Memoirs of a Geisha: Characters

This past week, I have been reading the book Memoirs of a Geisha. The main character, Chiyo, is very interesting to me. Even as a little girl, she seems very mature and worldly to me, maybe because Chiyo as an old woman is narrating this. She handles situations with a lot of self-assurance and resourcefulness. As a child in Japan, Chiyo was forcefully sold to a geisha okiya, or, basically, geisha house. Even when she recklessly tried to run away and ruined any chances of becoming a geisha, she resolves to never let herself remain a maid for all of her life. When she meets the Chairman of an electric company, she uses charm to persuade the Chairman to help her in her ambitions of becoming a geisha. When she finally does become an apprentice to the great geisha Mameha, she uses her cleverness to thwart her rivals. Eventually, she becomes a famous geisha, renaming herself Sayuri.

While this may sound uninteresting and confusing in my words, my point is that Sayuri is unfailingly clever and resourceful, always using this to fuel her ambitions and achieve them, no matter what stands in her way. Yet she does this with such naive innocence and purity, you would never accuse her of anything wrong or devilish. And throughout the book, as a mostly flat character, she never falters as a person or a geisha, staying strong even through the starving years of World War II. And for that, I admire her.