A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist’s world.
I’m sure there are a great many things I don’t know about these women in their splendid dresses, but I often have the feeling that without their wealthy husbands or boyfriends, many of them would be struggling to get by and might not bare the same proud opinions of themselves. And of course, the same thing is true for a first-class Geisha.
Un equilibrio entre lo bueno y lo malo puede abrir las puertas del destino.
Every step I have taken in my life since I was a child in Gion, I have taken in the hope of bringing myself closer to you.
Everyone knows that a wounded tiger is a dangerous beast.
I would’ve had an easier time if my emotions had all pulled me in the same direction, but it wasn’t so simple. I’d been blown about like a scrap of paper in the wind.
And yet when his death happened only a few months later, I understood that he left me at the end of his long life just as naturally as the leaves fall from the trees.
Two men are equals – true equals – only when they both have equal confidence.
Pumpkin was a girl who looked as if she could grow fat quickly, given the chance.
I won’t say my emotions had settled themselves by the time the train pulled into Kyoto Station early the following morning. After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.
You’ll be wrinkled yourself one day.” “But some of his wrinkles are the way he’s made,” I said. “The back of his head is as old as the front, but it’s as smooth as an egg.
I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.
Only when she sits before her mirror to apply her makeup with care does she become a geisha. And I don’t mean that this is when she begins to look like one. This is when she begins to think like one too.
We can’t waste our time thinking about such things,” she said. “Nothing is bleaker than the future, except perhaps the past.
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.
Some days the Arashinos’ little grandson, Juntaro, cried from hunger – which is when Mr. Arashino usually decided to sell a kimono from his collection. This was what we Japanese called the “onion life” – peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while.
But really, would Yoroido seem any less exotic if I went back there again? As a young girl I believed my life would never have been a struggle if Mr. Tanaka hadn’t torn me away from my tipsy house. But 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.
He smelled like the sea even after he had bathed. When he wasn’t fishing, he sat on the floor in our dark front room mending a fishing net. And if a fishing net had been a sleeping creature, he wouldn’t even have awakened it, at the speed he worked. He did everything this slowly.
My goodness, Sayuri, you do look like a peasant!” he said.
To me, he seemed to see the sap bleeding from the trunks of the pine trees, and the circle of brightness in the sky where the sun was smothered by clouds.
Couldn’t the wrong sort of living turn anyone mean?