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  • Sad and dark story. By the time I finished the book I had come to the conclusion that Geishas are just exploited girls..call whatever you want but in the end it is just pitiful how the whole system work to exploit women..

    

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• ― Annam_Mathews said on Jul 5, 2006 about the Hardcover edition| Add your feedback

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  • Learning so much about the cultural view of japanese people and their geishas was a real treat. The movie doesn't compare.

    

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• ― VeraHuff said on Oct 24, 2009 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

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  • Beautifully written

  • The writing is so visual in this book it is very easy to "see" every detail. I read this while in Singapore on business so I really got into the asian themes.

    

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• ― Lmarker said on Apr 8, 2009 about the Hardcover edition| Add your feedback

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  • Re-read

  • 2nd re-read and enjoyed it just as much as the first time!

    

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• ― Lil Bit said on Feb 1, 2009 about the Mass Market Paperback edition| Add your feedback

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  • I went into this book expecting to be really bored with it but was pleasantly surprised. I wasn't crazy about the writing style but I really enjoyed learning more about Japan during that time period and the life of a geisha.

    

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• ― Deanna Kyre said on Jan 19, 2009 about the Mass Market Paperback edition| Add your feedback

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  • Very Nicely Written

  • The movie was ok, it was the reason I picked up this book in the first place. It's a pretty tender story of a young girl who has to find her own way in life while taking on a position in society that forbids doing that. The job of a geisha is interesting in itself--highly paid and envied escort! Got ... Continue

    The movie was ok, it was the reason I picked up this book in the first place. It's a pretty tender story of a young girl who has to find her own way in life while taking on a position in society that forbids doing that. The job of a geisha is interesting in itself--highly paid and envied escort! Gotta love a historical romance, especially one set in a country as exotic as Japan. There is a lot of drama, too.

    

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• ― Sssdawna said on Jan 2, 2009 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

In this literary tour de force, novelist Arthur Golden enters a remote and shimmeringly exotic world. For the protagonist of this peerlessly observant first novel is Sayuri, one of Japan's most celebrated geisha, a woman who is both performer and courtesan, slave and goddess.

We follow Sayuri from her childhood in an impoverished fishing village, where in 1929, she is sold to a representative of a geisha house, who is drawn by the child's unusual blue-grey eyes. From there she is taken to Gion, the pleasure district of Kyoto. She is nine years old. In the years that follow, as she works to pay back the price of her purchase, Sayuri will be schooled in music and dance, learn to apply the geisha's elaborate makeup, wear elaborate kimono, and care for a coiffure so fragile that it requires a special pillow. She will also acquire a magnanimous tutor and a venomous rival. Surviving the intrigues of her trade and the upheavals of war, the resourceful Sayuri is a romantic heroine on the order of Jane Eyre and Scarlett O'Hara. And Memoirs of a Geisha is a triumphant work - suspenseful, and utterly persuasive.

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