Arthur Golden Audiobooks

Memoirs of a Geisha: a single novel, and a global publishing phenomenon

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.5/5 average

18 listener ratings

Who is Arthur Golden?

One novel, ten years in the writing, and a career defined by it ever since. Arthur Golden was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1956, read art history at Harvard with a specialism in Japanese art, took a master’s in Japanese history at Columbia and spent time working in Tokyo before starting the book that would occupy the following decade.

Memoirs of a Geisha was rewritten from scratch more than once, most decisively when he abandoned a third-person draft and handed the story to Sayuri herself. Published in 1997, it spent two years on the American bestseller lists, was translated into more than thirty languages and became a Rob Marshall film in 2005. It also brought controversy: Mineko Iwasaki, the former geisha he had interviewed, took legal action over his use of her name and the portrayal that resulted, and the case was settled in 2003. Golden has published no fiction since.

Arthur Golden in audiobooks

The edition on offer here is the HarperCollins abridgement, read by Noriko Aida in just under three hours. It is worth being clear about what that means: this is a condensed telling of Sayuri’s journey from a fishing village to the okiya of Gion and on through the upheaval of the war years, not the full novel, and it moves at a pace the unabridged text never attempts.

Taken on its own terms it is a lovely thing. Aida’s reading is unhurried and precise, and her handling of the Japanese names and terms gives the story a cadence that many English-language recordings flatten out. Think of it as an elegant introduction, well suited to a long train journey or to a first encounter with the story before you commit to the novel. Listen to it below.