Memoirs of a Geisha

Memoirs Of A Geisha
Arthur Golden
Chapter one
Suppose that you and I were sitting in a quiet room overlooking a gar-1 \
den, chatting and sipping at our
cups of green tea while we talked J about something that had happened a \
long while ago, and I said to
you, "That afternoon when I met so-and-so . . . was the very best aftern\
oon of my life, and also the very
worst afternoon." I expect you might put down your teacup and say, "Well\
, now, which was it? Was it
the best or the worst? Because it can't possibly have been both!" Ordina\
rily I'd have to laugh at myself
and agree with you. But the truth is that the afternoon when I met Mr. T\
anaka Ichiro really was the best
and the worst of my life. He seemed so fascinating to me, even the fish \
smell on his hands was a kind of
perfume. If I had never known him, I'm sure I would not have become a ge\
isha.
I wasn't born and raised to be a Kyoto geisha. I wasn't even born in Kyo\
to. I'm a fisherman's daughter
from a little town called Yoroido on the Sea of Japan. In all my life I'\
ve never told more than a handful
of people anything at all about Yoroido, or about the house in which I g\
rew up, or about my mother and
father, or my older sister-and certainly not about how I became a geisha\
, or what it was like to be one.
Most people would much rather carry on with their fantasies that my moth\
er and grandmother were
geisha, and that I began my training in dance when I was weaned from the\
breast, and so on. As a matter
of fact, one day many years ago I was pouring a cup of sake for a man wh\
o happened to mention that he
had been in Yoroido only the previous week. Well, I felt as a bird must \
feel when it has flown across the
ocean and comes upon a creature that knows its nest. I was so shocked I \
couldn't stop myself from
saying:
"Yoroido! Why, that's where I grew up!"
This poor man! His face went through the most remarkable series of chang\
es. He tried his best to smile,
though it didn't come out well because he couldn't get the look of shock\
off his face.
"Yoroido?" he said. "You can't mean it."
I long ago developed a very practiced smile, which I call my "Noh smile"\
because it resembles a Noh
mask whose features are frozen. Its advantage is that men can interpret \
it however they want; you can
imagine how often I've relied on it. I decided I'd better use it just th\
en, and of course it worked. He let
out all his breath and tossed down the cup of sake I'd poured for him be\
fore giving an enormous laugh
I'm sure was prompted more by relief than anything else.
"The very idea!" he said, with another big laugh. "You, growing up in a \
dump like Yoroido. That's like
making tea in a bucket!" And when he'd laughed again, he said to me, "Th\
at's why you're so much fun,

Sayuri-san. Sometimes you almost make me believe your little jokes are r\
eal."
I don't much like thinking of myself as a cup of tea made in a bucket, b\
ut I suppose in a way it must be
true. After all, I did grow up in Yoroido, and no one would suggest it's\
a glamorous spot. Hardly anyone
ever visits it. As for the people who live there, they never have occasi\
on to leave. You're probably
wondering how I came to leave it myself. That's where my story begins.
In our little fishing village of Yoroido, I lived in what I called a "ti\
psy house." It stood near a cliff where
the wind off the ocean was always blowing. As a child it seemed to me as\
if the ocean had caught a
terrible cold, because it was always wheezing and there would be spells \
when it let out a huge sneeze-
which is to say there was a burst of wind with a tremendous spray. I dec\
ided our tiny house must have
been offended by the ocean sneezing in its face from time to time, and t\
ook to leaning back because it
wanted to get out of the way. Probably it would have collapsed if my fat\
her hadn't cut a timber from a
wrecked fishing boat to prop up the eaves, which made the house look lik\
e a tipsy old man leaning on
his crutch.
Inside this tipsy house I lived something of a lopsided life. Because fr\
om my earliest years I was very
much like my mother, and hardly at all like my father or older sister. M\
y mother said it was because we
were made just the same,