Reddit reviews Geisha, A Life

No problem, I'm glad I could be of any help at all. I'm with you, I first read the book in my late teens and didn't understand its implications until much later. All I saw was the great writing, the moving story, but stories like this have context and implications beyond themselves.

Here is a link to Iwasaki's memoir. As a person above stated, she's not an author by trade so I don't think her work will have the same literary weight, but it will be a true story told by a woman who lived it, and I think that can be very powerful in of itself. :)

I've just finished Go ask Alice, it is pretty great :)

Geisha: A life by Mineko Iwasaki, is also one of my favorite book...

If you like comics and graphic novels, read The league of extraordinary gentlemen, Watchmen, The crow, Essex county a book about the rural lifestyle, hockey and family issues...

All of those are books I really loved and hope you will like if you read them :)

Geisha, a Life

If you'd like a different view, there's also Autobiography of a Geisha, whose author was a geisha at an onsen and writes about quite a different experience for a group of women also falling under the title of "geisha".

Geisha: A Life by Mineko Iwasaki is one of the more interesting biographies I've read. She was the inspiration for "Memoirs of a Geisha" but was ultimately displeased with the way she was portrayed and decided to write her own autobiography instead.

This is something that's on my To-Read list, but I saw you like memoirs so I'm going to recommend Geisha: A Life or Geisha of Gion as it's known here by Mineko Iwasaki. I plan to read it along side the novel Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden. The reason why these intrigue me as a pair is that Iwasaki agreed to help Golden with his novel, as long as he promised not to name her as a source. He went back on his promise and she got a lot of slack for that, especially as a lot of aspects about Geisha life was misrepresented/fabricated in his novel. It was because this she wrote her autobiography as a rebuttal to the novel, in order to contrast what she really experienced with the world Golden created.

That movie was gorgeous.The woman who gave him the information also wrote her own account because she believed Arthur Golden misrepresented her and the life of a geisha and breached their contract (she had stipulated that he not reveal her identity). I recommend it for anyone that loved Memoirs of a Geisha.

You might already know this but I wanted to leave it in case others do not.

edit: apparently this one is also good for a look at the non-glamorous side of the geisha world.

Not this book.