Book Review
Title: Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
Genre: Historical, Memoir
Rating: 3.75 Stars
Memoirs of a Geisha is one of my all-time favourite books and movies, I decided to re-read it because I learnt that there are two different account of this memoir, one from Arthur Golden and one from the geisha herself and I will be reading both this year. We are introduced to Chiyo and her older sister, Satsu who lived in a little seaside village, Yoroido with their parents. However, while Chiyo is still very young her mother becomes seriously ill which is unfortunate as her father’s first wife and their two children tragically died. Chiyo ends up meeting Mr. Tanaka who she takes a liking to and one day he makes a proposal to her father and Chiyo believes that he is adopted her and Satsu, however, it turns out that the two girls have been sold in order to buy medicine for her mother. Mr. Tanaka hands both girls off to Mr. Bekku after they have been inspected and the purity insured and they are taken to the Gion district of Kyoto miles away from home which is disturbing enough for the girls. It gets worse when the girls learn that they are to be separated, Chiyo is given to an okiya or geisha house while Satsu is taken somewhere else. Shortly after arriving Chiyo meets both Hatsumomo, the most popular geisha at the moment and another young girl working there who is affectionately called Pumpkin. She is warned by the woman who takes her in that the Mother of the house and Granny might not keep her yet and to be on her best behaviour which Chiyo is. While Granny doesn’t like anyone, Mother takes a liking to Chiyo but from previous readings and watching the movie we can already see hints at what is to come as Mother mentions Chiyo being full of water mainly speaking about her unusual eye colour and how it can guard against fire, this is a direct reference to Hatsumomo’s horrible temper.
As we approach the ¼ mark in the novel, Chiyo has been at the okiya for a month before she starts attending the special school where geisha learn their skills. She along with Pumpkin are taking lessons in singing, dance and tea ceremony among others. However, Hatsumomo has decided to make Chiyo’s life as difficult as possible for no apparent reason other than jealousy because many believe that Chiyo is more beautiful right now and while grow into a beautiful woman too making her a threat to Hatsumomo. For a time despite Hatsumomo’s behaviour everything seems to be going fine until Hatsumomo mentions that Satsu visited the okiya to speak with Chiyo and was turned away. From this moment on Hatsumomo uses the message Satsu left behind to blackmail Chiyo into doing whatever she wants. At first it is small things but this eventually escalates into getting Chiyo to ruin a kimono belonging to another geisha, Mameha who Hatsumomo is jealous of. What you have to remember is during this time kimono are ridiculously expensive and this price is added onto the debt that Chiyo owes the okiya and she receives a beating for it but life moves on. Chiyo also learns during this time that Hatsumomo has a boyfriend that she occasionally brings to the okiya which is strictly forbidden and more than once Chiyo catches them together and Hatsumomo warns her never to mention it. However, one night after delivering Satsu’s message at last, Chiyo gets to speak with her sister who is in a brothel although Chiyo doesn’t understand it right now and she wants them to run away together and Chiyo agrees. Upon returning to the okiya she catches Hatsumomo and Koichi together and offers Chiyo money to run away only to frame her for stealing a brooch but Mother quickly realises that Hatsumomo is covering up the fact she has a man there. While there isn’t much she can do to Hatsumomo apart from making sure someone is always awake to prevent the man returning and punishing the maids, Chiyo is confined to the okiya. Koichi who is married also leaves Hatsumomo making her foul temper worse than ever and she gladly rubs Chiyo’s face in the fact she can’t run away with her sister. However, Chiyo has a plan to escape and one night she climbs onto the roof to sneak away but she falls breaking an arm in the process. This leads to her training being stopped so she won’t become a geisha anymore, she will only serve as a maid and she has also missed her chance to run away with her sister. Shortly after this she receives a letter from Mr. Tanaka telling her that both her parents have died and Satsu has run away with a young man who was sweet on her before they left for Kyoto. Chiyo now realises she has nothing to return to and no prospects where she is now which is heart-breaking especially for a twelve year old but in the wake of this she meets a kind man only referred to as the Chairman and she begins to feel something she has never felt before. Around this point in the novel, you will begin to see how the movie slightly changed the timeline of certain events as Chiyo is portrayed as being much younger than 12 when she first meets the Chairman in the movie.
As we cross the ¼ mark in the novel, Chiyo has now lived at the okiya for tars and most of that time she has spent as a maid while watching others like pumpkin move up in the world. Chiyo hasn’t given up on being a geisha and she has been waiting patiently for an opportunity to present itself but it hasn’t so far. However, when Granny passes away and Mameha comes to visit she recognises Chiyo and see something in her as a few weeks later Mameha’s maid asks Chiyo to find an excuse to leave the okiya for a meeting. As Chiyo suspects she is taken to Mameha and questioned on why she hasn’t been training to be a geisha and she explains the childish mistakes she made and how she now recognises the opportunity she was given and wasted. Mameha explains to Chiyo that there might be something she can do but she can say nothing of this meeting until it has been done and once again Chiyo agrees. A short time later, Mameha visits the okiya and has a meeting with Mrs. Nitta (Mother) where she discreetly asks why Chiyo isn’t continuing her schooling and eventually makes a proposal to Mrs. Nitta. The proposal is that Mameha will take on Chiyo as a younger sister as she believes Chiyo will repay her debts by the time she is twenty, something very rarely done in the geisha community. Mrs. Nitta only care about the money and doesn’t really want to invest in Chiyo so Mameha sweetens the deal by accepting Mother’s offer of a reduced fee for training her but with the opportunity to double it if Chiyo manages to pay off her debts. With this deal agreed, Chiyo returns to her geisha training but she is years behind other geisha of a similar age like Pumpkin and some of the younger trainees have been raised in the geisha lifestyle which we learn a lot about in this section of the novel. However, unlike Pumpkin, Chiyo seems to find her rhythm very easily and manages to pick up skills a lot easier than most although she does struggle with dancing until she learns to focus on how the Chairman made her feel when she is beginning to dance and it helps a lot. During this time Hatsumomo lands her hardest blow yet as Pumpkin, Chiyo’s only friend is her younger sister and she forbids Pumpkin from speaking to her and often physically abused the girl but there is nothing that can be done about it. Mameha also warns Chiyo against speaking with her as she might report anything Chiyo says back to Hatsumomo which she could then use against which she has in the past. Mameha also explains the goal isn’t to be better than Hatsumomo it is to be more successful by either paying off her debts and living freely as Mameha does thank to her danna, a patron who financially supports a geisha in return for other “services” that a geisha wouldn’t normally provide and it is a very strict and complicated arrangement.
As we approach the halfway mark in the novel, we are starting to get into the real meat of the story as Chiyo’s life is about to expand in ways she could have never predicted. For the next six months Chiyo continues her lessons and sees little of Mameha during this time which is upsetting for her as Pumpkin makes her debut during this time and seems to be doing well. After Mameha returns she sees that Chiyo has begun developing into a lovely young woman at 14 and decides it might be time for her to make her debut soon. However, before that Mameha makes sure to introduce her to a lot of people so they know who she is before her debut as a way of insuring some level of success. By the time comes for Chiyo’s debut she is bound to Mameha as her younger sister and is given the name Sayuri. This upsets her the most because she feels like she has killed the person Chiyo was by accepting the name Sayuri. However, they soon get to work with Sayuri attending almost all of Mameha’s engagements with her and she is even introduced to Mameha’s danna, the Baron. Sayuri reflects, as this novel is being told in the past tense, that the Baron was wealthy enough to afford two geisha mistresses which was highly uncommon especially during the Depression. Hatsumomo is making it difficult for them by turning up to almost every engagement and trying to embarrass her and Sayuri to make Pumpkin seems better than she is. However, Mameha gets around this by planning an engagement that Hatsumomo would never turn up at because she find the one man disgusting. The two men they are going to be entertaining are Iwamura Ken, the owner of Iwamura Electric and the President of the company, Nobu Toshikazu. Upon arriving Sayuri realises that Nobu has suffered horrible burns on the one side of his face which would account for why Hatsumomo doesn’t like to look at him but this is overshadowed by the fact that the other man Iwamura Ken, is the Chairman who she met all those years before.
As we cross into the second half of the novel, Mameha has come up with a plan to stop Hatsumomo and it entirely depends on Sayuri seeming infatuated with Nobu and someone else she hasn’t met yet. This plan hurts Sayuri as she wants nothing more than to spend time with the Chairman rather than Nobu but she is yet to appreciate the kind of person Nobu is. With her mizuage sale fast approaching, Mameha finally explains to Sayuri what it means and it is essentially the sale of her virginity to the highest bidder. While this seems unethical it was a common practice for geisha back in the time when the novel is set. Here we see how naïve Sayuri still is in a lot of way as she is only 14 going on 15 right now and life is getting more difficult for her as Hatsumomo sets her attempts to ruin her reputation before its even started. However, when Hatsumomo sees Sayuri turning her attentions to Nobu she backs off, even though this is part of Mameha’s plan so she begins sabotaging her meetings with Doctor Crab because he prides himself on buying mizuage. Mameha manages to correct this before it does any major damage to Sayuri but the pressure is beginning to take its toll on her especially when all she wants is to spend more time with the Chairman. During a dinner Mameha’s danna, the Baron is hosting she reveals that she is unavailable to attending his cherry blossom party in Hakone because she is going to have an abortion which were still dangerous at this time and he demands that she sends Sayuri in her place and she has no choice but to comply. She warns Sayuri to be careful as the Baron has already made numerous comments towards her but when he assaults her at the party after everyone else has left she is shaken despite the fact he didn’t do anything except look at her and even the people around her tell her that its fine because he hasn’t tainted her worth but it opens Sayuri’s eyes to the way the world around her actually works. While I love the Chairman and the movie is amazing I am coming to realise that Nobu was a much better choice for Sayuri because unlike the Chairman, Nobu isn’t married and he is free to give Sayuri everything she wants when at best all she can be to the Chairman is a mistress like Mameha is to the Baron.
As we approach the ¾ mark in the novel, Sayuri’s mizuage sale happens and Doctor Crab is the highest bidder which was expected. What Sayuri learns much later in life is that Nobu wasn’t even part of bidding war as he dropped out pretty early as it wasn’t Sayuri’s mizuage he was interested in but her as a person. The bidding war was between Doctor Crab and the Baron, this explains Mameha’s cold behaviour to Sayuri during this time as the Baron is her danna and she was away aborting his baby when the sale happened but the pair never directly speak of it. Sayuri is also adopted by the mother of the Nitta okiya as well meaning her debts have been erased and she will someday inherit the okiya which infuriates Hatsumomo but there is nothing she can do about it now as the ceremony has taken place giving Sayuri the new name of Nitta Sayuri. After she officially becoming a geisha, Sayuri learns that in July of the year she turns 18 Nobu is going to become her danna and she realises in accepting that proposition that she will be sacrificing the hope she has held for a relationship between her and the Chairman even though she is already aware that the Chairman doesn’t really have an interest in her the way Nobu does. However, with the war escalating her mother changes her danna to be a General and this causes some tension between Nobu and Sayuri despite the bond growing between them and they fall out of touch. For several years, she prospers with the General as her danna although she hates the sexual relationship between them and for the first time she takes a boyfriend purely out of wanting someone sexually. By 1941/42 things are getting bad in Japan and the geisha districts are shut down so Sayuri turns to her danna for help but he isn’t even really her danna at this point due to his arrest and he tells her that he can’t help. Sayuri seeks out Nobu instead despite not speaking for four years and he agrees to help her by sending her to stay with a kimono maker who now makes parachutes for the war effort, and he explains that the reason he hasn’t sought out her company is because he doesn’t like having things he wants placed in front of him that he can’t have obviously referring to Sayuri. She comes back by essentially saying that she is now available if he still wants her and he tells her if they are both still alive after the war then he will seek her out despite the fact that the war may change them as people which I found so wholesome.
As we cross into the final section of the novel, the war has ended and Japan obviously lost and thus begins the American occupation of Japan. Sayuri doesn’t immediately return to Gion or her former life as mother is making money where she is but after a visit from Nobu explaining that he needs her help charming the Minister of Finance in order to save his company and in return he will become her danna and make sure she is looked after, she writes to mother and returns to Gion. Obviously everyone has changed because of the war except Nobu who has seen it before, and even her new appreciation and in a way love for Nobu doesn’t overshadow the longing she has for the Chairman which I was finding a little ridiculous at this point. However, Sayuri does seek out Pumpkin as she gets on well with soldiers both Japanese and American to help with the Minister and things return to some semblance of normal but we still have 60 or so pages left and I don’t know if the book is going to end the same way as the movie because if it does I will be a little disappointed as it is hinting right now that there is a real chance for Nobu and Sayuri to be together and honestly they both deserve it as Nobu is the only person who has been completely honest with Sayuri and treated her with respect and she has come to see him as a friend and could come to love him truly in time. While the novel does end the same way as the movie with Sayuri betraying Nobu in order to get the Chairman and them living out the rest of their days happily. Even Sayuri feels that her decisions with foolish as by pursuing the Chairman she destroyed her career in Gion and the friendships she had there. One issue I had with this story was the romance between Sayuri and the Chairman. While it is a tragic love story at best we know that Sayuri wouldn’t have been happy. While she does get her man in the end we know that Iwamura Ken is married meaning Sayuri can only be his mistress and any children she gives him would be illegitimate. However, if she had accepted Nobu as her danna he was unattached and it is something that comes up very frequently and I believe the way he felt for Sayuri meant he would have married her and given any children his name. While she might not have loved him the same way she loved the Chairman I felt that she could have been content with Nobu which is much more than most women especially geisha could ever hope for during this time. Overall, Memoirs of a Geisha was a very interesting story but I found as an adult I had more issues with the romance side of the story as Nobu was a far better choice for Sayuri in the long run and eventually she does realise this herself.
Buy it here:
Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
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