Mineko Iwasaki

No woman in the three-hundred-year history of the karyukai has ever come forward in public to tell her story—until now. "Many say I was the best geisha of my generation," writes Mineko Iwasaki. "And yet, it was a life that I found too constricting to continue. And one that I ultimately had to leave." Trained to become a geisha from the age of five, Iwasaki would live among the other "women of art"...