Detour! Memoirs of a Geisha.

Alright, guys. This is the long-awaited post about the book I read, oh drat, about a week ago. So, if you will excuse me for being absent for a few days, let's get back into the blog, shall we?

Memoirs of a Geisha was written in the late 90s about a fictional geisha, or artist/entertainer in Gion, Japan in the 1930s-1940s. It was slightly controversial when it originally came out because the author had interviewed an actual geisha for research, and fictionalized quite a lot about the situations and the mores of the lifestyle.

All in all, I really liked this book. First of all, it is written in a flowery, interesting style, but nothing too heady or over-the-top. It's a very lovely break from thick Russian books. As to the actual plot, it's a somewhat typical coming-of-age story, where the girl has one dream throughout her life, and through a quirk, achieves it in the end. The best part of the book, I think, was all of the descriptions of life in Japan, and the intricacies of what it really is to be a geisha. The descriptions of tea ceremonies, kimonos and dances were, frankly, quite lovely.

The protagonist says many times that a geisha is not a prostitute, she is an artist, dancer, and entertainer first and foremost. However, it seems through other things that the author says, one of the functions that a geisha performs is sometimes having sex with men with whom they have an ongoing financial arrangement. These men, called dannas think of the geisha as their mistresses. Also, when a girl is ready to lose her virginity, men bid on that, almost like an e-bay auction. This is one of the most controversial parts of the book, as ex-geisha have come out and said that the truth of the matter is absolutely nothing like that at all. Interesting at the very least.

Possible prostitution aside, it is a quite lovely book that kept me reading and kept me interested.

Tomorrow, I promise, we'll get back to War and Peace!

Days: 349 (eek!)
Books: 98 (It'll be there for a while.)