For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I’d always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness – a world in which fathers didn’t sell their daughters.
After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.
Perhaps it seems odd that a casual meeting on the street could have brought about such change. But sometimes life is like that isn’t it.
A tree may look as beautiful as ever; but when you notice the insects infesting it, and the tips of the branches that are brown from disease, even the trunk seems to lose some of its magnificence.
Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one.
Now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.
Anyone can have a good day. The question is what do you do on a bad day. That’s when you’re being tested. In a very tangible sense, a bad day shows your innermost essence more than a good day.
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.