If books are meant to transport you to different worlds and offer you new experiences that you can never experience because of the time and space you exist in, then Arthur Golden’s novel, Memoirs of a Geisha, gives you the chance to enter a period in Japanese history that you would be grateful to see come to life before your very eyes as you read, even if you would not want to actually live in such a space.

Memoirs of a Geisha, on which the movie of the same name is based, is a novel that has generated some controversy; in particular, the notion that Golden, as a Westerner writing about the East, employs Orientalist tropes in his depiction of geishas and their lives, and also because of the lawsuit Golden faced when one of the geishas he interviewed when he was writing the book, the once popular Mineko Iwasaki, sued him for breach of contract.

However, despite its flaws and all the controversy surrounding the novel, at its heart, there is a good story here; one that, no matter where the reader is from, will surely resonate with people from all sorts of differing backgrounds.
An interpretation of the main premise of the novel itself is one that has been evoked throughout the years in countless other stories: that of the heroine who comes from humble beginnings only to rise up and become an important figure in her world. Perhaps there is some euphemism there, considering that Chiyo, the novel’s protagonist, after the death of her poor mother, is taken and sold to a Geisha house in the Kyoto district of Japan, while her sister is sold as a prostitute to a brothel.

After a long period of many trials, Chiyo, renamed Sayuri in a symbolic attempt to emphasize the great change in her life and in her as an individual herself, eventually becomes a geisha – a Japanese dancer, entertainer, and courtesan. She trains under the tutelage of a renowned geisha named Mameha and because of her great beauty and sensitivity to her world, Sayuri eventually becomes one of the most popular geisha in the district, attracting the hatred and envy of her beautiful and wrathful rival, Hatsumomo.

Soon Sayuri, wrapped in fine clothes, and dancing for powerful men, falls in love and this becomes one of several incidents that complicate the life of the girl who once lived in a hut by sea with her ailing mother, her sister and her fisherman father.
The best thing about the novel is undoubtedly the writer’s ability to recreate the geisha world of pre-World War II. Golden painstakingly recreates the scenes in the okiya (the house where geisha live), the costumes, the subtle interactions the geisha had with men, and the many rituals that were performed by a geisha. The world of the geisha is so heavily guarded that reading Memoirs of a Geisha is almost like being introduced to a whole new world.

It is a place filled with secrets and forbidden love, with vengeful women in beautiful clothes, in a time where being a woman means to be bound by tradition, expectations, rules and honour.
If presenting the traditions of geisha and writing realistically about the period in which geisha were most active can be attributed to good research, then can the same be said about Golden, a white American man, being able to create the nuanced and careful presentations of the Japanese women, and their lives, relationships and emotions, in the novel?

However he does it, it is obvious that Golden’s rendition of the women in the novel is precise and suitably emotionally rooted.
Overall, Memoirs of a Geisha is a ravishing book, with a heroine that invokes pain and sadness, but also very much highlights the enduring power of love and hope.