Memoir’s of a geisha is a semi fictional tale based on real life observations of several geisha by the author Arthur Golden. Supposedly Golden spent almost ten years in researching every single detail of the geisha culture, while using the information provided by a famous geisha Mineko Iwasaki for most of his notes. It is a whole other thing that Mineko Iwasaki later sued the author for misrepresentation. Whether you want to treat this book like fiction or someone’s real life experience is your own choice.
This novel depicts the harrowing journey that the main character makes during her lifetime and it spans a timeframe that starts when she was a little girl and ends when she is a full fledged adult having several accomplishments to her credit.
It can be read as a love story, or as an insight into the lifestyle and customs of a geisha or as a story of innocence lost. As a reader, I have to say that I was swept away by various emotions while reading this book. It made me sometimes happy, sometimes sad or even angry but never bored. This had me in its grip from start to finish.
The book opens in Japan in the year 1929, when we meet a little girl called Chiyo who lives in a village called Yoroido with her mother who is very ill, father, who is a fisherman and an elder sister, Satsu. Chiyo thinks that Satsu is quite plain like her father. She tells us that everybody has a body type and her body type is the same as her mother’s(who Chiyo thinks is good looking), water.
A person whose body type is water also apparently has insight into the minds and hearts of others, because water can pass through even a little crack in the wall, which is to say that nothing can obstruct it. One day, Chiyo meets Mr. Tanaka, who is a rich man in the village, involved in the fish business.
Chiyo says,
"The day I met Mr.Tanaka is the best and the worst day of my life."
I think she calls it’Best’, because she at first thinks of Mr.Tanaka as a very kind man and’worst, ’ because that was the day it was decided that her innocence should be lost.
Her mother gives into the disease that ails her and soon passes away. Their father sells both girls, Chiyo and Satsu to Mr. Tanaka. Shortly Chiyo and her sister are sent off to the city Kyoto in Gion to be sold to geisha houses.
Upon arrival at a geisha house, both girls are examined but only Chiyo is bought and her sister leaves with the man. We much later find out that the sister was sold to a house. Note that geisha are different from and the word geisha in Japanese means’artisan.’ So, a geisha is a beautiful woman who was trained since childhood in manners, dance, music and the art of pleasing men by both witty conversation and sex.
The okiya(literally meaning house), is run by a former *geisha *who is called Mother. An old woman with a hip deformity called Aunty is also a resident of the okiya. In the geisha tradition Mother and Aunty are sisters, but not in the conventional sense. Granny who used to run the okiya before Mother adopted them both. Note that while Mother is considered to be the owner of the okiya, Aunty is generally treated like a maid. In the book only some characters are referred to by real names, all others are named according to Chiyo’s impressions of them, for example some one is called Dr. crab, because of his habit of chewing his lips, which Chiyo thinks is very crab like.
This particular geisha house called "Nitta okiya" has only one resident geisha, the beautiful but cruel Hatsumomo. For some reason(which we later find out to be Chiyo’s beauty), Hatsumomo takes instant dislike to Chiyo and tries to make her life miserable whenever possible. There is also another girl called Pumpkin(nicknamed so because she has a very round face) who is in a position similar to Chiyo’s, and is training to become a geisha. Chiyo accompanies Pumpkin to the geisha school.
Chiyo desperately searches for and finds her sister, who is a at a brothel and plans to run away with her. The escape attempt fails and Mother and Granny discover Chiyo. As a result of this deceit she loses the opportunity to be trained as a geisha and stops attending geisha school.
One day unable to bear the fact that she is to live her entire life as a maid, Chiyo runs out of the okiya in tears. When she wanders away and comes to a bridge a gentleman, who has another geisha by his side and a group of men by accompanying him, stops and talks very kindly to Chiyo. They are all are apparently out for a stroll. Chiyo guesses that he must belong to one of the electrical companies in the city and must be in a good position. He is very sympathetic towards Chiyo and as being the little girl who longs for affection that she is, Chiyo develops a certain attachment to this person, whom she refers to as Mr.Chairman. All through the rest of her life, Chiyo nurses the dream of becoming a geisha so that she can be a part of Mr. Chairman’s world.
Meanwhile, Hatsumomo adopts Pumpkin as her younger sister(younger sister is someone who learns from a working geisha and accompanies her to the various parties she attends at tea houses in the city, thus getting to know important people in the social circle). After a while, another revered geisha called Mameha(she is the archrival of Hatsumomo and there is certain enmity between the ladies) contacts Mother and asks her if she can be Chiyo’s elder sister. After Mother agrees, Mameha soon starts Chiyo off on training to become a geisha.
After several twists and turns and lessons, Chiyo is ready and is renamed "Sayuri.” As soon as a girl becomes a geisha, there is an auction for her virginity called mizuage. The man who makes the highest bid gets to bed the geisha first. A certain Doctor Crab whose name I cited as an example before buys Sayuri’s virginity. Following the triumphant *mizuage, * now that she is a full-fledged geisha, Sayuri attracts a lot of men but the one person that she longs for is Mr.Chairman who apparently has no interest in her.
On a personal note:
My impression of the novel’s ending was that it was very abrupt, and naive.
As a reader I at first felt that the author was justifying Sayuri’s manipulative methods and opportunistic nature by saying she was brought up to be deceitful as most geisha are.
I was wrong! This is not an ends-justify-means lesson in morality. Let me quote a line from the book, this is what Mameha tells Sayuri:
"We do not become geisha because we want to. We become geisha because we could not be anything else."
If you read this in terms of obstacles versus triumphs or in view of the journey that a little girl hailing from a distant village had to make, in order to be the best thing that was possible for her in the given circumstances, you will not be disappointed.
And anyway, in order to take into account only black and white as the two shades of morality, we need to be living in an ideal world. Which is far from the truth because in an ideal world would fathers sell their daughters for money like Chiyo’s father did?
I’ll leave you to your own conclusions.
Okay, enough said! If you want to know more, please buy it or borrow it from a library or steal it. But do read it and let me what you thought of the book. Please leave me a comment on what you thought about this review and rate it.