I loved reading this book. The first 418 pages were a sheer joy to read. The main character is Sayuri, a famous geisha, who has chosen to dictate her memoirs to an aquaintance in New York City. She begins with her childhood and the story of how she came to be in Gion, one of the famous geisha districts of Kyoto. As the story unfolds, we learn about her training and apprenticeship during the Great Depression and her life as a geisha, just before and after World War II. The story is told with riveting detail and the prose is quite moving. The characters and the setting felt "real" to me. I couldn't put it down. I read the whole book in the space of about six hours.

So why am I rating the book a '-'? The ending was horrible. It was just so wrong. I shouldn't have been surprised by it, because it does in fact fit with the main character's motivation and actions throughout the book--any other ending would not have been true to this character. But I hated it nonetheless.