1.) Provide 2 examples where you feel your author clearly used research methods to gather info about the topic being written about. Please provide quotes from the novel for each example and THOROUGHLY explain why you chose that quote and why you feel the novelist was also a researcher.
When I first began reading this book, I was under the impression that a Japanese man, born and raised in Japan, had wrote this book. Imagine my surprise when I realized the author was born in Tennessee! However, the author of this book has done a great deal of research which he used to write a completely fiction work. After I finished the book, I found myself wondering how he had conducted his research to find all the facts he used in this book. As I flipped to the acknowledgements, I found that he spoke with a few women who used to be geisha.
The research Arthur Golden conducted in Memoirs of a Geisha that I founder most interesting was how the geisha put their make-up on. In pages 70-75, Arthur Golden gives a detailed description of what it took the geisha Hatsumomo, to complete her make-up.
”She took some time to wipe her hands clean on a rag, and then moistened one of her flat makeup brushes in a dish of water and rubbed it in the makeup until she had a chalky white paste. She used this to paint her face and neck, but left her eyes bare, as well as the area around the lips and nose [...] she dampened some smaller brushes and used them to fill in the cutouts [...]. Now she moistened her pigment sticks and used them to rub a reddish blush onto her cheeks. The fashion at that time was to leave the upper lip unpainted, which made the lower lip look fuller [...] and this is what Hatsumomo did. Now Hatsumomo took the twig of paulownia wood she’d shown me earlier and lit it with a match. After it had burned for a few seconds she blew it out cooled it with her finger-tips, and then went back to the mirror to draw in her eyebrows with the charcoal.”
I also found the research he did about a geisha’s mizuage, which is the losing of her virginity to a man who pays a very generous price to have the privlege of taking her virginity. When picking the men a geisha think would be interested in the mizuage, she presents them with ekubo.
“Mameha went to a confectioner’s shop that same week and ordered on my behalf a kind of sweet-rice cake we call ekubo, which is the Japanese word for dimple. We call them ekubo because they have a dimple in the top with a tiny red circle in the center; some people think they look very suggestive” (Golden, 1997, p. 278).
2.) How does the author hook in the reader at the beginning of the novel? Please provide 2 quotes from the novel and THOROUGHLY explain why you chose those quotes and why you feel the novelist did what he/she did.
The author hooks in the reader by starting the book as if the main character is speaking right to you. It as if she is telling the reader her story herself, over tea. I say this because the very first paragraph of the book starts out like this:
“Suppose that you and I were sitting in a quiet room overlooking a garden, chatting and sipping at our cups of green tea while we talked about something that had happened a long while ago…” (Golden, 1997, p. 1).
Another way the author hooks the reader in is by raising curiousity, also in the very first paragraph of the book.
”But the truth is that the afternoon when I met Mr. Tanaka Ichiro really was the best and worst of my life [...] If I had never know him, I’m sure Iwould not have become a geisha” (Golden, 1997, p. 1).
The mixture of almost a personal element to the book and also curiousity about why meeting Mr. Tanaka was the best and worst day of her life, pushes the reader forward. I think the author did this to make the book more realistic and believeable, as if the main character is personally and exculsively telling the reader her story.
3.) What is the connection between the introduction and conclusion of the novel? How does/doesn’t the author form a circle between intro and conclusion? More specifically, what have you learned about storytelling from this author considering the Zinsser article you read about “the lead and the ending” and the Faryna article “Finding identity and voice?”
The connection between the introduction and conclusion was a little harder for me to see at first than I had hoped. After I flipped back and forth for a small amount of time, I finally figured it out. The author starts, continues and ends the book with the main character speaking to the audience in a personal way. She is, and has been, a geisha for a long while in the introduction and conclusion of the book.
After reading the Zinsser article I learned that the introduction needs to pull the reader in. Not just the first sentence, but the entire introduction needs to flow and seduce the reader, or you may lose them. The author may use a story to lead the reader in, try to make the reader curious, or simply make the reader smile. The author of Memoirs of a Geisha does all three of these things, which makes for an intoxicating and interesting story.
After reading your test on Memoirs of a Geisha, i am curious to read it. You provided really good examples and explained that it really sucked you in even from the beginning. I think i got a new book to read, that is, when i have time to.