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A review by hypatia13
Geisha: A Life by Mineko Iwasaki
4.0
This was really interesting. I'm torn between thinking how fascinating it must have been to be a top geiko, to be able to meet so many interesting people, and thinking how narrow and restricted a life it must have been, and how little practical training the geiko received.
The story is told in a very stilted and unemotional fashion, although I wonder if some of that is the challenge of translation. It took a bit of getting used to, and makes the book read more like a history than a memoir. I was also amazed at the author's memory - she recounts details of things that happen when she was only 3 years old! I'd be really surprised if she's actually able to remember that level of detail.
It's certainly some interesting background for books like Memoirs of a Geisha. I think the only thing that this book was really missing was a glossary. There are a lot of very specialized Japanese terms used throughout the book. Some of them have multiple meanings, and there are a lot of words that (to English eyes at least) look very similar. With no glossary or index, it was really hard to look back and find out what exactly was meant by a particular word.
The story is told in a very stilted and unemotional fashion, although I wonder if some of that is the challenge of translation. It took a bit of getting used to, and makes the book read more like a history than a memoir. I was also amazed at the author's memory - she recounts details of things that happen when she was only 3 years old! I'd be really surprised if she's actually able to remember that level of detail.
It's certainly some interesting background for books like Memoirs of a Geisha. I think the only thing that this book was really missing was a glossary. There are a lot of very specialized Japanese terms used throughout the book. Some of them have multiple meanings, and there are a lot of words that (to English eyes at least) look very similar. With no glossary or index, it was really hard to look back and find out what exactly was meant by a particular word.