Sayo Masuda (1925–2008)

An absolute must for anyone that's lived in Japan. I've read a lot about Japan (especially when I lived there), tho know much more about China in this era. Yet this memoir perhaps best conveyed to me the depths of poverty in 1930s Japan. I didn't even know that Nagano was the source of so many "China-goers" to Manchuria.

(To think that many people today in pampered, well-fed, kitsch-burden Japan are living with these memories. And they were still middle-aged when I lived in Japan.)

I suppose show more a great deal of credit goes to the editor, who coached such moving details from this unschooled, illegitimate girl, whose first memories were of being a "nursie" babysitter to a landowner's children. She didn't know her own name when her mother turned up when she was about 12--only to indenture her onward to become a hot springs geisha. (The indentured terms are still like that in Thailand, in the massage parlors and the lower brothels that aren't quite the slave quarters.)

But Sayo did have these acute feelings. Especially with her affectionate little brother, she conjures up the details that made him so precious to her.

Anthropologist Lisa Dalby and later, Arthur Golden in his novel (Geisha) made a persuasive case that there were much worse alternatives for poor women than becoming geisha of the high-end Kyoto district. A hot springs geisha in a tourist town was much more low rent; it was questionable whether a woman picked up much in the way of musical skills and the patron possibilities were, as we see here, more on the order of local yakuza. But it wasn't the lowest rung on the prostitute ladder, not by a long shot. Nonetheless we have one young woman allowing herself to die untreated of a venereal disease, another committing suicide, and Sayo herself attempting to kill herself. The good old days were better for women, right?

The houses were closed down in 1943 and it doesn't occur to Sayo to go back to the trade--instead she scrabbles for food in the countryside (!) of Chiba that she can being back for sale in Tokyo. She works alongside Koreans, a reformed murderer (who had done despicable things in China) and of course has to deal with gangsters.

When she needs money for her ill brother in the postwar period, she does turn to prostitution briefly, though she doesn't provide any details. Whether this was brothel work or what, she doesn't tell.

I think anyone familiar with Japan will be very surprised that such a sympathetic memoir, of a despised woman and class, was first published in the 1950s as a piece in a woman's magazine--and later in the early 1960s, as a short, page turner of a book.

Amazing to me that she was in her early 30s when she "wrote" this, with an attitude that her life was just about over and yet in 2002, at the time of translation, she was still alive, living anonymously in Tokyo. I respect the translator and Japanese editor for protecting Masuda-san's privacy but I so want to know what happened to her after the book was published, enabling her to live comfortably for the rest of her life. I'm sure that her mother, if alive, and the other half-siblings (whom she must have met for a few days at age 12) rediscovered her. I hoped she found some children to adopt.

And there must be loads of movie and TV adaptations? show less

As the title states, this is a true story of a Japanese geisha in the 1940s and 1950s. Beware though: it’s not the beautiful sweetness that you read or saw in Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha. No, life as a geisha was not about that for Masuda-san.

Masuda-san was sold by her parents to act as a nursemaid (as a child- not much bigger than the children she was meant to look after) and then again by an uncle to a geisha house. She had little education and could barely read and write. show more There she and her ‘elder sisters’ gradually rose up the ranks to become geishas. They learned the dancing and the shamisen, but the main objective was money for sex. The girls were indentured to the geisha house, forced to collect ‘points’ to pay out their contract. There were pregnancies, deaths from diseases and suicides.

But life after being a geisha was harsh. Masuda-san did many jobs to try and look after her brother: mistress, collecting and selling food, selling soap on the black market and waitressing. The poverty after WWII is tangible. Masuda-san only told her story to a women’s magazine to try to win a prize. She did, and fifty years later, her book is still in publication and translated into English.
This story is poignant as it tells of the stigma forever attached to geisha at this time (will people find out Masuda-san’s history?) and the running away from love as to avoid that stigma for her beloved. It’s not a pretty picture, but a very compelling one. show less

Not just a good book, but an important one.
Sayo Masuda's memoir gives an unembellished, unromanticized view of what it was really like to live and work as a geisha. It's a story of extreme poverty and oppression, but her resilience, spirit and humor shine through. It feels to me as though translator Rowley truly captured her authentic voice - the tale seems honest and sincere. The author never flinches from telling the bad along with the good, and the result is a story which truly shows the show more universality of humanity at our best and worst, regardless of time period or culture. show less

The most remarkable thing about this book is the author's voice. Although you have to wonder how much was altered in translation from Japanese to English, it is still very compelling. I think with memoirs you can always tell whether the author is trying to gloss over negative aspects of their life, but Masuda is unapologetic and genuine. This is not the soft, lyrical story of Arthur Golden, but the real thing, expressed by someone who was there. A very rich and evocative memoir.