Arthur Golden (1) (1957–)

*****WARNING: MAY CAUSE BOOK HANGOVER*****

This book was absolutely fantastic and I'm sorry I waited so long to read it. It was on my summer reading list in high school, but there were so many good ones on the list that summer that I opted for one of the others, though I can't remember which. After finally picking it up, I'm sorry I did.

The characters come right off the page and, before long, begin to feel like old friends. So much so, in fact that the closer you get to the end, the less you want to read because you know that your time with them has almost come to a close.

Golden did a beautiful job of combining historical elements with the little known background and day to day life of Geisha even if, by many accounts, there are inaccuracies. Sayuri (Chiyo) is a whirlwind of emotions and, despite the average person not actually having anything directly in common with her, she is painfully relatable in so many ways. You can't help but adore her. It definitely makes me feel worse that she and Pumpkin couldn't mend their friendship, but clearly cattiness is something that crosses cultures.

Without a doubt, I would strongly recommend this novel to anyone and everyone. It's got a little bit of everything: romance, deception, war, art, family, despair. There's a little something for everyone.… (more)

My friend Robin sent this book to me shortly after I moved to Tokyo. It was hard to find English-language books at first, so she sent me a couple to keep me reading. I probably would not have been interested in Memoirs of a Geisha had I not just moved to Japan. But I found it to be one of the best books I've ever read.

When I first started reading the book, I wanted to see what Sayuri looked like, so I did a Google search. It was then that I realized the book I was reading was not a biography, but fiction. Had me fooled! Still, it's easy to imagine that it is a true story. Even though I've only lived in Tokyo for about two months, I see how all of this story could be completely true.

I love Golden's characters! Pumpkin is so funny. Some of the lines he gives her crack me up! And Sayuri, of course, is an incredible character. Through her stories I laughed and even cried a couple of times. The stories themselves were so plain, just as Japanese people truly speak. The fact that an American man wrote this (and I believe it was his first novel) still amazes me. You'd swear it was really the memoir of a geisha.

Several nights in a row I stayed up reading until 5am. I just couldn't get enough of this book. I guess partly because of the story, but also in part because there's a little bit of Sayuri in each of us.… (more)

Received this as a BookCrossing book from an online friend, and I’m pretty sure that I never would have read it otherwise. It turned out to be pretty good, though.

I’m not wild about storytelling frames, and I went back and forth on this one. For most of the book it was bothering me, but as she enters the upheavals of WWII, there was something a little reassuring about it. Then again, that’s not necessarily a good thing.

Aside from the frame, there were some things I really liked and others I really didn’t. It’s a deeply anti-feminist book, in a way. Namely: It seems to me to be a book about how cruel women can be to each other, and how far above it all men are. You might say that that’s inherent in the content, but I don’t necessarily think that it is. There aren’t any real bonds among the girls/women in this book, other than the one counterexample of the protagonist and Mameha. Every other female-female relationship is based on greed, suspicion, revenge, desperation, or outright cruelty. The relationship between men and women, on the other hand, was probably dictated by content. Though it would have been nice to see expectations overturned at least a little bit. The protagonist spends her whole life waiting for a man to save her. Save her from what? Mostly, it seems, from having to live her own life.

Which brings me to my biggest complaint about the book: Does Chiyo/Sayuri ever actually do anything proactive to further her own cause? I can only think of one thing, and she completely bungles that in a way that any second-grader would have known to avoid. Other than that, she spends the length of the novel as a leaf on the wind, while everyone around her—geisha and non-geisha alike—is working to create some kind of life for him or herself. Part of what bothered me about the frame was that I knew she was going to come out all right in the end, and frankly I didn’t see why she should. I kept waiting for her to do something, and kept getting disappointed.

OK, so enough about what I didn’t like. I did enjoy the book, believe it or not. Mameha was interesting, as were several other minor characters. But mostly, Golden is quite a writer. There are a couple of spots in the book where the protagonist remembers back to other times in her life, and at those spots I became really aware of just how well the author had described those other times. I could really see and hear everything, both large and small details. That takes some real talent, I think, and some real work. He did a hell of a job.… (more)