About Arthur Golden: Arthur Golden is an American writer. He is the author of the bestselling novel Memoirs of a Geisha (1997).
He stood with his two frail hands on his cane and his eyes closed, and breathed in deeply the scent of the past. "Sometimes," he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.
Since the day I’d left Yoroido, I’d done nothing but worry that every turn of life’s wheel would bring yet another obstacle into my path; and of course, it was the worrying and the struggle that had always made life so vividly real to me.
My tears simply broke through the fragile wall that had held them, and with a terrible feeling of shame, I laid my head upon the table and let them drain out of me.
I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were pulling me down toward them.
Here's the thing: this eel spends its entire life trying to find a home, and what do you think women have inside them? Caves, where the eels like to live...when they find a cave they like, the wriggle around inside it for a while to be sure that...we...
Finally the homeless eel marked its territory, I suppose, and the Doctor lay heavily upon me, moist with sweat.
Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.
It’s less a matter of looking the other way than of closing our eyes to what we can’t stop from happening.
A woman who acts like a fool is a fool.
I worried she might spend an afternoon chatting with me about the sights and then wish me best of luck.
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. He and I never discussed his parentage, which wa...
Passion can quickly slip to jealousy, or even hatred.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
It is confusing, because in this culture we really don't have anything that corresponds to geisha.
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.
What I had to do was keep the story within certain limits of what was, of course, plausible.
We can never flee the misery that is within us.
