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Arthur Golden
This is a seductive and evocative epic on an intimate scale, which 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…
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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.
topAbout the Book
This is a seductive and evocative epic on an intimate scale, which 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.
topArthur Golden interview/review
From an interview in YOU Magazine December 1998 by Fanny Black
- There must have been problems for a young American male writing as a woman about such an alien world?
I was daunted by the prospect of trying to take on the persona of a geisha, even though it struck me intuitively as the right way to go… As I was writing, I had a clear sense of my own sensibility and of hers. I was aware that I was not writing about how I would respond to something, but how Sayuri would.
- What are Sayuri’s motives for telling her story?
She is aware of all she has lost, because nothing really works out well for her in the end – exiled without the man she loved, who was never more than an icon to her anyway. Her wish to tell her story is her way of giving her life meaning.
- What’s the significance of Sayuri’s relationship with the Chairman?
Any hope of running away is supplanted by this hope of having the Chairman. He represents hope to her. It’s not that she is in love with him.
- Is Sayuri so passive because it’s in her character, or because she’s been taught to be like that?
I felt it was the way geishas are taught to be… it was the kind of conditioning that was drilled into these girls. It’s a remarkably hierarchical society and you are expected to do what you’re told.
topStarting Points for Discussion
- Memoirs of a Geisha is a work of fiction, and yet it is introduced by a translator’s note which explicitly sets up the book as a memoir. What is the effect of this note on the story, and how does the reader respond to it?
- The world inside the okiya is a community of women who are all, in one way or another, exploited by the tradition that surrounds them. Yet none of the women are ultimately prepared to help each other out, why is this?
- After losing her virginity to Dr Crab Sayuri says, ‘Once you know this sort of thing, you can never unknow it’ (p. 234). How does sex change Sayuri’s perception of the world in which she lives?
- We are made very aware of the feelings of Sayuri and the other women in the novel, whilst the Chairman keeps his feelings veiled throughout. Are the men treated as real people? Does the womens’ ability to express themselves alter the balance of power between male and female?
- Mameha tells Sayuri that a geisha becomes a geisha not because she wants to be happy but because she has no choice. Yet Sayuri has two chances of escape – once when the Chairman gives her some money, and then again at the end of the war. Did she really have a choice, and if so, why didn’t she take her chances?
- How do western attitudes, old and new, impact on our reaction to the novel?
Other Books by Arthur Golden
Memoirs Of A Geisha
A seductive and evocative epic on an intimate scale, that tells the extraor…
Suggested Further Reading
- The Handmaid’s Tale ~ Margaret Atwood
- One Hundred Secret Senses ~ Amy Tan
- Wild Swans ~ Jung Chang
- Falling Leaves ~ Adeline Yen Mah
- The Second Sex ~ Simone de Beauvoir
- Waiting ~ Ha Jin