Title: Memoirs of a Geisha Author: Arthur Golden
Published: September 23, 1997
Genre(s): Historical Fiction
Page Count: 434
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:This story is a rare and utterly engaging experience. It tells the extraordinary story of a geisha—summoning up a quarter century from 1929 to the post-war years of Japan's dramatic history, and opening a window into a half-hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation.
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. Her memoirs conjure 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 land's most powerful men.
I’m sure that, as many have claimed, Memoirs of a Geisha is a very heavy-handed, westernized portrayal of Japanese culture. And considering the uproar Mineko Iwasaki raised in response to this book, I’m willing to bet that this isn’t particularly accurate or authentic, either. But to be honest, I don’t know. I’m not a scholar of Japanese tradition or culture, so I probably never would have known the difference between Golden’s inventions and reality. And, this being historical fiction, I suppose it’s excusable.
All that aside, I found the book to be very interesting and quick to read, in spite of its comparative bulk—661 page ebook. Even though there’s not much action and little dialogue, I didn’t find the text to be dull or hard to immerse myself in or any of that. Perhaps because of the novelty of the content, I found Memoirs of a Geisha to be an easy, engaging read.
That is not to say, however, that it is faultless. Arthur Golden writes in a very florid style that came off a bit cheesy to me. Sayuri, the geisha who narrates the book, had a propensity to compare everything to water or the ocean, and tended to speak in flowery extended metaphors, even as young as nine years old. At times, the imagery got a bit redundant and cloying, and I had to skim those sections.
Sayuri as a character, though, worries me. I didn’t hate her, but I find that what she represents is a bit disconcerting. Memoirs of a Geisha is, essentially, about a woman who spends 18 years pining after a man who apparently has no interest in her. She daydreams about him constantly, throws herself at his head, and generally sleepwalks through life because she’s “in love” with this man. And when, at the end, it turns out he has actually been in love with her this whole time, Sayuri immediately gives up her job, her friends and patrons, and moves halfway across the world to New York, just so they can be together. And she lives happily ever after.
That is not my idea of a strong, proactive female protagonist. Spending most of your life mooning after a man and feeling that your existence is only worthwhile if he validates you? Not a good message. Giving up everything you’ve worked to attain to make that man happy? Also not a good message. (Yes, Sayuri claims to be very happy in New York, and I believe her; however, she also says that she regrets leaving her friends and life in Japan. And she never would have considered leaving had it not been for her love interest.)
So, I don’t know. I feel like Memoirs of a Geisha is something I shouldn’t have liked; every reason I listed above, plus a hundred more, tells me that. I did like this book, though. It was entertaining, and even though this fails the Bechdel test pretty badly, I don’t care. (Note: the Bechdel test is problematic, but sometimes useful.)
