"Has there ever been an abandoned child," asks Sayo Masuda in her powerful memoir, "who goes on to live happily?" Sold by her mother first into indentured servitude and then into a geisha house, Masuda answers her own question with a survivor's confidence in the facts. Unlike Arthur Golden's novel,Memoirs of a Geisha, Autobiography of a Geisha is not an idealized view of life in the flower and willow world. Sayo Masuda's plainspoken chronicle of her life is told without sentimentality or fancy touches. And the facts are plenty.
Autobiography of a Geisha shocked Japan when first serialized in a Japanese women's magazine over 40 years ago, and Sayo Masuda, with "half a lifetime of pain and struggle" (the book's Japanese subtitle) became a sensation. Hers was not the glamorous life of a big-city escort. Masuda lived and worked in a geisha house near a tatty hot-spring resort in the countryside, and her stories of the days and nights with her sister geishas and their clients are tough and told with the world-weary wit of a woman who has seen it all.
While some considered geishas higher ranking than prostitutes by virtue of their training in the traditional arts of painting and music, Masuda makes clear that her geisha's life was no walk in the park. A geisha's biggest dream, she tells us, was to have her contract purchased by a wealthy client. But "either way there was a rope around your neck. What difference did it make who held the other end?" When Masuda fled her arrangement as "number three" mistress of a small-time gangster named Cockeye, she discovered that life in postwar Japan was rougher than she ever imagined.
Though she had barely more than an elementary education, Masuda is a natural-born raconteur who pulls no punches - she's unashamed of her career, or her grief at the suicides of a beloved sister geisha and her devoted younger brother. In a narrative rendered fluid and immediate by G.G. Rowley's translation, Autobiography of a Geisha is both an absorbing expose of the elaborate formalities and mean lives of Japan's women of comfort and a Dickensian page-turner complete with reversals of fortune and narrow escapes.
- Philip Herter's Foreign Correspondence appears regularly in the Times.
