"I studied Japanese language and culture in college and graduate school, and afterward went to work in Tokyo, where I met a young man whose father was a famous businessman and whose mother was a geisha." -- Arthur Golden
Arthur Golden (born 1956) is an American writer. He is the author of the bestselling novel Memoirs of a Geisha (1997).
Golden is a member of the Ochs-Sulzberger family (owners of the New York Times). He was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, grew up on Lookout Mountain, Georgia, and attended Lookout Mountain Elementary School in Lookout Mountain, Tennessee. He spent his middle and high school years at the Baylor School (then a boys-only school for day and boarding students) in Chattanooga, graduating in 1974. He attended Harvard University and received a degree in art history, specializing in Japanese art. In 1980, he earned an M.A. in Japanese history at Columbia University, and also learned Mandarin Chinese. After a summer at Peking University in Beijing, China, he worked in Tokyo. When he returned to the United States, he earned an M.A. in English at Boston University. He currently lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. He has a son (Hays Golden) and a daughter (Tess Golden) who recently graduated from Brown University.
After its release in 1997, Memoirs of a Geisha spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list. It has sold more than four million copies in English and has been translated into thirty-two languages around the world.
The novel Memoirs of a Geisha was written over a 10-year period during which Golden rewrote the entire novel three times, changing the point of view before finally settling on the first person viewpoint of Sayuri. Interviews with a number of geisha, including Mineko Iwasaki, provided background information about the world of the geisha.
After the Japanese edition of Memoirs of a Geisha was published, Golden was sued for breach of contract and defamation of character by Iwasaki. The plaintiff claimed that Golden had agreed to protect her anonymity, if she told him about her life as a geisha due to the traditional code of silence about their clients. Iwasaki sued Golden for breach of contract and defamation of character in 2001. The lawsuit was settled out of court in February 2003.
In 2005, Memoirs of a Geisha was made into a feature film starring Ziyi Zhang and Ken Watanabe, and directed by Rob Marshall, garnering three Academy Awards.
"Adversity is like a strong wind. It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are.""Geisha because when I was living in Japan, I met a fellow whose mother was a geisha, and I thought that was kind of fascinating and ended up reading about the subject just about the same time I was getting interested in writing fiction.""Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one.""I don't like things held up before me that I cannot have.""I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.""I worried she might spend an afternoon chatting with me about the sights and then wish me best of luck.""It is confusing, because in this culture we really don't have anything that corresponds to geisha.""Never give up; for even rivers someday wash dams away.""Passion can quickly slip to jealousy, or even hatred.""This character's entirely invented, and the woman that I interviewed wouldn't recognize herself, or really anything about herself, in this book, which she hasn't read, because she doesn't read English.""This time all the historical details and things were right. But I'd written it again in third person, and people found it dry. I decided to throw that one away.""We can never flee the misery that is within us.""What I had to do was keep the story within certain limits of what was, of course, plausible.""What I really wanted to know, though, was what it was like to be a geisha? Where do you sleep? What do you eat? How do you have your hair done?""You know, the men go to tea houses with the expectation that they will have a nice quiet evening and not read about it the next morning in the newspaper."