Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
During my last mini-deployment to Kuwait I was able to make it through more than ten books in three weeks. That, however, was during a lull in the election cycle, just after Senator Obama had clinched the Democratic nomination. Now, with the election heating up, I could not break away from the computer in the evenings in Kuwait, which is seven hours ahead of the East Coast. A lot of the news, speeches, and polls were being released as I was getting back to my room after work, and my total lack of restraint had me glued to the blogs when I probably should have been reading something a bit more enlightening. Even with these distractions, though, I was able to make it through 600 pages of Rebecca Fraser's The Story of Britain, and during one of my four flights back to the States I finally finished Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha.
Geisha was a runaway bestseller when it was first published a decade ago, and was made into an apparently mediocre film a few years back. It has been one of those books that hovers just on the edge of my must-read list, but never quite made it into the top-tier. When I deployed to Kuwait in June, however, I bought up a bunch of mass-market paperbacks to bring with me. Most of them were Bantam and Signet classics, but a few modern novels like Geisha as well.
The novel is really an uneven affair. Golden's great triumph is writing a convincing portrayal of Sayuri's life as a young female geisha in pre-WWII Japan despite being himself a middle-aged American man. Some of the better scenes in the book take place early on, in Saruyi's childhood just before and after she has been sold into servitude at a geisha house:
My thoughts were in fragments I could hardly piece together. Certainly it was true that a part of me hoped desperately to be adopted by Mr. Tanaka after my mother died; but another part of me was very much afraid. I felt horribly ashamed for even imagining I might live somewhere besides my tipsy house. After Mr. Tanaka had left, I tried to busy myself in the kitchen, but I felt a bit like Satsu, for I could hardly see the things before me. I don't know how much time passed. At length I heard my father making a sniffling noise, which I took to be crying and which made my face burn with shame. When I finally forced myself to glance his way, I saw him with his hands already tangled up in one of his fishing nets, but standing at the doorway leading into the back room, where my mother lay in the full sun with sheet stuck to her like skin.
Of course Mr. Tanaka has no interest in adopting her; instead he facilitates her sale to the Nitta okiya in the Gion district of Kyoto, where she is put to work as a maid in anticipation of a potential career as a geisha. Her arrival is met with great hostility from Hatsumomo, the resident geisha, and soon enough her future as a geisha is in great doubt. She accrues a large debt via various plots by Hatsumomo, and is removed from geisha training after a failed attempt to escape with her sister, who was sold into prostitution. At her lowest point, a chance encounter with a dignified businessman changes her worldview:
Ordinarily a man on the streets of Gion wouldn't notice a girl like me, particularly while I was making a fool of myself by crying. If he did notice me, he certainly wouldn't speak to me, unless it was to order me out of his way, or some such thing. Yet not only had this man bothered to speak to me, he'd actually spoken kindly. He'd addressed me in a away that suggested I might be a young woman of standing--the daughter of a good friend, perhaps. For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I'd always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness--a world in which fathers didn't sell their daughters. The noise and hubbub of so many people living their lives of purpose around me seemed to stop; or at least, I ceased to be aware of it. And when I raised myself to look at the man who'd spoken, I had a feeling of leaving my misery behind me there on the stone wall.
Without spoiling too much of the plot, suffice it to say that this man, the Chairman, plays a pivotal role in the rest of the book. He becomes Sayuri's idealized man; the idea of entertaining him as a geisha motivates her to seize the opportunity to restart her training, and to work diligently at perfecting the skills a successful geisha must possess. The road ahead of her is fraught with difficulty, not least because of the continuing hostility of Hatsumomo. But some of the obstacles are internal to Sayuri. She has experienced such dramatic swings in her fortune, dragged from an impoverished village life to the exotic world of high-end geishas only to be condemned to life as a maid, that her enthusiasm at a second-chance to become a geisha obscures the reality that a geisha's life is not her own. She remains in servitude, both financial and physical, to the men who patronize her.
The idealization of the Chairman, and her continuing desire to be reunited with him, conflicts with her relationships with other men, including the Chairman's friend and business partner, Nobu. While Sayuri's hopes fixate on the Chairman, it is actually Nobu who provides vital support for her at key moments in her life. Her relationship with Nobu actually seems much more central throughout the book, setting up serious tensions for Sayuri to resolve. It is in this resolution, one of the key moments in the latter stages of the book, that the book really falls flat. Golden misses the chance to explore the complex web of rights and obligations that a geisha, living a life of servitude, must attend to. Sayuri makes a number of self-serving choices, which she is certainly entitled to after years of subordinating herself to others, but is not forced to really face the consequences of these choices. Golden lets her off the hook, which might be temporarily uplifting, but is not satisfying as a conclusion to this woman's life.
