And I thought it took me awhile to get ready..

I thought it took me awhile to get ready in the mornings, but that’s nothing compared to what a geisha had to do during the 1920s and 1930s.  They were truly dedicated to their art.

I was inspired to re-read this book, Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden, after watching the movie based on it this past weekend.  Honestly, it is one of the better novels turned into a movie that I’ve seen and I was really impressed that everything I saw in the movie almost was exactly as I pictured it while reading the novel.

Memoirs is the story of Chiyo, a little girl who along with her sister are sold by her parents to places in Kyoto, Japan.  She is very unusual for she has blue-gray eyes instead of the traditional brown.  Chiyo is sold to an okiya, or geisha house while her older sister, Satsu, is sold to what we’d consider a whorehouse.  Chiyo is scared and confused about her new life, but is told that if she does what she is asked, she may someday become a great geisha like the one currently in residence at the Nitta okiya, Hatsumomo.  Chiyo quickly becomes friends with a girl she nicknames Pumpkin, and soon Chiyo is on her way to becoming a geisha when she starts learning the geisha arts at school.

However, Chiyo misses her family terribly.  When learning of her sister’s location nearby in another part of Kyoto, she sneaks out of the okiya to meet Satsu and they make plans of escaping in a few days.  A problem arises when Hatsumomo is found out to have been sneaking a man into the okiya, which is forbidden.  The okiya servants are punished by not being let out of the okiya, seeming to stop Chiyo from leaving.  Chiyo realized she could still meet her sister by sneaking out onto the roof, but Chiyo falls and breaks her arm.  The owners of the okiya, called Granny, Mother, and Auntie are disappointed as this adds even more to the debt that Chiyo has cost them.  Chiyo’s dreams of becoming a geisha are now over.

While running an errand, Chiyo meets the Chairman, who is surrounded by geisha.  Chiyo realizes that in order to become close to him, she needs to become a geisha.  Soon a well-respected geisha, Mameha, stops by the Nitta okiya and tells Mother she wants to have Chiyo become her little sister – meaning Mameha will mentor her.  This comes as a surprise to all because Chiyo was forced to ruin one of Mameha’s kimonos by Hatsumomo a few years earlier.  Mother and Mameha make a wager on how successful Chiyo will become and Mameha realizes that since Mother does not have an heir that she will adopt one of the geisha – Pumpkin, Hatsumomo, or Chiyo – to become the daughter of the okiya.

Soon Chiyo is bonded to Mameha as her younger sister, and is no longer Chiyo, but Sayuri.  Sayuri continues on the path to becoming a full geisha, which is most of the rest of the book.  She entertaines various men, including the Chairman she met all those years before, whom she loves.  Sayuri is even forced to leave Kyoto during and a few years after World War II. 

The real issue here is love.  Geisha it seems can’t love – for it seems to bring them nothing but trouble and sadness.  A prize for many men was to buy a geisha’s mizuage, to be the first person to sleep with a geisha, which Sayuri set the record.  There is also the danna, or patron, of a geisha who pays for the geisha’s expenses.  For many of these men that are danna, geishas are their mistresses. 

I’ll leave it up to you, my readers, to read the content of this book.  It is something hard to explain to someone unless you’ve read it.  Parts of this book are more graphic than I thought, especially relating to an “eel” exploring a woman’s “cave.”  However, this work was partially inspired by the real life of a geisha named Mineko Iwasaki who did live in Kyoto during the 1960s and 1970s.

I would recommend this book, as well as the movie it’s based on.  It is always amazing to me to see how different people’s lives can be, and yet they still feel and love no different from the rest of us.

That’s it for this week.  What’s up for next week’s review?  I’ve got a couple of options but I’m still trying to decide, there’s so many books to choose from!

Thanks for reading, and I’ll hopefully see you next week!