DATE: Sunday, November 9, 1997              TAG: 9710300649

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY BERNICE GROHSKOPF 

                                            LENGTH:   78 lines

A REMARKABLE WORK, FROM AN UNLIKELY SOURCE

MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA

ARTHUR GOLDEN

Alfred A. Knopf. 392 pp. $25.

In Memoirs of a Geisha, a debut novel, Arthur Golden has incorporated a detailed account of the lives of Japanese women who were educated to entertain men. The tale is told by a fictional geisha, famous during the 1930s and '40s.

Chiyo was 9 years old in 1930, living in a poor fishing village, when she was sold by her elderly father, too broken by poverty and his wife's prolonged illness to provide for Chiyo and her 15-year-old sister, Satsu. Believing his daughters will have a better life, he is unaware that Chiyo will be sold to an okiya, to be educated as a geisha, and Satsu to a house of prostitution.

The bewildered Chiyo works as a maid at an okiya, a house where geishas live, where she is beaten and fined for every minor infraction, her debts to be repaid when she becomes a geisha. Accounts are scrupulously recorded by ``Mother,'' one of the three inscrutable old women, or ``madams'' who run the okiya. Chiyo searches for her sister, and when she finally finds her, Satsu explains her plan for them to escape. But in attempting to leave the okiya to meet Satsu, Chiyo falls, breaks her arm, is caught, and is told she will never become a geisha. To compound her despair, Hatsumomo, a beautiful but cruel and spiteful geisha at the okiya, devises ingenious ways to make Chiyo's life miserable.

Unexpectedly, she is rescued by Hatsumomo's rival, another beautiful geisha named Mameha, who negotiates with the okiya to become Chiyo's ``big sister.'' Thus, Mameha helps Chiyo continue her schooling to become a geisha, to be known by her new name, Sayuri.

Through Sayuri's unusual silver-gray eyes the reader observes the arduous step-by-step education of a geisha from novice to apprentice to geisha. She describes the elaborate ritual of applying makeup, explains the significance of the different hairstyles, why the obi (a broad sash) is tied in different ways, and that a geisha's magnificent kimona is worn with the collar low because Japanese men are attracted to a woman's neck and throat.

A geisha is an artist educated to dance, sing, and play the shamisen, a stringed instrument. Sayuri learns the importance of being subtly seductive when pouring saki, showing just so much skin, such a tiny bit of wrist. A geisha's duty is to entertain Japanese men who patronize teahouses, where they pay for beautiful women to flatter and amuse them with humorous anecdotes. But while a geisha must be alluring, ``a true geisha will never soil her reputation by making herself available to men on a nightly basis.''

A fortunate geisha may have a danna, a man who supports her, a privilege for which men compete, bidding large sums, just as they bid for the privilege of deflowering a virgin, a painful humiliation Sayuri experiences at age 15. Sayuri learns that a woman becomes geisha only because she has no other choice.

As a child, Sayuri met a compassionate stranger who, sensing her despair, treated her kindly. The memory of that meeting sustains her through difficult years, and although she encounters him after she becomes a geisha, she fears he doesn't recognize her. But her fantasies of him continue, even during the harsh war years when Gion's many teahouses were closed, and Sayuri, safely housed, worked sewing parachutes.

Golden, an American who has graduate degrees in art history (specialty in Japanese art) and Japanese history, authenticates his story with an introductory ``translator's note.'' It explains that Sayuri's memoirs were recorded when she was in her mid-60s, a wise and courageous woman who spoke openly, with delicacy and elegance, of the heartbreak and cruelty, kindness and love, in her extraordinary life.

Told entirely in Sayuri's voice, this outstanding work of scholarship is also a compelling love story. So convinced are we that we've been reading the actual memoirs of Sayuri that only at the conclusion, when we read Golden's acknowledgements, are we reminded that we've been reading a remarkable work of fiction. MEMO: Bernice Grohskopf is a free-lance writer and book critic who lives

in Charlottesville. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

Arthur Golden

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