Memoirs of a Geisha

Exciting and surprising, Memoirs of a Geisha has broken records for staying on bestseller lists around the world and won over readers in more than 26 languages.

Shortly before her death, Sayuri, an elderly Japanese woman living in New York, recounts her life to a young American friend. Hers is the story of how, from a miserable childhood, she rose to become one of the most famous geishas in interwar Japan, a country where feudal echoes still lingered and where ancient traditions were beginning to coexist with the ways of the modern world.

Through Sayuri's eyes, we enter a secret world dominated by passions and sustained by appearances, where sensuality and beauty cannot be separated from submission: a world in which young aspiring geishas are rigorously trained in the art of seduction, and where they have to convince themselves that, for them, love is nothing more than an illusion.