Memoirs of a Geisha Read online

  After we'd finished our dinner and my father had gone to the village to watch the other fishermen play Japanese chess, Satsu and I cleaned the kitchen in silence. I tried to remember how Mr. Tanaka had made me feel, but in the cold quiet of the house it had slipped away from me. Instead I felt a persistent, icy dread at the thought of my mother's illness. I found myself wondering how long it would be until she was buried out in the village graveyard along with my father's other family. What would become of me afterward? With my mother dead, Satsu would act in her place, I supposed. I watched my sister scrub the iron pot that had cooked our soup; but even though it was right before her-even though her eyes were pointed at the thing-I could tell she wasn't seeing it. She went on scrubbing it long after it was clean. Finally I said to her:

  "Satsu-san, I don't feel well."

  "Go outside and heat the bath," she told me, and brushed her unruly hair from her eyes with one of her wet hands.

  "I don't want a bath," I said. "Satsu, Mommy is going to die-"

  "This pot is cracked. Look!"

  "It isn't cracked," I said. "That line has always been there."

  "But how did the water get out just then?"

  "You sloshed it out. I watched you."

  For a moment I could tell that Satsu was feeling something very strongly, which translated itself onto her face as a look of extreme puzzlement, just as so many of her feelings did. But she said nothing further to me. She only took the pot from the stove and walked toward the door to dump it out.

  chapter two

  The following morning, to take my mind off my troubles, I went swimming in the pond just inland from our house amid a grove of pine trees. The children from the village went there most mornings when the weather was right. Satsu came too sometimes, wearing a scratchy bathing dress she'd made from our father's old fishing clothes. It wasn't a very good bathing dress, because it sagged at her chest whenever she bent over, and one of the boys would scream, "Look! You can see Mount Fuji!" But she wore it just the same.

  Around noontime, I decided to return home for something to eat. Satsu had left much earlier with the Sugi boy, who was the son of Mr. Tanaka's assistant. She acted like a dog around him. When he went somewhere, he looked back over his shoulder to signal that she should follow, and she always did. I didn't expect to see her again until dinnertime, but as I neared the house I caught sight of her on the path ahead of me, leaning against a tree. If you'd seen what was happening, you might have understood it right away; but I was only a little girl. Satsu had her scratchy bathing dress up around her shoulders and the Sugi boy was playing around with her "Mount Fujis," as the boys called them.

  Ever since our mother first became ill, my sister had grown a bit pudgy. Her breasts were every bit as unruly as her hair. What amazed me most was that their unruliness appeared to be the very thing the Sugi boy found fascinating about them. He jiggled them with his hand, and pushed them to one side to watch them swing back and settle against her chest. I knew I shouldn't be spying, but I couldn't think what else to do with myself while the path ahead of me was blocked. And then suddenly I heard a man's voice behind me say:

  "Chiyo-chan, why are you squatting there behind that tree?"

  Considering that I was a little girl of nine, coming from a pond where I'd been swimming; and considering that as yet I had no shapes or textures on my body to conceal from anyone... well, it's easy to guess what I was wearing.

  When I turned-still squatting on the path, and covering my nakedness with my arms as best I could-there stood Mr. Tanaka. I could hardly have been more embarrassed.

  "That must be your tipsy house over there," he said. "And over there, that looks like the Sugi boy. He certainly looks busy! Who's that girl with him?"

  "Well, it might be my sister, Mr. Tanaka. I'm waiting for them to leave."

  Mr. Tanaka cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, and then I heard the sound of the Sugi boy running away down the path. My sister must have run away too, for Mr. Tanaka told me I could go home and get some clothes now. "When you see that sister of yours," he said to me, "I want you to give her this."

  He handed me a packet wrapped in rice paper, about the size of a fish head. "It's some Chinese herbs," he told me. "Don't listen to Dr. Miura if he tells you they're worthless. Have your sister make tea with them and give the tea to your mother, to ease the pain. They're very precious herbs. Make sure not to waste them."

  "I'd better do it myself in that case, sir. My sister isn't very good at making tea."

  "Dr. Miura told me your mother is sick," he said. "Now you tell me your sister can't even be trusted to make tea! With your father so old, what will become of you, Chiyo-chan? Who takes care of you even now?"

  "I suppose I take care of myself these days."

  "I know a certain man. He's older now, but when he was a boy about your age, his father died. The very next year his mother died, and then his older brother ran away to Osaka and left him alone. Sounds a bit like you, don't you think?"

  Mr. Tanaka gave me a look as if to say that I shouldn't dare to disagree.

  "Well, that man's name is Tanaka Ichiro," he went on. "Yes, me... although back then my name was Morihashi Ichiro. I was taken in by the Tanaka family at the age of twelve. After I got a bit older, I was married to the daughter and adopted. Now I help run the family's seafood company. So things turned out all right for me in the end, you see. Perhaps something like that might happen to you too."

  I looked for a moment at Mr. Tanaka's gray hair and at the creases in his brow like ruts in the bark of a tree. He seemed to me the wisest and most knowledgeable man on earth. I believed he knew things I would never know; and that he had an elegance I would never have; and that his blue kimono was finer than anything I would ever have occasion to wear. I sat before him naked, on my haunches in the dirt, with my hair tangled and my face dirty, with the smell of pond water on my skin.

  "I don't think anyone would ever want to adopt me," I said.

  "No? You're a clever girl, aren't you? Naming your house a 'tipsy house.' Saying your father's head looks like an egg!"

  "But it does look like an egg."

  "It wouldn't have been a clever thing to say otherwise. Now run along, Chiyo-chan," he said. "You want lunch, don't you? Perhaps if your sister's having soup, you can lie on the floor and drink what she spills."

  *

  From that very moment on, I began to have fantasies that Mr. Tanaka would adopt me. Sometimes I forget how tormented I felt during this period. I suppose I would have grasped at anything that offered me comfort. Often when I felt troubled, I found my mind returning to the same image of my mother, long before she ever began groaning in the mornings from the pains inside her. I was four years old, at the obon festival in our village, the time of year when we welcomed back the spirits of the dead. After a few evenings of ceremonies in the graveyard, and fires outside the entrances of the houses to guide the spirits home, we gathered on the festival's final night at our Shinto shrine, which stood on rocks overlooking the inlet. Just inside the gate of the shrine was a clearing, decorated that evening with colored paper lanterns strung on ropes between the trees. My mother and I danced together for a while with the rest of the villagers, to the music of drums and a flute; but at last I began to feel tired and she cradled me in her lap at the edge of the clearing. Suddenly the wind came up off the cliffs and one of the lanterns caught fire. We watched the flame burn through the cord, and the lantern came floating down, until the wind caught it again and rolled it through the air right toward us with a trail of gold dust streaking into the sky. The ball of fire seemed to settle on the ground, but then my mother and I watched as it rose up on the current of the wind, floating straight for us. I felt my mother release me, and then all at once she threw her arms into the fire to scatter it. For a moment we were both awash in sparks and flames; but then the shreds of fire drifted into the trees and burned out, and no one-not even my mother-was hurt.

  *

 
A week or so later, when my fantasies of adoption had had plenty of time to ripen, I came home one afternoon to find Mr. Tanaka sitting across from my father at the little table in our house. I knew they were talking about something serious, because they didn't even notice me when I stepped into our entryway. I froze there to listen to them.

  "So, Sakamoto, what do you think of my proposal?"

  "I don't know, sir," said my father. "I can't picture the girls living anywhere else."

  "I understand, but they'd be much better off, and so would you. Just see to it they come down to the village tomorrow afternoon."

  At this, Mr. Tanaka stood to leave. I pretended I was just arriving so we would meet at the door.

  "I was talking with your father about you, Chiyo-chan," he said to me. "I live across the ridge in the town of Senzuru. It's bigger than Yoroido. I think you'd like it. Why don't you and Satsu-san come there tomorrow? You'll see my house and meet my little daughter. Perhaps you'll stay the night? Just one night, you understand; and then I'll bring you back to your home again. How would that be?"

  I said it would be very nice. And I did my best to pretend no one had suggested anything out of the ordinary to me. But in my head it was as though an explosion had occurred. My thoughts were in fragments I could hardly piece together. Certainly it was true that a part of me hoped desperately to be adopted by Mr. Tanaka after my mother died; but another part of me was very much afraid. I felt horribly ashamed for even imagining I might live somewhere besides my tipsy house. After Mr. Tanaka had left, I tried to busy myself in the kitchen, but I felt a bit like Satsu, for I could hardly see the things before me. I don't know how much time passed. At length I heard my father making a sniffling noise, which I took to be crying and which made my face burn with shame. When I finally forced myself to glance his way, I saw him with his hands already tangled up in one of his fishing nets, but standing at the doorway leading into the back room, where my mother lay in the full sun with the sheet stuck to her like skin.

  *

  The next day, in preparation for meeting Mr. Tanaka in the village, I scrubbed my dirty ankles and soaked for a while in our bath, which had once been the boiler compartment from an old steam engine someone had abandoned in our village; the top had been sawed off and the inside lined with wood. I sat a long while looking out to sea and feeling very independent, for I was about to see something of the world outside our little village for the first time in my life.

  When Satsu and I reached the Japan Coastal Seafood Company, we watched the fishermen unloading their catches at the pier. My father was among them, grabbing fish with his bony hands and dropping them into baskets. At one point he looked toward me and Satsu, and then afterward wiped his face on the sleeve of his shirt. Somehow his features looked heavier to me than usual. The men carried the full baskets to Mr. Tanaka's horse-drawn wagon and arranged them in the back. I climbed up on the wheel to watch. Mostly, the fish stared out with glassy eyes, but every so often one would move its mouth, which seemed to me like a little scream. I tried to reassure them by saying:

  "You're going to the town of Senzuru, little fishies! Everything will be okay."

  I didn't see what good it would do to tell them the truth.

  At length Mr. Tanaka came out into the street and told Satsu and me to climb onto the bench of the wagon with him. I sat in the middle, close enough to feel the fabric of Mr. Tanaka's kimono against my hand. I couldn't help blushing at this. Satsu was looking right at me, but she didn't seem to notice anything and wore her usual muddled expression.

  I passed much of the trip looking back at the fish as they sloshed around in their baskets. When we climbed up over the ridge leaving Yoroido, the wheel passed over a rock and the wagon tipped to one side quite suddenly. One of the sea bass was thrown out and hit the ground so hard it was jolted back to life. To see it flopping and gasping was more than I could bear. I turned back around with tears in my eyes, and though I tried to hide them from Mr. Tanaka, he noticed them anyway. After he had retrieved the fish and we were on our way again, he asked me what was the matter.

  "The poor fish!" I said.

  "You're like my wife. They're mostly dead when she sees them, but if she has to cook a crab, or anything else still alive, she grows teary-eyed and sings to them."

  Mr. Tanaka taught me a little song-really almost a sort of prayer-that I thought his wife had invented. She sang it for crabs, but we changed the words for the fish:

  Suzuki yo suzuki!

  Jobutsu shite kure!

  Little bass, oh little bass!

  Speed yourself to Buddhahood!

  Then he taught me another song, a lullaby I'd never heard before. We sang it to a flounder in the back lying in a low basket by itself, with its two button-eyes on the side of its head shifting around.

  Nemure yo, ii karei yo!

  Niwa ya makiba ni

  Tori mo hitsuji mo

  Minna nemureba

  Hoshi wa mado kara

  Gin no hikari o

  Sosogu, kono yoru!

  Go to sleep, you good flounder!

  When all are sleeping—

  Even the birds and the sheep

  In the gardens and in the fields—

  The stars this evening

  Will pour their golden light

  From the window.

  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.

  Senzuru was mainly a dirty, smelly town. Even the ocean had a terrible odor, as if all the fish in it were rotting. Around the legs of the pier, pieces of vegetables bobbed like the jellyfish in our little inlet. The boats were scratched up, some of their timbers cracked; they looked to me as if they'd been fighting with one another.

  Satsu and I sat a long while on the pier, until at length Mr. Tanaka called us inside the Japan Coastal Seafood Company's headquarters and led us down a long corridor. The corridor couldn't have smelled more strongly of fish guts if we had actually been inside a fish. But down at the end, to my surprise, was an office, lovely to my nine-year-old eyes. Inside the doorway, Satsu and I stood in our bare feet on a slimy floor of stone. Before us, a step led up to a platform covered with tatami mats. Perhaps this is what impressed me so; the raised flooring made everything look grander. In any case, I considered it the most beautiful room I'd ever seen-though it makes me laugh now to think that the office of a fish wholesaler in a tiny town on the Japan Sea could have made such an impression on anyone.

  On the platform sat an old woman on a cushion, who rose when she saw us and came down to the edge to arrange herself on her knees. She was old and cranky-looking, and I don't think you could ever meet anyone who fidgeted more. When she wasn't smoothing her kimono, she was wiping something from the corner of her eye or scratching her nose, all the while sighing as though she felt very sorry there was so much fidgeting to be done.

  Mr. Tanaka said to her, "This is Chiyo-chan and her older sister, Satsu-san."

  I gave a little bow, to which Mrs. Fidget responded with a nod. Then she gave the biggest sigh she'd given yet, and began to pick with one hand at a crusty patch on her neck. I would have liked to look away, but her eyes were fixed on mine.

  "Well! You're Satsu-san, are you?" she said. But she was still looking right at me.

  "I'm Satsu," said my sister.

  "When were you born?"

  Satsu still seemed unsure which of us Mrs. Fidget was addressing, so I answered for her. "She's the year of the cow," I said.

  The old woman reached out and patted me with her fingers. But she did it in a most peculiar way, by poking me several times in the jaw. I knew she meant it as a pat b
ecause she wore a kindly look.

  "This one's rather pretty, isn't she? Such unusual eyes! And you can see that she's clever. Just look at her forehead." Here she turned to my sister again and said, "Now, then. The year of the cow; fifteen years old; the planet Venus; six, white. Hmm... Come a bit closer."

  Satsu did as she was told. Mrs. Fidget began to examine her face, not only with her eyes but with her fingertips. She spent a long while checking Satsu's nose from different angles, and her ears. She pinched the lobes a number of times, then gave a grunt to indicate she was done with Satsu and turned to me.

  "You're the year of the monkey. I can tell it just looking at you. What a great deal of water you have! Eight, white; the planet Saturn. And a very attractive girl you are. Come closer."

  Now she proceeded to do the same thing to me, pinching my ears and so on. I kept thinking of how she'd scratched at the crusty patch on her neck with these same fingers. Soon she got to her feet and came down onto the stone floor where we stood. She took a while getting her crooked feet into her zori, but finally turned toward Mr. Tanaka and gave him a look he seemed to understand at once, because he left the room, closing the door behind him.

  Mrs. Fidget untied the peasant shirt Satsu was wearing and removed it. She moved Satsu's bosoms around a bit, looked under her arms, and then turned her around and looked at her back. I was in such a state of shock, I could barely bring myself to watch. I'd certainly seen Satsu naked before, but the way Mrs. Fidget handled her body seemed even more indecent to me than when Satsu had held her bathing dress up for the Sugi boy. Then, as if she hadn't done enough already, Mrs. Fidget yanked Satsu's pants to the floor, looked her up and down, and turned her around facing front again.