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Saturday October 27, 2007 - 5:29 PM
I am so in love with the Japanese culture, and the Geisha of Gion are something I dearly wish I could have seen even once. In our day and age the mysteries of the past and the old world are lost because times change so quickly it doesn't keep anything or wait for anyone. Reading this book, over and over makes me feel like I could be walking down the streets of Gion watching the geisha walk by in all their adorments and beauty. The book was also great in the fact that they tought us that they wern't just companions, or even the mislabelled prostitutes some people believe, but that they were just people who chose a different path in life and it came out just as rich, just as loving as any other human life would have. I would recommend this book 100 times if I didn't want to keep it all to myself.
Sunday July 08, 2007 - 1:26 AM
I read this book the year it was published before a film could ever have time to be produced. I still have yet to see the film but I do so love the book. I've adored the book for years and with the way it's written, I almost believed the entire encounter to be in every essence, a true life story of geisha Sayuri.
It's very well spoken, the characters are beautifully portrayed, and the details are exquisitely sculptured to the point where you can imagine the landscapes and atmospheres nearly perfectly.
Another fact about the book that does make it interesting is it's honesty about the geisha culture.
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After the Japanese edition of Memoirs of a Geisha was published, Arthur Golden was sued for breach of contract and defamation of character by Mineko Iwasaki, a retired geisha he had interviewed for background information while writing the novel. The plaintiff asserted that Golden had agreed to protect her anonymity, if she told him about her life as a geisha due to the traditional code of silence about their clients. However, Golden listed Iwasaki as a source in his acknowledgements for the novel.
In 2003, Golden's publisher settled with Iwasaki out of court for an undisclosed sum of money.
Iwasaki later went on to write her own autobiography, an account vastly different from Arthur Golden's novel, published as Geisha, A Life in the US and Geisha of Gion in the UK.
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