Memoirs of a Geisha

Memoirs of a geisha

History with a hint of fairy tale. This story written by Arthur Golden is a story about a young little girl named Chiyo growing up to be a true Geisha in Kyoto. Chiyo was a 6 year old girl who lived in a tipsy house located in Yoroido. She has a unique gray coloured eye that was received from her mother who has had two much water in her eyes. Her mother was very ill and her father didn’t have enough money to support his family financially so Chiyo and her sister were sold to a Geisha house in Kyoto. This is where her story begins. As a child she did not know what a Geisha was until she met this man who had changed her life. She had faith that one day she will become as beautiful as the other Geishas and that the Chairman will adopt her to his house. With that faith she practiced and trained for many years until she finally became a true Geisha. She became a lady with the highest bid and finally met the Chairman. This sort of story is what attracts reader’s deeply in to this book. Learning Japanese culture as well as understanding a Geisha’s point of view of life. This book was able to become #1 international bestseller due to the author’s good use of symbolism, imagery and   historical-fairytale style.

The author starts off the book with Sayuri (Chiyo’s Geisha name) as a narrator of her own story. As the author describes her life in childhood, she briefly explains about how her parents met. “My mother always said she’d married my father because he had too much water in her personality and he had too much wood in his.” (Golden, pg9) The author does not clearly describe the meaning of having too much water or wood in personality but as you continue to read on this personality is very symbolic. “With all this water and all this wood, the two of them ought to have made a good balance and produced children with proper arrangement of elements.” (Golden, pg10) There is a sense of imagination between the paragraphs but it’s understood as water...