For most students, a failing grade in the first-year rite of passage Expository Writing marks the end of a literary career. Not so for Arthur Golden ’78, who overcame this obstacle to author the wildly successful novel Memoirs of a Geisha, which remained on The New York Times Best-Seller List for more than a year.

The book follows the poignant story of the young, light-eyed daughter of a poor Japanese fisherman who is sold into slavery in a Geisha house in distant Kyoto.

Memoirs captivated readers through the seductive first person voice of Sayuri as she is trained in the arts of the geisha—dance and music; wearing kimono, elaborate makeup and hair; pouring sake in a way designed to beguile; competing with a jealous rival for men’s attention—and the money that goes with it.

Golden breathed life into this exotic world with his capacity for empathy, attention to historical detail and an obsession with accuracy—both in the development of his characters and their surroundings.

The seeds of Memoirs were sewn during Golden’s time as an undergraduate at Harvard, where he acquired a grounding in Japanese art, language and culture which led to many more years of scholarship.

“I really think that the scholar in college was father of the man,” says Professor Emeritus John. M. Rosenfield, a mentor of Golden’s from his college days.

Attracted by the dynamic personality of this distinguished Japanese art scholar, Golden says he chose to concentrate in Japanese art history as an undergraduate.

“I studied Japanese art for two principle reasons,” Golden says. “One was that I really liked Professor Rosenfield. He made a university as big and sometimes as overwhelming as Harvard almost like a small college. The other reason was because I was very interested in the language.”

After Harvard, Golden went on to earn an M.A. in Japanese history from Columbia University in 1980 and later an M.A. in English from Boston University.

Despite his choice of academic pursuits, Golden says he prefers Western art to Japanese. “I find Japanese art beautiful, but a little remote,” he says. “I feel that way about the culture generally.”

But this remoteness could not keep Golden from penning a novel whose 320 pages penetrate to the core of Japanese culture.

Family Matters

Memoirs may have catapulted Golden into overnight fame, but his road to success was a long one. It took him 10 years and three drafts to produce Memoirs, he says, which has now been printed in 21 languages, with four million copies in English.

As a member of the Sulzberger family, the press dynasty which controls the New York Times, writing is in Golden’s blood. But he rejected the family formula for success when he declined to go into journalism, choosing the unfamiliar route of fiction instead.

“My grandmother didn’t understand; she thought I had made a terrible mistake,” Golden says. “One time I gave her a story I had written. She said, ‘I read your story—have you ever considered going into business?’ I laughed and said, ‘Granny, are you saying that because of the story or in spite of it?’ She laughed back and said, ‘Both, I guess.’”

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.

“As I got older, I made a study of it,” Golden says. “A 70-year-old would probably chuckle that I would call myself wise, but I mean in contrast to who I was at 25—I feel so much wiser.”

This was a guiding force in writing the novel.

People, Golden says, are fundamentally all the same—driven by the same needs and desires.

“If you can understand how those needs and desires translate themselves, it makes for almost like solving equations,” Golden says. “I think there are fundamental psychological truths, and so you always solve the equation of a personality with those things in mind.”

He says he keeps a sharp eye out for anything that departs from the believable, both in the psychological development of his characters and in the detail which fleshes out a historical novel.

“A lot of writing this novel felt to me in some ways like taking the path between the trees,” Golden says. “It was a constant struggle to find a believable path.”

This path took him to the boundaries of occupational dedication. Friends say that his intellectual curiosity is infinite, and Golden himself admits that he will stop at nothing to make sure his story is true to reality, calling this thoroughness an “obsession with the truth.”

“For him, writing is approached in a very different way—like conquering all of literature. He takes no shortcuts, whatever it takes,” friend and fellow novelist Mameve Medwed says. “By the time he sits down to write he knows everything there is to know—only Arthur would learn Dutch for his new novel.”

In preparation for writing Memoirs of a Geisha, Golden took nearly 200 pages of research notes. His new novel, he says, required nearly twice as many.

In an effort to adhere strictly to the reality of a geisha’s life, he even went so far as to purchase and experiment with the makeup a geisha would have worn, Medwed says.

She goes on to say that she wouldn’t be surprised if Golden went around barking in an effort to get into the head of the dog named Rosine who is featured in his new novel.

“He could have told his story from the perspective of a woman or of a baboon in a zoo,” says Golden’s best friend Anders .

Golden attributes his respect for accuracy to his newspaper roots.

“A writer, even a writer of fiction, and maybe even especially a writer of fiction, has an obligation to the truth,” he says.

Despite this nod to his family’s tradition, Golden’s success led to a major shake-up of the assumptions of his powerful family, Anders says.

“I think there is a tried-and-true formula in the family to success, which is to go into the paper,” Anders says. “It was not a formula he wanted to accept.”

Golden is presently immersed in writing his second novel, which tells the story of a man in Amsterdam in the 1840s who comes to the U.S. in the 1860s and becomes a successful meat packer in Chicago.

“I wanted to write about a business,” he says. “I settled on meat packing because it’s so difficult to dress it up and make it anything but what it is—it’s so raw. In this period was a great revolution in meat packing that works with the character that I imagine.”

Golden has declined requests for a sequel to Memoirs, despite the interest shown.

“The freshness and originality of the first book cannot be replicated,” Golden says. “And I wouldn’t have as much fun writing it.”

—Staff writer Ella A. Hoffman can be reached at ehoffman@fas.harvard.edu.