Arthur Golden

Adversity is like a strong wind. It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are. ”

What I had to do was keep the story within certain limits of what was, of course, plausible. ”

I don't like things held up before me that I cannot have. ”

Passion can quickly slip to jealousy, or even hatred. ”

Geisha because when I was living in Japan, I met a fellow whose mother was a geisha, and I thought that was kind of fascinating and ended up reading about the subject just about the same time I was getting interested in writing fiction. ”

It is confusing, because in this culture we really don't have anything that corresponds to geisha. ”

As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past. ”

This time all the historical details and things were right. But I'd written it again in third person, and people found it dry. I decided to throw that one away. ”

I studied Japanese language and culture in college and graduate school, and afterward went to work in Tokyo, where I met a young man whose father was a famous businessman and whose mother was a geisha. He and I never discussed his parentage, which was an open secret, but it fascinated me. ”