Memoirs of a Geisha (1997)

I read this book for pleasure and really enjoyed it. Very interesting to learn about how the Geisha lived and the struggles she went through before WWII. ( )

This is the story of a little girl sold into what is essentially high-class white slavery and the drama that her life includes. Taking Japan all the way through WWII, you learn what it was like to be a Geisha before the laws stated that a girl cannot begin her training until 16. You follow her search for a balance of love and life, and how she obtains it. ( )

By starting with what purports to be a 'translators note' this book puts the reader into the mindset that the events laid out before them are real. It the dives into the narrative, which takes the reader through the intricacies of the life of a geisha from the point of view of someone who was sold into that life as a child. Granted, this also helps the reader to forget that this was written by a westerner (an outsider, no matter how much the subject may have been studied) as a work of fiction. But it is still well-written, and I enjoyed it more than I expected to.

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! ( )