Product Description

A seductive and evocative epic on an intimate scale, that tells the extraordinary story of a geisha girl. Summoning up more than twenty years of Japan's most dramatic history, it uncovers a hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation. From a small fishing village in 1929, the tale moves to the glamorous and decadent heart of Kyoto in the 1930s, where a young peasant girl is sold as servant and apprentice to a renowned geisha house. She tells her story many years later from the Waldorf Astoria in New York; it exquisitely evokes another culture, a different time and the details of an extraordinary way of life. It conjures up the perfection and the ugliness of life behind rice-paper screens, where young girls learn the arts of geisha - dancing and singing, how to wind the kimono, how to walk and pour tea, and how to beguile the most powerful men.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32013 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Literary Review
'Exceptional and erotic'

About the Author
Arthur Golden was born and brought up in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He is a 1978 graduate of Harvard College with a degree in art history, specialising in Japanese art. In 1980 he earned an MA in Japanese history from Columbia where he also learned Mandarin Chinese. In 1988 he received an MA in English from Boston. He has lived and worked in Japan, but now lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, with his wife and children.

Customer Reviews

The opposite of a 'feel good' book
While it was a good book and I enjoyed it, there was just too much pain and suffering in it. The poor wee soul had it rough and the book just brought me down.

I (think) it's meant to be a happy ending but overall it just left me very sad. Every page I turned I thought "hopefully THIS will be the break she deserves"....but sadly it was usually just more unfairness and sadness.

It's packed with cultural reference which is interesting and if even half of the practices are ture..........they were rough times indeed.

Amazing
This book is probably one of the best I've ever read. It allows an insight into a culture that isn't really understood in Western society, and shows what life is actually like for a geisha of Gion. It opens your eyes to another, completely different world and does it in a way that makes you think about it from an objective point of view, rather than comparing it to our lives and culture.
Reading Memoirs of a Geisha is entertaining, funny and thought-provoking, often sad but always heart warming - despite some of the customs/events that would be shocking in the UK, you're never tempted to judge Sayuri (the main character, the geisha) for her actions. Instead you live through it with her and understand what and why she did.
This book is inspirational in that Sayuri goes through so much just to survive, and yet the way the book is written lets us see that it's not unusual for a geisha to go through even more than she did.
I would recommend Memoirs of a Geisha even to people who usually like a lighter read, because even though it's sometimes sad and makes you think a lot, it's also funny and you really feel for Sayuri. A brilliant and utterly engaging read.

An enchanting story
A beautiful and simpliscically amazing story of love and hope. I didn't know much about the Japanese Geisha's before reading this book, and now I feel i know them personally. Sayuri-san's world is both heartbreaking and inspiring. The most magical moments are the little detail's in story-telling that is present in the book. I have already read this book twice, and I believe it to be my favourite book of all time.