Arthur Golden was born and brought up in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He is a 1978 graduate of Harvard College with a degree in art history, specialising in Japanese art. In 1980 he earned an MA in Japanese history from Columbia University where he also learned Mandarin Chinese. After a summer at Beijing University, he went to work at a magazing in Tokyo. In 1988 he recieved an MA in English from Boston University. He has lived and worked in Japan, and since that time has been teaching writing and literature in the Boston area. He now lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, with his wife and children
'An epic tale and a brutal evocation of a disappearing world' The Times
A young peasant girl is sold as servant and apprentice to a renowned geisha house. Many years later she tells her story from a hotel in New York, opening a window into an extraordinary half-hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation and summoning up a quarter of a century of Japan's dramatic history.
'Intimate and brutal, written in cool, lucid prose it is a novel whose psychological empathy and historical truths are outstanding' Mail on Sunday
An epic tale and a beautiful evocation of a rapidly vanishing worldThe sort of novel that novel-lovers yearn for, which is to say, so convincing that while reading it you become transported to another time, another place, and feel you are listening and seeing with someone else's ears and eyesEndlessly fascinating...a narrative that is both gripping and beautifully paced...a wonderful readSayuri's memoirs reveal Golden to have great gifts of imaginative empathy...fascinatingThis is one of those rare novels that evokes a vanished world with absolute conviction and in every detail... This book is exceptional
