Memoirs of a Geisha

Memoirs of a Geisha
by Arthur Golden

I’d had this book on my list to read for a while, and with the movie in theatres, I figured I’d read the book before I went to see the movie.

This book was amazing. Such a touching story about a subject I knew NOTHING about. The author went to Gion in Japan to research the lives of geishas so that his account would be as close to real as possible. This story is not only a historical tale, but it is also a love story. We follow throught Sayuri’s life as she is taken further and further from her true love, the Chairman. She perserveres through difficulties in her okiya (her new home), the strain of training, petty differences with less popular geisha, and the great loss brought on by World War II. Full of twists and turns, you will fall in love with Sayuri. I HIGHLY recommend this book. From Amazon.com:

. . . 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.”