Book Review: Memoirs of a Geisha

For those of you who know me well, know that I am not nearly as big on compliments as I am on insults. However, Arthur Golden’s book deserves to be presented with its praise first. “Memoirs of a Geisha” was a wonderful story of the life of a Japanese Geisha from the depression until post-World War Two. The book went into a lot of detail of a Geisha’s day to day life and the emotions the narrator, Sayuri, felt. I enjoyed her character development and the ways everything could twist around in the book but she still kept her eyes on the one thing that gave her hope. The crippled patron, Nobu, was another well depicted multi-dimensional character. Sayuri and Nobu seemed to me to be well planned and organized characters that touched on most aspects of human emotion. I was disappointed by three things in the book.

My first disappointed was that the book was nothing more than a love story. My second disappointment was how badly written some of the other characters where in comparison to Sayuri and Nobu. Mr. Golden did not seem to spend any time at all on Pumpkin or the Chairman, even though they were very import aspects of the story. My last problem with the novel is the happy ending. In the end everything turned out happy with no proper explanation at all. I was very disappointed by the ending of the book.
In the end, Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden is worth reading. I wish the ending was better, but the imagery and language in the book makes it worth reading. I do not expect much from the movie based on this book and will not go out of my way to see it.