Product Description

In this literary tour de force, novelist Arthur Golden enters a remote and shimmeringly exotic world. For the protagonist of this peerlessly observant first novel is Sayuri, one of Japan's most celebrated geisha, a woman who is both performer and courtesan, slave and goddess.

We follow Sayuri from her childhood in an impoverished fishing village, where in 1929, she is sold to a representative of a geisha house, who is drawn by the child's unusual blue-grey eyes. From there she is taken to Gion, the pleasure district of Kyoto. She is nine years old. In the years that follow, as she works to pay back the price of her purchase, Sayuri will be schooled in music and dance, learn to apply the geisha's elaborate makeup, wear elaborate kimono, and care for a coiffure so fragile that it requires a special pillow. She will also acquire a magnanimous tutor and a venomous rival. Surviving the intrigues of her trade and the upheavals of war, the resourceful Sayuri is a romantic heroine on the order of Jane Eyre and Scarlett O'Hara. And Memoirs of a Geisha is a triumphant work - suspenseful, and utterly persuasive.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18574 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-22
• Released on: 2005-11-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 512 pages

Amazon.com
According to Arthur Golden's absorbing first novel, the word "geisha" does not mean "prostitute," as Westerners ignorantly assume--it means "artisan" or "artist." To capture the geisha experience in the art of fiction, Golden trained as long and hard as any geisha who must master the arts of music, dance, clever conversation, crafty battle with rival beauties, and cunning seduction of wealthy patrons. After earning degrees in Japanese art and history from Harvard and Columbia--and an M.A. in English--he met a man in Tokyo who was the illegitimate offspring of a renowned businessman and a geisha. This meeting inspired Golden to spend 10 years researching every detail of geisha culture, chiefly relying on the geisha Mineko Iwasaki, who spent years charming the very rich and famous.

The result is a novel with the broad social canvas (and love of coincidence) of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen's intense attention to the nuances of erotic maneuvering. Readers experience the entire life of a geisha, from her origins as an orphaned fishing-village girl in 1929 to her triumphant auction of her mizuage (virginity) for a record price as a teenager to her reminiscent old age as the distinguished mistress of the powerful patron of her dreams. We discover that a geisha is more analogous to a Western "trophy wife" than to a prostitute--and, as in Austen, flat-out prostitution and early death is a woman's alternative to the repressive, arcane system of courtship. In simple, elegant prose, Golden puts us right in the tearoom with the geisha; we are there as she gracefully fights for her life in a social situation where careers are made or destroyed by a witticism, a too-revealing (or not revealing enough) glimpse of flesh under the kimono, or a vicious rumor spread by a rival "as cruel as a spider."

Golden's web is finely woven, but his book has a serious flaw: the geisha's true romance rings hollow--the love of her life is a symbol, not a character. Her villainous geisha nemesis is sharply drawn, but she would be more so if we got a deeper peek into the cause of her motiveless malignity--the plight all geisha share. Still, Golden has won the triple crown of fiction: he has created a plausible female protagonist in a vivid, now-vanished world, and he gloriously captures Japanese culture by expressing his thoughts in authentic Eastern metaphors.

From Library Journal
"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. Highly recommended.
-?Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
In 1929 young Chiyo's father sells her to a fashionable geisha house outside of Kyoto. Thereafter her life, touched with struggle, heartache and, finally, a kind of triumph, becomes a window on both her soul and on pre-war Japanese culture, which is fragmenting around her. Bernadette Dunne's readingof this world and its strange (to Western eyes) inhabitants traces across our vision like a landscape painting on silk. The cultivated refinement of her voice ranges effortlessly and credibly from the innocent nine-year-old Chiyo to the magnificent but subtle Nitta Sayuri, the geisha she inevitably becomes. By the end we can almost see and hear the beautiful Sayuri step lightly across the polished wooden floor of the teahouse in her richly brocaded kimono to pour saki for the chairman. P.E.F. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

Awesome writing style..my absolutely favorite book
Just read an excerpt..or the first page and you will see that it pulls you into the story immediately and it never lets you go. I was never bored and fell so deeply into this story and into the imagery and emotion that I wish I could find another book that could take me on a such a journey as this book did. I've been searching but have not found its likeness. I was blown away that this story was written by a man and not by a Japanese Geisha.

Memoirs of a Geisha

I find it very hard to believe that in the 30s and 40s the Japanese culture, one of the most esteemed cultures in the world, would train young girls for the exclusive pleasure of men.

beautiful
The author does an incredible job at keeping the reader "hooked." i could not bring myself to put it down....when i finished the book, i wanted to learn more about geishas and their cultures.....this is a must read.