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Title: Autobiography of a Geisha by Sayo Masuda, G. G. Rowley ISBN: 0-231-12950-5 Publisher: Columbia University Press Pub. Date: 15 May, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: An Unapologetic Look at a Difficult Life
Comment: This book deserves a lot of publicity and has gone unrecognized for far too long. Masuda's account of a difficult (to say the least) existence as a geisha in a small town in Japan in unapologetic and strangely elegant. Her writing style is spare but she knows just how to convey each experience so that the full impact hits the reader. For someone supposedly so uneducated, Masuda's painfully-acquired wisdom lives on each and every page.
Rating: 5
Summary: We sell bodies, not art
Comment: While Minebo Iwasaki's remarkable autobiography 'Geisha, a Life' portraits the education and brilliant career of a top geisha, Sayo Masuda's recorded biography (she is illiterate) shows us a more than grim picture of the 'working' conditions of the vast majority of geisha, who were not educated to reach the top.
In fact, as a top geisha, Minebo Iwasaki could resist all her clients' sexual advances with the saying 'we sell art, not bodies'. But for the other ones the maxim was 'we sell bodies, not art'. As G.G. Rowley states clearly in his excellent introduction, the bottom line was 'sex for money'.
A geisha was a high class prostitute, who was owned by those who bought her and financed her education and kimonos. As a counterpart, they collected her fees until the total investment was paid back.
One of the most influential words in this biography is 'sold', beginning with the poor parents who were forced to sell their female children for sheer survival, over the geisha's virginity (here remarkably sold 4 times) to the milking of her protector.
This unvarnished book gives an appalling picture of the condition of the poor (the greatest part of the population) and more grimly the female poor in Japan up to the nineteen fifties of the past century. Life was a bitter struggle for survival on a diet of white rice, which many could not afford to buy every day.
This heartrending life story of a still more or less top class sex worker (there were lower ones) portraits us dreadfully that 'geisha were not considered to be human beings' (p. 76).
Nonetheless, Sayo Masuda told us a very 'human' story.
Not to be missed.
Rating: 3
Summary: interesting but not interesting enough...
Comment: If you are looking for a book containing the precious thoughts of a Geisha, like Aruthur Golden's book, I highly advise you not to read this book. I did not like this book. I only found it attractive because of the chance to see how it was for a geisha in the hot springs/spa district. Compared to geisha in Gion, Hot Spring Geisha do not appear as glamourus.
This book is an autobiography, not a study of Geisha, it only gives a slivver of a glimpse into the life of a geisha. The story is- about her which happened to include being a geisha. It's more or less the story of a woman who was ragged by the hardships and poverty of Japan during that time.
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Title: Geisha, a Life by Mineko Iwasaki ISBN: 0743444299 Publisher: Washington Square Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Women of the Pleasure Quarters: The Secret History of the Geisha by Lesley Downer ISBN: 0767904907 Publisher: Broadway Books Pub. Date: 09 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Memoirs of a Geisha ISBN: 0679781587 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 January, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Geisha by Liza Crihfield Dalby ISBN: 0520204956 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 1998 List Price(USD): $16.15 |
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Title: Geisha: A Unique World of Tradition, Elegance, and Art by John Gallagher ISBN: 1856486974 Publisher: PRC Publishing Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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