Sayuri lives a life like water flowing down a hill, until she splashes into something that forces her to find a new course.
Through her struggles, young Sayuri takes us into a geisha’s world - one where she’s trained to enchant the most powerful men, yet bear no power in choosing whom she can love. The world of geishas is where the gender dichotomy manifests to its fullest, where women are presented as nothing more than an object of desire. This is also so that they can earn a danna: a wealthy man who will pay for and take care of them in exchange for a more intimate relationship. From lavish kimonos to extensive hairdressing routines, a geisha’s main purpose is to please and entertain men, to gain their liking. In addition to becoming a skillful artist, the girls must learn how to carry themselves with grace and allure.Ī geisha will spend hours getting ready for work. Many of them started training at a very young age in a kaburenjo, a school that teaches girls how to sing, dance, play instruments, and perform tea ceremonies. Not to be confused with prostitution, the geisha business is dignified and requires years of rigorous and expensive training.įor background, in the 1920s, there were over 80,000 geishas in Japan. Sayuri is forced to become a geisha: a female Japanese entertainer specialized in the performance arts. Taking place in Japan, the novel spans from the early 1900s, when nine-year-old Sayuri is taken away from her family at the age of nine, to the 1950s, when World War II has left the country in shambles. Written by an evocative author, it tells the story of a character whom we learn to both love and hate. The only novel I’ve ever wanted to read twice in my life, Memoirs of a Geishais considered by many to be a historical fairy tale that paints a breathtakingly exotic and beautiful world.
0 kommentar(er)
