20 ~ Friday, Septeinber 3, 1999 — North Shore News
a

invented history
a oripping ta

Katharine Hamer
Contributing Writer

Memoirs of a Geisha by
Arthur Golden, Vintage
Canada, 434 pp, $17.95
In his debut novel,
already an international best-
seller, American author

Arthur Golden gets deep
inside che mind of a complex
woman: Nitta Sayuri, one of
Japan's “best-known geisha.”
As an invented biography,
the book is a feat in itself:
many attempts at the genre
fail miserably at both narra-
tive and character. But
Golden also manages to exe-
cute a deft, intuitive, and
Passionate portrait of a tradi-
ticnal Japanese woman.
Memoirs of a Geishe is rich
in its use of language, and
utterly gripping in its story-

SGHH EORMAAM SER WART

M6 Bae OF TESICHDiATE PEAS

Barkerville portraits

AN exhibition cf portraits by photographer C.D. Hoy opens tomorrow at Presentatisn House Galler; Born in
China in 1885, Hoy came to Canada as a teen and settled in Barkerville where he tock portraits of Chinese
miners, the Chilcotin natives and area settlers. The show is accompanied by a book about Hoy.

line. Obiects as simple as a
kimono are described in
ornate visual detail, like the
“orange silk with a silver
waterfall pouring from the
knee into a slate-bluc
ocean.”

Reading Golden’s words,
you are transported to pre-
war Kyoto, with its arched
wooden bridges, lily ponds, cobbled streets and dimly-lit tea-
houses.

An intriguing history of a long-forgotten era and a classic
fairy-tale, the book is also astonishingly adept at elucidating
the cunning ways of women and the “Tuthless motivations of
men.

Bicycle Days by John Burnham Schwartz, Vintage
Contemporaries, $17.95

“She said she loved those bicycle days, the way they made
her feel like a girl again. And it seemed to Alec as he listened
to her that nothing that good could ever stop, that all days
would be bicycle days, and that he need only turn his head to
find her there behind him, her arms outstretched, reaching
for hi him as he rushed round the park with the wind in his

ce.”

Like Memoirs, Bicycle Days is a coming-of-age story set in
Japan which goes some way towards demystifying castern cul-
ture.

But its central character is worids apart. Alec is a cocksure
young American who has come to Japan to work at 3 com-

See Discards Page 24

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