You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblatt.

Today my guest is Arthur Golden,

the author of Memoirs of a Geisha,

published by Knapp.

Now, as I was reading this book,

which is a novel

in the form of a first-person account

of the training and life of a geisha,

I developed myself a peculiar awareness of glances and exchanged rituals and bows. And then I thought, the only other book

that I knew this happening to me, oddly, was the remains of the day by Kashua Ishiguro, and he had brought

to the writing of the British butler the delicacies and restraints of his Japanese heritage.

So one saw a kind of overlay of one kind of hierarchical position, that of Geisha, onto another, that of Butler.

And I wondered in particular what it was that you found in yourself to be affiliated with the Geisha that allowed you to write her?

That's a very interesting question, and I have to tell you first that I'm delighted to have my book

mentioned in the same sentences, The Remains of the Day, which I think is a real masterpiece.

I adore that book, and I think I've read it about four or five times.

I'm not sure if I know what I found in myself except that. There is something very fundamental in Japanese culture that they talk about

...