The glamorous world of big-city geisha is familiar to many readers, but little has been written of the life of hardship and pain led by the hot-springs-resort geisha. Indentured to geisha houses by families in desperate poverty, deprived of freedom and identity, these young women lived in a world of sex for sale, unadorned by the trappings of wealth and celebrity.
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, aged sixteen, she made her debut as a geisha.
Autobiography of a Geisha chronicles the harsh life in the geisha house from 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 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 first hand the anguish and the fortitude of prostitutes, gangster mistresses, black-market traders, and abandoned mothers struggling to survive in postwar Japan.
Happiness was always short-lived for Masuda, but she remained compassionate and did what she could to help others; indeed, in sharing her story, she hoped that others might not suffer as she had. Although barely able to write, her years of training in the arts of entertaining made her an accomplished storyteller, and Autobiography of a Geisha is as remarkable for its wit and humor as for its unromanticized candor. It is the superbly told tale of a woman whom fortune never favored yet never defeated.
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.
Table of Contents
Part 1: A Little Dog, Abandoned and Terrified Little Crane the nursemaid The eyes of the oxen glow in the dark I, too, had a mother Part 2: The Sunburned Novice The dream palace Geisha school I want to be a geisha, right now My four "Elder Sisters'' The death of Elder Sister Takemi The hot iron The scar I learn my name Cruel rules I devote myself to art Part 3: Miss Low Gets Wise Shallow river A secret place The new novice The sleep-with-anyone geisha How to be cute and sexy Part 4: Bird in a Cage My first customer The geisha temperament Miscarriage Thou shalt not love In the party business Tip taker Tsukiko's suicide Revenge Part 5: Awakening to Love Number Two and Number Three Tricks of the love trade The witcher bewitched True love Attempted suicide Part 6: Wanderings of a Castaway No place to call home A brother's love Tears of humiliation War's end The dumpling-soup diner Part 7: A Dream for My Little Brother Beautiful eyes Peddler Street stall Gang moll Little Foundling Seven funerary laths Part 8: The Depths of Despair My little brother's suicide Return to Suwa Reunion Happy days Farewell banquet Love's anguish Happiness and unhappiness Wandering between life and death Part 9: The Road Back to Life Innocent smile Piiko the fledgling hawk Vain dreams The Prostitution Prevention Act Cats' paws
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
Norma Field
Sayo's unadorned yet spirited autobiography recounting her coming-of-age in the unglamorous world of the country geisha and the harsh choices offered by the postwar world makes a bracing antidote to the enticements of finery, romance with patrons, and exquisite training in the arts purveyed by so many geisha stories. The art in Masuda's life crystallizes from her very survival and subsequent determination to put it in writing herself.
— Norma Field, University of Chicago
Edwin McClellan
A remarkable story [that] tells us a great deal about how unkind a society can be to the more unfortunate of its fellow citizens.... An important piece of social history of Japan in the 1940s and 1950s. G. G. Rowley's translation is very good indeed. Her language is always natural and fluent, and very persuasive.
— Edwin McClellan, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Japanese Literature, Yale University
Arthur Golden
This engrossing and very human story of survival not only casts light on the lives of countless women in early modern Japan, but offers the reader a compelling portrait of one woman's experiences in the often idealized world of the geisha.
