This is a very painful book to read. It's not really made less painful by the knowledge that Masuda Sayo suffered for her entire life. There's a scene towards the beginning of Masuda's arrival at the okiya, when she was maybe around 12 years old, where Masuda witnesses another geisha refuse medical treatment for peritonitis in hopes of hastening her death as an end to her suffering. This incident greatly impacted Masuda. On 8 June 2008 Masuda found out she had liver cancer; only a few weeks later, on 26 June, she died.

Here's something that made me genuinely tear up:

Masuda wrote her autobiography between the years of 1956 and 1957. She had never learned to read more than hiragana, and wrote her entire book in it. Her editors worked carefully to convert her work into the standard kanji while preserving the feeling of her original writing.