Friends as well as family puzzled over his decision to become a novelist. They worried that he would wake up when he was 40 and find that he had wasted his life, he says.

Fittingly, Golden’s book was purchased by Random House Publishers on the cusp of his 40th birthday—when he was 39 and 10/12, he says.

“I don’t think that people knew quite what to do with Arthur,” says Richard Anders ’79, Golden’s best friend. “He was the kid brother of one branch of the family, sitting at home writing a book...about a Geisha—and all of a sudden he’s a famous author.”

The fact that Golden’s success came outside the Sulzberger family’s dominion was of no small significance.

“Plenty of people have done astonishing things, but always through the vehicle of the family,” Anders says. “He did something astonishing absolutely in his own right.”

Golden says his achievement was greeted with enthusiasm and, for some, a sense of relief that his foray into fiction had met with success.

“Arthur, that’s the best news—now you don’t have to have a mid-life crisis,” a good friend said when he shared the news that his book had found a publisher, Golden says.

A Study in Character

Memoirs left many bewildered by how a white American male could inhabit so completely the head and heart of a young Japanese woman.

Even Golden’s editor at Random House, Robin Desser, admits that she initially had some reservations about a novel set in Japan written in the first person by a non-Japanese man, but she says that when she read the book she was “transported.”

Golden, she says, accomplishes what many writers cannot.

“Sometimes people do this amazing act of ventriloquism, but cannot get inside the heart and soul of the character—Arthur does,” says Desser.

Golden does not attribute the success of his characters to a magic trick, but rather to a careful honing of the skills of a novelist and a keen eye for observation.

“I think that between the time I was an art history major and the time that I wrote Memoirs of a Geisha, I became deeply interested in how people work,” Golden says. “People think I wrote Memoirs of a Geisha as a scholar of Asia. I wrote it as a writer. I thought of myself and drew on skills I developed as a novelist.”

As a young man, he says, he had difficulty understanding people’s motives and reading between the lines.