Memoirs of a Geisha
A girl sold at nine years old. By thirty she is one of the most desired women in Japan. The gap between those sentences is the entire novel.
The Art of Becoming
Arthur Golden's 1997 novel follows Chiyo Sakamoto, a nine-year-old girl from a fishing village who is sold to an okiya in Kyoto's Gion district in the 1930s. Trained in the exacting arts of geisha culture, she reinvents herself as Sayuri and ascends to the height of the geisha world, navigating rivalry, patronage, wartime devastation, and a love she is never quite allowed to have. The novel is narrated as a memoir recorded decades later, looking back with a complicated clarity.
Reading Memoirs of a Geisha
Discipline
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"We do not choose our destinies. Only our responses to them.
"Arthur Golden
Golden spent a decade researching the novel and interviewed a retired geisha extensively. She later sued him for breach of confidentiality and defamation. He testified that she was not a source for Sayuri's story.
The 2005 Rob Marshall film starred Zhang Ziyi, Michelle Yeoh, and Gong Li. It won three Academy Awards but was controversial in Japan and China for casting Chinese actresses as Japanese geisha.