This is a fantastic and really interesting book written in a beautiful style-I’d definitely recommend it!

This is a beautiful book. It reads like a confession of a real geisha, complete with a translator’s note, but it’s all fictional.

It’s amazing that Arthur Golden was able to immerse himself in such a foreign culture and write in a voice so different than his own.

I read once in an interview with Golden that in the six years it took him to write the book, at one point, he’d actually painted his face with geisha makeup to literally get inside their skin.

So I find it tragic that, although he promised anonymity to one of the geisha he questioned, he printed her name in full in his acknowledgments.

He denies that he ever promised to keep her name a secret, but regardless, he understood so many things about the culture, he must have known what he was doing when he broke the code of silence.

It’s a good book, and he seems to be a good writer, but for me, the story will always be tainted by the real-life betrayal.

(You can see a Dateline interview with the geisha on YouTube here.)