Memoirs Of A Geisha (Vintage 21st Anniv Editions)

Memoirs Of A Geisha (Vintage 21st Anniv Editions)

by Arthur Golden (Author)

Synopsis

This is a seductive and evocative epic on an intimate scale, which tells the extraordinary story of a geisha girl. Summoning up more than twenty years of Japan's most dramatic history, it uncovers a hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation. From a small fishing village in 1929, the tale moves to the glamorous and decadent heart of Kyoto in the 1930s, where a young peasant girl is sold as servant and apprentice to a renowned geisha house. She tells her story many years later from the Waldorf Astoria in New York; it exquisitely evokes another culture, a different time and the details of an extraordinary way of life. It conjures up the perfection and the ugliness of life behind rice-paper screens, where young girls learn the arts of geisha - dancing and singing, how to wind the kimono, how to walk and pour tea, and how to beguile the most powerful men.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 512
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 04 Aug 2011

ISBN 10: 0099563088
ISBN 13: 9780099563082
Book Overview: A special celebratory edition to mark the 21st birthday of Vintage books.

Media Reviews
A startling debut.... By turns fairy tale, romance, coming of age and historical first novel, Memoirs of a Geisha is an astounding magic act.
- Ottawa Citizen
A fascinating, poignant and entirely believable tale, as delicate, intricate and beautiful as the silk kimonos so central to the story.... Captivating ... lush [and] lyrical.... This is a luxurious book, every page fat with evocative, beautiful words.... If life is a simple stream, Memoirs of a Geisha is a shimmering pebble that makes the water dance.
- The Toronto Sun
A startling act of literary impersonation, a feat of cross-cultural masquerade on the order of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day.... Golden's description of a kept woman's fleshly epiphanies has the purity of Colette.
- Vogue
Cause for celebration.... Rarely has a world so closed and foreign been evoked with such natural assurance.... In the unforgettable Sayuri, Golden has found the heart and matter of a truth that lies beyond detail.
- The New Yorker
A truly engrossing story. The reader suffers, triumphs, dreams and doubts with the heroine, all the way through.... Beautifully written.
- Sunday Express
Exceptional....This is one of those rare novels that evokes a vanished world with absolute conviction.
- Daily Mail

From the Paperback edition.


Astonishing . . . breathtaking . . . You are seduced completely. --Washington Post Book World

Captivating, minutely imagined . . . a novel that refuses to stay shut. --Newsweek

A story with the social vibrancy and narrative sweep of a much-loved 19th century bildungsroman. . . . This is a high-wire act. . . . Rarely has a world so closed and foreign been evoked with such natural assurance. --The New Yorker
Author Bio
Arthur Golden was born and brought up in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He is a 1978 graduate of Harvard College with a degree in art history, specialising in Japanese art. In 1980 he earned an MA in Japanese history from Columbia where he also learned Mandarin Chinese.