A Writer’s Responsibility — Where Fiction Ends and Deception Begins

I don’t often reread books.
If you ask me about one I’ve read, I can usually replay it in my head like a film — scenes, emotions, the general arc — even if years have passed. There are only a handful of exceptions that I return to intentionally, almost ritually. The entire Harry Potter series, which I reread at least once a year because it feels like home. The Alchemist, whenever I sense I’ve drifted too far from my personal legend (which, thanks to ADHD, happens often). Eat Pray Love, especially during moments of change, when something in my life is quietly rearranging itself.

Memoirs of a Geisha was different.

When I first read it in the late 90s, I couldn’t have told you the story afterwards — not really. What stayed with me instead was how completely it pulled me out of myself. I remember sitting on the paved front path of my ex-in-laws’ house, back against the wall, book in one hand, cigarette in the other, a glass of Coke beside me. At one point I looked up, momentarily disoriented, because nothing around me looked familiar. My body was in South Africa. My mind was deep in pre-World War II Japan.

I loved the book. I recommended it often. I believed it to be a true story.

Years later, rummaging through my favourite charity shop, I came across a copy that looked just as old as the one I’d once owned. I tried to remember the plot — I couldn’t. Only the feeling. Only the impact. So I bought it, curious about why something that once moved me so deeply had left so little narrative trace.

This time, reading it as a much older, much more healed version of myself, the experience was very different.

From the opening pages, I was once again captivated. Empathy came easily — maybe too easily. Sayuri’s childhood mirrored my own in uncomfortable ways: abandonment at a knowing age, separation from her sister, neglect, abuse, the absence of safe adults, and the determination to keep going anyway. She doesn’t frame herself as a victim. She simply tells what happened, and somehow that makes it more powerful.

By the end of the book, I felt reassured. She made it.
And in some strange, borrowed way, so did I.

And then I read the acknowledgements.

Before I get to why that moment mattered so much, it’s important to understand how carefully this book earns the reader’s trust from the very beginning.

Memoirs of a Geisha opens with a Translator’s Note — a prologue in every sense of the word. We are introduced to Jakob Haarhuis, a professor of Japanese history, whose academic credentials and lifelong relationship with Japan are laid out in detail. He explains how he came to know Nitta Sayuri, the woman whose memoirs we are about to read, and why she chose him to tell her story. He speaks of recorded conversations, of trust built over time, of conditions under which the memoir could be published. Even a year after her death, he tells us, he still listens to her voice.

It feels intimate.
It feels authoritative.
It feels real.

From there, Sayuri speaks directly to the reader — not as a character, but as a woman recounting her life. She addresses us as “you,” filling in context she didn’t have at the time, explaining her thinking, letting us sit beside her as if we are Jakob himself. Somewhere in the back of our minds, we imagine two older people in a quiet room, a tape recorder on the table between them, a life being preserved before it disappears.

And so we surrender to the story.

That’s the thing about a story well told — it doesn’t demand belief. It creates it.

Sayuri describes her early childhood in a poor fishing village, running wild, naive to the way the world works. She recounts being taken from her home, separated from her sister, and sold into a life she couldn’t possibly understand. Neglect. Cruelty. Control. And yet, throughout it all, she never asks for pity. She simply survives.

You root for her instinctively. Even if you can’t relate through shared experience, you care for a child ripped from everything familiar and forced to adapt to stay alive. That’s just human nature.

By the time the story ends, there is a sense of quiet resolution. She finds a version of peace. She doesn’t rage against the past or blame the people who hurt her. She accepts her life as the path she walked. It is deeply moving.

I wasn’t ready to put the book down. Wanting to savour it, I kept reading — into the acknowledgements — hoping, perhaps, for one final glimpse of Sayuri beyond the page. Something to hold on to.

And that’s when the bubble burst.

“Although the character of Sayuri and her story are completely invented, the historical facts of a geisha’s day-to-day life in the 1930s and 1940s are not.”

Sayuri wasn’t real.
Her life wasn’t real.
Jakob Haarhuis wasn’t real either.

What followed — a late-night spiral through Google — only deepened the discomfort.

It wasn’t just that the central figures were invented; it was that the 'facts' I had trusted were actually a collection of disputes, lawsuits, and academic criticism. It turns out the world Golden built was shaped less by lived truth and more by a Western gaze that wanted a particular, profitable version of Japan.

As someone with socialist views and a deep-seated belief in human rights, this is where the 'vulnerability hangover' turned into a quiet rage. It felt like a form of intellectual colonisation. He didn't just borrow a story; he borrowed the credibility of a culture he didn't own, used it to build a house of mirrors, and then sold tickets to people like me who were looking for a way to process our own very real trauma.

And suddenly, what I felt wasn’t disappointment. It was betrayal.

This wasn't the honest agreement of fiction. We know Hogwarts isn't real, but the magic is the 'opt-in' part of the deal.

This felt different.

This felt like being invited to trust — emotionally, vulnerably — under the guise of truth, only to be told later that the scaffolding of credibility was part of the illusion.

Especially when that illusion mirrors lived trauma.

It took me months to articulate why this sat so heavily with me. I understand now why my 20-year-old self couldn’t remember the story — she likely couldn’t afford to. A much older version of me could recognise the parallels, honour the resilience, and still feel unsettled by the way the story was framed.

Which brings me to the questions that linger:
Where is the line between fiction and deception?
Does intent matter, or does impact carry more weight?
Can we separate a writer from their work when trust itself is part of the narrative device?
And what responsibility do writers have when they borrow the language of truth to tell a story that isn’t?

Perhaps the real discomfort isn’t that the story was invented —
but that, for so many of us, it felt like something that was lived.

How I Read Books
I don’t review books to judge their literary merit or cultural impact. I write about how a story meets me — what it asks of me emotionally, what it gives me, and what it takes. This reflection isn’t about whether Memoirs of a Geisha is beautifully written. It is. It’s about the relationship between truth, trust, and storytelling — and what happens when that relationship fractures.