A Conversation with Arthur Golden, about Memoirs of A Geisha
Q: What sparked your interest in the subject of geisha?
A: I studied Japanese language and culture in college and graduate
school, and afterward went to work in Tokyo, where I met a young man whose
father was a famous businessman and whose mother was a geisha. He and I never
discussed his parentage, which was an open secret, but it fascinated me. After
returning to the U.S., I began work on a novel in which I tried to imagine this
young man's childhood. Gradually I found myself more interested in the life of
the mother than the son and made up my mind to write a novel about a geisha.
I read everything I could find on the subject, in English and in Japanese,
and ended up writing an 800 page first draft focusing on five years in the life
of a Kyoto geisha shortly after World War II. Then as I prepared to revise the
manuscript, a longtime Japanese friend of my grandmother's offered to introduce
me to a Kyoto geisha named Mineko--retired already at the age of 42 and
evidently willing to talk to me. I flew to Japan to meet with her, not at all
certain what to expect. I worried she might spend an afternoon chatting with me
about the sights and then wish me best of luck. But instead she answered every
question I asked, always with great candor, and took me on an insider's tour of
the geisha district of Gion in Kyoto, even arranging for me to observe and
photograph the daily ritual of a geisha being helped into her kimono by a
professional dresser. She took my understanding of a geisha's daily existence
and stood it on its head. I had to throw out my entire 800 page draft and start
from scratch.
Q: Why was she willing to open up to you? You state in the beginning of
your novel that geisha don't generally talk about their experiences.
A: She had a number of reasons, I believe. For one thing, she knew I
wasn't approaching her as a journalist, but as a fiction writer. I didn't want
salacious details about her customers; I never asked for names, or even about
experiences she'd had, but only about the rituals and routines of a geisha's
life. I found Mineko to be a very kind woman with a generous spirit; we became
and remain friends. Actually, I can think of another reason why she helped me:
during her years as a geisha, Mineko had at one time or other met many of
Japan's great living writers and artists. With her considerable respect for
cultural traditions, probably she felt some concern for a struggling young
writer.
Q: You mention that Mineko had retired already in her early forties. Is
this common among geisha?
A: Most geisha never have the option of retiring, but Mineko was
enormously successful and made a great deal of money. I don't think she enjoyed
being a geisha. She wanted to run a little bar in the Gion district rather than
continuing to wear herself out going from teahouse to teahouse entertaining
customers. In fact, I think she'd just opened a bar at the time she met her
husband, who is an artist. She retired from the Gion district when they decided
to marry.
Q: Is Mineko the model for your protagonist, Sayuri?
A: No, I wouldn't say that. Though it's true that after meeting Mineko,
my understanding of geisha changed fundamentally, and of course, my idea of
Sayuri changed along with it. I had imagined that geisha probably sprinkled
their conversations with high-handed references to art and poetry, but in fact,
Mineko was too naturally clever to resort to anything so artificial. For
example, when she and her family came to visit us in Boston, I took her to
Harvard Yard to see the place; it happened to be an hour or so after
commencement ceremonies had ended. We sat together on a bench while I explained
the meaning of the different colored gowns--black for undergraduates, blue for
master's degrees, and red for PhDs--when an older man stumbled by, clearly a bit
drunk. Mineko turned to me and said, "I guess that man's nose just got a
PhD." That comment strikes me as so characteristic of Mineko. She became
such an exceptionally successful geisha partly because of her cleverness--though
her great beauty had a good deal to do with it as well.
In establishing Sayuri's voice in the novel, I considered it essential to
find some quality of cleverness that would help her rise out of the mire in
which most geisha have no choice but to spend their lives. So in this sense, I
did draw on my knowledge of Mineko to create Sayuri. However, the story of
Sayuri's life in no way relates to Mineko's. In fact, I've never asked Mineko
anything beyond the most superficial questions about her history. I didn't want
to limit the possibilities that might suggest themselves to me as I tried to
imagine Sayuri's struggle.
Q: Did you feel any reluctance, as a man, to try writing a novel from the
point of view of a woman?
A: I certainly did. As an American man of the 1990s writing about a
Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides--man to
woman, American to Japanese, and present to past. Actually, I see a fourth
divide as well, because geisha dwell in a sub-culture so peculiar that even a
Japanese woman of the 1930s might have considered it a challenge to write about
such a world. Before meeting Mineko, I'd written a draft in third person. Even
after interviewing her I felt no temptation to try entering the head of my
protagonist by writing in first person. Instead I wrote another 750 page draft
in third person. While I was revising it for submission, a number of big name
agents and editors in New York began calling me--very heady stuff for an
unpublished writer. But when they saw the manuscript, they all lost interest. I
know I'm a perfectly competent prose stylist; I didn't think the writing itself
had scared them away. And the subject matter is so fascinating--or at least it
was fascinating to me. The way I saw it, if I'd failed to bring the world of
geisha compellingly to life, I'd done something dreadfully wrong. And in fact,
as I came to understand, my mistake was having chosen to use a remote,
uninvolved narrator. So you see, I'd ended up writing a dry book precisely
because of my concerns about crossing four cultural divides.
By this time I'd spent more than six years on the project; I certainly felt
no temptation to give it up. During these years of work I'd come to know my
protagonist and the sub-culture in which she dwelt so much better than I'd ever
imagined possible; very quickly I began to ask myself why I shouldn't try
crossing those cultural divides after all. As for seeing things from the point
of view of a woman, well, I knew my wife quite well; I understood how she felt
about things. I felt I could say the same about my mother, and my sister, and
quite a number of women friends. If I could understand and sympathize with their
points of view, perhaps I could do the same with Sayuri's.
Q: Why did you choose to begin the novel with a translator's preface. The
book isn't really in any meaningful sense a translation, is it?
A: No, it isn't a translation; I wrote it in English. My Japanese is
fine, but certainly not good enough for that! I did, however, always try to keep
in mind how things would be expressed in Japanese, and to select words and
phrases that I felt would convey the same tone. But the translator's preface
serves quite a different purpose. In writing a novel from the perspective of a
geisha, I faced a number of problems. To begin with, how would Americans
understand what she was talking about? Even fundamental issues like the manner
of wearing a kimono or makeup couldn't be taken for granted if the audience
wasn't Japanese. When I'd written the novel in third person, the narrator had
had the freedom to step away from the story for a moment to explain things
whenever necessary. But it would never occur to Sayuri to explain things--that
is, it wouldn't occur to her unless her audience was not Japanese. This is the
role of the translator's preface, to establish that she has come to live in New
York and will be telling her story for the benefit of an American audience.
That's also the principle reason why the novel had to end with her coming to New
York. It took me a number of tries to find a believable way of getting her
there.
Q: Here's a question you've undoubtedly heard before: Are geisha
prostitutes?
A: As a matter of fact, all through the years I worked on this novel,
that was the first question people asked me. The answer isn't a simple yes or
no. The so-called "hot springs geisha," who often entertain at
resorts, are certainly prostitutes. But as Sayuri says in the novel, you have to
look at how well they play the shamisen, and how much they know about tea
ceremony, before you determine whether they ought properly to call themselves
geisha. However, even in the geisha districts of Kyoto and Tokyo and other large
cities, a certain amount of prostitution does exist. For example, all apprentice
geisha go through something they call mizuage, which we might call,
"deflowering." It amounts to the sale of their virginity to the
highest bidder. Back in the '30s and '40s, girls went through it as young as
thirteen or fourteen--certainly no later than eighteen. It's misleading not to
call this prostitution, even child prostitution. So we can't say that geisha
aren't prostitutes. On the other hand, after her mizuage, a first-class geisha
won't make herself available to men on a nightly basis. She'll be a failure as a
geisha, though, if she doesn't have a man who acts as her patron and pays her
expenses. He'll keep her in an elegant style, and in exchange she'll make
herself sexually available to him exclusively. Is this prostitution? Not in the
exact sense we mean it in the West, where prostitutes turn "tricks"
with "johns," and so on. To my mind, a first-class geisha is more
analogous to a kept mistress in our culture than to a prostitute.
Reproduced with the permission of the publisher, Knopf
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