But as her mother lies dying, her aged father sells nine-year-old Chiyo and her older sister to a man with connections to the top geisha houses in the Gion district of Tokyo. Written as a fictional memoir (including a fictional “translator’s note” at the beginning), the book tells the extraordinary story of one woman’s life as a geisha.Ĭhiyo, a pretty grey-eyed child, is born into an impoverished fishing family living in a village on the coast of the Sea of Japan. For some inexplicable reason, both have passed me by. It has even been turned into a Hollywood film. Remember that project I set myself at the start of the year, the one in which I read at least a dozen books from my TBR that are listed in Peter Boxall’s 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die? Well, this is book four (I’m woefully behind) - and what a mixed bag it turned out to be.Īrthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha seems to be one of those novels that everyone has read. Fiction – paperback Vintage 497 pages 2005.
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