Autobiography of a Geisha

Autobiography of a Geisha (芸者,苦闘の半生涯 , Geisha, kutō no hanshōgai^?) is a book by Sayo Masuda (ますだ • さよ, Masuda Sayo^?, kanji 増田 小夜).

About the author

Masuda was born in 1925, near the town of Shiojiri in Nagano Prefecture. During her later teen years, into her early twenties, she was an onsen geisha at a hot-spring resort in Japan. After this, she became a prostitute, vigorously protesting the passage of anti-prostitution laws. She eventually got a job making soap for a Korean worker, which she held for several months. When the soap business failed, she began drinking heavily, which led to her near death from liver failure and a suicide attempt. She survived and quit drinking, and when she had sufficiently recovered, she began to look after children, eventually becoming a full time caretaker for several years. Eventually, she was able to open her own restaurant, and ran it for several decades. As a result of heavy drinking in her twenties, she died of liver cancer on June 26th, 2008.

Masuda wrote her autobiography between the years of 1956 and 1957. She had never learned to read more than hiragana, and wrote her entire book in it. Her editors worked carefully to convert her work into the standard kanji while preserving the feeling of her original writing.

Content of the autobiography

As a child Masuda lived as a nurse-maid in a large farming household, where she got little to eat, no education, poor sleeping quarters, and was frequently punished. When Masuda was about twelve, her mother needed money to pay for her husband’s medical treatment. Her uncle retrieved her from the landowners and sold her to an okiya (geisha house) called Takenoya.

During these years her nickname became “Crane,” as she was never allowed to wear socks and would lift one leg up and warm her foot on the thigh of the other leg. This nickname was used even after she moved to the okiya. Masuda did not know her own real name until she was hospitalized for an injury as a geisha apprentice and the doctors called her Ms. Masuda.

Masuda’s autobiography details her struggles as a geisha in a hot-springs resort. These geisha were frequently expected to have sex with their clients, which resulted in Masuda feeling her only useful skill was the ability to sell her body, a concept she struggled with well into her life. Her book covers her time as a geisha, her struggles to get by in a war-torn Japan, her efforts to keep her splintered family together, and her desire to completely remove herself from the sex trade. Masuda longed to get an education and find decent employment, a feat near impossible with a background as frowned upon as hers.

Throughout her autobiography, Masuda continually projects the idea that parents should be responsible for their children and should not bear children they are not prepared to support. Masuda never got married and never had children, although caring for the children of others was always her favorite way to spend her time.

Reception

After the book's writing, Masuda was harshly criticized by her community, and eventually had to move to another town. Largely because of this, she almost always communicated with people through her publisher, and refused to meet with most people interested in discussing her book, although she made a personal request to meet G.G. Rowley.

Masuda’s Autobiography of a Geisha has been strangely ignored in many publications about geisha. In her autobiography Geisha, a Life (also known as Geisha of Gion), Mineko Iwasaki claims to be the first geisha to come forward to tell her story. Many scholars echo this claim, though Masuda’s work was published 40 years before Iwasaki’s.

List of characters

Takechiyo, Karuta, Takemi, Shizuka: Masuda’s older sisters in the Okiya

Tsukiko: One of her younger sisters in the Okiya

Mother: Masuda's Mother of the okiya, brutal disciplinarian

Cockeye: Masuda’s first danna, small-time promoter, gang boss, and very fond of virgins

Hii-san: Tsukiko’s ex-boyfriend, the son of the owner of a small factory in Suwa.

Naoko: Cockeye’s first mistress. She ran a restaurant in the town of Lower Suwa.

Motoyama-san: A son of a liquor merchant. He was a second lieutenant, become ill, and had been excused temporarily from military service. He worked in Nippon Wireless

Brother: One of her brothers. Devoted to Masuda, he suffered intestinal tuberculosis and committed suicide at a hospital.

References

Sayo Masuda, Autobiography of a Geisha. Translated by G.G. Rowley. New York : Columbia University Press, 2003. ISBN 0231129513

Obituary for Masuda Sayo