Memoirs of a Geisha

A young peasant girl is sold as servant and apprentice to a renowned geisha house. She tells her story many years later from the Waldorf Astoria in New York. Her memoirs conjure 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 land's most powerful men.

"I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see."

Arthur Golden was born and brought up om Chattanooga, Tennessee. He is a 1978 graduate of Harvard College with a degree in art history, specialising in Japanese art. In 1980 he earned an M. A. in Japanese history from Columbia where he also learned Mandarin Chinese. After a summer at Beijing University, he went to work at a magazine in Tokyo. In 1988 he received an M. A. in english from Boston University. He has lived and worked in Japan, and since that time has been teaching writing and literature in Boston Area. He now lives in Brookline. Massachusetts, with his wife and children.