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Book Review of Geisha : A Life

Geisha : A Life
monk376 avatar reviewed on
Helpful Score: 1


REAL LIFE MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA

I LOVE this book because Memoirs of a Geisha is my all time favorite book (read it like 20 times). Mineko Iwasaki (author of Geisha, A Life) is what Memoirs is (supposedly) based off of. If you read both you might notice names from her real story are incorporated in the fiction version.

I decided to review this book because I just found Geisha, A Life in my collection and it had a cut out article in it from a magazine the year before it was published. Here's what it says:

THE REAL GEISHA
Mineko Iwasaki, purportedly the model for the narrator of Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha, is going to tell her own story-and according to her agent, her decision has nothing to do with the lawsuit the retired geisha recently brought against Golden and Random House in which Iwasaki claimed the book hurt her reputation and that she is owed royalties (Random House disputes the claim). "It's absolutely seperate-she wanted to tell her own story," says Jandy Nelson of Manus & Associates. "We have never seen the world of geishas from a nonfiction angle," says Emily Bestler, the executive editorial director of Pocket, which paid mid-six figures for the memoir.
-Matthew Flamm, Entertainment Weekly, June 8, 2001

Interesting, eh? So anyone who read Memoirs and liked it, I definitely recommend this book. It was fun to compare the two books. They both are excellent reads!