Memoirs of a Geisha
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Summary
'An epic tale and a brutal evocation of a disappearing world' The Times
Summoning up more than twenty years of Japan's most dramatic history, Memoirs of a Geisha uncovers a hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation.
From a small fishing village in 1929, the tale moves to the glamorous and decadent heart of Kyoto in the 1930s, where a young peasant girl is sold as a servant and apprentice to a renowned geisha house. Telling her story many years later from the Waldorf Astoria in New York, each page exquisitely evokes another culture, a different time and the details of an extraordinary way of life. It conjures up the perfection and the ugliness of life behind rice-paper screens, where young girls learn the arts of geisha: dancing and singing, how to wind the kimono, how to walk and pour tea, and how to beguile the most powerful men.
Summoning up more than twenty years of Japan's most dramatic history, Memoirs of a Geisha uncovers a hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation.
From a small fishing village in 1929, the tale moves to the glamorous and decadent heart of Kyoto in the 1930s, where a young peasant girl is sold as a servant and apprentice to a renowned geisha house. Telling her story many years later from the Waldorf Astoria in New York, each page exquisitely evokes another culture, a different time and the details of an extraordinary way of life. It conjures up the perfection and the ugliness of life behind rice-paper screens, where young girls learn the arts of geisha: dancing and singing, how to wind the kimono, how to walk and pour tea, and how to beguile the most powerful men.