Letter from Lhasa, number 193. (Golden 1999): Memoirs of a Geisha
by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi
Golden, A., Memoirs of a Geisha. A novel, Vintage Contemporaries, 1999.
(Golden 1999).
Arthur Golden
The reading of this book is decidedly pleasant, since its beginnings. Although apparently a novel, deceived (although making that clear at the end of the artistic “deception”), according to the best traditions of the European historical novels, under a direct oral report of the main protagonist, the work is actually, in my opinion, an accurate historical reconstruction under the form of the novel. What is, for me, sometimes or frequently, the best way of presenting results of scientific researches in social matters.
The reader may discover one of the truths of the Japanese development and developmentalism, actually not at all different from other developments and developmentalisms in whatever place of the world. Such is reality. Mine is not a value judgment. The general conditions of the proletarian and sub-proletarian population remained miserable, without any real legality for protecting proletarians and sub-proletarians (a no-right society as it is [also] Japan, even now), and with them exploited even when dying and died, delivering their best daughters to prostitution what was anyway better then other proletarian and sub-proletarian jobs.
Geishas are just the prostitutes for the ruling class. In this book is represented, through some single cases (specifically two sisters, and overall one of them), the ruling class prostitutes’ making, the geishas’ factory.
Golden, A., Memoirs of a Geisha. A novel, Vintage Contemporaries, 1999.
