Memoirs of a Geisha
by Arthur Golden
Memoirs of A Geisha is an epic drama about the remote and shimmeringly exotic world of Sayuri, one of Japan’s most celebrated geishas. The novel has been a beloved bestseller all over the world and the movie won 3 Academy Awards in 2005. The film stars Asia’s most celebrated movie stars including Zhang Ziyi (House of Flying Daggers; Hero), Ken Watanabe (The Last Samurai), Gong Li (Raise The Red Lantern), and Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon).
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.
About the Author
Arthur Golden (born in 1956 in Chattanooga, Tennessee) is the writer of the bestselling novel Memoirs of a Geisha. After its release in 1997, Memoirs of a Geisha spent two years on The New York Times bestseller list. The book has sold more than four million copies in English and has been translated into thirty-two languages around the world. The novel Memoirs of a Geisha was written after interviewing a number of geisha, including Mineko Iwasaki, for background information about the world of the geisha, although Golden fictionalized key aspects of Geiko's life including the notion that they participated in ritualized prostitution.
