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Who Is Arthur Golden?

Well, for starters, he is the author of the novel Memoirs of a Geisha, which was published on September 23rd, 1997. Though the novel is nearly a decade old, book sales remain steadily high, especially with the 2005 release of the Memoirs of a Geisha movie. The book has sold more than four million copies, and it has been translated into 32 languages.

He is part of the Ochs-Sulzberger family, which owns the New York Times. The Ochs-Sulzberger family traces its lineage back to Ashkenazic German Jews. He was born in 1956 in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His family consists of his wife, Trudy, and his two children. His mother is Ruth Holmberg, a retired publisher of The Chattanooga Times and a distinguished academian.

Arthur Golden, like his mother, is also highly educated. He began his educational career at the Baylor School, a private school for wealthier students, with tuition ranging from about $17,000 a year to $32,000 (depending on whether or not you are a boarding student). Most of its graduates boast Ivy League college enrollment. Golden attended Harvard and received a bachelors degree in Art History with a specialization in Japanese art. He then earned his masters in Japanese history at Columbia University, where he also learned Mandarin Chinese. He was also educated at Beijing University, and has worked in Tokyo. After returning to the United States, Golden earned his most recent degree at Boston University, where he earned a Masters degree in English.

As you may or may not know, Arthur Golden has also been involved in a lawsuit with ex-geisha Mineko Iwasaki. The charges were breach of contract and defamation of character. Iwasaki claims that what she told Golden about the lives of geisha was confidential information, and that he let the source of his information from her leek in his acknowledgements section of the novel. The case was settled out of court for an unknown sum of money.

My own personal opinion on this is that a scholar with three degrees would not want to risk his academic reputation for the sake of spicing up a best-selling novel. Getting degrees takes lots of time and money -- masters degrees require about 6 years of education, and bachelors about 4. So that's a total of 16 years of education in Golden's case, all to be wasted with a false tradition in a fictional novel? I think that Golden did receive information about the lives of geisha from Mineko Iwasaki, and that he did breach his contract with her never to reveal his sources, but that the tradition of mizuage was a fact, and not just lies created by Golden to make his novel more interesting, as Iwasaki reports. Whether or not the tradition of mizuage is still held today is up for debate. It was a ceremony that geisha underwent historically, which would make it accurate within the context of the book. But I suppose if you want a piece of the profit pie that Golden seems to have generated, suing is a good way to get it.