What is a Geisha? That’s the question Chiyo/Sayuri soon comes to ask as she’s taken from the poor fishing village of her home, and into the sprawling city of Kyoto, where she enters into the servitude of a Geisha house. Their beauty intoxicating, their presence like butterflies caught in the city’s tempest, and soon the grey-eyed Sayuri has caught the eye of a once prominent Geisha who decides to train her in the art of becoming one. Sayuri’s life changing to a series of questions on how a Geisha should act, think and be? Her training harsh, the demands plentiful and the rewards – not as she had first imagined.
Sayuri’s beauty is matched by her talent, intelligence and kind soul, and in this she attracts all around her, but unfortunately their attentions are full of many sins; envy, greed, lust and wrath, while all she wants is the man that once showed her kindness as a child.
Arthur Golden’s book captures a time of vast change in Japan, and the delicacy of women’s position in a society that views them as objects to be adorned, or to be abused, as is the case for Sayuri’s sister who is sold into a brothel, while Sayuri is saved from this fate because of her looks, though the threat is ever present. For her great beauty, that once protected her, may also be her downfall, with the unstable and dangerously entrancing Hatsumomo (a successful Geisha) seeing Sayuri for the threat she could one day become, and in this she takes every chance to ruin her.
The narrative tells of a need for love, from sisterly to romantic, and a longing for a place to belong when there is none to be had, with friendships real to those of betrayal. Its backdrop as harsh as the world Sayuri finds herself in, but Golden has created a butterfly made of steel, and despite the many attempted crushes to Sayuri’s spirit, she defies them all and tries to fly off to something far more magnificent than what is offered around her. This spirit continuing through the turbulent times surrounding World War II.
‘I long ago developed a very practiced smile…its advantage is that men can interpret it however they want; you can imagine how often I’ve relied on it.’ Arthur Golden writes Sayuri’s tale as though she is recounting her past, her secrets divulged and her inner-most thoughts shared, and if you are in doubt as to whether a male writer can produce a book from a female perspective, especially one this intimate, then you can lay your doubts to rest here. Golden’s writing looks effortless, as though he’s merely a close friend of Sayuri who’s listening to her life as she pours him another cup of Saké, and what a life it has been.
Book Edition Information:
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 9780099771517
Cover Photograph: Jodi Cobb
Presented Edition: 2011 Paperback
Background image courtesy of Will Schulenberg on Unsplash
