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The result is a novel with the broad social canvas (and love of coincidence) of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen's intense attention to the nuances of erotic maneuvering. Readers experience the entire life of a geisha, from her origins as an orphaned fishing-village girl in 1929 to her triumphant auction of her mizuage (virginity) for a record price as a teenager to her reminiscent old age as the distinguished mistress of the powerful patron of her dreams. We discover that a geisha is more analogous to a Western "trophy wife" than to a prostitute--and, as in Austen, flat-out prostitution and early death is a woman's alternative to the repressive, arcane system of courtship. In simple, elegant prose, Golden puts us right in the tearoom with the geisha; we are there as she gracefully fights for her life in a social situation where careers are made or destroyed by a witticism, a too-revealing (or not revealing enough) glimpse of flesh under the kimono, or a vicious rumor spread by a rival "as cruel as a spider."
Golden's web is finely woven, but his book has a serious flaw: the geisha's true romance rings hollow--the love of her life is a symbol, not a character. Her villainous geisha nemesis is sharply drawn, but she would be more so if we got a deeper peek into the cause of her motiveless malignity--the plight all geisha share. Still, Golden has won the triple crown of fiction: he has created a plausible female protagonist in a vivid, now-vanished world, and he gloriously captures Japanese culture by expressing his thoughts in authentic Eastern metaphors.
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Book Description Hardback. Condition: Good. The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine. Seller Inventory # GOR003443017
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: Very Good. This is a seductive and stunningly evocative epic on an intimate scale, which tells the extraordinary story of a geisha girl. Summoning up more than twenty years of Japan's most dramatic history, it uncovers a hidden world of erotcism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation. From a small fishing village in 1929, the tale moves to the glamourous and decadent heart of Kyoto in the 1930s, where a young peasant girl is sold into a kind of slavery, as servant and apprentice to a renowned geisha house. Transformed by one man's act of kindness, she fights her way through hardship and jealousies to become successful as Sayuri the geisha girl. Then war breaks out and she has to escape and transform herself once again. She tells her own story many years later from the Waldorf Astoria in New York; and what is so utterly extraordinary about this novel is the way it exquisitely and unforgettably evokes another culture, a different time and the details of an extraordinary way of life. It conjures up the cruelty and the heartbreak, the perfection and the ugliness of life behind the rice-paper screens, where young girls learn the arts of the geisha - dancing and singing, how to wind the kim. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. Seller Inventory # GOR003528131
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