As usual, it would seem I’m in a minority with this romantic tale of Chiyo-become-Sayuri, the peasant girl who became geisha.
Set amid the backdrop of Depression Era and World War II Japan, the story takes you from Chiyo’s fishing village, peasant beginnings to the opulent, harsh and at the same time frivolous world of Gion, where Chiyo transforms into a highly trained geisha known as Sayuri, and from there into the bitterly harsh realities of post-war Japan where she eeks out an existence as a dyer for a former, famed kimono maker.
While I wanted to become enveloped in this artful, contrived world of the geisha, as I was in the film, I found myself distanced. Golden’s insights of things Japanese is masterful, but I feel his insights of things feminine lacking. This became uncomfortably clear during the section dealing with Sayuri’s virginity sale, and how she reacts to her successful buyer. For a young girl without sexual knowledge she is remarkably cool, to the point the entire section becomes dispassionate and a non-event.
Even prior to that when the infamous Baron wishes to see what he’s bidding for and secrets her away to undress her, the terror of the moment is utterly lost.
Indeed the only terror Sayuri feels, and even then it’s not sexual, is much later on, after she’s become a very well-known and experienced geisha, and attempts to thwart a would-be patron’s bid for her. Her shame, and her terror, is not for the act of sex, but rather that the Chairman, her long-time love, discovers her rather than her intended victim.
Perhaps this distancing is a cultural difference. Perhaps not. As such I was left feeling the author’s credibility lacked.
There are other instances of emotional distance. While Chiyo, and then Sayuri, mourns the loss of her mother, it is lost on the reader because there has been little by way of relationship development, and so Chiyo’s mourning becomes nothing more than whining. Again, this occurs in the relationship between Chiyo and her father. She professes to miss him, and yet he has never treated her with kindness. And the relationship between Chiyo and her sister, and her need to find her sister, looses emotional impact because there has been little in the way of development of this relationship. We are expected, as a reader, to simply accept there is a bond. It doesn’t work. And so not only Chiyo/Sayuri, but the entire tone of the novel, comes off as cool, without passion, and certainly it would appear from the words Golden chooses he very much wishes the reader to feel passionately.
As it is, I would rate Memoirs of a Geisha as light summer reading, and entirely forgettable.

Format:Trade Paperback
Published:January 6, 1999
Dimensions:448 Pages, 5.11 x 7.96 x 1.1 in
ISBN:067697175x
Published By:Vintage Canada