A Japanese Cinderella

...Later she surreptitiously reads snatches of Sayuri's diary...

...Or, "my face hung like a kimono from a rod...

...No such thing occurs...

...But throughout the book she remains elusive, her personality marked by a doelike innocence...

...Similarly disconcerting is the author's habit of limiting Sayuri to exclusively Japanese imagery...

...He excels, too, at teaching us about the way geisha put on makeup, the stages of their education and how they earn their living...

...But her fictional memoirs repeatedly offer up scenes rife with innuendo and delicate import, and then those scenes are flattened under the crushing weight of her bland tale...

...Golden seems to want the reader to exult in Sayuri's triumph and ignore the cruel implications of the auction, to move on eagerly to the next confrontation with Hatsumomo and the eventual union with the glamorous Chairman...

...It is wonderfully chilling stuff, and yet the book uses this crucial event, and Sayuri's reaction to it, mostly for the purposes of plot advancement...

...The stereotype of geisha is that they do not reflect upon their position in society...

...He does appear intermittently, though, hovering benignly in the background, safely out of the way of the action...

...But Golden, although his tale is sometimes concerned with sex, is no voyeur...

...In fact, it is a Cinderella story: A naïve country girl achieves big-city success, and the love of the man she has long worshiped, despite the evil machinations of her enemies...

...One lengthy section of the novel provides a particularly glaring example of this...

...Hatsumomo has done all she could to stymie this ascent, even spreading rumors that Sayuri is no virgin at all...

...Much has been made of Gulden's ambitious act of ventriloquism at the heart of this novel, and it is quite a bold project...

...Her schemes include trying to implicate Sayuri in a theft...

...In the creepiest moment of the whole sequence, Doctor Crab, the auction's high bidder, has sex with Sayuri and afterward stashes a vial of her blood away in his collection of samples from young geisha he has deflowered...

...He is more of a curator...

...Unfortunately, her clothes and trappings are far more interesting than she is: It is a problem when a novel functions best as a fashion show...

...Her skin," she says of one character, "made me think of a "piece of sashimi left on the plate overnight...

...Nevertheless, her innocence fetches a record price—one that will stand for several decades, we are told...

...Whenever the Chairman turned up, I found myself attempting to look beyond Gulden's happy ending (Sayuri finally becomes the Chairman's mistress), to gain some understanding of the compromised life of a geisha...

...This chaste and wooden infatuation seems contrary to everything else in the novel...

...He crosses lines of gender, culture and history in order to speak as Sayuri...

...The sexual symbolism is obvious...

...His narrative is imposed on an exotic world rather than organic to it...

...The first half of Golden's novel deals with the struggle between Sayuri and an older geisha, Hatsumomo, who has little on her mind besides making the younger woman miserable...

...with my eyes the size of rice crackers...

...This absurd and cruel situation—a child dressed up as a porcelain dummy, selling off her hymen—is ripe for some kind of drama that will strip away the protagonist's view and illuminate her emotions for us...

...I had seen the Chairman during only one brief moment in my life," she tells us, "but I'd spent a great many moments since then imagining him...

...Reviewed by Gabriel Brownstein English Department, Barnard College There is a suggestion of voyeurism in the title of Arthur Gulden's first novel, Memoirs of a Geisha...

...She merely reiterates it in a series of widely spaced asides to the reader...

...Everything is reduced to a backdrop for the fairy tale...

...His characters, however, fail to convey any emotional, psychological or historical complexities...

...One might argue that by underlining her cultural identity so decoratively, the author has Sayuri acting exactly as a geisha In Coining Issues Brooke Allen on John Updike's "Toward the End of Time" Bill Christophersen on Alfred Kazin's "God and the American Writer" would...

...Soon admirers will bid on her mizuage, that is, the opportunity to relieve her of her virginity...

...And she wears gorgeous silk kimonos: One was "water blue, with swirling lines in ivory to mimic the current in a stream...

...I've spent days trying to figure out how to ruin your life," she cackles...

...To be sure, at one point she has "the sudden insight that nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine," but it doesn't change a persistent tendency not to ponder anything too complicated, such as World War II or her near-prostitute status...

...That brings us to the inherent difficulty at the heart of Golden's undertaking...

...Sayuri's ultimate goal is the love of the Chairman, a beautiful and delicate Prince Charming figure, who lends the weeping girl a handkerchief in her pre-geisha days and then does not have occasion to speak to her for the next 3 00 pages...

...As an apprentice, Sayuri wanders the streets of Gion dressed in a costume so heavy there is serious danger of her toppling over...

...Her hair is done in an erotically charged style known as the "split peach," in which a red scarf is revealed by the part in her topknot...

...the surface of the water was ringed with gold wherever the soft green leaves of a tree touched it...

...We do learn some wonderful tidbits from Hatsumomo—for instance, that a variety of geisha makeup is made from nightingale droppings...

...The constant, heavy emphasis on Sayuri's Japaneseness ultimately serves to render it artificial...

...He doesn't want to peek behind screens, he would rather examine their delicate woodwork...

...As a reader, I longed for Memoirs of a Geisha to finally shock Sayuri out of her serenity and offer a more nuanced view of her universe...

...Ten pages later she declares, "If I was to have a rescuer, I wanted it to be the Chairman...

...Hatsumomo tells Sayuri she smells like garbage, like old fish, and has eyes the color of crushed worms...

...Or, "I stood there...

...Sayuri's desire for him is not demonstrated through the logic of the story either...

...He is masterful at describing the teahouses, hairdressers' shops and alleyways of Gion, the Geisha district of Kyoto...

...Two hundred pages later she asks, "Why couldn't I stop thinking about the Chairman...

...Never does she deviate from her wickedness...

...Initially descriptions of this sort are evocative, yet they begin to grate after a while (imagine a Jewish narrator who describes his world in terms of Klezmer, kishlce and gefilte fish...

...The mizuage auction merely represents another triumph over Hatsumomo, and another step in Sayuri's progress toward geisha glory...

...Instead, I was introduced to a world I had never seen or fully imagined, and then made to feel it was a place I had visited too many times before...

...Told in the voice of Sayuri, a geisha who rises to prominence in pre-World War II Japan, the book as well seems to promise an intimate glimpse into a strange, somewhat tawdry "profession" devoted to ritualized sexual display...