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Title: Great, but not without its flaws
Review: No doubt about it, this is, by any standard, a book that excels through its sheer readability. Nothing could be more entertaining and engaging than Sayuri's struggle to survive as a geisha after being sold into slavery by her own father. We really care about this character, and that's the test of a good book. However, this book does have its problems, as others have noted. The main one seems to be an unfortunate difficulty that crops up over and over again when a male author tells a story through the viewpoint of a female protagonist. Namely, there's something fundamentally passive about Sayuri. Everything happens TO her, and everyone acts ON her. She never truly does anything except to react to what the other characters are doing. This is the same problem that marred Wally Lamb's "She's Come Undone" and Callie Khouri's "Thelma and Louise" screenplay. A passive female character does seem more appropriate in "Memoirs of a Geisha," but it still gets annoying.
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