Memoirs of a Geisha

“Even as a child I could tell that Mr. Tanaka saw the world around him as it really was; he never wore the dazed look of my father. 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. He lived in the world that was visible, even if it didn't always please him to be there.”

Whereas Sayuri’s father often seemed to be dazed or puzzled by the world around him, Mr. Tanaka is a more astute, world-wise character. Sayuri does not know what awaits her when she meets him, but, even as a child, she can perceive this contrast between the two men. As she goes on to realize, Mr. Tanaka does not harbor any illusions about the world and is not the kind of person to daydream. He recognizes that the world is not always ideal, but he remains fully present in it nonetheless. 

“I walked home in a state of such agitation, I don’t think there could have been more activity inside me if I'd been an anthill. 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. Somewhere between the various thoughts about my mother-somewhere past the discomfort in my lip-there nestled a pleasant thought I tried again and again to bring into focus. It was about Mr. Tanaka. I stopped on the cliffs and gazed out to sea, where the waves even after the storm were still like sharpened stones, and the sky had taken on the brown tone of mud. I made sure no one was watching me, and then clutched the incense to my chest and said Mr. Tanaka's name into the whistling wind, over and over, until I felt satisfied I'd heard the music in every syllable. I know it sounds foolish of me-and indeed it was. But I was only a confused little girl.”

After her first encounter with Mr. Tanaka, during which he had told her that she was beautiful, Sayuri feels overwhelmed and struggles to deal with the various thoughts clouding her mind. Concerns about her ailing mother are ever-present, yet meeting Mr. Tanaka has had a dramatic effect upon her and she regards his entry into her life as a pivotal event that is filled with promise. Of course, she does not realize the precise role that he will play and, as an adult, she can see that her reaction was foolish. As she remarks, though, she was only a child living in a fishing village at the time and could hardly have been expected to act otherwise. 

“Couldn't the wrong sort of living turn anyone mean? I remembered very well that one day back in Yoroido, a boy pushed me into a thorn bush near the pond. By the time I clawed my way out I was mad enough to bite through wood. If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.”

Granny is portrayed as a cantankerous individual and living with her is far from easy. However, whereas Sayuri had previously seen her merely as unpleasant, she wonders if, like herself, Granny has suffered hardships that made her mean. She remembers a childhood incident in which a boy had pushed her into a thorn bush and she had grown angry during the few minutes that it took to claw her way out. As she reasons, if a relatively minor, short-lived incident could have this effect, what would more prolonged suffering do to a person’s character? This line of thinking causes Sayuri to regard Granny with a degree of pity.

“If I'd never met Mr. Tanaka, my life would have been a simple stream flowing from our tipsy house to the ocean. Mr. Tanaka changed all that when he sent me out into the world. But being sent out into the world isn't necessarily the same as leaving your home behind you. I'd been in Gion more than six months by the time I received Mr. Tanaka's letter; and yet during that time, I'd never for a moment given up the belief that I would one day find a better life elsewhere, with at least part of the family I'd always known. I was living only half in Gion; the other half of me lived in my dreams of going home. This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes consume us completely.”

Sayuri regards her meeting with Mr. Tanaka as both the worst and the best day of her life: she has certainly experienced much grief in the days since then but she recognizes that, were it not for this meeting, she would have carried on living a simple life in Yoroido. Still, during her first six months in Gion, she clings to the idea of being reunited with her family—as she notes, leaving something behind geographically is not the same as leaving it behind emotionally. Learning of her parents’ deaths puts an end to this possibility and causes her to reflect on the fragility of dreams and the dangers of pursuing them.

“My existence was as unstable as a stream, changing in every way; but the moth was like a piece of stone, changing not at all. While thinking this thought, I reached out a finger to feel the moth's velvety surface; but when I brushed it with my fingertip, it turned all at once into a pile of ash without even a sound, without even a moment in which I could see it crumbling. I was so astonished I let out a cry. The swirling in my mind stopped; I felt as if I had stepped into the eye of a storm. I let the tiny shroud and its pile of ashes flutter to the ground; and now I understood the thing that had puzzled me all morning. The stale air had washed away. The past was gone. My mother and father were dead and I could do nothing to change it. But I suppose that for the past year I'd been dead in a way too. And my sister . . . yes, she was gone; but I wasn't gone. I'm not sure this will make sense to you, but I felt as though I'd turned around to look in a different direction, so that I no longer faced backward toward the past, but forward toward the future. And now the question confronting me was this: What would that future be?”

In this passage, Sayuri recalls an incident that occurred early during her time at the okiya: a moth landed on her arm one day and, when she brushed it away, it drifted to the floor, dead. Sayuri did not know if she was responsible, but she was touched by its death and admired its wings. This recollection prompts her to recover the moth—which she had buried it in a rag—and unwrap it. Finding it unchanged, she muses that her own life is the opposite of the moth’s, in that it has been unstable and rocked by change. However, when the moth disintegrates at her touch, she finally stops holding on to the past and, instead, opens her eyes to the fact that her life is now headed in a different direction. She does not know what the future will bring, but she accepts that she has entered a new chapter of her life.

“I mean to say that if you have experienced an evening more exciting than any in your life, you're sad to see it end; and yet you still feel grateful that it happened. In that brief encounter with the Chairman, I had changed from a lost girl facing a lifetime of emptiness to a girl with purpose in her life. 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? And I really do think if you'd been there to see what I saw, and feel what I felt, the same might have happened to you.”

In the same way that meeting Mr. Tanaka had a dramatic effect on her, Sayuri’s encounter with the Chairman changes her life. When he talks to her, she is touched by his kind manner and concern for her welfare and she decides that he is her destiny. She recognizes that this might seem odd given that it is only a casual, brief exchange, but she points out that this is how life works sometimes. It is not a matter of facts or logic but rather of emotions, and what may seem inconsequential from an outsider’s perspective can be monumental for the person experiencing it firsthand. 

“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 we 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.”

After Mameha consults her almanac, Sayuri finds that the day she had planned to make her escape was deemed inauspicious for her but ideal for her sister. Sayuri had never really taken the zodiac seriously before, but this incident causes her to adopt a philosophical mindset. She now feels that the fabric of life is connected and that people are affected by forces beyond their control. This raises the issue of self-determination and Sayuri concludes that all we can do is move with the currents of the universe and try to understand them as best we can. Fighting against them is doomed to failure, as she found when she tried to escape the okiya.

“You must remember that a geisha, above all, is an entertainer and a performer. We may pour sake or tea for a man, but we never go and fetch another serving of pickles. And in fact, we geisha are so well pampered by our maids that we scarcely know how to look after ourselves or keep our own rooms orderly, much less adorn a room in a teahouse with flowers.”

While it might seem as though a geisha acts as a maid or servant, Sayuri explains that her real role is that of an entertainer or performer. Even though geisha may serve drinks, this is part of their overall function and, as we learn elsewhere in the novel, is a skill in itself. Readers should not assume that they merely fetch food and drink: being a geisha is about artistry and is far-removed from being a maid. In fact, geisha have their own maids to see to everyday tasks and are unaccustomed to looking after themselves, let alone taking care of others.

“So you see, a geisha of the first or second tier in Gion can’t be bought for a single night, not by anyone. But if the right sort of man is interested in something else—not a night together, but a much longer time and if he’s willing to offer suitable terms, well, in that case geisha will be happy to accept such an arrangement. Parties and so on are all very nice; but the real money in Gion comes from having a danna, and a geisha without one-such as Hatsumomo-is like a stray cat on the street without a master to feed it.”

Here, Sayuri explains the role of a danna in a geisha’s life. A geisha’s main task is to entertain, and Sayuri clarifies that this is not the same as prostitution. Some geisha may make themselves available to men on a casual basis, but the most successful geisha do not. They may, however, be receptive to a more formal, long-term arrangement, with a danna, who then covers many of their expenses. Hatsumomo’s behavior has resulted in her being without a danna, which means that, unlike Mameha, she is starved of this support and has no choice but to live in an okiya.

“When I first learned the news of my family, it was as though I'd been covered over by a blanket of snow. But in time the terrible coldness had melted away to reveal a landscape I’d never seen before or even imagined. I don’t know if this will make sense to you, but my mind on the eve of my debut was like a garden in which the flowers have only begun to poke their faces up through the soil, so that it is still impossible to tell how things will look. I was brimming with excitement; and in this garden of my mind stood a statue, precisely in the center. It was an image of the geisha I wanted to become.”

After Mameha consults her almanac, Sayuri finds that the day she had planned to make her escape was deemed inauspicious for her but ideal for her sister. Sayuri had never really taken the zodiac seriously before, but this incident causes her to adopt a philosophical mindset. She now feels that the fabric of life is connected and that people are affected by forces beyond their control. This raises the issue of self-determination and Sayuri concludes that all we can do is move with the currents of the universe and try to understand them as best we can. Fighting against them is doomed to failure, as she found when she tried to escape the okiya.

“As I studied myself in the mirror, a most peculiar thing happened. I knew that the person kneeling before the makeup stand was me, but so was the unfamiliar girl gazing back. I actually reached out to touch her. She wore the magnificent makeup of a geisha. Her lips were flowering red on a stark white face, with her cheeks tinted a soft pink. Her hair was ornamented with silk flowers and sprigs of un-husked rice. She wore a formal kimono of black, with the crest of the Nitta okiya. When at last I could bring myself to stand, I went into the hall and looked in astonishment at myself in the full-length mirror. Beginning at the hem of my gown, an embroidered dragon circled up the bottom of the robe to the middle of my thigh. His mane was woven in threads lacquered with a beautiful reddish tint. His claws and teeth were silver, his eyes gold-real gold. I couldn’t stop tears from welling up in my eyes.”

“The Baron—who I was beginning to realize was something of a nervous man—leaned over to scratch at a mark on the surface of Mameha's table, and made me think of my father on the last day I'd seen him, digging grime out of ruts in the wood with his fingernails. I wondered what he would think if he could see me kneeling here in Mameha's apartment, wearing a robe more expensive than anything he'd ever laid eyes on, with a baron across from me and one of the most famous geisha in all of Japan at my side. I was hardly worthy of these surroundings. And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped about my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.”

After Mameha consults her almanac, Sayuri finds that the day she had planned to make her escape was deemed inauspicious for her but ideal for her sister. Sayuri had never really taken the zodiac seriously before, but this incident causes her to adopt a philosophical mindset. She now feels that the fabric of life is connected and that people are affected by forces beyond their control. This raises the issue of self-determination and Sayuri concludes that all we can do is move with the currents of the universe and try to understand them as best we can. Fighting against them is doomed to failure, as she found when she tried to escape the okiya.

“Looking back, I can see that this conversation with Mameha marked a shift in my view of the world. Beforehand I'd known nothing about mizuage; I was still a naive girl with little understanding. But afterward I could begin to see what a man like Dr. Crab wanted from all the time and money he spent in Gion. Once you know this sort of thing, you can never unknow it. I couldn't think about him again in quite the same way.”

In this passage, Sayuri recalls the moment when she grasped the real intentions of men like Dr. Crab. She had been naive up to this point: she knew that geishas were entertainers and that wealthy men spent a lot of time and money in Gion, but she had not understood the sexual politics involved in this arrangement. Learning about mizuage is thus a revelation, and she no longer sees men like Dr. Crab in the same light, now that she knows their real intentions. 

“But now that I was outside Kyoto, I could see that for most people life had nothing to do with Gion at all; and of course, I couldn't stop from thinking of the other life I’d once led. 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.”

When she is taken to visit the Baron, Chiyo reflects that life does not begin and end in Gion. Despite her initial distress at being taken from her home, as well as her earlier longing to return there, she has grown accustomed to her new life. Venturing out into the wider world, however, causes her to think about her home in Yoroido, and she realizes that people have no power over grief. All one can do is let it run its course, and this is something that Sayuri has experienced directly. Without realizing it, her grief over her family has dissipated, and it is only moments like this that spark her memories of them and cause her to reflect on her past.

“‘Young girls hope all sorts of foolish things, Sayuri. Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one.’”

In this succinct comment, Mameha warns Sayuri of the danger of investing in unrealistic hopes and dreams. Sayuri has pinned all her dreams on the Chairman, whereas Mameha views her own relationship with the Baron in a more pragmatic light—love and passion are irrelevant. Mameha therefore acts as an adviser to her younger, more idealistic sister, cautioning her to discard any romantic notions she might have and to accept the world as it is.

“One evening while I was kneeling at a table in the Ichiriki Teahouse, trying not to think too much about my feelings of misery, I had a sudden thought of a child lost in the snowy woods; and when I looked up at the white-haired men I was entertaining, they looked so much like snowcapped trees all around me that I felt for one horrifying moment I might be the sole living human in all the world.”

When she is entertaining at the teahouse one evening, Sayuri is struck by the sight of the older, white-haired men that surround her and she compares them to snowcapped trees. This makes her aware of how lonely she is. She may be busy entertaining and the mood may seem jovial, but she feels detached from these men and is conscious of her youth and vulnerability.

“The Admiral seemed to me the sort of man who really was accustomed to winning. Finally someone asked him the secret of his success.

‘I never seek to defeat the man I am fighting,’ he explained. ‘I seek to defeat his confidence. A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course to victory. Two men are equals—true equals—only when they both have equal confidence.’”

In this passage, Sayuri remembers a social gathering at which an Admiral had revealed the secret of his success. As he related, his aim was never to defeat the person he was fighting but rather to defeat their confidence. This is advice that Sayuri follows in her dealings with Hatsumomo: by this point, Sayuri is no longer a fearful girl who has to follow Hatsumomo’s orders. She can now match her rival’s confidence. It is only when a person has conquered their doubts that they can achieve victory

“What if I came to the end of my life and realized that I'd spent every day watching for a man who would never come to me? What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realize I'd never really tasted the things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been, because I'd thought of nothing but the Chairman even while my life was drifting away from me. And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.”

Sayuri experiences a moment of doubt and fear when she wonders if her dreams about the Chairman will ever become a reality. Imagining a future with the Chairman has been her sole source of motivation and, here, she worries that this has clouded her vision. She is now concerned that she will look back on her life and realize that she has never appreciated things that she has experienced because she has been preoccupied with the Chairman. Still, she cannot dismiss her sense that the Chairman is her destiny and that, without him, her life is essentially meaningless.  

“In all of these spots, I felt I was standing on a stage many hours after the dance had ended, when the silence lay as heavily upon the empty theater as a blanket of snow. I went to our okiya and stared with longing at the heavy iron padlock on the door. When I was locked in, I wanted to be out. Now life had changed so much that, finding myself locked out, I wanted to be inside again.”

During the war and its aftermath, Sayuri stays with a family of kimono workers and helps make parachutes (a job secured for her by Nobu). She is safer in this environment, but, when she visits Gion, her reaction is one of melancholy and longing. In contrast to her early attempt to escape the okiya, she now wishes to return to it. This consequently makes her aware of her attachment to life in Gion, and, following the horrors and uncertainty of the war, she now wishes to return to a familiar environment.  

“I'd often said to the women in the neighborhood that I wasn't sure if I'd ever go back to Gion—but the truth is, I'd always known I would. My destiny, whatever it was, awaited me there. In these years away, I'd learned to suspend all the water in my personality by turning it to ice, you might say. Only by stopping the natural flow of my thoughts in this way could I bear the waiting. Now to hear Nobu refer to my destiny . . . well, I felt he'd shattered the ice inside me and awakened my desires once again.”

Here, again, Sayuri feels a strong sense that her destiny lies in Gion. She had previously said that she did not know if she would return there after the war, but, really, she knew that she would. Her life and her desires had been put on hold—frozen—until she could return home. Sayuri may not be able to predict her future, but she feels a renewed sense of hope at the prospect of being in Gion once again.

“Of course, we Japanese were living in a decade of crushed hopes. I wouldn't have found it surprising if mine had died off just like so many other people's. But on the other hand, many believed the country itself would one day rise again; and we all knew such a thing could never happen if we resigned ourselves to living forever in the rubble. Every time I happened to read an account in the newspaper of some little shop that had made, say, bicycle parts before the war, and was now back in business almost as though the war had never happened, I had to tell myself that if our entire nation could emerge from its own dark valley, there was certainly hope that I could emerge from mine.”

In this passage, Sayuri refers to the wider cultural context of life in Japan during and after the Second World War. Defeat has inevitably resulted in a loss of hope for many people, but there are also many who believe that the country will once again. This will never happen, however, if individuals accept failure and a life of stagnation. People take a proactive approach by returning to work, and Sayuri relates this to her own situation: if the country as a whole can emerge from the wreckage incurred by war, then surely there is a glimmer hope for her as well. 

“‘You took something from me a long time ago, Sayuri. How does it feel now?’ she said. Her nostrils were flared, her face consumed with anger like a burning twig. It was as though the spirit of Hatsumomo had been living trapped inside her all these years, and had finally broken free.”

Sayuri has always regretted the loss of her friendship with Pumpkin and hoped to resume it at some point. However, she is shocked when Pumpkin betrays her by trying to sabotage her relationship with the Chairman. At this point, Sayuri realizes that simmering resentment has been eating away at Pumpkin for many years. She has never forgiven Sayuri for taking her place as the adopted daughter of their okiya, and, when her anger flares up here, Sayuri feels as though Pumpkin is channeling the spirit of Hatsumomo.

“Because I'd set my sights on becoming a geisha only to win the affections of the Chairman, probably I ought to have felt no sense of loss in withdrawing from Gion. And yet over the years I'd developed many rich friendships, not only with other geisha but with many of the men I'd come to know. I wasn't banished from the company of other women just because I'd ceased entertaining; but those who make a living in Gion have little time for socializing. I often felt jealous when I saw two geisha hurrying to their next engagement, laughing together over what had happened at the last one. I didn't envy them the uncertainty of their existence; but I did envy that sense of promise I could well remember.”

After she has secured the affections of the Chairman, Sayuri leaves her life as a geisha behind. Despite some of the unpleasant encounters that she had experienced during her career, as well as the uncertainty of that lifestyle, she feels a degree of envy when she sees other geisha. As she explains, there was a sense of excitement and possibility associated with being a geisha; likewise, she enjoyed the laughter and socializing. She is still able to speak with her old friends, but people who make their living in Gion do not have much time to spare. So, while Sayuri is happy in her life with the Chairman, she feels a pang of loss, illustrating that the life of a geisha is not one of mere hardship and misery.