Previously published September 26, 2007 at:
http://5riversnews.blogspot.com/2007/09/review-memoirs-of-geisha-by-arthur.html
As usual, it would seem I'm in a minority with this romantic tale
of Chiyo-become-Sayuri, the peasant girl who became geisha.
Set amid the backdrop of Depression Era and World War II Japan, the
story takes you from Chiyo's fishing village, peasant beginnings to
the opulent, harsh and at the same time frivolous world of Gion,
where Chiyo transforms into a highly trained geisha known as
Sayuri, and from there into the bitterly harsh realities of
post-war Japan where she eeks out an existence as a dyer for a
former, famed kimono maker.
While I wanted to become enveloped in this artful, contrived world
of the geisha, as I was in the film, I found myself distanced.
Golden's insights of things Japanese is masterful, but I feel his
insights of things feminine lacking. This became uncomfortably
clear during the section dealing with Sayuri's virginity sale, and
how she reacts to her successful buyer. For a young girl without
sexual knowledge she is remarkably cool, to the point the entire
section becomes dispassionate and a non-event.
Even prior to that when the infamous Baron wishes to see what he's
bidding for and secrets her away to undress her, the terror of the
moment is utterly lost.
Indeed the only terror Sayuri feels, and even then it's not sexual,
is much later on, after she's become a very well-known and
experienced geisha, and attempts to thwart a would-be patron's bid
for her. Her shame, and her terror, is not for the act of sex, but
rather that the Chairman, her long-time love, discovers her rather
than her intended victim.
Perhaps this distancing is a cultural difference. Perhaps not. As
such I was left feeling the author's credibility lacked.
There are other instances of emotional distance. While Chiyo, and
then Sayuri, mourns the loss of her mother, it is lost on the
reader because there has been little by way of relationship
development, and so Chiyo's mourning becomes nothing more than
whining. Again, this occurs in the relationship between Chiyo and
her father. She professes to miss him, and yet he has never treated
her with kindness. And the relationship between Chiyo and her
sister, and her need to find her sister, looses emotional impact
because there has been little in the way of development of this
relationship. We are expected, as a reader, to simply accept there
is a bond. It doesn't work. And so not only Chiyo/Sayuri, but the
entire tone of the novel, comes off as cool, without passion, and
certainly it would appear from the words Golden chooses he very
much wishes the reader to feel passionately.
As it is, I would rate Memoirs of a Geisha as light summer reading,
and entirely forgettable.