consultant, and was asked to audition for a dancing part. She wore her best summer-weight kimono to the audition and carried herself, she says, with the self-effacing grace that a true geisha might possess. But she was alarmed by the speeded-up tempo of the music and the Broadway-style movement demands. Can you throw the fan higher? she was asked.

"We Japanese don't do it that way," she replied. Welcome to Hollywood, she was told.