Memoirs of a Geisha

by Arthur Golden

It had never occurred to me that my mother wouldn’t simply go on being sick.

but she looked as if she’d spent her years stewing herself into a state of concentrated meanness.

Lol nice metaphor

You owe the okiya even for the money it cost to acquire you.”

Oh.my.God

Granny’s always hated me for it. One time she beat me so badly for something I did that she broke one of my hips.

They wore kimono and hair ornaments similar to geisha, but their obi were tied in the front rather than the back. I’d never seen this before and didn’t understand it, but it’s the mark of a prostitute. A woman who must take her sash on and off all night can’t be bothered with tying it behind her again and again.

Couldn’t the wrong sort of living turn anyone mean?

Yes!

By the time I clawed my way out I was mad enough to bite through wood. If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.

It’s true that up until this time in my life Mr. Tanaka had brought me nothing but suffering; but he also changed my horizons forever.

We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.

I love this.

I’m not sure this will make sense to you, but I felt as though I’d turned around to look in a different direction, so that I no longer faced backward toward the past, but forward toward the future.

For showing me that something besides cruelty could be found in the world, I suppose.

But to be a geisha . . . I could see it now as a stepping-stone to something else.

I’d never understood how closely things are connected to one another. And it isn’t just the zodiac I’m talking about. We human beings are only a part of something very much larger.

You see, stage fright drains the feeling from your hands; and when you’ve already grown accustomed to playing with hands that are numbed and miserable, stage fright presents much less of a problem.

For example, I found a way of practicing the shamisen while running errands. I did this by practicing a song in my mind while picturing clearly how my left hand should shift on the neck and how the plectrum should strike the string. In this way, when I put the real instrument into my lap, I could sometimes play a song quite well even though I had tried playing it only once before. Some people thought I’d learned it without practicing, but in fact, I’d practiced it all up and down the alleyways of Gion.

Fascinating!

An apprentice geisha is expected to walk a man to the toilet and back, but no one expects a novice to do it.

Gah!

And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped about my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

Often while I was dressing for these evenings, Hatsumomo hinted she might stop by, but she never did. Then one afternoon when I wasn’t expecting it, she informed me she had some free time that evening and would be absolutely certain to come.

Why

The first time, I couldn’t have felt more panicked if I’d sneezed and found pieces of my brain in the handkerchief.

Omg what a description!

As I later learned, a year or two before I’d first come to Gion, Dr. Crab had paid a record amount for Mameha’s mizuage—maybe ¥7000 or ¥8000.

I just threw up a liitle in my mouth

Two very wealthy men had bid against each other to be her mizuage patron.

I wasn’t sure he would, but Mameha assured me that a man doesn’t cultivate a relationship with a fifteen-year-old apprentice geisha unless he has her mizuage in mind.

BAAAARRRFFF!!

wander along at about the speed mud oozes down a hill, and with about as much purpose.

“My guess,” she said, “is that we have a few months before the adoption occurs. Which means that the time has come for your mizuage, Sayuri, whether you’re ready for it or not.”

This is just so awful in so may ways

In any case, when an apprentice geisha becomes available for mizuage, she presents boxes of these ekubo to the men who patronize her. Most

This Is so extremely awful it makes me feel ill

Well, Mameha, I have the proper punishment for you. You’re no longer invited to my party this year. What’s more, I want you to send Sayuri in your place.”

I knew this was coming

couldn’t quite look her in the eye after she said this. I knew perfectly well she was talking about the Baron.

Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord.

“Told her what?” “That you haven’t changed your mind about adopting her.” “Whatever gave her that idea? I never had the least intention of adopting her in the first place.”

Jaw.Floor.

After mizuage an apprentice wears her hair in a new style, and with a red silk band at the base of the pincushion bun, rather than a patterned one.

Even this is so creepy - outward known symbol of who is a virgin and who is not

because this woman is thinking, “My goodness . . . I’m talking with a prostitute . . .” A moment later she’s rescued by her escort, a wealthy man a good thirty or forty years older than she is. Well, I often find myself wondering why she can’t sense how much we really have in common. She is a kept woman, you see, and in my day, so was I.

Like melania trump

had never occurred to me that Mother believed her stained teeth had anything to do with eating pickles. When she’d finished giving me a good view of her mouth, she picked up her pipe again and took in a puff of smoke.

Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one.”

An en is a karmic bond lasting a lifetime. Nowadays many people seem to believe their lives are entirely a matter of choice; but in my day we viewed ourselves as pieces of clay that forever show the fingerprints of everyone who has touched them.

As for Yasuda-san, who’d wanted to see the robe on me, I told him that because of its colors and its butterfly motif, I could wear it only very early in the spring, and since it was now already summer, nearly a year would have to pass before he could see me in it.

Im sure this is cultural but i doknt understand why they dont just tell the truth . Why not say im devastated to say my house mother sold it

“Oh, please don’t, Sayuri-san! He already says how nothing about me is as good as you. If he sees you again, he’ll only think the worse of me.

Such an awful thing

I wasn’t as pleased to hear this as you might imagine. Hatsumomo and I had managed to live side by side these past few years by keeping away from each other.

I dontf see why she cant just say she does not want to switch

By this time I was feeling sick at heart—I can’t think of any better way of describing it. For it’s one thing to find your secrets suddenly exposed, but when your own foolishness has exposed them . . . well, if I was prepared to curse anyone, it was myself for keeping the journal in the first place and stowing it where Hatsumomo could find it.

Yes that was a serious flaw

never seek to defeat the man I am fighting,” he explained. “I seek to defeat his confidence. A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course to victory. Two men are equals—true equals—only when they both have equal confidence.”

I’d been out of touch with Nobu for more than four years by that time; I knew at once I couldn’t approach him.

“That wouldn’t have taken him long. Why didn’t he save what little influence he had for you?” “I haven’t seen him in more than a year . . .” “You haven’t seen me in more than four years. And I have saved my best influence for you.

I learned that year that nothing is so unpredictable as who will survive a war and who won’t. Mameha survived, working in a small hospital in Fukui Prefecture as a nurse’s assistant; but her maid Tatsumi was killed by the terrible bomb that fell on Nagasaki, and her dresser, Mr. Itchoda, died of a heart attack during an air raid drill.

I’m sorry to say that in the early years of the Allied Occupation, the Baron drowned himself in his splendid pond after his title and many of his holdings were taken away. I don’t think he could face a world in which he was no longer free to act on his every whim.

With her highly developed ability to benefit from other people’s suffering,

Lol! What a description!

I wondered too what would become of my sister, Satsu, wherever she was.

thought perhaps she might send a letter to me in care of the Nitta okiya,

It does make me wonder why Satsu never did this as far as we know. Surely at least in later years she might have tried.

well, I felt like a foolish girl again; had it really taken me all these years to understand that Satsu had no way of knowing the name of the Nitta okiya?

Ah. True.

Adversity is like a strong wind. I don’t mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be. Mr.

I’d been looking only for a sign about the Chairman, and hadn’t noticed. From this experience I understood the danger of focusing only on what isn’t there. What

What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realize I’d never really tasted the things I’d eaten, or seen the places I’d been, because I’d thought of nothing but the Chairman even while my life was drifting away from me.