I enjoyed reading Memoirs of a Geisha because it feels authentic; the analogies and idioms Golden uses to describe Chiyo/Sayuri's experience remind me of the way Chinese women in my family tell stories. The memoir motif, though it feels personal and at times, poetic, is why I cannot rate this at five stars. It reads like a memoir, like Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior, but it is hard to get over that Memoirs of a Geisha was written by a white, American, middle-aged man, who went to Harvard and did not experience any of the circumstances in this book. I'm not saying I have never loved books with female narrators written by men (see The Fault in Our Stars); however, with this particular book, so entrenched in what it means to have been a woman in this setting, and purposefully labelled a "memoir" in the title rather than a fiction, I could not help but read it through the lens of a male scholar and wonder: is he trying to fetishize the geisha? What is it that interests him in the story of a geisha? Memoirs of a Geisha is a fascinating story full of rich metaphor, but I would not recommend reading it directly after an actual memoir, like Min's Red Azalea, because it cannot compare.