Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

Rating: 4 stars

If it weren’t obvious from the title, this is fiction and not an actual story. Or is it? I read a bit on Wikipedia and the back of the book to find out the truth (doing more than that is asking a lot from me), and it’s a complicated answer.

A page after the conclusion lists a number of people who were involved with writing the book, including quite a few geisha. Apparently the story was so close to reality that the primary geisha got death threats for revealing things she should never have. So I guess some of it is true? Anyway, she wrote her own book which is entirely non-fiction and are actual memoirs, so, uh, I dunno? Anyway, the book follows the formula life never does, the three-act structure. So I originally thought there was almost nothing true. 

Onto the story. It’s mostly the story of how a girl becomes a geisha and the difficulties in her life. It effectively is benign (as benign as such a thing can do) human and sex trafficking. I can envision someone defending the practice and saying something like ‘but look at how empowered and elegant the women are’, but the protagonist and her sister are literally sold into slavery. Not only that, but her sister is sold off to be a prostitute! And then the protagonist’s mizuage, her virginity, at the age of fifteen, is not only examined to check if her hymen is intact. This is after a rich aristocrat sexually assaults her. I fail to see anything redemptive in a system that not only allows that but encourages it. On top of that, the entire system (from the top the bottom of the geisha society from the okiya that house them, the teahouses where they ‘entertain’ men and the geisha communities are financially dependent on exploitation, so they encourage it. The society does allow some independence or free choice much later in the woman’s life, but it depends.

Okay, onto the plot. It’s interesting and good, at least when I was reading a chapter a day. When I started reading more, I found myself a bit bored, but I think that’s more about my taste than the quality of the writing.

I guess this is where I should talk about characters, but I didn’t find them particularly interesting (and hey, you can say that’s because it’s based on a ‘true story’, but the book manages to make fiction of some other things, almost undoubtedly). There were a couple of times where the supposedly good characters did what was bad or selfish things as seen from another perspective, but that didn’t make anyone seem complex. It just made me not like them.

Overall, the plot didn’t really seem particularly unique since it was treading the ground of the ‘it’s fiction but is it?’ thing, which doesn’t let you necessarily make a profound message, and that’s most of the 4 stars. It’s a good story but not one that would ever garner a second read from me. Also, the last chapter and the epilogue (okay, the last two chapters, but that’s really what they are) are too positive for my taste. One good thing is that the book, minus the last chapter, ends right at the resolution of the climax.