The tale of Nitta Sayuri, one of the most famous geisha in the height of Great Depression, in the famously secretive and legendary Gion district in Japan.
Who cares if the story is fictional? It did not bother me at all.
Gion is a tightly knit community of what can be called the most empowered women in Japan, the geisha.
First off, this is to be made clear. A geisha is not for sale.
She is an entertainer. A talented dancer, a singer, a witty conversationalist, and an embodiment of charm and grace. The only job of a geisha is to keep the clients entertained. After that, it is more important what kind of an impression you make on her, rather than she on you, if you are interested in knowing her better.
Nitta Sayuri was born Chiyo, in an insignificant little fishing village, somewhere on a cliff, somewhere in Japan. She lives the first nine years of her life in a, quote ''tipsy house'' unquote- a hovel, on the edge of a cliff, bent so far back that it has been supported on another wooden bar, rather like it were drunk.
She divides her life between the cliff paths, with their cold sprays of brine and their howls, and a little fishing pool, that she sometimes goes to swim in, with her sister, Satsu.
So what is so special about an insignificant nine year old in an even more insignificant village?
Her eyes.
Chiyo possesses lovely eyes - not dark brown, like the other nine hundred and ninety nine point nine nine nine....percent of Japan, but blue - grey, like a splash of pale ink on rice-paper. SHe says her mother had ones just like her. This colour indicated that she had too much 'water' in her personality, so she married a man who had too much 'wood', i.e Chiyo's father, a sad, weatherbeaten, slow man. Unfortunately for Chiyo's mother, her children tuned out not to be perfect mixes of 'wood' and 'water' as she had hoped; instead she ended up having heavy boned, slightly slow Satsu and imaginative, curious Chiyo.
On account of these eyse, Chiyo and her sister are taken to Kyoto to be sold to a prominent geisha house in Gion. Over there, however, Satsu is turned away due to her looks, or rather the lack of them, and ends up becoming a prostitute, who later runs away with a childhood playmate.
Chiyo, on the other hand, spends the first two years of her life as a servant of the okiya, or geisha house, serving under her mistresses whom she calls Mother, a walking calculator, Granny, a grumbly and often cruel old woman, and Auntie, a kind woman,a failed geisha.
Here too, she meets the cruel vamp to defeat all vamps........Hatsumomo.
Hatsumomo makes life as miserable of Chiyo as she can, but Chiyo manages to rise above them, and claim her place as a geisha, with the help of master geisha Maneha, who teaches her song, dance, posture, and most importantly, how to pour tea for a man so as to reveal just a little bit of inner wrist. Any more, and you are a whore;any less, and...where's the entertainment?
The gazillion steps it takes to be a geisha are carefully and interestingly explained, including every one of the bazagillion details that you have to take care of on the way - the rituals, the painful hairstyle, the HEAVY clothing, the singing, the dancing, the music.....and finally, the formal introduction to the rest of the geisha world, every bit as haughty and tradition obsessed as, say, British Royalty?
There is a lot more to the book, lots of other important details, but this a review, not a cheat guide. Now here's what I actually felt about the book.
The descriptions are flawless, and the narrative is extremely clear, very mathematical. Here is also where it loses. In most places, the narrative is cool, in some it is downright cold, it does not have that delightfully intimate feeling that memoirs, which are after all, a collection of memories, are supposed to have.
Some paragraphs portray emotion exquisitely, and you can feel that, and the very next ones are cool. There is the nagging feeling throughout the book, that this book was not written by a woman - it probably took a lot of research to write the book, but being a geisha was purely a woman's prerogative! It would be very hard for a man to achieve that point of comfort with the topic, to write about it as lucidly and sensitively as a woman.
The book is itself like one of those huge silk scrolls of Japanese miniature art. Lots of characters, neatly, precisely and exquisitely painted; the characters, however beautiful they may be, oddly static, with no hint of movement, no life.
The book, to put it frankly, reads not like the memoirs of a geisha, but like a textbook on one. Extraordinarily interesting for a textbook, but a textbook nevertheless.
The novel, I hear, also contains a number of inaccuracies; there was a case against Arthur Golden about that some years ago. But I, being in no position to know the facts, have not considered them and treated the novel as the independent work of fiction that it is.
Read the book for a sweeping, dramatic view of Depression - era Japan, and the timelessness of men and the secret lives they lead.
Take it, however, with a pinch of salt.
