A seductive and evocative epic told on an intimate scale.
Summoning up more than twenty years of Japan's most dramatic history, Memoirs of a Geisha uncovers a hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation.
From a small fishing village in 1929, the tale moves to the glamorous and decadent heart of Kyoto in the 1930s, where a young peasant girl is sold as servant and apprentice to a renowned geisha house. Telling her story many years later from the Waldorf Astoria in New York, each page exquisitely evokes another culture, a different time and the details of an extraordinary way of life. It conjures up the perfection and the ugliness of life behind rice-paper screens, where young girls learn the arts of geisha: dancing and singing, how to wind the kimono, how to walk and pour tea, and how to beguile the most powerful men.
'An epic tale and a brutal evocation of a disappearing world' The Times
Vorwort
A special celebratory edition to mark the 21st birthday of Vintage books.
Autorentext
Arthur Golden was born and brought up in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He is a 1978 graduate of Harvard College with a degree in art history, specialising in Japanese art. In 1980 he earned an MA in Japanese history from Columbia where he also learned Mandarin Chinese.
Klappentext
'An epic tale and a brutal evocation of a disappearing world' The Times
Summoning up more than twenty years of Japan's most dramatic history, Memoirs of a Geisha uncovers a hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation.
From a small fishing village in 1929, the tale moves to the glamorous and decadent heart of Kyoto in the 1930s, where a young peasant girl is sold as a servant and apprentice to a renowned geisha house. Telling her story many years later from the Waldorf Astoria in New York, each page exquisitely evokes another culture, a different time and the details of an extraordinary way of life. It conjures up the perfection and the ugliness of life behind rice-paper screens, where young girls learn the arts of geisha: dancing and singing, how to wind the kimono, how to walk and pour tea, and how to beguile the most powerful men.