Memoirs of a Geisha, by Arthur Golden

"I wasn't born and raised to be a Kyoto geisha... I'm a fisherman's daughter from a little town called Yoroido on the Sea of Japan." Beginning in a poor fishing village in 1929, Memoirs of a Geisha chronicles the life of nine-year-old Chiyo, born with blue-gray eyes, and sold with her sister into the slave life of being a geisha after her mother's death. Lost in this new world where a girls virginity is sold to the highest bidder, Chiyo works as a servant in the okiya of Hatsumomo until she is taken under of wing of Hatsumomo's archenemy Mameha, another powerful and beautiful geisha in a…