Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

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Arthur Golden's brilliant debut novel, Memoirs of a Geisha, is a reminder of just how silly the exhortation 'write what you know!' can be. Clearly Golden, a 40-something American male, has never lived anything remotely similar to the experiences of a geisha coming of age in the '30s, the glory days of Kyoto's Gion pleasure district. Yet it is precisely this vanished world that he re-creates with subtlety, sensuality, and supreme authority, bringing to life characters so complete and idiosyncratic — so fully sprung from the eras he has evoked — that his novel ultimately overwhelms us, as seductive and beguiling as the geisha of its title.

With details as finely etched as those in a Hiroshige woodcut, Golden brings to life the beauty of pre-war Japan, specifically the Gion district of that most graceful of ancient cities, Kyoto, as experienced by Sayuri, the gray-eyed geisha of the book's title. It is Sayuri's metamorphosis, from her impoverished beginnings in a poor fishing village, when she is still known as Chiyo, to her standing as one of Japan's most celebrated entertainers, that makes up the dramatic arc of this tale. Chiyo is only nine when she and her sister, Satsu, are virtually sold to a stranger by her father. Chiyo's unusual beauty lands her an apprenticeship in one of Kyoto's best-known okiya, or geisha houses, while the plainer Satsu is led to a run-down part of town where she will be forced into prostitution. Except for a momentary reunion many months later, the sisters never see one another again.

In theokiya,Chiyo's beauty earns her the lifelong enmity of the head geisha, the lovely but venomous Hatsumomo. Chiyo suffers months of mistreatment by Hatsumomo, whose lies and manipulations not only threaten her future as an apprentice but threaten to sink her beneath a mountain of debt that a lifetime of servitude in the okiya may never pay off. Luckily, Chiyo, now renamed the more auspicious 'Sayuri,' is saved by Hatsumomo's rival, the celebrated geisha Mameha, who strikes an unusual deal with the head of the okiya, under whose terms she will take Sayuri as her pupil.

The quick-witted Sayuri turns out to be a fast learner. Although still mourning the loss of her family and her childhood, Sayuri, already entranced by Hatsumomo's exquisite kimonos and make-up, knows her only hope lies in becoming a celebrated geisha herself. Melancholy yet self-assured, she has an epiphany one morning after finding a dead moth she buried months earlier beneath the foundation of the okiya.

It seemed to be wearing a robe in subdued grays and browns.... Everything about it seemed beautiful and perfect and so utterly unchanged. It struck me that we — that moth and I — were two opposite extremes. My existence was as unstable as a stream...but the moth was like a piece of stone, changing not at all. While thinking this...I brushed it with my finger tip, and it turned all at once into a pile of ash without even a sound. I let the tiny shroud flutter to the ground; and now I understood the thing that had puzzled me all morning...the past was gone. My mother and father were dead...and my sister...was gone; but I wasn't.... I felt as though I'd turned around to look in a different direction, so that I no longer faced backward towards the past, but forward towards the future.

Sayuri, Mameha notes, has an abundance of water in her personality. 'Water never waits,' Mameha informs her at one of their first meetings. 'It can wash away earth, it can put out fire; it can wear metal down and sweep it away.... Those of us with water in our personality don't pick where we'll flow to. All we can do is flow where the landscape of our lives carries us.'

So Sayuri flows forward, absorbing a geisha's traditional education: the shamisen lessons and tea ceremonies; the dance lessons and ikebana; witnessing nights of entertaining in Kyoto's most elegant tea houses. All the while she is aware that her fortunes will always hinge on others: on the whims of Mother, the head of the okiya; on the intrigues of Gion itself; on her ability to negotiate the rivalries between herself and her fellow apprentices and between Mameha and Hatsumomo; and most important, on Mameha's handling of the delicate negotiations that surround the bidding for Sayuri's mizuage, or virginity, a step that will largely determine whether or not she will be able to secure for herself a favorable danna, or patron, without which any geisha is, as Mameha instructs, like 'a stray cat on the street.'

This idea of flow, of going where the current of destiny takes one, permeates the narrative and is a cause of despair for Sayuri, who has fallen deeply in love with a man she believes to be unattainable. 'We don't become geisha so our lives will be satisfying,' a resigned Mameha counsels Sayuri. 'We become geisha because we have no other choice.... Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them, but when they become old, they look silly wearing even one.'

Sayuri eventually does become a full-fledged geisha, even a renowned one. Yet the water in her personality also signals a passionate nature that very little can dam. Ultimately, Sayuri does not fit into this world in which ritual is prized above individual happiness. In a devastating act of courage and deception, Sayuri risks everything she has achieved for a chance at happiness.

Like a gorgeously layered kimono, Memoirs gradually unfolds to reveal the courage, love, daring, and hope of an intensely human — and, it turns out, surprisingly modern — woman. Sayuri's voice, alternately poetic and mischievous, lends the narrative an immediacy that provides a beguiling counterpoint to the exquisitely detailed rituals — such as the lacquered mask Sayuri learns to apply so expertly — that make up so much of geisha life in prewar Gion. Like Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World, Memoirs of a Geisha revives a long-vanished world and makes us experience, however briefly, its fragile, mothlike, and indelible beauty.

From the Publisher

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.

Newsday

As close to un-put-downable as any novel in years, yet bristling with intelligence and grace. Wow!

People Magazine

Remarkable...elegant...lyrical...evocative.

USA Today

Enthralling...Draws the reader in from the very first page.

San Francisco Chronicle

esmerizing...and beautifully detailed.

Mademoiselle

Stunningly authentic...Be prepared to get totally engrossed.

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. -- Wilda Williams

Vogue

A startling act of literary impersonation, a feat of cross-cultural masquerade on the order of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day... Golden's description of a kept woman's fleshly epiphanies has the purity of Colette.

Washington Post Book World

Astonishing... A breathtaking performance... By the time you realize the extent of [the geisha's] professional skill, you are seduced as completely as any of her clients, hungry for her story.

Entertainment Weekly

High-toned prose...scholarly detail.

Dan Cryer

Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha is as exotic as a moonscape and as accessible and old-shoe comfortable as Pride and Prejudice. The ritual culture of the geisha seems utterly alien, as remote from contemporary experience as foot-binding or arranged marriages, yet Golden pegs his first novel to such a recognizable set of dilemmas that its initially foreign landscape is made utterly familiar.

Being a geisha, as Golden explains it, is akin to being an Austen heroine. Men have power and money; women have beauty and charm. It's up to the geisha to learn how to use her wiles if she wants to have any hope of keeping body and soul intact. For Austen's English maiden, the aim was a husband and the financial security he provided. For the geisha in pre-World War II Japan, marriage was usually out of the question, since the powerful men who enjoyed her company often already had wives. And to remain a geisha she could not be married. So the geisha's goal was to make him her danna (patron) and she would become his mistress.

Golden ushers us into this decidedly non-PC territory with exemplary finesse. The geisha, he makes clear, is not a prostitute but an entertainer. Trained in conversation, tea ceremony, dance, song and the shamisen (a stringed instrument), she soothes careworn men in evening gatherings at teahouses. These women may not be men's equals, but they are not their sexual slaves. Flunking out of the system may lead to prostitution, but playing by the rules requires that you avoid it.

The novel's narrator is Nitta Sayuri, a poor fisherman's daughter sold at the age of 9 into the Kyoto geishahood. The girl is blessed with beauty (her unusual gray-blue eyes elicit many compliments), intelligence and wit. She will need every one of these assets as she struggles to find her place in a world controlled by men. As one of her elders informs her, "We don't become geisha so our lives will be satisfying. We become geisha because we have no other choice."

Golden's storytelling is rich and slow-paced. Like Austen, he lavishes attention on the minute details that regulate and define social distinctions. In the raising of a teacup or an eyebrow there are worlds of implication. The prose style is simple and strangely satisfying, perfectly attuned to its time and place. Golden manages to find the simile for every occasion. "That startling month in which I first came upon the Chairman again ... made me feel like a pet cricket that has at last escaped its wicker cage. For the first time in ages I could go to bed at night believing that I might not always draw as little notice in Gion as a drop of tea spilled onto the mats."

Golden deftly makes use of a culture that deflects emotion and makes direct communication taboo to create a world of intrigue and romance. Depression and war remain in the background while Sayuri imbibes wisdom from her mentor, Mameha, battles her rival, Hatsumomo, and yearns for the attentions of the Chairman. Memoirs of a Geisha is an intelligent entertainment. -- Salon Oct. 29, 1997

Sarah Midori Zimmerman

"A novel that is full of cliffhangers great and small, a novel that refuses to stay shut."--Newsweek

"Part historical novel, part fairy tale, part Dickensian romance, Memoirs of a Geisha is not only a richly sympathetic portrait of a woman, but a finely observed picture of an anomalous and largely vanished world.... An impressive and unusual debut." --New York Times

You've heard about the book. You may have even heard that its author, Arthur Golden, spent ten years writing the novel and threw away 2,800 manuscript pages trying to get it just right. Determination paid off beyond Golden's wildest dreams. After a first printing of 35,000 copies, Memoirs of a Geisha has gone back to press 35 times, with 450,000 copies now in print. The book has been on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly a year. To top it off, Steven Spielberg was so taken with the book that he came off hiatus to begin production: "Memoirs of a Geisha" will be his next feature film. Be sure to join us on Thursday, November 5th at 7pm ET when we chat with Arthur Golden.

The Art of Seduction

Arthur Golden's brilliant debut novel, Memoirs of a Geisha, is a reminder of just how silly the exhortation "write what you know!" can be. Clearly Golden, a 40-something American male, has never lived anything remotely similar to the experiences of a geisha coming of age in the 1930s, the glory days of Kyoto's Gion pleasure district. Yet it is precisely this vanished world that he re-creates with subtlety, sensuality, and supreme authority, bringing to life characters so complete and idiosyncratic -- so fully sprung from the eras he has evoked -- that his novel ultimately overwhelms us, as seductive and beguiling as the geisha of its title.

With details as finely etched as those in a Hiroshige woodcut, Golden brings to life the beauty of prewar Japan, specifically the Gion district of that most graceful of ancient cities, Kyoto, as experienced by Sayuri, the gray-eyed geisha of the book's title. It is Sayuri's metamorphosis, from her impoverished beginnings in a poor fishing village, when she is still known as Chiyo, to her standing as one of Japan's most celebrated entertainers, that makes up the dramatic arc of this tale. Chiyo is only nine when she and her sister, Satsu, are virtually sold to a stranger by her father. Chiyo's unusual beauty lands her an apprenticeship in one of Kyoto's best-known okiya, or geisha houses, while the plainer Satsu is led to a run-down part of town, where she will be forced into prostitution. Except for a momentary reunion many months later, the sisters never see each other again.

In the okiya, Chiyo's beauty earns her the lifelong enmity of the head geisha, the lovely but venomous Hatsumomo. Chiyo suffers months of mistreatment by Hatsumomo, whose lies and manipulations not only threaten her future as an apprentice but threaten to sink her beneath a mountain of debt that a lifetime of servitude in the okiya may never pay off. Luckily, Chiyo, now renamed the more auspicious Sayuri, is saved by Hatsumomo's rival, the celebrated geisha Mameha, who strikes an unusual deal with the head of the okiya, under whose terms she will take Sayuri as her pupil.

The quick-witted Sayuri turns out to be a fast learner. Although still mourning the loss of her family and her childhood, Sayuri, already entranced by Hatsumomo's exquisite kimonos and makeup, knows her only hope lies in becoming a celebrated geisha herself. Melancholy yet self-assured, she has an epiphany one morning after finding a dead moth she buried months earlier beneath the foundation of the okiya.

It seemed to be wearing a robe in subdued grays and browns.... Everything about it seemed beautiful and perfect and so utterly unchanged. It struck me that we -- that moth and I -- were two opposite extremes. My existence was as unstable as a stream...but the moth was like a piece of stone, changing not at all. While thinking this...I brushed it with my finger tip, and it turned all at once into a pile of ash without even a sound. I let the tiny shroud flutter to the ground; and now I understood the thing that had puzzled me all morning...the past was gone. My mother and father were dead...and my sister...was gone; but I wasn't.... I felt as though I'd turned around to look in a different direction, so that I no longer faced backward towards the past, but forward towards the future.

Sayuri, Mameha notes, has an abundance of water in her personality. "Water never waits," Mameha informs her at one of their first meetings. "It can wash away earth, it can put out fire; it can wear metal down and sweep it away.... Those of us with water in our personality don't pick where we'll flow to. All we can do is flow where the landscape of our lives carries us."

So Sayuri flows forward, absorbing a geisha's traditional education: the shamisen lessons and tea ceremonies, the dance lessons and ikebana, witnessing nights of entertaining in Kyoto's most elegant teahouses. All the while she is aware that her fortunes will always hinge on others: on the whims of Mother, the head of the okiya; on the intrigues of Gion itself; on her ability to negotiate the rivalries between herself and her fellow apprentices and between Mameha and Hatsumomo; and most important, on Mameha's handling of the delicate negotiations that surround the bidding for Sayuri's mizuage, or virginity, a step that will largely determine whether or not she will be able to secure for herself a favorable danna, or patron, without which any geisha is, as Mameha instructs, like "a stray cat on the street."

This idea of flow, of going where the current of destiny takes one, permeates the narrative and is a cause of despair for Sayuri, who has fallen deeply in love with a man she believes to be unattainable. "We don't become geisha so our lives will be satisfying," a resigned Mameha counsels Sayuri. "We become geisha because we have no other choice.... Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them, but when they become old, they look silly wearing even one."

Sayuri eventually does become a full-fledged geisha, even a renowned one. Yet the water in her personality also signals a passionate nature that very little can dam. Ultimately, Sayuri does not fit into this world in which ritual is prized above individual happiness. In a devastating act of courage and deception, Sayuri risks everything she has achieved for a chance at happiness.

Like a gorgeously layered kimono, MEMOIRS gradually unfolds to reveal the courage, love, daring, and hope of an intensely human -- and, it turns out, surprisingly modern -- woman. Sayuri's voice, alternately poetic and mischievous, lends the narrative an immediacy that provides a beguiling counterpoint to the exquisitely detailed rituals -- such as the lacquered mask Sayuri learns to apply so expertly -- that make up so much of geisha life in prewar Gion. Like Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World, Memoirs of a Geisha revives a long-vanished world and makes us experience, however briefly, its fragile, mothlike, and indelible beauty.

Sarah Midori Zimmerman is a writer and editor in New York City.

Kirkus Reviews

Cherry-blossom delicate, with images as carefully sculpted as bonsai, this tale of the life of a renowned geisha, one of the last flowers of a kind all but eliminated by WW II, marks an auspicious, unusual debut. Japan is already changing, becoming industrialized and imperialistic, when in 1929 young Chiyo's fisherman father sells her to a house in Kyoto's famous Gion district. The girl's gray-eyed beauty is startling even in childhood, so much so that her training is impeded by the jealousy of her house's primary geisha, the popular, petty Hatsumomo. Caught trying to run away, Chiyo loses her trainee status until taken under the wing of Mameha, a bitter rival of Hatsumomo.

Chiyo flourishes with Mameha as her guide, soon receiving her geisha name, Sayuri, and having her mentor skillfully arrange the two main events vital to a geisha's success: the sale of Sayuri's virginity (for a record price), and the finding of a sugar-daddy to pay her way. Seeing the implications of Japan's militarism, Mameha pairs Sayuri with the general in charge of army provisions, so that as WW II drags on she and her house have things no one else in Gion can obtain. After the war, with her general dead and others vying for her attention, Sayuri pines anew for the only man she ever loved—an electrical-corporation chairman whose kindness to a crying Chiyo years before altered the course of her future.

Though incomparable in its view of a geisha's life behind the scenes, the story loses immediacy as it goes along. When modern times eclipse Gion's sheltered world, the latter part of Sayuri's life—compared to the incandescent clarity of its first decades—seems increasingly flat.

What People Are Saying

Ann Beattie
Arthur Golden's novel is wonderful:involving, intelligent, fascinating, and almost Dickensian in the way the characters inhabit the landscape, and the landscape permeates the characters. It's unique, beautifully written book.

Arthur Golden
[Geisha] is not about sex, though sex is available. It's about being a womanand being present in this group of men and changing the social dynamic. . . . .It is the only subculture in Japan I know of that is absolutely ruled by women. -- Interviewed in People Magazine, November 23, 1998

Product Details

• Interviews & Essays
• Reading Group Guide
• Read an Excerpt

Interviews & Essays

Arthur Golden: I am happy to be here, never having done an online chat!

Arthur Golden: When I lived in Japan in 1981 I met a guy whose father was a famous businessman and whose mother was a geisha, so I wanted to write a novel about such a fellow. But when I researched the subject of geisha I changed topics. I changed topics because it seemed such great material for me for fiction.

Arthur Golden: Mineko and Sayuri are very different. The only similarities in their lives are that both were sold as children, and both set a record for the sale of their virginity. Other than that, the stories of their lives as well as their personalities are quite different.

Arthur Golden: The content is entirely fiction, although the historic facts of a geisha's life are accurate. The translator is also an invention. The problem for me was that I had to find a way to make it believable for Sayuri to annotate the story as she told it. If she lived in Kyoto all her life she won't even know what we wouldn't understand, so I wanted the reader to know from the beginning of the book that she is living in New York City, telling her story, looking back at her life, already knowledgeable about it, and talking to a Westerner. Under these circumstances, she would naturally annotate her story as she told it. That, for me, is the reason for the translator's preface.

Arthur Golden: I am very flattered by this question, and although I have heard it quite a number of times, I am never sure how to answer. For me, the experience of writing from the point of view of a woman simply involved imagining how the character might react to what had happened to her -- not how I would react, but how she would react. Many times I thought of ideas, but I couldn't manage to get them properly written on the page. I would come up with another idea, and it would go smoothly. But the following day when I reread it, it would stand out, and my intention was to make a kind of smooth surface where nothing seemed jarringly out of place until it seemed that way to me. I think that it is fairly common for readers to be disturbed by problems like anachronism in novels, or moments when characters behave out of character, so writing from a different perspective is just a matter of paying attention to the part of yourself that notices those things.

Arthur Golden: Yes, the traditions and schools still exist, but nowadays geisha enter the profession voluntarily after high school, rather than involuntary as children; and at the end of the night they go home to their own apartments, so the life is much less rigorous and much more free than it was.

Arthur Golden: There is. In the first draft of the novel, she didn't have those eyes, but when I reread it while preparing to edit it, I noticed a lot of water imagery I hadn't been aware of. Then I took my children to a water amusement park, where I happened to see two sisters all wet from the water with the most astonishingly beautiful blue-gray eyes, and it suddenly struck me that I just had to give Sayuri those eyes. As a footnote, since writing the novel, I learned to my surprise there really are people in Japan with such eyes, mostly because of traces of Russian ancestry.

Arthur Golden: First of all, it feels great! I have been astonished by the success of the novel. In fact, I am right now at Universal Studios, where I have been given a tour of the set and kimono design for Steven Spielberg's adaptation, so you can imagine how utterly flabbergasted I feel by all of this! As for the pressure, I try to look at it this way: If you are going to have a problem in life, this is a really good problem to have!

Arthur Golden: They are sticking very closely to the original story and, in fact, changing essentially nothing, though they have to shorten it considerably, of course. They are keeping me involved informally. I spent a weekend with the costume and set designers, discussing issues that concerned them in their work, for example. And I am sure every so often they may have one or two things they want to talk to me about, but mostly my job is just to sit back and watch it all and have great fun. I would like to add that I feel incredibly fortunate that the story is in such great hands.

Arthur Golden: That is a terrific question, and the answer is yes -- very much so! I never went so far as to try expressing things first in my own mind in Japanese and then translating them into English, but I was always aware of choosing words that would seem to convey the spirit of Japanese as spoken by a woman -- because in Japan men and women speak very differently. Some circumstances call for more polite and formal language than others, and strange as it may seem, the reality is that women must always speak in a more genteel and polite manner than men.

Arthur Golden: The only geisha I know who reads English is Liza Dalby, who as a American graduate student actually became a geisha in Japan during the late '70s and wrote a book about it called GEISHA. Happily, she has reacted very well to the novel, and in fact we are doing a series of events together in San Francisco this week. But, although the novel is in the process of being translated into Japanese, it hasn't been released there yet, and I have no idea what the reaction there will be.

Arthur Golden: I misunderstood so many things about the day-to-day life of geisha that it is hard for me to point to a single example. But to name a few things: I wrote a scene in which a geisha put on her makeup and got all the facts wrong; I didn't understand the extreme importance of kimono in that culture; and I didn't have any idea about the ways in which geisha related to one another in reality and to their customers.

Arthur Golden: I was surprised by that myself. When I first began doing research, I imagined that geisha were very ethereal creatures -- more likely to recite a poem than tell a dirty joke -- but when I had a chance to spend time among geisha, I saw the reality very quickly. I think it is easier to understand if you keep in mind that men go to geisha in order to be entertained, usually at the end of a long workday, and jokes go over much better than poetry.

Arthur Golden: It is true that I scrapped the novel after meeting a geisha, and in a strange way, I was pleased to do it. I wanted to be accurate to the world of geisha as it really was, and now through good fortune I had the opportunity to correct my mistakes. What was much harder was throwing out the entire second draft as well and starting it over a third time, when I came to understand I still hadn't produced the novel I hoped to write.

Arthur Golden: Gosh, you have done a pretty good job! Geisha don't have any counterpart in our culture because here in the West, men and women socialize together freely. In Japan they don't. Men hire women to entertain them, and the principal role of a geisha is to provide female companionship. Sometimes that means telling stories, sometimes it means just being arm candy, and at other times it can also involve sex.

Arthur Golden: I did know that the novel would cover quite a span of history, and this thought appealed to me. I have heard the novel described as "an epic on a intimate scale," and I suppose that is a good way to think of it, because it is really about one woman's life, even though it is set during a period of considerable turmoil. As for the outline, yes, I actually did write an outline, but working only one or two chapters ahead of the point I had already reached. As John Updike describes writing a novel, it felt like driving down a road at night; you can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

Arthur Golden: Much sooner than the nine years it took me to write this one! I comfort myself with the thought that this novel took nine years because it was really three completely separate novels I wrote, so my best guess is three years. It will not be about Japan, but I would rather not say anymore about it.

Arthur Golden: I am now on something like my fourth or fifth book tour. I have spent about a total of four or five months on the road during the last year. A typical day is something I could never have imagined two years ago: a couple of radio interviews, a print interview or two, a photo shoot, maybe a TV appearance and a bookstore appearance in the evening, as well as drop-ins to sign books at various bookstores in the area. Some days are slower than that and then, even when I am at home, I have been averaging six or seven interviews a week and sometimes a couple of photo shoots a week.

Arthur Golden: I can only guess, since I have never paid myself, and my research focused on the time period before the war. It is something like this, though: Four or five men at a first-class teahouse for the evening entertained by a couple of geisha, including dinner and a couple of drinks, would run probably upward of $10,000.

Arthur Golden: Yes, very nervous. But what else can you do? It is a strange undertaking to take your life into your hands this way, unsure of the outcome, and it is perfectly true I might well have ended up flat on my face. I suppose all any of us can do, while at the same time relying on our best judgment, is give ourselves permission to take risks.

Arthur Golden: You would be surprised how ignorant most Japanese are on the subject of geisha, but it is safe to say this kind of exploitation was frowned upon in ways it wasn't 50 years ago. As for the question of rebirth, geisha culture has never really died out in the first place, but it has changed. It is much less exploitive now than it was before.

Arthur Golden: I recommend Liza Dalby's book GEISHA and Jodi Cobb's book of photographs, called GEISHA: THE LIFE, THE VOICES, THE ART. A number of documentaries on the subject are in preproduction now, and a companion book as well, so more will be available before long.

Arthur Golden: I think that is a good description, particularly if you think of the sort of high-class mistress who exists on the same continuum as a prostitute, that is to say, we are not talking about women who become mistresses out of love but because of the opportunity it affords them.

Arthur Golden: In every case, I had to learn enough about these practices to write convincingly about them, but I never had to go so far as take lessons myself or try any of these practices. But I did put a small amount of makeup on the side of my face before writing about it, to see how it felt.

Arthur Golden: Just to say thanks so much for all the thought-provoking questions and for taking the time to log on!

Reading Group Guide

1. Many people in the West think of geisha simply as prostitutes. After reading Memoirs of a Geisha, do you see the geisha of Gion as prostitutes? What are the similarities, and what are the differences? What is the difference between being a prostitute and being a "kept woman, " as Sayuri puts it [p. 291]?

2. "The afternoon when I met Mr. Tanaka Ichiro, " says Sayuri, "really was the best and the worst of my life" [p. 7]. Is Mr. Tanaka purely motivated by the money he will make from selling Chiyo to Mrs. Nitta, or is he also thinking of Chiyo's future? Is he, as he implies in his letter, her friend?

3. In his letter to Chiyo, Mr. Tanaka says "The training of a geisha is an arduous path. However, this humble person is filled with admiration for those who are able to recast their suffering and become great artists" [p. 103]. The word "geisha" in fact derives from the Japanese word for art. In what does the geisha's art consist? How many different types of art does she practice?

4. Does Sayuri have a better life as a geisha than one assumes she would have had in her village? How does one define a "better" life? Pumpkin, when offered the opportunity to run away, declines [p. 53]; she feels she will be safer in Gion. Is her decision wise?

5. How does Sayuri's status at the Nitta okiya resemble, or differ from, that of a slave? Is she in fact a slave?

6. Are Mother and Granny cruel by nature, or has the relentless life of Gion made them what they are? If so, why is Auntie somewhat more human? Does Auntie feel real affection for Sayuri and Pumpkin, or does she see them simply aschattel?

7. "We must use whatever methods we can to understand the movement of the universe around us and time our actions so that we are not fighting the currents, but moving with them" [p. 127]. How does this attitude differ from the Western notion of seizing control of one's destiny? Which is the more valid? What are Sayuri's feelings and beliefs about "free will"?

8. Do you see Sayuri as victimized by Nobu's attentions, or do you feel pity for Nobu in his hopeless passion for Sayuri? Do you feel that, in finally showing her physical scorn for Nobu, Sayuri betrayed a friend, or that real friendship is impossible between a man and a woman of their respective stations?

9. How do Japanese ideas about eroticism and sexuality differ from Western ones? Does the Japanese ideal of femininity differ from ours? Which parts of the female body are fetishized in Japan, which in the West? The geisha's ritual of preparing herself for the teahouse is a very elaborate affair; how essentially does it differ from a Western women's preparation for a date?

10. Does the way in which the Kyoto men view geisha differ from the way they might view other women, women whom they might marry? What are the differences? How, in turn, do geisha view men? Is the geisha's view of men significantly different from that of ordinary women?

11. Do you find that the relationship between a geisha and her danna is very different from that between a Western man and his mistress? What has led Sayuri to think that "a geisha who expects understanding from her danna is like a mouse expecting sympathy from a snake" [p. 394]?

12. As the older Sayuri narrates her story, it almost seems as though she presents Chiyo and Sayuri as two different people. In what ways are Chiyo and Sayuri different? In what ways are they recognizably the same person?

13. Pumpkin believes that Sayuri betrayed her when she, rather than Pumpkin, was adopted by the Nitta okiya. Do you believe that Sayuri was entirely blameless in this incident? Might she have helped to make Pumpkin's life easier while they were in the okiya together? Or has Pumpkin's character simply been corrupted by her years with Hatsumomo and the entire cruel system that has exploited her?

14. Sayuri senses that she shares an en, a lifelong karmic bond, with Nobu [p. 295]. How might a Western woman express this same idea?

15. During Sayuri's life, Japan goes through a series of traumas and unprecedented cultural change: the Great Depression, the War, the American Occupation. How do the inhabitants of Gion view political events in the outside world? How much effect do such events have upon their lives? How aware are they of mainstream Japanese culture and life?

16. What personal qualities do Sayuri and Mameha have that make them able to survive and even prosper in spite of the many cruelties they have suffered? Why is Hatsumomo, for example, ultimately unable to survive in Gion?

17. Is Sayuri the victim of a cruel and repressive system, a woman who can only survive by submitting to men? Or is she a tough, resourceful person who has not only survived but built a good life for herself with independence and even a certain amount of power?

18. Why might Golden have chosen to begin his narrative with a "Translator's Note"? What does this device accomplish for him?

19. In Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden has done a very daring thing: he, an American man, has written in the voice of a Japanese woman. How successfully does he disguise his own voice? While reading the novel, did you feel that you were hearing the genuine voice of a woman?

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