TOKYO (AFP) ??” Kiharu Nakamura.

TOKYO (AFP) ??” Kiharu Nakamura, who abandoned a career as a top geisha to teach traditional Japanese music and dance in the United States for nearly half a hundred years has died at the age of 90 her publisher said.

Nakamura died at her hearthstone in New York City upon Monday, according to Tokyo's Soshisha Co Ltd which has published her 10 works including her autobiographical 1983 best-seller "Edokko Geisha Ichidaiki" (The Memoir of a Tokyo-born Geisha).

The cause of her death was not immediately known.

"I heard she was in poor condition freshly because of her advanced age," Soshisha editor Shinobu Honda said.

The autobiography has been translated into eight languages and adapted into a television drama and a play at hearth portraying Nakamura as the merely geisha who could speak English in pre-World War II Tokyo.

French avant-garde artist Jean Cocteau, king of comedy Charlie Chaplin