In 1997, novelist Arthur Golden offered readers an intoxicating and riveting story of a hidden world in his acclaimed novel, Memoirs of a Geisha. The sweeping romantic epic spent two years on The New York Times best-seller list, sold more than four million copies in English, and has been translated into 32 languages.
Now, Oscar-nominated director Rob Marshall (Chicago) and producers Lucy Fisher, & Douglas Wick and Steven Spielberg, along with an acclaimed international cast and an award-winning behind-the-camera team have brought this mesmerizing fable to the screen.
Set in a mysterious and exotic world which still casts a potent spell today, the story begins in the years before World War II, when a Japanese child is torn from her penniless family to work as a servant in a geisha house. Despite a treacherous rival who nearly breaks her spirit, the girl blossoms into the legendary geisha Sayuri. Beautiful and accomplished, Sayuri captivates the most powerful men of her day, but is haunted by her secret love for the one man beyond her reach.
Memoirs of a Geisha begins in 1929, near the end of the geishas’ golden era. Told as a fable from a disappearing world, the film is set in a fictional hanamachi or geisha district.
As Sayuri (Ziyi Zhang) enters this hidden world, she is taught that a geisha is not free to love, or to pursue her own destiny. Her mentor, the legendary geisha Mameha (Michelle Yeoh), understands the limits of an intimate relationship with a special patron or danna, and teaches Sayuri to keep her feelings tightly reined. Unlike Sayuri’s defiant rival Hatsumomo (Gong Li), Mameha knows that a proper geisha cannot afford to indulge her passion for any man.
Yet Sayuri cannot forget a moment of unexpected kindness she experienced at an early age. The memory of that moment shimmers like a mirage, and sustains her through years of suffering. Looking back at her life, she remembers “a little girl with more courage than she knew,” and reflects, “These are not the memoirs of an Empress, nor of a Queen. These are memoirs of another kind.”
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