As is obvious from the author’s name, this is a novel pretending to be a memoir. Chiyo, a young girl, joins (or rather, is sold to) a geisha house, where she initially works as a maid, later goes through geisha training and apprenticeship, and finally becomes a full geisha.

Plot-wise, the early years get the most attention, and every subsequent year goes past faster and faster – at the beginning of the book Chiyo is 9; by the middle she is 14; by the end she’s an old woman. A lot of attention is paid to her years of painful struggle to be accepted into geisha training, and the rituals and processes of becoming a geisha, yet we hear relatively little about her time as a famous geisha. It feels like the author loses interest, or has a deadline to keep: the second half has less life and energy. The ending is the weakest part; the book just fades out with a very unsatisfying conclusion. Still, most of the plot was exciting enough, and well-enough presented, to keep me interested all the way through.

True to the memoir form, the focus of the book is on that which is small and close – jealousies, everyday events, conversations. The small-scale is presented with beautiful detail, especially of kimonos, hair styles, insides of houses. But the book has almost nothing to say about the wider world outside Chiyo’s immediate day-to-day life, such as Japanese society, the changes to Japan over all this time, or even anything insightful about the geisha tradition. While I got a rough picture of what the life of a geisha entailed, I would have liked to know a lot more.

Interestingly, all those who laud the book’s authenticity and claim that it “perfectly describes Japanese life” or something of that nature, are westerners. All comments by Japanese readers, and Westerners living in Japan, have said that Golden doesn’t know much about what he’s talking about.

So in actual fact the book is more historical romance than history. Unfortunately the romance element is hollow and naive. The characters are simplistic, and each one has a single role to play: the rival is a vicious plotter; the head of the geisha house is ugly and only cares about money; the influential man who becomes attracted to Chiyo is decent yet grumpy. Even Chiyo herself is shallow, and remains childish throughout the book. She is repeatedly described as clever, but doesn’t show it much – she doesn’t try to understand the big picture of what is going on around her, or have any sort of direction in her life. She becomes obsessed with a man she’s seen once, and then somehow keeps that infatuation alive for many years, even though she only meets him a few times a year at most, doesn’t really know him, and there are no signs that he cares about her.

(And why do all of Chiyo’s metaphors involve either trains, sea waves or tree leaves?)

All in all, not a bad book, but not particularly noteworthy either. Definitely not worth all the praise and attention it’s gotten – most of that has got to be due to the exotic setting and the word “geisha” in the title.