As Chiyo’s mother dies, her father sells her and her sister into Dickensian misery. Chiyo is sent to a house where geisha are trained and where she must buy back her freedom; Satsu is delivered to a whorehouse. Soon Chiyo encounters the treacherous geisha Hatsumomo: ““She may have been cruel as a spider but she was more lovely chewing on her fingernail than most geisha looked posing for a photograph.’’ Threatened by Chiyo’s beauty, Hatsumomo sets about crushing her fledgling career. Chiyo’s only allies are a wily geisha named Mameha and the kindly chairman of an electric company who she dreams will make her his mistress. No, it’s not high feminism, but ultimately you admire Golden for refusing to dress prewar Japan in ’90s robes.
““Geisha’’ is rich with atmosphere, but it’s rendered in a prose so spare and pure the novel seems written in disappearing ink. One only wishes that the ending weren’t so rushed, that Chiyo had thought harder about her father’s betrayal and that she didn’t persist in idolizing the vaguely drawn Chairman when she has a far more interesting suitor, the gruff Nobu. ““I have to tell you the truth,’’ says Golden, who’s 40 and lives on a leafy street in Brookline, Mass., with his wife and two kids. ““My parents divorced when I was 8, and my father died when I was 13. He died of emphysema. He was a heavy smoker–smoked from the time he was 9, or something. So I missed out on having a father to a very considerable degree. And this Chairman is in some ways the elusive father that I never had. And just because of my own emotional mishigas, I found it immensely difficult to write about the Chairman. At times it was almost agony.''
Golden grew up in Chattanooga, Tenn. He is the great-grandson of Adolph Ochs, who bought and reinvented The New York Times at the turn of the century. Golden became transfixed by Japan while at Harvard, then worked at a magazine in Tokyo in the early ’80s. While in Japan, he befriended a young man whose father was a businessman and whose mother was a geisha. In the late ’80s Golden wrote an 850-page novel, using the third person and a lot of guesswork about kimonos and makeup. But he threw it away when a Japanese friend found him a retired Kyoto geisha to interview. Says Golden, ““I asked Mineko every question on my mind, a number of them about sex, and she answered every one with candor. Even her husband was very nice. He bragged about [the sale of her virginity]. She’d set a record.’’ Golden wrote a 750-page novel, again in third person. Friends said it was dry, and he threw it away.
In person, Golden is gracious and patrician, pleated and pressed. (Sometimes he’ll use blasted as an adjective; sometimes he’ll answer the door by trumpeting, ““Ahoy there!’’) But beneath the pleasantries, you sense the hardheaded resolve one would need to rewrite the same story for a decade. In 1994, Golden finally found the pitch-perfect first person for ““Geisha.’’ He quickly won over two of publishing’s savvier thirtysomethings: agent Leigh Feldman, who recently brokered ““Cold Mountain,’’ and Knopf editor Robin Desser, who once had the foresight to buy the paperback rights to ““Snow Falling on Cedars.’’ Feldman and Desser had long discussions about whether it was kosher for a Western male like Golden to channel a geisha. The quality of the manuscript carried the day. Knopf paid $250,000 for ““Geisha’’ and days later, at the 1996 Frankfurt Book Fair, began reselling it to 13 countries, including Estonia.
Golden and Mineko have stayed in touch. ““We’re friends,’’ he says. ““She came here to Boston. Danced right here on this patio. I had about 30 friends who sat out in the grass, and Mineko came and danced to some tape-recorded shamisen music. Everybody had dessert and champagne. She was a huge hit. A huge hit.’’ In ““Geisha,’’ Golden returns the favor with a remarkable dance of his own.
