Well above them are the geisha whose fees for entertaining men at teahouses and parties and for serving as long-term mistresses to the highest-bidding patrons support the okiyo. There is a pecking order in the Nitta okiyo, and young maids like Chiyo who have been bought to become income-producing geisha are at the very bottom. The cruelty and exploitation they endure rival that found in Dickens’ “Oliver Twist” and instantly arouse the reader’s indignation and sympathy. Chiyo, being more attractive, is sent to an okiyo, a boarding house for geisha, while her hapless sister goes to a brothel. Instead, he arranges for her father to sell both Chiyo and her older sister to people in Kyoto who are all too willing to make use of them. Chiyo is foolish enough to think he might adopt her and thus rescue her from her destitute “tipsy house” on the Sea of Japan before her elderly father and cancer-ridden mother die. Her unusual striking blue-gray eyes catch the attention of the wealthy owner of the Japan Coastal Seafood Co. Golden tells a mesmerizing story of a poor fisherman’s daughter named Chiyo, who in the 1930s is sold into slavery at age 9. “Memoirs of a Geisha” is a bravura performance, a first novel that provides a vivid view into a largely lost and secret world. He has created an utterly convincing fiction that is also stirring and beautiful. Voice is central to literature, and Arthur Golden, who has degrees in Japanese art and history from Harvard and Columbia, has managed to disguise, alter and project his with the skill of a talented ventriloquist and impersonator. Would “Memoirs of a Geisha” be so remarkable if it weren’t written by a white American male? Would the first-person story of the hardship and ritual of a geisha’s life in the Gion district of Kyoto during the 1930s and ‘40s be less fascinating if it were based on personal experience rather than on a brilliant alchemy of research and imagination? Certainly, the feat of an outsider capturing an alien world makes us marvel.
0 kommentar(er)
