"What I really wanted to know, though, was what it was like to be a geisha? Where do you sleep? What do you eat? How do you have your hair done?"
About this Quote
Curiosity is doing two jobs here: it drives the narrator forward, and it quietly exposes the West's hunger to turn an entire culture into a set of consumable details. Golden stacks the questions in a brisk, almost childlike rush - sleep, food, hair - the most domestic, tactile stuff. That choice matters. It dodges politics, economics, coercion, and history in favor of logistics, as if "being a geisha" is primarily an aesthetic lifestyle to be toured. The tone isn't malicious; it's the more slippery kind of bias that arrives disguised as fascination.
The subtext is the classic tourist gaze: if you can inventory someone's routines, you can imagine you've understood them. "What it was like" promises interiority, but the follow-up questions deliver surfaces. Hair, especially, is doing heavy cultural work. Geisha hair is labor, discipline, and public identity, but it's also an exoticized symbol Western readers have been trained to fixate on. Golden leans into that obsession because it pulls readers in quickly, translating unfamiliar worlds through bodily maintenance and ritual.
Context makes the intent sharper. Memoirs of a Geisha was built for a global audience primed for a feminized, mysterious Japan - intricate, sensual, secretive. This line performs the doorway move: it invites you to enter through the ordinary so you don't notice how much power sits behind the act of looking. The questions sound intimate, but they're also extractive, treating a woman's life as a catalog you can flip through.
The subtext is the classic tourist gaze: if you can inventory someone's routines, you can imagine you've understood them. "What it was like" promises interiority, but the follow-up questions deliver surfaces. Hair, especially, is doing heavy cultural work. Geisha hair is labor, discipline, and public identity, but it's also an exoticized symbol Western readers have been trained to fixate on. Golden leans into that obsession because it pulls readers in quickly, translating unfamiliar worlds through bodily maintenance and ritual.
Context makes the intent sharper. Memoirs of a Geisha was built for a global audience primed for a feminized, mysterious Japan - intricate, sensual, secretive. This line performs the doorway move: it invites you to enter through the ordinary so you don't notice how much power sits behind the act of looking. The questions sound intimate, but they're also extractive, treating a woman's life as a catalog you can flip through.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
|---|---|
| Source | Memoirs of a Geisha — Arthur Golden (1997), novel; contains the quoted lines in the book's early narrative. |
More Quotes by Arthur
Add to List
