Memoirs Of A Geisha

Memoirs of a Geisha

The main character of this novel, Chiyo, experiences so many riveting trials and tribulations, but just when all seems so bleak, many wonderful things begin to happen in her life as well. Chiyo begins to build her life, aspires to work hard to become a geisha, has many hopes, dreams and even falls in love. The novel is filled with so many historical facts of a geisha's day-to-day life in Japan during the 1930s and 1940s, and keeps your interest from beginning to end.

Memoirs of a Geisha is a novel by Arthur Golden, published in 1997. The novel, told in first-person view, tells the fictional story of a geisha working in Kyoto, Japan, before and after World War II.

In the 1930s Japan's nine-year-old Chiyo lives in the small fishing village of Yoroido on the coast of the Sea of Japan with her mother who is sick from bone cancer and her elderly father. It is during the Great Depression and he can barely afford to take care of Chiyo's mother. Chiyo soon meets an incredibly wealthy man who wants to give her a different life. Her father gives Chiyo and her sister, Satsu, to the wealthy man, named Mr. Tanaka, who takes them to Kyoto, where they are separated. Chiyo is sold to the Nitta okiya, a geisha house in the geisha district of Gion. Chiyo meets Mrs. Nitta, or "Mother", and Granny, the mistresses of the okiya. She befriends the okiya's other trainee, a girl she nicknames Pumpkin, on account of how when she focuses her tongue points out of the side of her mouth, and with her round face it looks like a stem emerging from a pumpkin. Everyone later calls her Pumpkin as well, even her customers after she becomes a geisha and has her name officially changed to Hatsumiyo.

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