Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
Memoirs of a Geisha tells the story of Chiyo, a young girl from a fishing village who became one of Kyoto’s most famous geisha in the 1930′s.
Little Chiyo is spotted one day by a rich fisherman, who brings her and her sister to Kyoto, with the consent of their dying mother and ageing father. Chiyo is sold to an okiya, a geisha house belonging to Mrs. Nitta (known to the girls as "Mother"), while her sister Satsu’s fate is even worse. Chiyo longs for her family and suffers the harsh treatment reserved to a girl who is nothing but a maid until her time comes to be a geisha. Worst of all, her attractiveness and her striking blue-gray eyes are strongly resented by cruel and beautiful Hatsumomo, who is the only geisha living in the Nitta Okiya at the time and who sees Chiyo as a rival.
Soon Chiyo tries to escape, committing the one mistake that proves nearly fatal to her geisha career, by almost condemning her to a lifetime as a maid. Some time later, an encounter with the Chairman, a man who shows her kindness but whose identity she does not know, will make her want, for the first time of her life, to be a geisha, in the hope that she will be able to see him again one day. From there, Chiyo, who later becomes Sayuri, will try her best to overcome the obstacles and become a geisha, with some help from another popular geisha: Mameha. Chiyo/Sayuri will have to avoid the traps laid by Hatsumomo along the way in order to make a successful career, carried all along by the dream of her and the Chairman together…
Although it is a fiction, this novel is the result of many years of extensive research and interviews with geishas. This expertise, along with the use of a first-person narration, results in a story that immerses the reader so completely in another world, that he or she hardly pauses to think about the appalling reality of a geisha: a woman whose only function is to entertain men, to serve them, and whose virginity is sold to the highest bidder when she is sometimes as young as fourteen years old.
Instead, through the first candid and later experienced eyes of Chiyo/Sayuri, we go with the flow of the narration and follow her without judgment into the now extinct world of Gion, in its okiyas and its teahouses; a microcosm in which, like in the larger world, people are motivated by jealousy, greed or ambition. The way these geisha manage to gain power, how cleverly they build their spheres of influence, will determine who wins and who loses. Thus, the geisha is not only the pretty entertainer in an elaborate kimono who plays shamisen or tells ribald jokes; if a geisha wants to survive, she has to become as good a strategist and as skilled a reader of human character as any influent man…
Memoirs of a Geisha struck me the first time I read it as the perfect balance between exoticism, intrigue, romance and masterful storytelling, which probably explains its considerable success. It is my second reading of this novel, which has become one of my favorites, and I liked it even better than the first time. If you haven’t read it yet, do so, you won’t regret it…
Rating: 5/5
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