have an inkling as to what to expect from the author. Is he a born storyteller or
is the literary idea more important? Does he writer poetic prose or long and
confusing sentences? Are the characters real and believable or do they live on
a different plane? There is no way of knowing what is coming, but the possibility
of it being great exists.
‘Memoirs of Geisha’ is Arthur Golden’s debut-novel and it is really great. It
tells the story of the life of Nitta Sayuri, a little girl with incredibly beautiful eyes
that lived in a small fishing village in 1929 Japan, until a rich aristocrat noticed
her and saw in her the potential to become a successful Geisha. She is sold to
the aristocrat and educated to become a leading Geisha, rivalling the most
important Geishas in pre-WWII Japan.
The novel is exciting in the sense that it represented (for me at least) a
completely unknown and exotic world, where the traditions and rules of pre-
WWII Japan come to life because the novel tells the story of one of its prime
movers. What struck me the most about Nitta Sayuri, the Geisha whose
‘memoirs’ we are presented with, comes across as a very likeable woman, a bit
timid at first but not in any sense a weak character. When one analyses her
decision-making however, one comes to realise that as a Geisha, everything is
decided for her and, having been sold, she has really nothing to want and to
decide.This tragedy and sadness of this kind of ‘slavery’ is heightened exactly
because Sayuri is not a weak character at all. It made me wonder whether
Sayuri, as a character, had misled the reader into liking her and rooting for her
the way she has been taught to make men like her and root for her. Is the
Sayuri of this novel an illusion? Has Sayuri, in her memoirs, retained the mask
and the skills of a Geisha as if we, the reader, are her last customers and she,
the Geisha, has won us over with the perfect portrait of a Geisha.
The novel is presented as if it were a transcription and a translation of
many interviews that were conducted by Jakob Haarhuis, a non-existent
professor of Japanese History whom allegedly wrote the ‘translator’s note’
preceding the novel. This type of presentation, common in Victorian times but
sometimes still used today (for example in Eco’s ‘The name of the rose’) adds
to the reality of these memoirs, as exquisite a work of a novelist’s craftsmanship
as it is an exotic and enticing peep into an unknown world where appearance is
paramount but nothing is what it seems.
