Memoirs of a Geisha
By Arthur Golden
(Vintage, Mass Market Paperback, 9781400096893, 512pp.)
Publication Date: November 22, 2005
Other Editions of This Title: eBook, Large Print (October 10, 2006), Large Print (November 15, 2005), Paperback (November 8, 2005), Compact Disc (November 8, 2005), Compact Disc - Abridged (November 8, 2005), Compact Disc - Abridged (July 1999), Paperback (January 10, 1999), Audio Cassette (September 1998), Hardcover (September 23, 1997), Audio Cassette - Abridged (September 23, 1997)
Categories: Historical - General
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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.
Arthur Golden was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and was educated at Harvard College, where he received a degree in art history, specializing in Japanese art. In 1980 he earned an M.A. in Japanese history from Columbia University, where he also learned Mandarin Chinese. Following a summer at Beijing University, he worked in Tokyo, and, after returning to the United States, earned an M.A. in English from Boston University. He resides in Brookline, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children.
"Astonishing . . . breathtaking . . . You are seduced completely." —Washington Post Book World
"Captivating, minutely imagined . . . a novel that refuses to stay shut." —Newsweek
"A story with the social vibrancy and narrative sweep of a much-loved 19th century bildungsroman. . . . This is a high-wire act. . . . Rarely has a world so closed and foreign been evoked with such natural assurance." —The New Yorker
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