Memoirs of a Geisha (1997)

Finally finished it after putting it down so many times over the last couple months or so. I did enjoy it and was enjoying it at the time but it's a heavy book for me personally, so I kept having to put it down. It ended the way I wanted it to. How she went about things some may not agree with, but I understand the why behind it. I watched the movie some years ago and decided to read the book when I saw it in the book store...Glad I picked it up. :-) ( )

Oh my goodness, what an amazing and beautiful book! I read this book three years after I saw the movie. I loved the movie so much I didn't want to read the book and become disappointed in the story.

I'm glad I put distance between seeing the movie and reading the book. I haven't seen the movie since it's first viewing. So I remembered certain things and not others, so reading the book was with fresh eyes.

The book was so thick with detail and character depth and struggle and insight. I was so shocked that this man has written not only a book about a woman, and written his female characters so well, but wrote about a geisha, which is not just any kind of woman. I was so impressed at how he could embody these female characters and make them so life-like. I've read several books where I feel like the author absolutely cannot capture the opposite sex at all. For instance, Twilight (although this is too easy). Does Stephanie Meyers really think that real men are like her male characters? She has no insight into a man's brain at all. It's as if she's only watched soap operas her entire life. How boring.

But Memoirs...oh wow, I cannot explain just how much I absorbed this book. I hated to put it down to go to work. I hated having to go to bed! I was most interested in the geisha life more than anything. I pleased to read in the acknowledgments that Golden actually met and shadowed one of the last geisha still alive who was trained in the ways of the 1930's/1940s geisha were. I know that today's geisha are not at all the geisha that once were. So I loved how this book could almost be a historical fiction.

I won't lie. I want a kimono and the experience of being old school geisha, just once, just to see how it is, how I would be, could I do it even.

The writing was lyrical and detailed but without overdoing it. What a wonderful book. I've put the book "Geisha" by Liza Dalby who is the only American woman welcome into the world of geisha just to get a modern woman's feeling of that world. Golden also used Liza as a reference for this book. This author did an amazing job of really trying to get into the world and the time and the lives of these women. I am so impressed and would recommend this book to everyone! ( )

A truly extraordinary book and one told with knowledge, a little sympathy, and a lot of insight into this world. And it is its own world, with schools, okiya where the geisha and their maids live, ceremonies and rituals, and beautifully embroidered kimonos. The character interactions show the universality of humans and to know that bullying goes on everywhere was a healing touch for me. Highly recommend, and one I immersed myself into. ( )

Now known by her geisha name, Sayuri tells a story of her childhood in her tipsy house; of friends and a certain enemy within the okiya; her struggles; of being a geisha before and after the second world war; of love, and her life after her days of being a geisha were over.

At nine years old Chiyo is taken from her family and everything she has ever known and is sold to an okiya in the most prominent geisha district in Kyoto. After years of rebelling, being in trouble and being a maid she breaks down in the street and is comforted by a kind man simply known to her as the Chairman. She donates the money he has given her to a shrine in Gion, praying to become a geisha in the hopes of seeing him again one day.

After hard work, dedication, and thoughts of the Chairman, Chiyo not only goes on to become a geisha, but one of the most well-known geisha in Kyoto. ( )

I liked this novel at the time I read it, but not passionately. I think now I'd have a lot to say about Orientalism and white male fantasies and it would probably make it uncomfortable. A lot of the images have stuck with me, but I think they are also misrepresentations. I think the images stuck because they are white invention and fantasy.