I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were pulling me down toward them.
Time your actions so you’re not fighting against the currents but moving with them.
We don’t become geisha because we want our lives to be happy; we become geisha because we have no choice.
Occasionally in life we come upon things we can’t understand, because we have never seen anything similar.
How many times already had I encountered the painful lesson that although we may wish for the barb to be pulled from our flesh, it leaves a welt that doesn’t heal?
Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.
Finally the homeless eel marked its territory, I suppose, and the Doctor lay heavily upon me, moist with sweat.
Those of us with water in our personalities don’t pick where we’ll flow to. All we can do is flow where the landscape of our lives carries us.
Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can’t put the two together...
If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even a stone can be worn down with enough rain.
A wounded tiger is a dangerous beast.
But what I could see out of the corner of my eye made me think of two lovely bundles of silk floating along a stream. In a moment they were hovering on the walkway in front of me, where they sank down and smoothed their kimono across their knees.
I worried she might spend an afternoon chatting with me about the sights and then wish me best of luck.
By the time we arrived, as evening was approaching, I felt as sore as a rock must feel when the waterfall has pounded on it all day long.
I studied Japanese language and culture in college and graduate school, and afterward went to work in Tokyo, where I met a young man whose father was a famous businessman and whose mother was a geisha. He and I never discussed his parentage, which was an open secret, but it fascinated me.
If Mother and Mameha couldn’t come to an agreement, I would remain a maid all my life just as surely as a turtle remains a turtle.
I could no more have stopped myself from feeling that sadness than you could stop yourself from smelling an apple that has been cut open on the table before you.
No one knows the author of memoir so well like himself.
And when I raised myself to look at the man who’d spoken, I had a feeling of leaving my misery behind me there on the stone wall.
The corridor couldn’t have smelled more strongly of fish guts if we had actually been inside a fish.