Sayuri’s story spans 25 years - from 1929 to a few years after the end of the Second World War - and provides a fascinating glimpse, not only of the secret world of the geisha but of Japan’s history during that era.īoxall describes it as an important book for its “glimpses into a way of life that has all but disappeared”. The book follows her education and “apprenticeship”, describes the auctioning of her virginity and her subsequent rise as one of Japan’s most celebrated geishas. The sisters are separated, and Chiyo - now renamed Sayuri - must learn to adjust to a new, often cruel, way of life as a young slave in a geisha house. But as her mother lies dying, her aged father sells nine-year-old Chiyo and her older sister to a man with connections to the top geisha houses in the Gion district of Tokyo. Written as a fictional memoir (including a fictional “translator’s note” at the beginning), the book tells the extraordinary story of one woman’s life as a geisha.Ĭhiyo, a pretty grey-eyed child, is born into an impoverished fishing family living in a village on the coast of the Sea of Japan. For some inexplicable reason, both have passed me by. It has even been turned into a Hollywood film. Remember that project I set myself at the start of the year, the one in which I read at least a dozen books from my TBR that are listed in Peter Boxall’s 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die? Well, this is book four (I’m woefully behind) - and what a mixed bag it turned out to be.Īrthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha seems to be one of those novels that everyone has read. Fiction – paperback Vintage 497 pages 2005.
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