Book #70: Memoirs of a Geisha

Book #70: Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

January 20, 2014


I had been trying to get my hands on a copy of this book since I started this blog. I've never seen the movie (I'd really love to, as I'm sure it would be visually stunning), but it's another one of those books that I've always meant to read. A woman who works for the organization that I teach for (I'm not really an employee of this same organization, but of the local school district; my students are residents on this treatment facility campus) had a copy, and it took her a while to get through it. But when she was finished, she kindly loaned it to me.

I'll start by saying that geisha are not exactly like prostitutes. True, they are paid for having sex with men...but at one point, Sayuri (the narrator of the book, the 'geisha' of the title) compares geisha to 'kept women' of Western culture, and that's probably closer to the truth. Geisha (that's both the plural and singular...didn't know that going into this) are cultural symbols; Sayuri at one point calls them 'playthings' of the men in power. But the men in power are their playthings as well, to some extent. Prostitutes are...well, prostitutes.

Typically, a young woman of standing in Japan at that time (I'm referring to the earlier part of the 20th century, including World War II) did not aspire to be a geisha. Mameha, Sayuri's 'older sister' (mentor geisha) once said that a geisha is a geisha because she has no choice. That was so with Sayuri. She'd come from a small fishing village. Her mother was very sick, and her fishman father was old, and had nothing to leave for his two daughters. Sayuri (then Chiyo, though her name would change when she became a geisha officially), as a young girl, was noticed by a local businessman, who basically convinced her father to sell her to an okiya (a small compound for geisha in a geisha district). Her older sister, not nearly so lovely, was sold off as a prostitute, and later ran away from Kyoto.

I found the time frame of this book to be off balance. Though the title of this book would make you think that it would focus on Sayuri's time as a full-fledged geisha, this is not really the case. More time is spent on her childhood, particularly her early years in Gion, suffering under Hatsumomo, the star geisha in her okiya. Hatsumomo is a fascinating character, and one thing that disappointed me about this book is that more is not explained about her past. I feel like I learned more about Nobu, Sayuri's almost-danna, then I did about Hatsumomo. Though they were enemies from the start (for Hatsumomo, whose position in the okiya was precarious because she was not an adopted daughter, was threatened by lovely young Chiyo with her strange blue/grey eyes), you would think that Sayuri would somehow learn more about how Hatsumomo came to be such a bitch. Yet her character isn't really fleshed out; she suffers a terrible, though somewhat unknown, fate, when her increasingly erratic behavior and her out-of-control drinking (as well as the fact that Sayuri had secured her place as the adopted daughter of the okiya, in spite of Hatsumomo's years of trying to sabotage her) gets her throw out on the street.

It's so cold. There is no love in this world. Sayuri is adopted by the woman she calls 'Mother' (though only because that's what everyone in the okiya, including her own adopted sister, calls her) because she makes a good living as a geisha. Mostly this is from being a popular entertainer. Most of her money would also come from her danna, the man who 'keeps' her. The man actually has to make a deal with the head of the geisha's okiya, and the local teahouses are also involved in this. When a geisha has a danna, she still goes out to entertain. Any time that she spends with men, as she pours their drinks, laughs at their jokes, performs dances for them or plays an instrument, is paid for, through the teahouse that is hosting. Geisha mean big business, and the entire community of Gion not only benefits from, but is dependent upon, the success of the geisha who work in the many teahouses there. I couldn't help but think, as Sayuri was regarding some of her patrons as her friends, that this was a strange sort of friendship. I mean, they paid her to spend time with them. It's not a bad way for a woman to make her money, and hey, I can't even really judge the sexual stuff (as Sayuri said, it's not really any different from being a 'kept woman,' besides all the other people involved in the negotiations). But to call these patrons friends...well, I guess I didn't see enough of Sayuri's time as an actual geisha to really buy into that.

I was definitely disappointed in the second half of the book, when I was so drawn into young Chiyo's plight. With some of the foreshadowing, I was led to think that the years of World War II would have a huge impact on Sayuri's life. Yet that part is so brief; for a few years, she's living outside of Kyoto and working for a kimono maker, who had been commissioned to sew parachutes for the Japanese army. Sayuri describes how the war changed her physically, but otherwise she seemed much the same. And from there, it's an abrupt rush to the end of the book, where Sayuri gets what her heart has always desired, but in a way that I found to be disappointing.

You see, I actually wanted Sayuri to end up with Nobu. I saw him as one of those curmudgeon with a heart of gold type of characters, and I am always drawn to those. I wanted the ever-perfect Chairman to not be perfect in some way; I didn't feel anything for this character one way or the other, though he was the one driving force in Sayuri's entire life. Ever since the day he'd comforted her when she was a young girl crying on the streets, she'd sworn that she'd become a star geisha and win his heart. Well, the Chairman had been scheming to get to her himself, until he saw his partner Nobu's interest in the young woman. That ending was explained kind of sloppily; I recall that Mameha, in taking Sayuri to the sumo tournament the day that she met Nobu, had done so with the express purpose of her meeting Nobu; yet the Chairman says that he had directly asked Mameha to help young Chiyo become a geisha for him. So I'm bothered enough by that detail that I just can't buy into that ending.

Plus, I thought that Sayuri's original assumption about Mameha's involvement was more believable. I can buy into Mameha having an interest in her rival's scapegoat, a pretty young girl with potential, and using that girl against her. Mameha was most interesting and real then. She was also very real when it was revealed that she'd been pregnant by her danna, a pig referred to as the Baron, three times, and had all of them aborted. Some pregnant geisha have their babies, but abortions are common with geisha. It's an embarrassing topic to discuss, somewhat taboo, but not a hot-button issue in their culture.

But besides those two moments, Mameha kind of is the 'little miss perfect' that Hatsumomo accuses her of being. I felt like, in spite of the length of the text, the characters in this book were not as well fleshed-out as they might have been. Golden went into detail about the characters physical appearances (Gion is full of ugly men with money and beautiful women), but other than Nobu or Sayuri herself, there were many things that I still wanted to know about most of the other important characters, such as Pumpkin or Mother. This story had a lot of potential, and while it was full of the interesting details that I look for in books that center around other cultures, I felt like this book was very off-balance. I'm sure the movie is magnificent, if they have kimono that are as beautiful as the ones described in the book, and cherry blossoms, and mountains and hot springs. Turning this book into a film was probably a dream come true for the production team, I'm sure.