Sayo Masuda’s Autobiography of a Geisha offers a story of unremitting hardship faced by a hot-springs geisha, a virtual indentured sex-slave in pre-World War II Japan.
Born in 1925, Masuda began work as a nursemaid at age 5 and suffered a childhood of emotional and material poverty. She was then sold to the Takenoya geisha house in Upper Suwa at age 12. While her food and clothing were provided for by Takenoya, she was subject to constant verbal abuse as an apprentice. At one point, she was heaved down the stairs by her "Mother" (the name she uses for the proprietor of the geisha house) and nearly lost a leg. During her recovery, she attempted suicide and further injured herself.
Eventually, Masuda mastered the art of seduction as a geisha. The middle portion of the narrative is taken up with stories of her successful campaign for a danna (patron), of her brother’s tragic suicide, and of her star-crossed love affair with a Japanese politician.
Autobiography of a Geisha, translated for the first time into English by G. G. Rowley, was published in Japan in 1957 and has been in print in Japan steadily ever since. The tale is rendered in a simple English prose to reflect Masuda’s own, untrained style (she did not have schooling and she only learned to write hiragana script later in life). For Western readers, Masuda’s autobiography is a gift: a glimpse into the dark reality behind one of the most shrouded institutions in Japanese culture. --Patrick O’Kelley
From Publishers Weekly
Masuda's account of being a geisha in rural Japan at a hot springs resort is at once intriguing and heartbreaking. There is nothing idyllic in her description of geisha training or life between the world wars. Born in 1925, Masuda was sent to work for a wealthy landowner when she was five. At 12, she was sold to a geisha house for about 30 yen, the price of a bag of rice. During those years, Masuda writes, "I wasn't even able to wonder why I didn't have any parents or why I should be the only one who was tormented. If you ask me what I did know then, it was only that hunger was painful and human beings were terrifying." Originally published in Japan in 1957, where it is still in print, this book grew out of an article that Masuda, who didn't learn to read and write until she was in her 20s, submitted for a contest in Housewife's Companion magazine. Her picaresque adventures as a geisha, then mistress, factory worker, gang moll and caretaker for her young brother offer an impassioned plea for valuing children. "Never give birth to children thoughtlessly!" she writes. "That is why, stroke by faltering stroke, I've written all this down."Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
The geisha profession has been romanticized in literature, but Masuda exposes the underside of the geisha lifestyle. Masuda was sold to a geisha house in the hot-spring resort town of Suwa, far from the teahouses of Kyoto. Though she is educated at the geisha house, the housemother there is demanding and cruel. When Masuda interferes to help her friend Karuta, the only geisha who befriends her, the housemother throws her down the stairs for her troubles. Most of the other geishas are no kinder to her--they call her "low" because they believe her to be stupid. Her virginity is sold to a man known as Cockeye, who is three times her age. Cockeye eventually buys her contract from the geisha house, but when Masuda finds herself in love with a dashing soldier, she risks being banished from Cockeye's house to a life of even more uncertainty. Originally written in 1957 and now translated into English for the first time by Rowley, Masuda's memoir is a must-read for those interested in the lives of geishas. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"A much-needed corrective to the romantic myths spun around this profession... Superbly preserved and sensitively rendered... [Masuda's] gripping, heart-rending and humorous account is a gem, especially as it offers a view 'from below' of the untold social history of modern Japan." -- Times Literary Supplement
Review
"In this sensitive translation of an original memoir of a real geisha, Gaye Rowley gives us an unvarnished firsthand look into the world of a woman who unflinchingly relates the bitter struggle of her geisha existence in pre-WWII Japan. This is a fascinating and heart-rending tale." -- Liza Dalby, author of Geisha
Book Description
Sayo Masuda was a geisha at a hot springs resort, where the realities of sex for sale are unadorned by the trappings of wealth and power. Remarkable for its wit and frankness, the book is a moving record of a woman's survival on the margins of Japanese society -- in the words of the translator, "the superbly told tale of a woman whom fortune never favored yet never defeated."
Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Japanese
About the Author
Sayo Masuda lives in Japan. G. G. Rowley teaches English and Japanese literature at Waseda University in Tokyo. She is the author of Yosano Akiko and The Tale of Genji.
Autobiography of a Geisha FROM THE PUBLISHER
"Sayo Masuda has written the first full-length autobiography of a former hot-springs-resort geisha. Masuda was sent to work as a nursemaid at the age of six and then was sold to a geisha house at the age of twelve. In keeping with tradition, she first worked as a servant while training in the arts of dance, song, shamisen, and drum. In 1940, at the age of sixteen, she made her debut as a geisha." "Autobiography of a Geisha chronicles the harsh life in the geisha house in which Masuda and her "sisters" worked. They were routinely expected to engage in sex for payment, and Masuda's memoir contains a grim account of a "sister" geisha's slow death from untreated venereal disease. Upon completion of their indenture, geisha could be left with no means of making a living. Marriage sometimes meant rescue, but the best that most geisha could hope for was to become a man's mistress." Masuda also tells of her life after leaving the geisha house, painting a vivid panorama of the grinding poverty of the rural poor in wartime Japan. As she eked out an existence on the margins of Japanese society, earning money in odd jobs and hard labor - even falling in with Korean gangsters - Masuda experienced firsthand the anguish and the fortitude of prostitutes, gangster mistresses, black-market traders, and abandoned mothers struggling to survive in postwar Japan.
SYNOPSIS
Masuda is 78 now. When she was 12, she was sold to a geisha house in the hot springs resort of Suwa. Her memoir, first written in 1956-57, has none of the glamour or intrigue of other recent accounts of geishas, and is subtitled Half a Lifetime of Pain and Struggle. Rowley (English and Japanese literature, Waseda U., Tokyo) translates a 1995 revised edition published in the Heibonsha Library series. She also provides a bibliography. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
FROM THE CRITICS
The Los Angeles Times
The writing throughout is quite plain and utterly unsentimental, more a self-narrated ethnography than a work of literature. Still, what is lost in literary style is more than compensated with the bracing slap of truth as she depicts the realities of geisha life and its sullied aftermath. Courageously, Masuda refuses to put white makeup on the unsightly aspects of her tale, inviting readers to take a long, hard look at the unadulterated face of geisha living. — Bernadette Murphy
Publishers Weekly
Masuda's account of being a geisha in rural Japan at a hot springs resort is at once intriguing and heartbreaking. There is nothing idyllic in her description of geisha training or life between the world wars. Born in 1925, Masuda was sent to work for a wealthy landowner when she was five. At 12, she was sold to a geisha house for about 30 yen, the price of a bag of rice. During those years, Masuda writes, "I wasn't even able to wonder why I didn't have any parents or why I should be the only one who was tormented. If you ask me what I did know then, it was only that hunger was painful and human beings were terrifying." Originally published in Japan in 1957, where it is still in print, this book grew out of an article that Masuda, who didn't learn to read and write until she was in her 20s, submitted for a contest in Housewife's Companion magazine. Her picaresque adventures as a geisha, then mistress, factory worker, gang moll and caretaker for her young brother offer an impassioned plea for valuing children. "Never give birth to children thoughtlessly!" she writes. "That is why, stroke by faltering stroke, I've written all this down." (May) FYI: While Arthur Golden's fictional Memoirs of a Geisha (1997) continues to be the yardstick against which all other books on the geisha world are measured, Masuda's account is a worthy complement. Readers interested in this culture will probably have already seen Atria's Geisha, a Life (Forecasts, Sept. 9, 2002) and Gotham's Madame Sadayakko: The Geisha Who Bewitched the West (Forecasts, Jan. 20). Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
The deeply unromantic life of a low-rent geisha. Some work the high-end world of Kyoto and Tokyo, and others work out of cheesy hot-spring resorts, their fare a stream of small-time businessmen, factory owners, and petty gangsters. Such was Masuda's lot back in the 1940s, when this rudimentarily trained geisha served more as an indentured servant and prostitute than an artful consort. Nonetheless, it was a step up from her stint as a nursemaid, beginning at age six, when she subsisted on leftovers and was mortified, tormented, and slapped about by adults and kids alike. In need of money, her mother called Masuda home and promptly sold her to a geisha house when she was 12. This unvarnished account, first published 45 years ago and still in print in Japan, does not paint a pretty picture. "Geisha's pride wasn't worth a broken straw sandal," writes Masuda, who made the mistake of falling in love and was then tossed out by the patron, who had bought her from the house. Turned away by her family, she reunited with her younger brother ("My dreams, my affections, they were all for him. He was my reason for living"), and together they struggled to survive in postwar Japan. In stark prose as fateful as a Greek tragedy, she captures a wholly dreadful existence hustling a few illegally foraged potatoes to a starving population for a few yen. When her brother contracted tuberculosis, Masuda intended to return to prostitution to pay for his penicillin, but he threw himself from the hospital roof rather than let that happen. She stayed hungry and harassed, thanks to hypocritical anti-prostitution laws passed in the '50s (and taken to pieces here), until this account shocked Japanese readers with itsbitter taste of grinding poverty and its revelations about the geisha world's dark side. A comfortless portrait of the flip side of the geisha world, where one is more slave than courtesan. A rock and a hard place-and enough to give readers gray hair.
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