The 1$ Game: Memoirs of a Geisha

“The 1$ Game” is a series by one of West 10th’s Prose Editors, Victor Galov, published every other Friday. Victor buys any book that catches his attention — and costs a dollar or less. Some are Pulitzer winners or literary classics. Others are clearly neither. What do “The Fountainhead,” “The Prince,” and “50 Shades of Gray” have in common? You could find all three for just 1$. 



Today, I sing the praises of the 1997 bestseller, Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden.

Memoirs of a Geisha follows the true story Chiyo (later Sayuri), as she is forcibly dragged into the world of the Gion Prefecture of Kyoto, Japan. Serving as a Geisha in a small household, she navigates a complex world of internal politics with her rivals and sisters-in-training, as well as toeing around the delicate social position of a woman admired, lusted after, sometimes loved, and yet only sometimes acknowledged. Sayuri struggles, overcomes, falls, and stands back up, time and time again, just to survive in a world isolated far from her family.

Even with a beautiful, timeless plot that displays the best, and worst of Japanese pre-war culture and traditions, full of interesting characters and incredible emotional beats that pound drumsticks into your heart, the strength of this novel is in it’s prose. Arthur Golden uses his bilingual understanding of Japanese to create a new energy, a unique style of writing I have not experienced anywhere else. People tumble down stairs like water spills down rocks, leaves fall and flash their colors in the sun like lightning bugs, the writing alone is worth studying. I stopped annotating the best lines four pages into the novel- I was marking two or three times a paragraph.

Memoirs of a Geisha is an excellent novel, with immaculate prose and amazing characters, story, and setting. The only flaw I could find in the novel was the romance subplot, which while tangential to the main story, lacked an interesting dynamic or flair to it. Memoirs of a Geisha is an absolute must read for fans of Japanese literature, culture, or language, and I highly recommend this book to anyone else.

And I grabbed it for a dollar.