There are two kinds of Geisha. There of the Geisha of Gion and Tokyo, who pride themselves as being not only social entertainers but also artists. Sex is almost always implied, never overt. Then there are the Hot Springs Geisha. For these geisha, shamisen and dance are not an art unto themselves, they are a means to an end. Sex is the ultimate goal, and the line between artist and prostitute is so blurred it is almost non-existent.

Sayo Masuda wrote about her experiences as a pre-WWII hot springs geisha, and her life afterwards, in the mid 1950s. Although a best-seller in Japan, it wasn't translated into English until 2003, when the mythology of the geisha entered western thought with Arthur Golden's [b:Memoirs of a Geisha|930|Memoirs of a Geisha|Arthur Golden|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1157749066s/930.jpg|1558965]. Although Masuda only spent about 5 years as an actual hot springs geisha, she shows how the experience affected her life -- both in terms of the talents she picked up there and the stigma she earned -- for the next several years. In the afterward, the translator even mentions that just the publication of the book ran her out of the town she had been living in at the time.

Masuda writes with a simplicity brought on by the fact that she wasn't taught to read or write until her 20s, and the tense often switches from past to present and back again. But the simplicity also means there's no room for deceit, and the plain truth of her words jump off the page with an easiness not found in more "serious" memoirists.

Although, as I said, she only spends about 5 years, and about 1/4 of the book, as an actual hot springs geisha, this book is still a fascinating account of what it was like to be a woman living on the margins of society in the early 20th century Japan. Most women like her could have never told their story, since most of the them would have been as illiterate as she started out. So this book uniquely preserves an unexamined strata of society in Japan.