I finished reading another book today: Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha. It is a beautiful book, if one can say such a thing about a story that details the objectifying and abuse of women.
I lived in Japan for two years as a child, and so knew about geisha long before reading this book. They did not exist there anymore when I was there as they had when the book takes place, in the years surrounding and during World War II. I vaguely remember my mother being cautious in telling me about them, hesitant, I think, to explain to me the more sordid aspects of their careers.
Golden’s narrative fit into and also expanded my understanding of Japanese culture: love of beauty, passionate appreciation for nature, the deep importance of proper respect. It also explored uglier aspects of human nature which easily transcend national boundaries: greed, cruelty, selfishness.
I learned that a geisha was not a prostitute exactly. She was a paid entertainer, who earned her living using acquired or fostered talents in the arts to help paying customers pass the time. A geisha was valued for her femininity, her beauty, her clever conversation, her ability to sing, play, dance. If she were fortunate, she might be a paid mistress of one man, while continuing to — more or less chastely — entertain other men.
Within this context, Golden returned again and again to beauty in a kimono, a face, the angle of an arm, the movement of a body in dance. Although geisha were subjected to the injustice of a society governed tyrannically by men, they created art in and of their subjection, and it was beautiful.
Golden’s narrator has an eye for nature and the mouth of a poet. Her descriptions are simile after simile that made me think of haiku: “All that afternoon, I felt as agitated as a pile of rocks in an earthquake;” “my mind on the eve of my debut was like a garden in which the flowers have only begun to poke their faces up through the soil, so that it is impossible to tell how things will look.”
This passage in particular struck me: “Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.”
And this: “I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like ink on paper.”
I’m glad I read it.
