Memoirs of a Geisha

Memoirs of a Geisha is a novel, but it presents itself as the true account of an elderly woman. In the opening, a supposed historian says he gathered the recollections of Nitta Sayuri, a former geisha living in New York. After that, she is the one speaking, in the first person, looking back.

This frame is a literary trick: the reader enters the story like someone listening to a grandmother tell about the past, with affection, vanity, and a few gaps. It's worth remembering the whole time that none of it is real biography. It is fiction, written by an American, inspired by research on Japan in the first half of the twentieth century.

It all begins in a small fishing village by the sea, in the late 1920s. Chiyo, nine years old, has blue-gray eyes that are rare in that region, and she lives with her father, already old, and her mother, who is very ill. The house is poor, crooked, and smells of fish, and the family gets by as best it can.

A local merchant, Mr. Tanaka, sees opportunity where others see misfortune. In exchange for money, he takes Chiyo and her older sister, Satsu, to the big city, with the promise of better work. Their father accepts because he sees no way out, and their mother has no strength to stop it. It is the act that tears the girl away from her childhood.

The book treats the scene soberly, but it leaves a sense of unease: a child is sold, and everyone around her finds excuses to call it an opportunity. The story thus begins with a kind of exploitation that, in other forms, still exists today, when poverty is used as an argument to take away the choice of people who have no way to refuse.

The train ride to Kyoto is the last time Chiyo sees the world she knew. On arrival, the sisters are separated. Satsu is taken to a brothel, a fate the book shows with discretion, and Chiyo is sent to a geisha house in the Gion district, called an okiya.

The separation is the protagonist's first great wound. For years, she tries to find her sister again, and that search is one of the threads of the story. The contrast between the two, one thrown into a worse fate and the other into a world full of luxury and traps, shows how chance decides entire lives.