As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides – man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past.
Now, Chiyo, stumbling along in life is a poor way to proceed. You must learn how to find the time and place for things.
Water never waits. It changes shape and flows around things, and finds the secret paths no one else has thought about – the tiny hole through the roof or the bottom of the box. There’s no doubt it’s the most versatile of the five elements. It can wash away earth; it can put out fire; it can wear a piece of metal down and sweep it away. Even wood, which is its natural complement, can’t survive without being nurtured by water.
I knew he noticed the tress, and the mud, and the children in the street, but I had no reason to believe he’d ever notice me.
The world was simply too cruel; how could I survive?
I won’t say I’d never wondered what might happen if she should die; I did wonder about it, in the same way I wondered what might happen if our house were swallowed up in an earthquake. There could hardly be life after such an event.
I’d done nothing but worry that every turn of life’s wheel would bring yet another obstacle into my path; and of course, it was the worrying and the struggle that had always made life so vividly real to me. When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.
Because I’d lived through adversity once before, what I learned about myself was like a reminder of something I’d once known but had nearly forgotten-namely, that beneath the elegant clothing, and the accomplished dancing, and the clever conversation, my life had no complexity at all, but was as simple as a stone falling toward the ground. My whole purpose in everything during the past ten years had been to win the affections of the Chairman.
When I unwrapped the moth from its funeral shroud, it was the same startlingly lovely creature as on the day I had entombed it. Everything about it seemed beautiful and perfect, and so utterly unchanged.
I can tolerate his company for about half an hour. After that I am not responsible for the things I say!
Remember, Chiyo, geisha are not courtesans. And we are not wives. We sell our skills, not our bodies. We create another secret world, a place only of beauty. The very word “geisha” means artist and to be a geisha is to be judged as a moving work of art.
Of course I was happy to sit and listen, but I understood perfectly well that the Chairman wasn’t telling these things to me because he wanted me to know them. He was clearing them from his mind, just like draining water from a bucket. So I listened closely not to his words, but to the tone of his voice; because in the same way that sound rises as a bucket is emptied, I could hear the Chairman’s voice softening as he spoke.
We topped the ridge a few moments later, and the town of Senzuru came into view below us. The day was drab, everything in shades of gray. It was my first look at the world outside Yoroido, and I didn’t think I’d missed much. I could see the thatched roofs of the town around an inlet, amid dull hills, and beyond them the metal-colored sea, broken with shards of white. Inland, the landscape might have been attractive but for the train tracks running across it like a scar. – Chapter 2, pg 20.
Every man has his destiny. But who needs to go to a fortune-teller to find it?
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.