The book has sold 4 million copies in English and been translated into 32 languages. 'Memoirs' has become the favored airplane reading for travelers to Japan, and for millions more a bedside escape into the secret life of the exotic 'painted dolls.' Her indictment is of a novel that millions of readers found to be an intimately knowledgeable story of geisha life in the 1930s and 1940s. 'Basically, what is written in Arthur Golden's book is false,' says the retired geisha, in her first interview since the book was published in Japanese in November and she was able to read it. To Mineko, thank you for everything,' Arthur Golden wrote in the acknowledgments of the English version of the book, a stunningly popular novel that stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 58 weeks. 'I am indebted to one individual above all others. She was the source of much of the rich texture in the descriptions of 'Memoirs of a Geisha,' its author says. Mineko Iwasaki was a famous geisha in Kyoto's most prestigious geisha district until her retirement in 1980. She knows the years have left her beauty and elegance intact. That was her 28 years ago, she says, feigning embarrassment. The woman in the picture smiles wistfully as she closes the magazine. Her dress would be coveted in any age it falls in mesmerizing folds of gold-woven brocade, a finely embroidered silk belt wrapped around her tiny waist. Today? A century ago? Her painted white face gives no clue. The woman in the photograph peers over her shoulder with dark, somber eyes.

KYOTO, JapanThe old magazine falls open to a page of timeless beauty.

Memoirs of a geisha books