How It All Goes Down
- A Westerner named Jakob Haarhuis includes this note as preface to the main attraction: the memoirs of a geisha. (The translator has the most hard-to-pronounce name in the whole book.)
- He tells us that in 1936, he saw a dance performance in Kyoto.
- One of the geisha captivated him that day. And years later, he became her friend in New York City.
- Her name is Nitta Sayuri, and we're about to hear her story.
- Geisha are notoriously secretive, but now that she lives outside of Japan, Sayuri wants her story told.
- She dictated her memoirs to Jakob, and now we have them.
- So let's get to it.