There she is trained in the arts of dance, singing and the tea ceremony. Sold as a child by her financially desperate father, Chiyo is placed in a house for geisha as the personal maid to Hatsumomo, one of Kyoto's most sought-after geisha. In the process, Golden evokes the spectrum of traditional Japanese society.

Golden effortlessly spins the tale as the dictated autobiography of quick-witted Chiyo Sakamoto, the daughter of a poor fisherman, who attains the pinnacle of geisha success.

The life of a famous Kyoto geisha-from her painful apprenticeship in the early 1930s through the years of her prime and her later career in Manhattan-is rendered with stunning clarity in this fully imagined first novel. It is a unique and triumphant work of fiction-at once romantic, erotic, suspenseful-and completely unforgettable. In Memoirs of a Geisha, we enter a world where appearances are paramount where a girl's virginity is auctioned to the highest bidder where women are trained to beguile the most powerful men and where love is scorned as illusion. We witness her transformation as she learns the rigorous arts of the geisha: dance and music wearing kimono, elaborate makeup, and hair pouring sake to reveal just a touch of inner wrist competing with a jealous rival for men's solicitude and the money that goes with it. It begins in a poor fishing village in 1929, when, as a nine-year-old girl with unusual blue-gray eyes, she is taken from her home and sold into slavery to a renowned geisha house. Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the story of her life as a geisha. Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel tells with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha.

Geisha books