Memoirs of a Geisha

by Arthur Golden

Overview

A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel tells with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha.

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read

Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the story of her life as a geisha. It begins in a poor fishing village in 1929, when, as a nine-year-old girl with unusual blue-gray eyes, she is taken from her home and sold into slavery to a renowned geisha house. We witness her transformation as she learns the rigorous arts of the geisha: dance and music; wearing kimono, elaborate makeup, and hair; pouring sake to reveal just a touch of inner wrist; competing with a jealous rival for men's solicitude and the money that goes with it.

In Memoirs of a Geisha, we enter a world where appearances are paramount; where a girl's virginity is auctioned to the highest bidder; where women are trained to beguile the most powerful men; and where love is scorned as illusion. It is a unique and triumphant work of fiction—at once romantic, erotic, suspenseful—and completely unforgettable.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679781585
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/10/1999
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	11,090
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.10(d)
Lexile:	1000L (what's this?)
Age Range:	14 - 18 Years

About the Author

Arthur Golden was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and was educated at Harvard College, where he received a degree in art history, specializing in Japanese art. In 1980 he earned an M.A. in Japanese history from Columbia University, where he also learned Mandarin Chinese. Following a summer at Beijing University, he worked in Tokyo, and, after returning to the United States, earned an M.A. in English from Boston University. He resides in Brookline, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children.

Read an Excerpt

Suppose that you and I were sitting in a quiet room overlooking a garden, chatting and sipping at our cups of green tea while we talked about something that had happened a long while ago, and I said to you, "That afternoon when I met so-and-so...was the very best afternoon of my life, and also the very worst afternoon." I expect you might put down your teacup and say, "Well, now, which was it? Was it the best or the worst? Because it can't possibly have been both!" Ordinarily I'd have to laugh at myself and agree with you. But the truth is that the afternoon when I met Mr. Tanaka Ichiro really was the best and the worst of my life. He seemed so fascinating to me, even the fish smell on his hands was a kind of perfume. If I had never known him, I'm sure I would not have become a geisha.

I wasn't born and raised to be a Kyoto geisha. I wasn't even born in Kyoto. I'm a fisherman's daughter from a little town called Yoroido on the Sea of Japan. In all my life I've never told more than a handful of people anything at all about Yoroido, or about the house in which I grew up, or about my mother and father, or my older sister--and certainly not about how I became a geisha, or what it was like to be one. Most people would much rather carry on with their fantasies that my mother and grandmother were geisha, and that I began my training in dance when I was weaned from the breast, and so on. As a matter of fact, one day many years ago I was pouring a cup of sake for a man who happened to mention that he had been in Yoroido only the previous week. Well, I felt as a bird must feel when it has flown across the ocean and comes upon a creature that knows its nest. I was so shocked I couldn't stop myself from saying:

"Yoroido! Why, that's where I grew up!"

This poor man! His face went through the most remarkable series of changes. He tried his best to smile, though it didn't come out well because he couldn't get the look of shock off his face.

"Yoroido?" he said. "You can't mean it."

I long ago developed a very practiced smile, which I call my "Noh smile" because it resembles a Noh mask whose features are frozen. Its advantage is that men can interpret it however they want; you can imagine how often I've relied on it. I decided I'd better use it just then, and of course it worked. He let out all his breath and tossed down the cup of sake I'd poured for him before giving an enormous laugh I'm sure was prompted more by relief than anything else.

"The very idea!" he said, with another big laugh. "You, growing up in a dump like Yoroido. That's like making tea in a bucket!" And when he'd laughed again, he said to me, "That's why you're so much fun, Sayuri-san. Sometimes you almost make me believe your little jokes are real."

I don't much like thinking of myself as a cup of tea made in a bucket, but I suppose in a way it must be true. After all, I did grow up in Yoroido, and no one would suggest it's a glamorous spot. Hardly anyone ever visits it. As for the people who live there, they never have occasion to leave. You're probably wondering how I came to leave it myself. That's where my story begins.

In our little fishing village of Yoroido, I lived in what I called a "tipsy house." It stood near a cliff where the wind off the ocean was always blowing. As a child it seemed to me as if the ocean had caught a terrible cold, because it was always wheezing and there would be spells when it let out a huge sneeze--which is to say there was a burst of wind with a tremendous spray. I decided our tiny house must have been offended by the ocean sneezing in its face from time to time, and took to leaning back because it wanted to get out of the way. Probably it would have collapsed if my father hadn't cut a timber from a wrecked fishing boat to prop up the eaves, which made the house look like a tipsy old man leaning on his crutch.

Inside this tipsy house I lived something of a lopsided life. Because from my earliest years I was very much like my mother, and hardly at all like my father or older sister. My mother said it was because we were made just the same, she and I--and it was true--we both had the same peculiar eyes of a sort you almost never see in Japan. Instead of being dark brown like everyone else's, my mother's eyes were a translucent gray, and mine are just the same. When I was very young, I told my mother I thought someone had poked a hole in her eyes and all the ink had drained out, which she thought very funny. The fortune-tellers said her eyes were so pale because of too much water in her personality, so much that the other four elements were hardly present at all--and this, they explained, was why her features matched so poorly. People in the village often said she ought to have been extremely attractive, because her parents had been. Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can't put the two together; this was the terrible trick nature had played on her. She had her mother's pouty mouth but her father's angular jaw, which gave the impression of a delicate picture with much too heavy a frame. And her lovely gray eyes were surrounded by thick lashes that must have been striking on her father, but in her case only made her look startled.

My mother always said she'd married my father because she had too much water in her personality and he had too much wood in his. People who knew my father understood right away what she was talking about. Water flows from place to place quickly and always finds a crack to spill through. Wood, on the other hand, holds fast to the earth. In my father's case this was a good thing, for he was a fisherman, and a man with wood in his personality is at ease on the sea. In fact, my father was more at ease on the sea than anywhere else, and never left it far behind him. He smelled like the sea even after he had bathed. When he wasn't fishing, he sat on the floor in our dark front room mending a fishing net. And if a fishing net had been a sleeping creature, he wouldn't even have awakened it, at the speed he worked. He did everything this slowly. Even when he summoned a look of concentration, you could run outside and drain the bath in the time it took him to rearrange his features. His face was very heavily creased, and into each crease he had tucked some worry or other, so that it wasn't really his own face any longer, but more like a tree that had nests of birds in all the branches. He had to struggle constantly to manage it and always looked worn out from the effort.

When I was six or seven, I learned something about my father I'd never known. One day I asked him, "Daddy, why are you so old?" He hoisted up his eyebrows at this, so that they formed little sagging umbrellas over his eyes. And he let out a long breath, and shook his head and said, "I don't know." When I turned to my mother, she gave me a look meaning she would answer the question for me another time. The following day without saying a word, she walked me down the hill toward the village and turned at a path into a graveyard in the woods. She led me to three graves in the corner, with three white marker posts much taller than I was. They had stern-looking black characters written top to bottom on them, but I hadn't attended the school in our little village long enough to know where one ended and the next began. My mother pointed to them and said, "Natsu, wife of Sakamoto Minoru." Sakamoto Minoru was the name of my father. "Died age twenty-four, in the nineteenth year of Meiji." Then she pointed to the next one: "Jinichiro, son of Sakamoto Minoru, died age six, in the nineteenth year of Meiji," and to the next one, which was identical except for the name, Masao, and the age, which was three. It took me a while to understand that my father had been married before, a long time ago, and that his whole family had died. I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were pulling me down toward them.

With all this water and all this wood, the two of them ought to have made a good balance and produced children with the proper arrangement of elements. I'm sure it was a surprise to them that they ended up with one of each. For it wasn't just that I resembled my mother and had even inherited her unusual eyes; my sister, Satsu, was as much like my father as anyone could be. Satsu was six years older than me, and of course, being older, she could do things I couldn't do. But Satsu had a remarkable quality of doing everything in a way that seemed like a complete accident. For example, if you asked her to pour a bowl of soup from a pot on the stove, she would get the job done, but in a way that looked like she'd spilled it into the bowl just by luck. One time she even cut herself with a fish, and I don't mean with a knife she was using to clean a fish. She was carrying a fish wrapped in paper up the hill from the village when it slid out and fell against her leg in such a way as to cut her with one of its fins.

Our parents might have had other children besides Satsu and me, particularly since my father hoped for a boy to fish with him. But when I was seven my mother grew terribly ill with what was probably bone cancer, though at the time I had no idea what was wrong. Her only escape from discomfort was to sleep, which she began to do the way a cat does--which is to say, more or less constantly. As the months passed she slept most of the time, and soon began to groan whenever she was awake. I knew something in her was changing quickly, but because of so much water in her personality, this didn't seem worrisome to me. Sometimes she grew thin in a matter of months but grew strong again just as quickly. But by the time I was nine, the bones in her face had begun to protrude, and she never gained weight again afterward. I didn't realize the water was draining out of her because of her illness. Just as seaweed is naturally soggy, you see, but turns brittle as it dries, my mother was giving up more and more of her essence.

Then one afternoon I was sitting on the pitted floor of our dark front room, singing to a cricket I'd found that morning, when a voice called out at the door:

"Oi! Open up! It's Dr. Miura!"

Dr. Miura came to our fishing village once a week, and had made a point of walking up the hill to check on my mother ever since her illness had begun. My father was at home that day because a terrible storm was coming. He sat in his usual spot on the floor, with his two big spiderlike hands tangled up in a fishing net. But he took a moment to point his eyes at me and raise one of his fingers. This meant he wanted me to answer the door.
Dr. Miura was a very important man--or so we believed in our village. He had studied in Tokyo and reportedly knew more Chinese characters than anyone. He was far too proud to notice a creature like me. When I opened the door for him, he slipped out of his shoes and stepped right past me into the house.

"Why, Sakamoto-san," he said to my father, "I wish I had your life, out on the sea fishing all day. How glorious! And then on rough days you take a rest. I see your wife is still asleep," he went on. "What a pity. I thought I might examine her."

"Oh?" said my father.

"I won't be around next week, you know. Perhaps you might wake her for me?"

My father took a while to untangle his hands from the net, but at last he stood.

"Chiyo-chan," he said to me, "get the doctor a cup of tea."

My name back then was Chiyo. I wouldn't be known by my geisha name, Sayuri, until years later.

My father and the doctor went into the other room, where my mother lay sleeping. I tried to listen at the door, but I could hear only my mother groaning, and nothing of what they said. I occupied myself with making tea, and soon the doctor came back out rubbing his hands together and looking very stern. My father came to join him, and they sat together at the table in the center of the room.

"The time has come to say something to you, Sakamoto-san," Dr. Miura began. "You need to have a talk with one of the women in the village. Mrs. Sugi, perhaps. Ask her to make a nice new robe for your wife."

"I haven't the money, Doctor," my father said.

"We've all grown poorer lately. I understand what you're saying. But you owe it to your wife. She shouldn't die in that tattered robe she's wearing."

"So she's going to die soon?"

"A few more weeks, perhaps. She's in terrible pain. Death will release her."

After this, I couldn't hear their voices any longer; for in my ears I heard a sound like a bird's wings flapping in panic. Perhaps it was my heart, I don't know. But if you've ever seen a bird trapped inside the great hall of a temple, looking for some way out, well, that was how my mind was reacting. It had never occurred to me that my mother wouldn't simply go on being sick. I won't say I'd never wondered what might happen if she should die; I did wonder about it, in the same way I wondered what might happen if our house were swallowed up in an earthquake. There could hardly be life after such an event.

"I thought I would die first," my father was saying.

"You're an old man, Sakamoto-san. But your health is good. You might have four or five years. I'll leave you some more of those pills for your wife. You can give them to her two at a time, if you need to."

They talked about the pills a bit longer, and then Dr. Miura left. My father went on sitting for a long while in silence, with his back to me. He wore no shirt but only his loose-fitting skin; the more I looked at him, the more he began to seem like just a curious collection of shapes and textures. His spine was a path of knobs. His head, with its discolored splotches, might have been a bruised fruit. His arms were sticks wrapped in old leather, dangling from two bumps. If my mother died, how could I go on living in the house with him? I didn't want to be away from him; but whether he was there or not, the house would be just as empty when my mother had left it.

At last my father said my name in a whisper. I went and knelt beside him.

"Something very important," he said.

His face was so much heavier than usual, with his eyes rolling around almost as though he'd lost control of them. I thought he was struggling to tell me my mother would die soon, but all he said was:

"Go down to the village. Bring back some incense for the altar."

Our tiny Buddhist altar rested on an old crate beside the entrance to the kitchen; it was the only thing of value in our tipsy house. In front of a rough carving of Amida, the Buddha of the Western Paradise, stood tiny black mortuary tablets bearing the Buddhist names of our dead ancestors.

"But, Father...wasn't there anything else?"

I hoped he would reply, but he only made a gesture with his hand that meant for me to leave.

What People are Saying About This

Arthur Golden

[Geisha] is not about sex, though sex is available. It's about being a womanand being present in this group of men and changing the social dynamic. . . . .It is the only subculture in Japan I know of that is absolutely ruled by women. -- Interviewed in People Magazine, November 23, 1998

Ann Beattie

Arthur Golden's novel is wonderful:involving, intelligent, fascinating, and almost Dickensian in the way the characters inhabit the landscape, and the landscape permeates the characters. It's unique, beautifully written book.

Reading Group Guide

The questions, discussion topics, and suggested reading list that follow are intended to enhance your group's experience of reading Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha. We hope that they will give you a number of interesting ideas and angles from which to approach this enthralling debut novel, which is the fictional true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha.

1. Many people in the West think of geisha simply as prostitutes. After reading Memoirs of a Geisha, do you see the geisha of Gion as prostitutes? What are the similarities, and what are the differences? What is the difference between being a prostitute and being a "kept woman," as Sayuri puts it [p. 291]?

2. "The afternoon when I met Mr. Tanaka Ichiro," says Sayuri, "really was the best and the worst of my life" [p. 7]. Is Mr. Tanaka purely motivated by the money he will make from selling Chiyo to Mrs. Nitta, or is he also thinking of Chiyo's future? Is he, as he implies in his letter, her friend?

3. In his letter to Chiyo, Mr. Tanaka says "The training of a geisha is an arduous path. However, this humble person is filled with admiration for those who are able to recast their suffering and become great artists" [p. 103]. The word "geisha" in fact derives from the Japanese word for art. In what does the geisha's art consist? How many different types of art does she practice?

4. Does Sayuri have a better life as a geisha than one assumes she would have had in her village? How does one define a "better" life? Pumpkin, when offered the opportunity to run away, declines [p. 53]; she feels she will be safer in Gion. Is her decision wise?

5. How does Sayuri's status at the Nitta okiya resemble, or differ from, that of a slave? Is she in fact a slave?

6. Are Mother and Granny cruel by nature, or has the relentless life of Gion made them what they are? If so, why is Auntie somewhat more human? Does Auntie feel real affection for Sayuri and Pumpkin, or does she see them simply as chattel?

7. "We must use whatever methods we can to understand the movement of the universe around us and time our actions so that we are not fighting the currents, but moving with them" [p. 127]. How does this attitude differ from the Western notion of seizing control of one's destiny? Which is the more valid? What are Sayuri's feelings and beliefs about "free will"?

8. Do you see Sayuri as victimized by Nobu's attentions, or do you feel pity for Nobu in his hopeless passion for Sayuri? Do you feel that, in finally showing her physical scorn for Nobu, Sayuri betrayed a friend, or that real friendship is impossible between a man and a woman of their respective stations?

9. How do Japanese ideas about eroticism and sexuality differ from Western ones? Does the Japanese ideal of femininity differ from ours? Which parts of the female body are fetishized in Japan, which in the West? The geisha's ritual of preparing herself for the teahouse is a very elaborate affair; how essentially does it differ from a Western women's preparation for a date?

10. Does the way in which the Kyoto men view geisha differ from the way they might view other women, women whom they might marry? What are the differences? How, in turn, do geisha view men? Is the geisha's view of men significantly different from that of ordinary women?

11. Do you find that the relationship between a geisha and her danna is very different from that between a Western man and his mistress? What has led Sayuri to think that "a geisha who expects understanding from her danna is like a mouse expecting sympathy from a snake" [p. 394]?

12. As the older Sayuri narrates her story, it almost seems as though she presents Chiyo and Sayuri as two different people. In what ways are Chiyo and Sayuri different? In what ways are they recognizably the same person?

13. Pumpkin believes that Sayuri betrayed her when she, rather than Pumpkin, was adopted by the Nitta okiya. Do you believe that Sayuri was entirely blameless in this incident? Might she have helped to make Pumpkin's life easier while they were in the okiya together? Or has Pumpkin's character simply been corrupted by her years with Hatsumomo and the entire cruel system that has exploited her?

14. Sayuri senses that she shares an en, a lifelong karmic bond, with Nobu [p. 295]. How might a Western woman express this same idea?

15. During Sayuri's life, Japan goes through a series of traumas and unprecedented cultural change: the Great Depression, the War, the American Occupation. How do the inhabitants of Gion view political events in the outside world? How much effect do such events have upon their lives? How aware are they of mainstream Japanese culture and life?

16. What personal qualities do Sayuri and Mameha have that make them able to survive and even prosper in spite of the many cruelties they have suffered? Why is Hatsumomo, for example, ultimately unable to survive in Gion?

17. Is Sayuri the victim of a cruel and repressive system, a woman who can only survive by submitting to men? Or is she a tough, resourceful person who has not only survived but built a good life for herself with independence and even a certain amount of power?

18. Why might Golden have chosen to begin his narrative with a "Translator's Note"? What does this device accomplish for him?

19. In Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden has done a very daring thing: he, an American man, has written in the voice of a Japanese woman. How successfully does he disguise his own voice? While reading the novel, did you feel that you were hearing the genuine voice of a woman?

Interviews

On Thursday, November 5th, barnesandnoble.com welcomed Arthur Golden to discuss MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA.

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Moderator: We are so pleased that you could join us tonight, Arthur Golden, to discuss your bestseller, MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA. It is a rare book that garners so many rave reviews and fans as yours has. Do you have any opening comments for your online audience this evening?

Arthur Golden: I am happy to be here, never having done an online chat!

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Leslie Blake from Vermont: What sparked your interest in the geisha and Japan?

Arthur Golden: When I lived in Japan in 1981 I met a guy whose father was a famous businessman and whose mother was a geisha, so I wanted to write a novel about such a fellow. But when I researched the subject of geisha I changed topics. I changed topics because it seemed such great material for me for fiction.

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Ellen Wood from Portland: Is Sayuri Mineko's alter ego? How closely do their lives reflect one another? Thanks for the note at the end of your book about Mineko. That was really fascinating that you had that opportunity to speak to a real geisha.

Arthur Golden: Mineko and Sayuri are very different. The only similarities in their lives are that both were sold as children, and both set a record for the sale of their virginity. Other than that, the stories of their lives as well as their personalities are quite different.

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Kenneth R. Abraham from Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles: There was an introduction by Jakob Haarhuis in the edition of MEMOIRS I read. I just wanted to know how I should interpret this introduction, in which he relates a series of interviews with a geisha, as I understand the content of the book is mostly fiction.

Arthur Golden: The content is entirely fiction, although the historic facts of a geisha's life are accurate. The translator is also an invention. The problem for me was that I had to find a way to make it believable for Sayuri to annotate the story as she told it. If she lived in Kyoto all her life she won't even know what we wouldn't understand, so I wanted the reader to know from the beginning of the book that she is living in New York City, telling her story, looking back at her life, already knowledgeable about it, and talking to a Westerner. Under these circumstances, she would naturally annotate her story as she told it. That, for me, is the reason for the translator's preface.

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Monica Bradley from Richmond, VA: I loved your book and found it hard to believe that a man could have so perfectly captured a woman's voice from a foreign culture. What do you think enabled you to capture the female psyche so well?

Arthur Golden: I am very flattered by this question, and although I have heard it quite a number of times, I am never sure how to answer. For me, the experience of writing from the point of view of a woman simply involved imagining how the character might react to what had happened to her -- not how I would react, but how she would react. Many times I thought of ideas, but I couldn't manage to get them properly written on the page. I would come up with another idea, and it would go smoothly. But the following day when I reread it, it would stand out, and my intention was to make a kind of smooth surface where nothing seemed jarringly out of place until it seemed that way to me. I think that it is fairly common for readers to be disturbed by problems like anachronism in novels, or moments when characters behave out of character, so writing from a different perspective is just a matter of paying attention to the part of yourself that notices those things.

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Francesca from New York: Do the traditions of the geisha still exist today? Are there still schools, etc.?

Arthur Golden: Yes, the traditions and schools still exist, but nowadays geisha enter the profession voluntarily after high school, rather than involuntary as children; and at the end of the night they go home to their own apartments, so the life is much less rigorous and much more free than it was.

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Marcy from New York: Is there a story behind why you made Sayuri's eyes gray?

Arthur Golden: There is. In the first draft of the novel, she didn't have those eyes, but when I reread it while preparing to edit it, I noticed a lot of water imagery I hadn't been aware of. Then I took my children to a water amusement park, where I happened to see two sisters all wet from the water with the most astonishingly beautiful blue-gray eyes, and it suddenly struck me that I just had to give Sayuri those eyes. As a footnote, since writing the novel, I learned to my surprise there really are people in Japan with such eyes, mostly because of traces of Russian ancestry.

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Sarah from Florida: After finally finishing your novel and creating such a huge success, how does it feel? Are there great demands on your time now? Pressure to write something equally good?

Arthur Golden: First of all, it feels great! I have been astonished by the success of the novel. In fact, I am right now at Universal Studios, where I have been given a tour of the set and kimono design for Steven Spielberg's adaptation, so you can imagine how utterly flabbergasted I feel by all of this! As for the pressure, I try to look at it this way: If you are going to have a problem in life, this is a really good problem to have!

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Claire from Dallas, TX: I hear Steven Spielberg will be the director of the movie version of your book. How fantastic! How closely will they stick to your story? Are you involved in the project? And when will it be in theaters?

Arthur Golden: They are sticking very closely to the original story and, in fact, changing essentially nothing, though they have to shorten it considerably, of course. They are keeping me involved informally. I spent a weekend with the costume and set designers, discussing issues that concerned them in their work, for example. And I am sure every so often they may have one or two things they want to talk to me about, but mostly my job is just to sit back and watch it all and have great fun. I would like to add that I feel incredibly fortunate that the story is in such great hands.

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Marcia B. from New Kent: I found your prose really beautiful, especially your metaphors. (For example, the scene in which Sayuri finds a crumbling moth, and its destruction signals her to leave her past behind.) In writing this book, did you try to keep in the spirit of the Japanese language, as they would express things?

Arthur Golden: That is a terrific question, and the answer is yes -- very much so! I never went so far as to try expressing things first in my own mind in Japanese and then translating them into English, but I was always aware of choosing words that would seem to convey the spirit of Japanese as spoken by a woman -- because in Japan men and women speak very differently. Some circumstances call for more polite and formal language than others, and strange as it may seem, the reality is that women must always speak in a more genteel and polite manner than men.

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Beth from Chicago: Since the book has come out, have you heard from any other geisha, and what has their response been to your work?

Arthur Golden: The only geisha I know who reads English is Liza Dalby, who as a American graduate student actually became a geisha in Japan during the late '70s and wrote a book about it called GEISHA. Happily, she has reacted very well to the novel, and in fact we are doing a series of events together in San Francisco this week. But, although the novel is in the process of being translated into Japanese, it hasn't been released there yet, and I have no idea what the reaction there will be.

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Emily Marshall from Baltimore: What were some of your own misconceptions about the life of a geisha before you spoke with Mineko and wrote the first draft of your novel?

Arthur Golden: I misunderstood so many things about the day-to-day life of geisha that it is hard for me to point to a single example. But to name a few things: I wrote a scene in which a geisha put on her makeup and got all the facts wrong; I didn't understand the extreme importance of kimono in that culture; and I didn't have any idea about the ways in which geisha related to one another in reality and to their customers.

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Katrina Baron from Minnesota: I found it really funny that when the geisha entertained men, their manners and appearance were so refined, but they got drunk and told the men dirty jokes. Not what you would expect, right?

Arthur Golden: I was surprised by that myself. When I first began doing research, I imagined that geisha were very ethereal creatures -- more likely to recite a poem than tell a dirty joke -- but when I had a chance to spend time among geisha, I saw the reality very quickly. I think it is easier to understand if you keep in mind that men go to geisha in order to be entertained, usually at the end of a long workday, and jokes go over much better than poetry.

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Penny from Nashville, TN: I heard that after you met a real Kyoto geisha, you scrapped your first draft entirely. How daunting was this to start over, and did the new novel pour out easier then?

Arthur Golden: It is true that I scrapped the novel after meeting a geisha, and in a strange way, I was pleased to do it. I wanted to be accurate to the world of geisha as it really was, and now through good fortune I had the opportunity to correct my mistakes. What was much harder was throwing out the entire second draft as well and starting it over a third time, when I came to understand I still hadn't produced the novel I hoped to write.

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Mary Burke from New Orleans: In reading your book, it struck me that a geisha really is so many things -- a performer, a supermodel of sorts, a businesswoman, a prostitute. How would you describe the geisha?

Arthur Golden: Gosh, you have done a pretty good job! Geisha don't have any counterpart in our culture because here in the West, men and women socialize together freely. In Japan they don't. Men hire women to entertain them, and the principal role of a geisha is to provide female companionship. Sometimes that means telling stories, sometimes it means just being arm candy, and at other times it can also involve sex.

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Elaine from Seattle: The scope of your book is so wide -- including decades and decades of history, beginning in Japan and ending in America. When you started writing this novel, did you realize it would be an epic of sorts? Did you write an outline of everything you wanted to include?

Arthur Golden: I did know that the novel would cover quite a span of history, and this thought appealed to me. I have heard the novel described as "an epic on a intimate scale," and I suppose that is a good way to think of it, because it is really about one woman's life, even though it is set during a period of considerable turmoil. As for the outline, yes, I actually did write an outline, but working only one or two chapters ahead of the point I had already reached. As John Updike describes writing a novel, it felt like driving down a road at night; you can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

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Jonathan from Seattle: My wife and I saw you at the recent NW Bookfest! Since it took you many years to write this book, when can we expect another wonderful book from you?

Arthur Golden: Much sooner than the nine years it took me to write this one! I comfort myself with the thought that this novel took nine years because it was really three completely separate novels I wrote, so my best guess is three years. It will not be about Japan, but I would rather not say anymore about it.

---

Anna from New Jersey: How long was your book tour? I've heard they are terribly exhausting. What was a typical day like? By the way, my mother and I loved your book.

Arthur Golden: I am now on something like my fourth or fifth book tour. I have spent about a total of four or five months on the road during the last year. A typical day is something I could never have imagined two years ago: a couple of radio interviews, a print interview or two, a photo shoot, maybe a TV appearance and a bookstore appearance in the evening, as well as drop-ins to sign books at various bookstores in the area. Some days are slower than that and then, even when I am at home, I have been averaging six or seven interviews a week and sometimes a couple of photo shoots a week.

---

Ejovi from New York: Currently, what prices do geisha entertain for?

Arthur Golden: I can only guess, since I have never paid myself, and my research focused on the time period before the war. It is something like this, though: Four or five men at a first-class teahouse for the evening entertained by a couple of geisha, including dinner and a couple of drinks, would run probably upward of $10,000.

---

Josh from Philadelphia: This novel involved a great deal of research that was expensive, difficult, and involved asking lots of favors from lots of people. I would like to know if you were nervous to invest so much time and effort into a book, when you had never written one before?

Arthur Golden: Yes, very nervous. But what else can you do? It is a strange undertaking to take your life into your hands this way, unsure of the outcome, and it is perfectly true I might well have ended up flat on my face. I suppose all any of us can do, while at the same time relying on our best judgment, is give ourselves permission to take risks.

---

Dale from Williamsburg, VA: There is so much beauty in the culture and traditions of the geisha -- teaching young girls discipline, dance, manners, art of conversation, etc., but on the other hand there is such an opportunity for young girls to be abused or sexually exploited. Where do the Japanese weigh in on this issue today? Are they proud of this cultural practice, which used to be so prevalent? Would it ever have a rebirth?

Arthur Golden: You would be surprised how ignorant most Japanese are on the subject of geisha, but it is safe to say this kind of exploitation was frowned upon in ways it wasn't 50 years ago. As for the question of rebirth, geisha culture has never really died out in the first place, but it has changed. It is much less exploitive now than it was before.

---

Bruce McCardle from Pittsburgh: Do you know of any other books or movies we can learn more about geishas from? I found your book remarkable.

Arthur Golden: I recommend Liza Dalby's book GEISHA and Jodi Cobb's book of photographs, called GEISHA: THE LIFE, THE VOICES, THE ART. A number of documentaries on the subject are in preproduction now, and a companion book as well, so more will be available before long.

---

Elise from Bedford: After reading your superb novel, I really feel differently about the geisha. I see her now as a high-class mistress, not really a prostitute at all -- except for perhaps the sale of her virginity. What do you think?

Arthur Golden: I think that is a good description, particularly if you think of the sort of high-class mistress who exists on the same continuum as a prostitute, that is to say, we are not talking about women who become mistresses out of love but because of the opportunity it affords them.

---

Missy from Brooklyn: To write about all the elaborate practices in the geisha culture -- putting on the makeup, tea ceremony, dancing -- did you have to enact any of these yourself to understand them?

Arthur Golden: In every case, I had to learn enough about these practices to write convincingly about them, but I never had to go so far as take lessons myself or try any of these practices. But I did put a small amount of makeup on the side of my face before writing about it, to see how it felt.

---

Moderator: It's been a pleasure to spend some time with you this evening, Arthur Golden. Reading MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA was truly a remarkable experience for me and for the many fans who joined us tonight. We hope you'll join us again in the future. Do you have any final comments for our online audience?

Arthur Golden: Just to say thanks so much for all the thought-provoking questions and for taking the time to log on!

---

Editorial Reviews

"Astonishing . . . breathtaking . . . You are seduced completely." —Washington Post Book World

"Captivating, minutely imagined . . . a novel that refuses to stay shut." —Newsweek

"A story with the social vibrancy and narrative sweep of a much-loved 19th century bildungsroman. . . . This is a high-wire act. . . . Rarely has a world so closed and foreign been evoked with such natural assurance." —The New Yorker

From the Publisher

The Barnes & Noble Review

The Art of Seduction

Arthur Golden's brilliant debut novel, Memoirs of a Geisha, is a reminder of just how silly the exhortation 'write what you know!' can be. Clearly Golden, a 40-something American male, has never lived anything remotely similar to the experiences of a geisha coming of age in the '30s, the glory days of Kyoto's Gion pleasure district. Yet it is precisely this vanished world that he re-creates with subtlety, sensuality, and supreme authority, bringing to life characters so complete and idiosyncratic — so fully sprung from the eras he has evoked — that his novel ultimately overwhelms us, as seductive and beguiling as the geisha of its title.

With details as finely etched as those in a Hiroshige woodcut, Golden brings to life the beauty of pre-war Japan, specifically the Gion district of that most graceful of ancient cities, Kyoto, as experienced by Sayuri, the gray-eyed geisha of the book's title. It is Sayuri's metamorphosis, from her impoverished beginnings in a poor fishing village, when she is still known as Chiyo, to her standing as one of Japan's most celebrated entertainers, that makes up the dramatic arc of this tale. Chiyo is only nine when she and her sister, Satsu, are virtually sold to a stranger by her father. Chiyo's unusual beauty lands her an apprenticeship in one of Kyoto's best-known okiya, or geisha houses, while the plainer Satsu is led to a run-down part of town where she will be forced into prostitution. Except for a momentary reunion many months later, the sisters never see one another again.

In theokiya,Chiyo's beauty earns her the lifelong enmity of the head geisha, the lovely but venomous Hatsumomo. Chiyo suffers months of mistreatment by Hatsumomo, whose lies and manipulations not only threaten her future as an apprentice but threaten to sink her beneath a mountain of debt that a lifetime of servitude in the okiya may never pay off. Luckily, Chiyo, now renamed the more auspicious 'Sayuri,' is saved by Hatsumomo's rival, the celebrated geisha Mameha, who strikes an unusual deal with the head of the okiya, under whose terms she will take Sayuri as her pupil.

The quick-witted Sayuri turns out to be a fast learner. Although still mourning the loss of her family and her childhood, Sayuri, already entranced by Hatsumomo's exquisite kimonos and make-up, knows her only hope lies in becoming a celebrated geisha herself. Melancholy yet self-assured, she has an epiphany one morning after finding a dead moth she buried months earlier beneath the foundation of the okiya.

It seemed to be wearing a robe in subdued grays and browns.... Everything about it seemed beautiful and perfect and so utterly unchanged. It struck me that we — that moth and I — were two opposite extremes. My existence was as unstable as a stream...but the moth was like a piece of stone, changing not at all. While thinking this...I brushed it with my finger tip, and it turned all at once into a pile of ash without even a sound. I let the tiny shroud flutter to the ground; and now I understood the thing that had puzzled me all morning...the past was gone. My mother and father were dead...and my sister...was gone; but I wasn't.... I felt as though I'd turned around to look in a different direction, so that I no longer faced backward towards the past, but forward towards the future.

Sayuri, Mameha notes, has an abundance of water in her personality. 'Water never waits,' Mameha informs her at one of their first meetings. 'It can wash away earth, it can put out fire; it can wear metal down and sweep it away.... Those of us with water in our personality don't pick where we'll flow to. All we can do is flow where the landscape of our lives carries us.'

So Sayuri flows forward, absorbing a geisha's traditional education: the shamisen lessons and tea ceremonies; the dance lessons and ikebana; witnessing nights of entertaining in Kyoto's most elegant tea houses. All the while she is aware that her fortunes will always hinge on others: on the whims of Mother, the head of the okiya; on the intrigues of Gion itself; on her ability to negotiate the rivalries between herself and her fellow apprentices and between Mameha and Hatsumomo; and most important, on Mameha's handling of the delicate negotiations that surround the bidding for Sayuri's mizuage, or virginity, a step that will largely determine whether or not she will be able to secure for herself a favorable danna, or patron, without which any geisha is, as Mameha instructs, like 'a stray cat on the street.'

This idea of flow, of going where the current of destiny takes one, permeates the narrative and is a cause of despair for Sayuri, who has fallen deeply in love with a man she believes to be unattainable. 'We don't become geisha so our lives will be satisfying,' a resigned Mameha counsels Sayuri. 'We become geisha because we have no other choice.... Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them, but when they become old, they look silly wearing even one.'

Sayuri eventually does become a full-fledged geisha, even a renowned one. Yet the water in her personality also signals a passionate nature that very little can dam. Ultimately, Sayuri does not fit into this world in which ritual is prized above individual happiness. In a devastating act of courage and deception, Sayuri risks everything she has achieved for a chance at happiness.

Like a gorgeously layered kimono, Memoirs gradually unfolds to reveal the courage, love, daring, and hope of an intensely human — and, it turns out, surprisingly modern — woman. Sayuri's voice, alternately poetic and mischievous, lends the narrative an immediacy that provides a beguiling counterpoint to the exquisitely detailed rituals — such as the lacquered mask Sayuri learns to apply so expertly — that make up so much of geisha life in prewar Gion. Like Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World, Memoirs of a Geisha revives a long-vanished world and makes us experience, however briefly, its fragile, mothlike, and indelible beauty. — Sarah Midori Zimmerman

Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
Arthur Golden's brilliant debut novel, Memoirs of a Geisha, is a reminder of just how silly the exhortation 'write what you know!' can be. Clearly Golden, a 40-something American male, has never lived anything remotely similar to the experiences of a geisha coming of age in the '30s, the glory days of Kyoto's Gion pleasure district. Yet it is precisely this vanished world that he re-creates with subtlety, sensuality, and supreme authority, bringing to life characters so complete and idiosyncratic — so fully sprung from the eras he has evoked — that his novel ultimately overwhelms us, as seductive and beguiling as the geisha of its title.

With details as finely etched as those in a Hiroshige woodcut, Golden brings to life the beauty of pre-war Japan, specifically the Gion district of that most graceful of ancient cities, Kyoto, as experienced by Sayuri, the gray-eyed geisha of the book's title. It is Sayuri's metamorphosis, from her impoverished beginnings in a poor fishing village, when she is still known as Chiyo, to her standing as one of Japan's most celebrated entertainers, that makes up the dramatic arc of this tale. Chiyo is only nine when she and her sister, Satsu, are virtually sold to a stranger by her father. Chiyo's unusual beauty lands her an apprenticeship in one of Kyoto's best-known okiya, or geisha houses, while the plainer Satsu is led to a run-down part of town where she will be forced into prostitution. Except for a momentary reunion many months later, the sisters never see one another again.

In theokiya,Chiyo's beauty earns her the lifelong enmity of the head geisha, the lovely but venomous Hatsumomo. Chiyo suffers months of mistreatment by Hatsumomo, whose lies and manipulations not only threaten her future as an apprentice but threaten to sink her beneath a mountain of debt that a lifetime of servitude in the okiya may never pay off. Luckily, Chiyo, now renamed the more auspicious 'Sayuri,' is saved by Hatsumomo's rival, the celebrated geisha Mameha, who strikes an unusual deal with the head of the okiya, under whose terms she will take Sayuri as her pupil.

The quick-witted Sayuri turns out to be a fast learner. Although still mourning the loss of her family and her childhood, Sayuri, already entranced by Hatsumomo's exquisite kimonos and make-up, knows her only hope lies in becoming a celebrated geisha herself. Melancholy yet self-assured, she has an epiphany one morning after finding a dead moth she buried months earlier beneath the foundation of the okiya.

It seemed to be wearing a robe in subdued grays and browns.... Everything about it seemed beautiful and perfect and so utterly unchanged. It struck me that we — that moth and I — were two opposite extremes. My existence was as unstable as a stream...but the moth was like a piece of stone, changing not at all. While thinking this...I brushed it with my finger tip, and it turned all at once into a pile of ash without even a sound. I let the tiny shroud flutter to the ground; and now I understood the thing that had puzzled me all morning...the past was gone. My mother and father were dead...and my sister...was gone; but I wasn't.... I felt as though I'd turned around to look in a different direction, so that I no longer faced backward towards the past, but forward towards the future.

Sayuri, Mameha notes, has an abundance of water in her personality. 'Water never waits,' Mameha informs her at one of their first meetings. 'It can wash away earth, it can put out fire; it can wear metal down and sweep it away.... Those of us with water in our personality don't pick where we'll flow to. All we can do is flow where the landscape of our lives carries us.'

So Sayuri flows forward, absorbing a geisha's traditional education: the shamisen lessons and tea ceremonies; the dance lessons and ikebana; witnessing nights of entertaining in Kyoto's most elegant tea houses. All the while she is aware that her fortunes will always hinge on others: on the whims of Mother, the head of the okiya; on the intrigues of Gion itself; on her ability to negotiate the rivalries between herself and her fellow apprentices and between Mameha and Hatsumomo; and most important, on Mameha's handling of the delicate negotiations that surround the bidding for Sayuri's mizuage, or virginity, a step that will largely determine whether or not she will be able to secure for herself a favorable danna, or patron, without which any geisha is, as Mameha instructs, like 'a stray cat on the street.'

This idea of flow, of going where the current of destiny takes one, permeates the narrative and is a cause of despair for Sayuri, who has fallen deeply in love with a man she believes to be unattainable. 'We don't become geisha so our lives will be satisfying,' a resigned Mameha counsels Sayuri. 'We become geisha because we have no other choice.... Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them, but when they become old, they look silly wearing even one.'

Sayuri eventually does become a full-fledged geisha, even a renowned one. Yet the water in her personality also signals a passionate nature that very little can dam. Ultimately, Sayuri does not fit into this world in which ritual is prized above individual happiness. In a devastating act of courage and deception, Sayuri risks everything she has achieved for a chance at happiness.

Like a gorgeously layered kimono, Memoirs gradually unfolds to reveal the courage, love, daring, and hope of an intensely human — and, it turns out, surprisingly modern — woman. Sayuri's voice, alternately poetic and mischievous, lends the narrative an immediacy that provides a beguiling counterpoint to the exquisitely detailed rituals — such as the lacquered mask Sayuri learns to apply so expertly — that make up so much of geisha life in prewar Gion. Like Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World, Memoirs of a Geisha revives a long-vanished world and makes us experience, however briefly, its fragile, mothlike, and indelible beauty.

bn.com

Enthralling...Draws the reader in from the very first page.

USA Today

Remarkable...elegant...lyrical...evocative.

People Magazine

Stunningly authentic...Be prepared to get totally engrossed.

Mademoiselle

As close to un-put-downable as any novel in years, yet bristling with intelligence and grace. Wow!

Newsday

esmerizing...and beautifully detailed.

San Francisco Chronicle

'I wasn't born and raised to be a Kyoto geisha....I'm a fisherman's daughter from a little town called Yoroido on the Sea of Japan.' How nine-year-old Chiyo, sold with her sister into slavery by their father after their mother's death, becomes Sayuri, the beautiful geisha accomplished in the art of entertaining men, is the focus of this fascinating first novel. Narrating her life story from her elegant suite in the Waldorf Astoria, Sayuri tells of her traumatic arrival at the Nitta okiya (a geisha house), where she endures harsh treatment from Granny and Mother, the greedy owners, and from Hatsumomo, the sadistically cruel head geisha. But Sayuri's chance meeting with the Chairman, who shows her kindness, makes her determined to become a geisha. Under the tutelage of the renowned Mameha, she becomes a leading geisha of the 1930s and 1940s.

After the book's compelling first half, the second half is a bit flat and overlong. Still, Golden, with degrees in Japanese art and history, has brilliantly revealed the culture and traditions of an exotic world, closed to most Westerners. -- Wilda Williams

Library Journal

Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha is as exotic as a moonscape and as accessible and old-shoe comfortable as Pride and Prejudice. The ritual culture of the geisha seems utterly alien, as remote from contemporary experience as foot-binding or arranged marriages, yet Golden pegs his first novel to such a recognizable set of dilemmas that its initially foreign landscape is made utterly familiar.

Being a geisha, as Golden explains it, is akin to being an Austen heroine. Men have power and money; women have beauty and charm. It's up to the geisha to learn how to use her wiles if she wants to have any hope of keeping body and soul intact. For Austen's English maiden, the aim was a husband and the financial security he provided. For the geisha in pre-World War II Japan, marriage was usually out of the question, since the powerful men who enjoyed her company often already had wives. And to remain a geisha she could not be married. So the geisha's goal was to make him her danna (patron) and she would become his mistress.

Golden ushers us into this decidedly non-PC territory with exemplary finesse. The geisha, he makes clear, is not a prostitute but an entertainer. Trained in conversation, tea ceremony, dance, song and the shamisen (a stringed instrument), she soothes careworn men in evening gatherings at teahouses. These women may not be men's equals, but they are not their sexual slaves. Flunking out of the system may lead to prostitution, but playing by the rules requires that you avoid it.

The novel's narrator is Nitta Sayuri, a poor fisherman's daughter sold at the age of 9 into the Kyoto geishahood. The girl is blessed with beauty (her unusual gray-blue eyes elicit many compliments), intelligence and wit. She will need every one of these assets as she struggles to find her place in a world controlled by men. As one of her elders informs her, "We don't become geisha so our lives will be satisfying. We become geisha because we have no other choice."

Golden's storytelling is rich and slow-paced. Like Austen, he lavishes attention on the minute details that regulate and define social distinctions. In the raising of a teacup or an eyebrow there are worlds of implication. The prose style is simple and strangely satisfying, perfectly attuned to its time and place. Golden manages to find the simile for every occasion. "That startling month in which I first came upon the Chairman again ... made me feel like a pet cricket that has at last escaped its wicker cage. For the first time in ages I could go to bed at night believing that I might not always draw as little notice in Gion as a drop of tea spilled onto the mats."

Golden deftly makes use of a culture that deflects emotion and makes direct communication taboo to create a world of intrigue and romance. Depression and war remain in the background while Sayuri imbibes wisdom from her mentor, Mameha, battles her rival, Hatsumomo, and yearns for the attentions of the Chairman. Memoirs of a Geisha is an intelligent entertainment. -- Salon Oct. 29, 1997

Dan Cryer

A startling act of literary impersonation, a feat of cross-cultural masquerade on the order of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day... Golden's description of a kept woman's fleshly epiphanies has the purity of Colette.

Vogue

Astonishing... A breathtaking performance... By the time you realize the extent of [the geisha's] professional skill, you are seduced as completely as any of her clients, hungry for her story.

Washington Post Book World

"A novel that is full of cliffhangers great and small, a novel that refuses to stay shut."--Newsweek

"Part historical novel, part fairy tale, part Dickensian romance, Memoirs of a Geisha is not only a richly sympathetic portrait of a woman, but a finely observed picture of an anomalous and largely vanished world.... An impressive and unusual debut." --New York Times

You've heard about the book. You may have even heard that its author, Arthur Golden, spent ten years writing the novel and threw away 2,800 manuscript pages trying to get it just right. Determination paid off beyond Golden's wildest dreams. After a first printing of 35,000 copies, Memoirs of a Geisha has gone back to press 35 times, with 450,000 copies now in print. The book has been on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly a year. To top it off, Steven Spielberg was so taken with the book that he came off hiatus to begin production: "Memoirs of a Geisha" will be his next feature film. Be sure to join us on Thursday, November 5th at 7pm ET when we chat with Arthur Golden.

The Art of Seduction

Arthur Golden's brilliant debut novel, Memoirs of a Geisha, is a reminder of just how silly the exhortation "write what you know!" can be. Clearly Golden, a 40-something American male, has never lived anything remotely similar to the experiences of a geisha coming of age in the 1930s, the glory days of Kyoto's Gion pleasure district. Yet it is precisely this vanished world that he re-creates with subtlety, sensuality, and supreme authority, bringing to life characters so complete and idiosyncratic -- so fully sprung from the eras he has evoked -- that his novel ultimately overwhelms us, as seductive and beguiling as the geisha of its title.

With details as finely etched as those in a Hiroshige woodcut, Golden brings to life the beauty of prewar Japan, specifically the Gion district of that most graceful of ancient cities, Kyoto, as experienced by Sayuri, the gray-eyed geisha of the book's title. It is Sayuri's metamorphosis, from her impoverished beginnings in a poor fishing village, when she is still known as Chiyo, to her standing as one of Japan's most celebrated entertainers, that makes up the dramatic arc of this tale. Chiyo is only nine when she and her sister, Satsu, are virtually sold to a stranger by her father. Chiyo's unusual beauty lands her an apprenticeship in one of Kyoto's best-known okiya, or geisha houses, while the plainer Satsu is led to a run-down part of town, where she will be forced into prostitution. Except for a momentary reunion many months later, the sisters never see each other again.

In the okiya, Chiyo's beauty earns her the lifelong enmity of the head geisha, the lovely but venomous Hatsumomo. Chiyo suffers months of mistreatment by Hatsumomo, whose lies and manipulations not only threaten her future as an apprentice but threaten to sink her beneath a mountain of debt that a lifetime of servitude in the okiya may never pay off. Luckily, Chiyo, now renamed the more auspicious Sayuri, is saved by Hatsumomo's rival, the celebrated geisha Mameha, who strikes an unusual deal with the head of the okiya, under whose terms she will take Sayuri as her pupil.

The quick-witted Sayuri turns out to be a fast learner. Although still mourning the loss of her family and her childhood, Sayuri, already entranced by Hatsumomo's exquisite kimonos and makeup, knows her only hope lies in becoming a celebrated geisha herself. Melancholy yet self-assured, she has an epiphany one morning after finding a dead moth she buried months earlier beneath the foundation of the okiya.

It seemed to be wearing a robe in subdued grays and browns.... Everything about it seemed beautiful and perfect and so utterly unchanged. It struck me that we -- that moth and I -- were two opposite extremes. My existence was as unstable as a stream...but the moth was like a piece of stone, changing not at all. While thinking this...I brushed it with my finger tip, and it turned all at once into a pile of ash without even a sound. I let the tiny shroud flutter to the ground; and now I understood the thing that had puzzled me all morning...the past was gone. My mother and father were dead...and my sister...was gone; but I wasn't.... I felt as though I'd turned around to look in a different direction, so that I no longer faced backward towards the past, but forward towards the future.

Sayuri, Mameha notes, has an abundance of water in her personality. "Water never waits," Mameha informs her at one of their first meetings. "It can wash away earth, it can put out fire; it can wear metal down and sweep it away.... Those of us with water in our personality don't pick where we'll flow to. All we can do is flow where the landscape of our lives carries us."

So Sayuri flows forward, absorbing a geisha's traditional education: the shamisen lessons and tea ceremonies, the dance lessons and ikebana, witnessing nights of entertaining in Kyoto's most elegant teahouses. All the while she is aware that her fortunes will always hinge on others: on the whims of Mother, the head of the okiya; on the intrigues of Gion itself; on her ability to negotiate the rivalries between herself and her fellow apprentices and between Mameha and Hatsumomo; and most important, on Mameha's handling of the delicate negotiations that surround the bidding for Sayuri's mizuage, or virginity, a step that will largely determine whether or not she will be able to secure for herself a favorable danna, or patron, without which any geisha is, as Mameha instructs, like "a stray cat on the street."

This idea of flow, of going where the current of destiny takes one, permeates the narrative and is a cause of despair for Sayuri, who has fallen deeply in love with a man she believes to be unattainable. "We don't become geisha so our lives will be satisfying," a resigned Mameha counsels Sayuri. "We become geisha because we have no other choice.... Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them, but when they become old, they look silly wearing even one."

Sayuri eventually does become a full-fledged geisha, even a renowned one. Yet the water in her personality also signals a passionate nature that very little can dam. Ultimately, Sayuri does not fit into this world in which ritual is prized above individual happiness. In a devastating act of courage and deception, Sayuri risks everything she has achieved for a chance at happiness.

Like a gorgeously layered kimono, MEMOIRS gradually unfolds to reveal the courage, love, daring, and hope of an intensely human -- and, it turns out, surprisingly modern -- woman. Sayuri's voice, alternately poetic and mischievous, lends the narrative an immediacy that provides a beguiling counterpoint to the exquisitely detailed rituals -- such as the lacquered mask Sayuri learns to apply so expertly -- that make up so much of geisha life in prewar Gion. Like Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World, Memoirs of a Geisha revives a long-vanished world and makes us experience, however briefly, its fragile, mothlike, and indelible beauty.

Sarah Midori Zimmerman is a writer and editor in New York City.

Sarah Midori Zimmerman

High-toned prose...scholarly detail.

Entertainment Weekly

Cherry-blossom delicate, with images as carefully sculpted as bonsai, this tale of the life of a renowned geisha, one of the last flowers of a kind all but eliminated by WW II, marks an auspicious, unusual debut. Japan is already changing, becoming industrialized and imperialistic, when in 1929 young Chiyo's fisherman father sells her to a house in Kyoto's famous Gion district. The girl's gray-eyed beauty is startling even in childhood, so much so that her training is impeded by the jealousy of her house's primary geisha, the popular, petty Hatsumomo. Caught trying to run away, Chiyo loses her trainee status until taken under the wing of Mameha, a bitter rival of Hatsumomo.

Chiyo flourishes with Mameha as her guide, soon receiving her geisha name, Sayuri, and having her mentor skillfully arrange the two main events vital to a geisha's success: the sale of Sayuri's virginity (for a record price), and the finding of a sugar-daddy to pay her way. Seeing the implications of Japan's militarism, Mameha pairs Sayuri with the general in charge of army provisions, so that as WW II drags on she and her house have things no one else in Gion can obtain. After the war, with her general dead and others vying for her attention, Sayuri pines anew for the only man she ever loved—an electrical-corporation chairman whose kindness to a crying Chiyo years before altered the course of her future.

Though incomparable in its view of a geisha's life behind the scenes, the story loses immediacy as it goes along. When modern times eclipse Gion's sheltered world, the latter part of Sayuri's life—compared to the incandescent clarity of its first decades—seems increasingly flat.

Kirkus Reviews