Madame Sadayakko

Women of the Pleasure Quarters: The Secret History of the Geisha Ever since Westerners arrived in Japan, they have been intrigued by Japanese womanhood and, above all, by geisha. This fascination has spawned a wealth of extraordinary fictional creations, from Puccini’s Madame Butterfly to Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha. But a...	Geisha of Gion: The Memoir of Mineko Iwasaki 'I want you to know what it is really like to live the life of a geisha, a life filled with extraordinary professional demands and richly glorious rewards. It is a life in which I was a pre-eminent success; many say the best of my generation. And yet, it was a life that I found t...	Autobiography of a Geisha Sayo Masuda’s Autobiography of a Geisha offers a story of unremitting hardship faced by a hot-springs geisha, a virtual indentured sex-slave in pre-World War II Japan. Born in 1925, Masuda began work as a nursemaid at age 5 and suffered a childhood of emotional and material ...	Geisha In the mid-1970s, an American graduate student in anthropology joined the ranks of white-powdered geisha in Kyoto, Japan. Liza Dalby took the name Ichigiku and apprenticed in the famed Pontocho district, trailing behind "older sisters" bemused by this long-legged Westerner in...	Rivalry: A Geisha's Tale (Japanese Studies Series) Originally published in 1918, Rivalry is regarded as the masterpiece of Nagai Kafu, a Japanese novelist known for his brilliant renderings of Tokyo in the early years of modern Japan. Stephen Snyder offers the first English translation of the complete, uncensored text, which has...
The Secret Life of Geisha Studio: A&e Home Video Release Date: 11/29/2005 Run time: 100 minutes	Geisha: A Life Now in her 50s, Mineko Iwasaki was one of the most famed geishas of her generation (and the chief informant for Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha). Her ascent was difficult, not merely because of the hard, endless training she had to undergo--learning how to speak a hyper-eleva...	Memoirs of a Geisha According to Arthur Golden's absorbing first novel, the word "geisha" does not mean "prostitute," as Westerners ignorantly assume--it means "artisan" or "artist." To capture the geisha experience in the art of fiction, Golden trained as long and hard as any geisha who must ma...	Kimono: Fashioning Culture The colorful and stylized kimono--the national garment of Japan--expresses not only Japanese aesthetic sensibilities but the soul of Japan as well. In this beautifully written and lavishly illustrated book, Liza Dalby, author of the highly acclaimed Geisha and Tale of Murasaki, t...	Geisha In this classic best seller, Liza Dalby, the first non-Japanese ever to have trained as a geisha, offers an insider's look at the exclusive world of female companions to the Japanese male elite. A new preface examines how geisha have been profoundly affected by the changes of the...

Just a minor quibble
As others have noted, the author includes a fair amount of conjecture in this charming and passionate account. Most of it is credible, but Sadayakko could not possibly have "sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge" in 1899, as Downer writes on page 91. Oops!

EXCELLENT LIFE STORY OF A GEISHA
I read this book today, and I couldn't put it down. It is beautifully written and had some happy and sad parts. It is a really great story about the life of Japan's first star who traveled to America and Europe telling of her experiences. It also tells of her lovers, historical events, scenery,family, and geisha life. While I was reading this, I felt like I was in olden day Japan. Very descriptive and a wonderful read. I highly recommend this book.

below expectations
I got interested in geisha culture after watching Memoirs of Geisha and then reading the same named book, and then buying more and more books about geisha. Out of everything I've read so far,I found " Madame Sadayakko.." to be the least interesting one. It's very biographical. The language and the contents of the story is very dull. Besides the author going back and forth refering to the events,which have happenned in the past and will happen in the future. I understand that the mission of the book was to provide historical accounts of Madame Sadayako's life and geisha traditions. But taking in the account the name of the book, it fell below my expectations. I still don't see how this Geisha bewitched the West.

A great historical tie-in
I love books on the Victorian period and found this tied in on two levels. The view of Japan and its culture at the time was enlightening, and the parallels with Europe and the U.S. informative. Saddayakko's struggles were almost epic, and her strength of will amazing. The reader is pulled into her struggles just to survive, maintain some dignity, and fight convention in Japan and the world. It is also an interesting history of the world of theater and the hypocrisy of society as it worships and vilifies at the same time.

Interesting but Fanciful
The book is an interesting look at a woman that lived an unconventional life during what were probably the most tumultuos years of Japan's history. The author sets the background beautifully, giving you incicive details of each historical period of Sada's life and paints a clear picture of a woman who knew herself and was quite unique. However, I found it irksome to read so many suppositions about Sada's thoughts, emotions and motivations that simply would not be found Ms. Downer's reasearch. Not only are Sada's thoughts guessed and given as motivations, those of her nearest and dearest as well. If this were a fictional account like Liza Dalby's "The Tale of Murasaki : A Novel" or even Arthur Golden's "Memoirs of a Geisha", both based on real people, it would be just fine. In both those VERY entertaining novels the authors allow themselves this artistic liscence once they clasify their efforts as fiction. This book however is an interesting read and gives a tantalizing glimpse into an epoch of Japan's history and the people that populated it. I recomend it to other Japan and Geisha enthusiasts but with the above warning.