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.
It was what we Japanese called the onion life, peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while.
Can’t you see? Every step I have taken, since I was that child on the bridge, has been to bring myself closer to you.
When a man takes a mistress, he doesn’t turn around and divorce his wife.
I fell into a sound sleep and dreamed that I was at a banquet back in Gion, talking with an elderly man who was explaining to me that his wife, whom he’d cared for deeply, wasn’t really dead because the pleasure of their time together lived on inside him.
Here again, I saw life in all its noisy excitement passing me by.
I don’t like things held up before me that I cannot have.
Geisha because when I was living in Japan, I met a fellow whose mother was a geisha, and I thought that was kind of fascinating and ended up reading about the subject just about the same time I was getting interested in writing fiction.
She paints her face to hide her face. Her eyes are deep water. It is not for Geisha to want. It is not for geisha to feel. Geisha is an artist of the floating world. She dances, she sings. She entertains you, whatever you want. The rest is shadows, the rest is secret.
Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.
A woman who acts like a fool is a fool.
And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped around my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.
Neither you nor I can know your destiny. You may never know it! Destiny isn’t always like a party at the end of the evening. Sometimes it’s nothing more than struggling through life from day to day.
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.