126. MEMOIRS of a GEISHA

Arthur Golden 1997

In this striking memoir that reads like a work of non-fiction, Sayuri sits with a translator and narrates her life as one of the most sought-after geisha in Gion around World War II. Now living in New York, she takes us back sixty years, from the time she is first sold to an okiya (a geisha house) to her training under a famous geisha Mameha. As we learn the art of being a geisha, including mastering dance, applying proper make-up, wearing the perfect kimono, serving tea, and making small talk, we also learn of the bitter geisha rivalries as well as the nuances of bidding for a geisha's mizuage (virginity) and acquiring a danna (permanent patron). The book's writing is effortless and gently philosophical, teaching quiet waiting, much like Sayuri's patience in her yearning for her true destiny.

'One evening in the spring of 1936, when I was a boy of fourteen, my father took me to a dance performance in Kyoto.'(opening line)

'White make-up causes all sorts of curious illusions; if a geisha were to paint the entire surface of her lips, her mouth would end up looking like two slices of tuna. So most geisha prefer a poutier shape, more like the bloom of a violet.'(66)

'We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course. If I'd never met Mr. Tanaka, my life would have been a simple stream flowing from our tipsy house to the ocean.'(105-106)

'The noise and the hubub of so many people living their lives of purpose around me seemed to stop; or at least, I ceased to be aware of it. 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.'(110-111)

'Now I understood the thing I've overlooked; the point wasn't to become a geisha, but to be one. To become a geisha... well, that was hardly a purpose in life. But to be a geisha... I could see it now as a stepping-stone to something else.'(114)

'I can see you have a great deal of water in your personality. 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. And yet, you haven't drawn on those strengths in living your life, have you?'(125)

'I'd never understood how closely things are connected to one another. and it isn't just the zodiac I'm talking about. We human beings are only a part of something very much larger. When we walk along, we may crush a beetle or simply cause a change in the air so that a fly ends up where it might never have gone otherwise. And if think of the same example but with ourselves in the role of the insect, and the larger universe in the role we've just played, it's perfectly clear that we're affected every day by forces over which we have no more control than the poor beetle has over our gigantic foot as it descends upon it. What are we to do? We must use whatever methods we can to understand the movement of the universe around us and time our actions so that we are not fighting the currents, but moving with them.'(127)

'That startling month in which I first came upon the Chairman again -- and met Nobu, and Dr. Crab, and Uchida Kosaburo -- made me feel something like a pet cricket that has at last escaped its wicker cage.'(223)

'... Mameha assured me that a man doesn't cultivate a relationship with a fifteen-year-old apprentice geisha unless he has her mizuage in mind.

"you can bet it isn't your conversation he's attracted to," she told me.'(233)

'Grief is a most peculiar thing; we're so helpless in the face of it. It's like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.'(255)

'Adversity is like a strong wind. I don't mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.'(348)

'But here I was again, like a girl trying to catch mice with her hands. Why couldn't I stop thinking about the Chairman?'(394)

'In the instant before that door opened, I could almost sense my life expanding just like a river whose waters have begun to swell; for I had never before taken such a drastic step to change the course of my own future. I was like a child tiptoeing along a precipice overlooking the sea. And yet somehow I hadn't imagined a great wave might come and strike me there, and wash everything away.'(406)

'Since the day I'd left Yorido, 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.'(419)

'But now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.'(closing lines)

Vintage Contemporaries Edition, February 1999

428 pages

Book owned