Hoo boy. 
 This book is painful to like because it is dishonest. It's a beautiful lie, and ultimately is exploiting Westerners who don't know the history of geisha while Golden gives the source of its story the cold shoulder. It is an enjoyable read, certainly. I even gave it five stars back then. But I had to change it once I realized how superficial this book really is. 
 When I first read this novel, I was in high school, and I really was into Japanese culture. So I read this book after I saw the movie, and I was absolutely entranced. After all, I'd never read anything about geisha before, only watched some documentaries. The story is about a little girl, Chiyo, who is sold to a hanamachi (geisha house). The book is primarily about how she grows up and has to navigate through the world of Gion and in her hanamachi. It was exciting, suspenseful, and enchanting. Just thinking about all the sumptuous kimono and the parties and the setting was stirring. 
 But westerners tend to have a certain idea of what eastern culture is like. A wildly romanticized one. There's always an emphasis on setting and descriptions. I'll be darned if a westerner doesn't add cherry blossoms and elements (wood, water, fire, etc) in their eastern stories. Then there are the little wisdom blurbs and metaphors. About everything. Another reviewer detailed the enormous list of them. 
 There is always a certain something is missing in these types of books. When I got to college, I started reading more about geisha, Liza Dalby and Mineko Iwasaki, kimono and wigs, and Orientalism a bit. And I started to get the creeping feeling that I'd been lied to. 
 Certainly, Memoirs is a fictional novel. Fictional being the key word here. But one expects that the fictional characters are in a place based on reality if it's supposed to be a faux memoir narrated by a "real" geisha. And indeed, the woman who helped Golden write this book saw her interviews and her life taken and twisted into a huge moneymaker. 
 It's difficult to enjoy this novel again because the setting feels superficial. It feels like the story takes place in a beautiful painted version to Japan. It's gorgeous, but flat. It has intricate details, but lacks depth. It imparts knowledge, but no wisdom. 
 In the end, it's a great read as long as readers see it for what it is: a romanticized, sugar-coated, dramatized version of geisha culture. It's beautiful, but it's a dream.