Sayo Masuda (1925–2008)

Not just a good book, but an important one.
Sayo Masuda's memoir gives an unembellished, unromanticized view of what it was really like to live and work as a geisha. It's a story of extreme poverty and oppression, but her resilience, spirit and humor shine through. It feels to me as though translator Rowley truly captured her authentic voice - the tale seems honest and sincere. The author never flinches from telling the bad along with the good, and the result is a story which truly shows the universality of humanity at our best and worst, regardless of time period or culture.… (mais)

Masuda Sayo was a geisha in a rural part of Japan. Her story starts when she was six years old. Rejected by her mother as she was an illegitimate child, Masuda was sent to be a nursemaid at an age where she should still have been in the nursery herself. When she was twelve she was sold to a geisha house. Masuda relates her training years – then describes how she was sold to an elderly man when she was only sixteen. He had a wife and a mistress already.

This is a terrible story to read – in that it is not made up – it really happened. Masuda never went to school but related her story to expose the geisha industry from the fairytale status that the western world seems to hold it. She is frank, and hold nothing back. Geisha’s are an integral part of Japanese society, and yet the women who work in the industry are scorned by society when they leave the protection of the Geisha houses.

G. G. Rowley translated the story directly from the original Japanese in 2003 – she then was able to meet Masuda in 2004 when she was 81 years of age – and added an epilogue in 2005.

An interesting insight into another world.

… (mais)