‘Geisha’ a Golden Moment for Author

He is every inch the intellectual, the sort who can, with impunity, toss around a term like “hypertrophy.”

Hypertrophy? you ponder, hoping your ignorance is not too apparent. Did I order that for lunch today?

This blessed confluence of supreme self-confidence and unshakable verbal precision may be what enabled Arthur Golden to slog through 10 years and three drafts of a first novel told ultimately in the voice of a Japanese woman. From young village girl to worldly wise woman--from Chiyo, fisherman’s daughter, to Sayuri, glamorous geisha--Golden’s grasp of this foreign female persona never falters.

His “Memoirs of a Geisha” (Knopf, 1997) bounded on to bestseller lists within a month of publication. In hardback, “Geisha” has held a spot on the Los Angeles Times’ bestseller list for 61 weeks. Hardcover sales were so strong that Knopf delayed publishing the paperback, prompting a brisk black-market trade in “Geisha” paperbacks from England, where the softcover was available. When the U.S. paperback finally appeared in mid-January, the books flew off the shelves. Within a week of the softcover’s debut, “Geisha” was No. 1 on both the Los Angeles and San Francisco paperback bestseller lists.

“The numbers are unbelievable,” said Paul Bogaards, Knopf’s marketing director.

And the phenomenon has expanded beyond the bookshelf. Steven Spielberg bought the rights to “Geisha” and plans to make it into a feature film for Columbia Pictures and DreamWorks. Golden, in fact, already has consulted with Spielberg’s costume designers. Singer-actress Madonna loves “Geisha”; she said so on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” On the cover of the February edition of Harper’s Bazaar, Madonna appears garbed as a geisha.

The novel has been published in 26 languages, among them, most recently, Japanese. Readers in the home country of the fictional Sayuri apparently are just as fascinated by details about how a girl becomes a geisha as those outside Japan. “Geisha” also is on bestseller lists in Israel and Germany.

And from its outset, “Geisha” has sold disproportionately well in Southern California, home to this country’s largest concentration of Asian Americans. Ingram, the country’s largest book wholesaler, ships books to retailers from half a dozen distribution centers scattered around America. Ingram’s warehouse in Walnut--which serves Southern California--has sold 40% more copies of “Geisha” than any of the other warehouses.

All of which has got to be heady stuff for a 41-year-old first-time novelist.

“Well, of course, I hoped for good reviews, and I hoped the book would sell well,” Golden said. What has happened to him and his book, he allowed, has been “astonishing.”

Tall and lanky, Golden is impossibly boyish-looking. He has an adolescent’s vanity about a tiny bandage on his face, the result of minor surgery to remove a small blemish. Pre-”Geisha,” Golden conceded, he would not have worried about the bandage or the blemish.

But Golden is also a turbo-charged titan of the literati. He wants you to know that after Harvard, he earned two master’s degrees, one in Asian history and one in fine arts. He speaks Japanese, and his Mandarin is more than passable. He conducts seminars in narrative structure. Then there’s that “hypertrophy” thing.

“Geisha,” he disclosed, is “kind of a hypertrophy of Japanese rules, rather than a mere extension.”

(For the record, “hypertrophy” means a considerable increase in the size of an organ or tissue caused by the enlargement of its components.)

With that matter clarified--thank goodness!--Golden can return to the topic at hand. Until he was perhaps 22, Golden assumed he would settle in an ivory tower, the groves of academe. Once he realized that what he really wanted to do was write, and nothing else, he thought about journalism.

As it happened, this was his family’s business. Golden was raised in Lookout Mountain, Tenn., where his parents, Ruth Holmberg and Ben Hale Golden, each served as publisher of the Chattanooga Times. His uncle is Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, for 30 years the publisher of the New York Times. Golden’s cousin Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. is that paper’s current publisher. Several other relatives, including a brother, are scattered throughout that paper’s hierarchy.

So when Golden talks about journalism, what he means is, “I flirted with going to work for the [New York] Times.”

Instead, Golden decided to become a novelist. Methodically.

“I set out very deliberately to learn about fiction,” he said.

On his own, he deconstructed novel after novel. He analyzed character development, dialogue and narrative structure. It helped in this venture that Golden was able to live off family money.

Sixteen years ago, he married Trudy Legge, an exchange student he met on a flight to Beijing. With their two children and their watch-cat, Gwennie, they live in an exquisitely restored, early 20th century house. Antiques abound, and an intricate, hand-painted design delineates the walls from the ceiling in the grand parlor.

The first two drafts of “Geisha” were told in the third person. Both attempts focused on Sayuri only as an adult. Neither version ever got as far as being shown to anyone in publishing, especially not after more than one friend gently told Golden, “You do realize it’s a little dry?”

Less determined souls might have jumped ship. Golden admitted it’s hard to explain why--and how--he kept going “without sounding like one of those self-motivational gurus.”

But here is what happened; here is the dynamic that enabled Golden to see “Geisha” to completion:

“I play classical guitar,” he explained. “One night I discovered that some days you play and everything feels right. Other times you play and you can’t get one note right. But I learned that if you keep going when things feel bad, you will learn. The bad days will make you who you are, not the good days.”

It helped also that Golden believed deeply in the core of his story.

“I felt this material was so good that I knew I would never find better,” he said. “And if I couldn’t do this right, I might as well give up.”

Still, even in the dry moments, even when “Geisha” looked as if it might be, in more ways than one, the project of Golden’s lifetime, “I really didn’t feel like giving up was an option.”

Then, through a friend of his grandmother, Golden was put in touch with Mineko Iwasaki, a retired geisha from Kyoto. In a sense, Golden became her apprentice, learning minute details of the geisha trade. From Mineko he learned how geishas achieve and preserve their elaborate hairdos, how they maintain a wardrobe of expensive kimonos, how they market their virginity, how they are schooled in entertaining men. For full verisimilitude, Golden at one point tried on the ghostly white makeup of the geisha.

Golden finally got it right.

“Rarely has a world so closed and foreign been evoked with such natural assurance,” crowed the New Yorker.

Sayuri is a fictional character, and her story was born entirely in Golden’s head. But in many ways, he said, “it is not my book, if you know what I mean. I wanted the reader to forget all about me. This is a geisha’s book.”

Golden’s most recent literary venture is a magazine ad for Absolut vodka, told--not surprisingly--in the voice of a geisha. But already, his next novel is forming. Once again, he expects to tell a first-person story. This time, the setting will be in the United States.

“Geisha” will, of course, be a tough act to follow. But he says he will chart the same course of spare, conscientious writing. For Golden, “the words are a conduit, a pipeline.” With luck and hard work--especially during the inevitable bad moments--the new work will assume the level of resonance that has brought millions of readers around the world to “Geisha.”