Readers Place

1. Due to your extensive studies of Japanese culture, many people are surprised to discover when they reach the end of Memoirs of a Geisha that it is a work of fiction. Why did you decide to construct your novel in such a way?

There are two reasons. First, I’ve always been drawn to fiction that presents not so much a strong authorial presence as a believable character speaking in a convincing voice-books like I, Claudius and Remains of the Day. It seems to me a writer serves his material best by getting out of the way of it. But there’s another reason I chose this approach with Memoirs of a Geisha, though I was probably only semi-conscious of it at the time, namely, that if readers are made bluntly aware of the existence of a writer named Arthur Golden, they’ll be less likely to give themselves over to a novel told in the voice of a geisha. Instead they’ll be asking themselves who this guy is and what he knows about the subject. By keeping myself hidden, I serve the novel best. That’s the reason there are no running heads at the tops of the pages (saying my name and the title of the novel), and also why the dedication and acknowledgements come at the end. At the beginning, even a dedication would only have served to heighten the reader’s awareness of me as the writer.

2. Where did your passion for Japanese culture stem from?

Strange as it may sound I wouldn’t say I have a passion for Japanese culture any more than for Chinese culture, or English culture, or Dutch culture. All of them are fascinating. I began studying Japan in college originally because I was intrigued by the language. I’ll admit that when I was nineteen or twenty I went through a brief love affair with Japan, but since then I’ve been far more of a realist. There are things about Japan I love and things about it that drive me crazy. I would say the same about the United States.

3. The book contains an incredible amount of detail about a Geisha’s life and customs – how long did it take you to do your research?

I did my research in several stages. First I read everything I could about geisha. There was a reasonable amount of material available, but almost none of it told the sorts of details I really needed, such simple day-to-day things as: What time do geisha go to bed? How often do they get their hair done? How do they spend the hours of the day when they’re not working? I wanted to know what it was really like to be a geisha, and as it turned out, no written materials told me that. Then a few years later I was introduced by a friend in Tokyo to several geisha willing to talk to me. I didn’t ask them about their experiences as geisha or about their lives, but only about the minutiae of a geisha’s day and the rituals and traditions of the culture.

I should mention that all along the way, right up until I finished editing the manuscript, I always had my eyes open for new details to enrich the novel’s texture. If I came upon a book about Japanese noodles, for example, I might comb it for information about noodles particular to Kyoto, or better still, particular to one season, so as to give my character more of the highly-specialized knowledge a real geisha would have had.

4. In the acknowledgments of the novel, you mention that you had misconceptions about the life of a geisha. Do you think these misconceptions are common in Western society and were you seeking to correct them in writing Memoirs of a Geisha?

I do think there are common misconceptions, and yes, I was seeking to correct them, even if that wasn’t my principle motive in writing the book. But in the acknowledgements I was referring to something slightly different. Widely-held misconceptions about geisha rarely go any deeper than the belief that they are nothing more than glorified prostitutes. By the time I met up with the couple of geisha I interviewed in Kyoto, I had of course gone well beyond that. I was suffering from what I suppose might be called a “higher level of misconception.”

The romantic view of Japan holds that geisha are highly-refined artists, and I’m afraid I myself had fallen into that belief. In truth, geisha are entertainers. The arts they practice are arts of entertainment-not flower arranging or painting, but musical instruments, dance, and tea ceremony. Sometimes it’s said that geisha are trained in the “art of conversation,” but can anyone really be taught how to seem clever and entertaining at a party? Some come by it naturally and others don’t. Those geisha who do will go on to be more successful-by natural selection, you might say. To some extent we’re kidding ourselves when we look at them and imagine they have been instructed carefully in how to charm men, or that they approach the world with the sort of “artistic temperament” we so often romanticize in the West. That isn’t to say some geisha don’t deserve considerable respect for their attainments in dance or music, for example, only that it’s easy to overstate the point.

5. I love the narrative voice of Sayuri – it is very beautiful and extremely convincing. How did you achieve this?

Thanks for that compliment. In answering the question, I’d say that in some ways finding the voice of a character probably isn’t so different from, for example, a prank that involves imitating someone’s mother on the phone. You have in mind a character, and you continually ask yourself how that character would see the world and how she would express her views to us. In the case of Sayuri there are other considerations along the way, because her outlook is of course affected by her cultural and historical background, as are the ways she might express herself.

A novel written in first person is essentially a novel written in dialogue. The challenge is exactly the same: to find ways for the character to express herself that seem…well, characteristic.

6. Memoirs of a Geisha is now a studied text in schools and universities. It has also recently been named a Vintage Future Classic. How does this feel?

Needless to say, I’m delighted by it all. I certainly couldn’t have imagined any of it while writing the book!

7. How did you feel when you heard Memoirs of a Geisha was going to be made into a film and were you at all anxious about seeing it for the first time?

When Hollywood first approached me, I was a little surprised. In all the years I’d worked on the book, the thought of a film never once occurred to me. As it turned out, I had plenty of time to get used to the idea, because six or seven years passed before it finally got made. And as for the first time I saw it, yes, I was nervous, in an almost inexplicable sort of way. I had that same feeling as the first few times I went up before an audience-sweaty palms, dry throat, and so on. I hadn’t expected to feel that way.

8. How much input did you have into the production of the film, and how did you feel about the altered ending?

Not being a filmmaker, I had little to bring to the production. I did read each draft of the screenplay and offer my comments, but after that I was nothing more than a bystander.

To tell the truth, I’m not sure the ending is altered. In the novel she ends up in New York, but that was merely a novelistic device on my part to give her a Western sensibility, so she could tell her story in a way we Westerners would understand. (If she’d lived her entire life in Kyoto, she wouldn’t even have known what sorts of things needed explaining.) The film, however, presents her life as an observer might see it, so a Western sensibility isn’t really necessary.

There’s another slight alteration, in that the character of the Minister, who is a Japanese in the novel, is changed into an American officer in the film. As far as I’m concerned, however, the character is there to play a role, and the role he plays is the same whether he’s American or Japanese. Rob Marshall preferred an American in order to give more opportunity to explore the intersection of the two cultures after the war. I had plenty of time for this in the book, but of course, films always moves much faster than novels do.

9. Can you tell us what you are working on at the moment?

My second novel is about a boy who starts in Amsterdam, comes to the United States around age seventeen, and ends up a very successful businessman in the meat packing industry. It takes place between about 1855 and 1875. Although it is of course a very different novel from Memoirs of a Geisha, it’s told in a similarly intimate first person voice and covers about the same span in the life of its protagonist.

10. Who are your favourite authors and why?

I don’t think I have any favorite authors-not that there aren’t authors who impress me. I could name a long list of books I love, but the authors who wrote them may not have written anything else on my list. Just to give a few examples, the books (aside from The Remains of the Day, and I, Claudius, which I’ve already mentioned) would have to include, in no particular order: Pride and Prejudice; The Catcher in the Rye; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime; In Cold Blood; Lonesome Dove; The Johnstown Flood; The Story of the Stone (in five volumes); Don Quixote; and on and on…