Eastern exposure

Arthur Golden's great Geisha

by Johnette Rodriguez

Arthur Golden is as astounded as anyone else about the roaring success of his fictional "autobiography" of a Japanese geisha, Memoirs of a Geisha. Since its publication in the fall of '97, it has spent more than 58 weeks on the New York Times best seller list and been translated into 26 languages. Golden sold the film rights to Columbia Pictures, and Steven Spielberg plans to direct. And Madonna is so taken with Memoirs she has gone for the geisha look in her newest music video!

"The astonishing thing to me is if I sit down next to someone on an airplane and we end up falling into conversation, invariably people have either read the book or know about it," Golden related in a phone conversation last week from his home in Brookline, Massachusetts. "It's gotten to be rare for people to not have heard about the book. And that just blows my mind!"

Indeed, readers from Litchfield to Little Rock have been spellbound by the struggles and growth of the young girl Chiyo and the dreams and successes of the geisha Sayuri whom she becomes. Golden introduces Sayuri's story as though she is a retired geisha, living in New York and telling her life history to an NYU professor. This sets up the confiding, intimate tone that pulls us immediately into the mind of a nine-year-old child, living in a destitute fishing village on the Sea of Japan, with an elderly father, a mother dying of cancer and an older sister, in the midst of the Great Depression. The reader is instantly captivated by the young girl's spunk, her vivid imagination, her innocent optimism. Golden grabs our attention as Chiyo and her sister are sold into slavery and taken far from their childhood home; he compels us to find out how Chiyo will cope with the tragedies of her young life and what she will learn to get her through it; and he hooks us on uncovering the everyday intricacies of geisha life, right along with Chiyo.

This is quite a feat for a 42-year-old first-time novelist, who, despite a college career that focused on Japanese art and history, maintains he knew almost as little about geisha as "your next-door neighbor." What interested Golden primarily was the writing of fiction, and in casting about for a topic, he remembered a fellow he'd met in Japan who was the son of a famous businessman and a geisha. When he started to do research for a novel about this man and his parents, he became intrigued with the sub-culture of geisha and with getting the details right about it.

"That really was the problem," Golden recalled. "If I'm going to have the main character slip into a back room for a quick meal, what is the back room like? What is the meal? What is it like when they're in a hurry? If you make it up, it's just not going to feel right."

Golden was fortunate enough to interview one of the last geisha trained in the old tradition and one of Japan's top geisha in the '60s and '70s, Mineko Iwasaki. Iwasaki, at 42, was retired from geisha life, married and the mother of a child at the time she spoke with Golden in 1992. She filled in the gaps in his research and gave him a true insider's look at daily life in Gion, the geisha section of Kyoto, where Memoirs is set. (In its heyday in the '30s, there were as many as 800 geisha in Gion; today only about 80 remain.)

What fascinated Golden as he got deeper into his topic was: "the texture of that world, a sense of what it might be like to live there, the feeling of just how different it really was. The particular experience of waking in a certain kind of room, in a certain kind of bed, with a certain kind of wierd wooden pillow. The rhythm of the day, the concerns of that kind of life."

Thus, inside the character of Chiyo/Sayuri, we hear doors sliding open or shut; we notice the hard cotton futon under our backs and straw mats under our feet; we smell the pipe smoke of "Mother," the madam of the house; we try to sleep with our necks on a wooden stand that holds up the geisha's carefully styled hairdo; we watch the change of seasons in the cherry trees that hang over the nearby river.

And all of this is evoked by a man who grew up in Chattanooga. Though Golden does not tie his storytelling ability to anything in his Southern upbringing, he cannot deny his literary/journalistic heritage: his mother, Ruth S. Holmberg, is a sister of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, chairman emeritus of The New York Times Company. Holmberg was until recently chairwoman of the company that published The Chattanooga Times .

Perhaps that background contributed to Golden's thirst for detail. But it also gave him an innate sense of the need to hold his readers' attention. Golden particularly wanted readers to come away from his book with a closeness to the main character. And so they have.

"The thing I hear most often from readers is, `I really was sad when it was over because I didn't want to lose this friend,' " Golden said, a sense of wonder in his voice. "People often think that, in fact, she was real. I've had phone calls and letters asking, `Could you give me an address where I could write to her?' "

Part of that may be the conceit of the novel and readers not paying close enough attention to the fictional set-up. But part of it is really identifying with Sayuri: with her longing to be loved, her desire to get back at those who hurt her, her confusion over whom she can trust, her resilience in the face of setbacks.

"This is, even though it's about wearing kimono, a fairly Western novel," Golden noted. "Japanese literature is much more minimalist -- it often focuses on the drudgery of daily life, feelings of ennui, it's not a happy world view. This is a more Western novel in the sense of the journey she takes and the struggles she has to overcome."

Thus, Memoirs of a Geisha is not a detailed account of the sex life of a geisha. Although the deflowering of a geisha is auctioned off to the highest bidder -- in the novel, Sayuri's, at the age of 15, brings a record-high price -- she may have little to do with that person after the ritual is completed. Her life revolves around entertaining men through dance and music, through witty conversation and casual flirtation and through the rigidly structured tea ceremony. Traditional geisha do not sell their time for brief sexual encounters -- they reserve those favors for long-term relationships with wealthy men.

Golden wanted to be careful not to overwhelm his book by the details of the world he was creating. His use of carefully chosen metaphors in Sayuri's voice accomplishes that in a marvelously lyrical way. In Memoirs of a Geisha, Golden successfully balances the basic tools of his craft -- language and plot, research and characterization -- as carefully as a geisha balances the heavy weight of her garments as she walks on tall wooden shoes. And like her, he seems to flow forward, with just the edge of the kimono fluttering behind, beckoning us on.

Arthur Golden will lecture on Friday, March 5 at 7 p.m. at the Providence Public Library. Tickets are $25 ($50 for preferred seating and admission to a private reception and book signing). Call 455-8125.