Many years later she tells her story from a hotel in New York, opening a window into an extraordinary half-hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation and summoning up a quarter of a century of Japan's dramatic history. Well read, but remains good 'An epic tale and a brutal evocation of a disappearing world' The Times A young peasant girl is sold as servant and apprentice to a renowned geisha house. Access a growing selection of included Audible Originals, audiobooks and podcasts. It moves from a small fishing village in 1929 to the glamorous and decadent Kyoto of the 30s and on to postwar New York. Pick 1 title (2 titles for Prime members) from our collection of bestsellers and new releases.

Summoning up more than 20 years of Japan's most dramatic history, the geisha's story uncovers a hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation. Obviously this production got the short shrift, and I am upset because it is really such a marvelous book.Description for Memoirs of a Geisha Paperback. He thanked Iwasaki by name in the book’s acknowledgements, which caused Iawaski to receive strong and threatening backlash because geishas have a traditional code of silence about their. What is that? Romanized Japanese is the easiest language to pronounce: it is just like Spanish. Code of Silence: While doing research for Memoirs of a Geisha, Golden interviewed Mineko Iwasaki, a former geisha who had worked in Kyoto during the 1960s. The geisha serves a cup of 'sackey' (sake). I could hardly believe what I was hearing-'Is this some regional dialect I am unfamiliar with?' I thought. I know Japanese and Japanese culture, but you dont have to know much about Japan to do better than this! The narrator attempts a Japanese accent at points, but it emerges as crudely Chinese. I never lost myself in the story, and I could never lose my awareness of the irritating, clipped, nasal voice of this woman reading a book to me as if it were for a test in middle school.

You can't hear the spirit, the feeling, the charm of the chararaters and the plot. You can hear the commas, the capital letters, the white space in between the words. (Even that doesn't make sense, if you know the story.) But no. At first, I thought she was in character, as some sort of clipped and emotionless spinster, to convey the personality of this elderly, formal Japanese geisha telling her story. The narrator really only reads the book-reading a book is quite different from telling a story.

This is an excellent book in print, but the audiobook was ruined by its inferior production.

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden