Memoirs of a Geisha

by Arthur Golden

Like prostitutes, their lower-class counterparts, geisha are often in the unusual position of knowing whether this or that public figure really does put his pants on one leg at a time like everyone else.

My mother always said she’d married my father because she had too much water in her personality and he had too much wood in his.

My name back then was Chiyo. I wouldn’t be known by my geisha name, Sayuri,

In front of a rough carving of Amida, the Buddha of the Western Paradise, stood tiny black mortuary tablets bearing the Buddhist names of our dead ancestors.

Was life nothing more than a storm that constantly washed away what had been there only a moment before, and left behind something barren and unrecognizable?

Fishermen are terribly superstitious, you see. They especially don’t like women to have anything to do with fishing.

The year of the cow; fifteen years old; the planet Venus; six, white.

“You’re the year of the monkey. I can tell it just looking at you. What a great deal of water you have! Eight, white; the planet Saturn.

I felt as sore as a rock must feel when the waterfall has pounded on it all day long.

“It’s an okiya,” she said. “It’s where geisha live.

something like what a fish might feel for the fisherman who pulls the hook from its lip.

If you’ve never seen a shamisen, you might find it a peculiar-looking instrument.

Japanese men, as a rule, feel about a woman’s neck and throat the same way that men in the West might feel about a woman’s legs. This is why geisha wear the collars of their kimono so low in the back that the first few bumps of the spine are visible;

They wore kimono and hair ornaments similar to geisha, but their obi were tied in the front rather than the back.

the mark of a prostitute.

We human beings are only a part of something very much larger. When we walk along, we may crush a beetle or simply cause a change in the air so that a fly ends up where it might never have gone otherwise.

A true geisha will never soil her reputation by making herself available to men on a nightly basis.

The terms of the arrangement will probably oblige the danna to pay off a portion of the geisha’s debts and cover many of her living expenses every month—such

wooden shoes we call okobo, which an apprentice geisha always wears.

Forty-seven Ronin—who avenged their master’s death and afterward killed themselves by seppuku—well, it was their leader who hid himself in the Ichiriki Teahouse while plotting revenge.

kuroyaki—“char-black”—a sort of perfume made by charring wood and grinding it into a soft gray dust.

“The first time a woman’s cave is explored by a man’s eel. That is what we call mizuage.”