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 
afternoon 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!" Ordinarily I'd have to laugh at myself and agree with you. But the 
truth is that the afternoon when I met Mr. Tanaka 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 geisha. 

I wasn't born and raised to be a Kyoto geisha. I wasn't even born in Kyoto. 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 
grew 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 mother 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 who 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 changes. 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 
then, and of course it worked. He let out all his breath and tossed down the cup of sake I'd 
poured for him before 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, "That's why 
you're so much fun, Sayuri-san. Sometimes you almost make me believe your little jokes are 
real." 

I don't much like thinking of myself as a cup of tea made in a bucket, but 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 occasion 
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 "tipsy 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 decided our tiny house must have been offended by the ocean sneezing in its face 
from time to time, and took to leaning back because it wanted to get out of the way. Probably 
it would have collapsed if my father hadn't cut a timber from a wrecked fishing boat to prop 
up the eaves, which made the house look like a tipsy old man leaning on his crutch. 

Inside this tipsy house I lived something of a lopsided life. Because from my earliest years I 
was very much like my mother, and hardly at all like my father or older sister. My mother said 
it was because we were made just the same, she and I-and it was true we both had the 
same peculiar eyes of a sort you almost never see in Japan. Instead of being dark brown like 
everyone else's, my mother's eyes were a translucent gray, and mine are just the same. 
When I was very young, I told my mother I thought someone had poked a hole in her eyes 
and all the ink had drained out, which she thought very funny. The fortunetellers said her 
eyes were so pale because of too much water in her personality, so much that the other four 
elements were hardly present at a}}-and this, they explained, was why her features matched 
so poorly. People in the village often said she ought to have been extremely attractive, 
because her parents had been. Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, 
but you can't put the two together; this was the terrible trick nature had played on her. She 
had her mother's pouty mouth but her father's angular jaw, which gave the impression of a 
delicate picture with much too heavy a frame. And her lovely gray eyes were surrounded by 
thick lashes that must have been striking on her father, but in her case only made her look 
startled. 

My mother always said she'd married my father because she had too much water in her 
personality and he had too much wood in his. People who knew my father understood right 
away what she was talking about. Water flows from place to place quickly and always finds a 
crack to spill through. Wood, on the other hand, holds fast to the earth. In my father's case 
this was a good thing, for he was a fisherman, and a man with wood in his personality is at 
ease on the sea. In fact, my father was more at ease on the sea than anywhere else, and 
never left it far behind him. He smelled like the sea even after he had bathed. When he 
wasn't fishing, he sat on the floor in our dark front room mending a fishing net. And if a 
fishing net had been a sleeping creature, he wouldn't even have awakened it, at the speed 
he worked. He did everything this slowly. Even when he summoned a look of concentration, 
you could run outside and drain the bath in the time it took him to rearrange his features. His 
face was very heavily creased, and into each crease he had tucked some worry or other, so 
that it wasn't really his own face any longer, but more like a tree that had nests of birds in all 
the branches. He had to struggle constantly to manage it and always looked worn out from 
the effort. 

When I was six or seven, I learned something about my father I'd never known. One day I 
asked him, "Daddy, why are you so old?" He hoisted up his eyebrows at this, so that they 
formed little sagging umbrellas over his eyes. And he let out a long breath, and shook his 
head and said, "I don't know." When I turned to my mother, she gave me a look meaning she 
would answer the question for me another time. The following day without saying a word, she 
walked me down the hill toward the village and turned at a path into a graveyard in the 
woods. She led me to three graves in the corner, with three white marker posts much taller 
than I was. They had stern-looking black characters written top to bottom on them, but I 
hadn't attended the school in our little village long enough to know where one ended and the 
next began. My mother pointed to them and said, "Natsu, wife of Sakamoto Minoru." 
Sakamoto Minoru was the name of my father. "Died age twenty-four, in the nineteenth year 
of Meiji." Then she pointed to the next one: "Jinichiro, son of Sakamoto Minoru, died age six, 
in the nineteenth year of Meiji," and to the next one, which was identical except for the name, 


Masao, and the age, which was three. It took me a while to understand that my father had 
been married before, a long time ago, and that his whole family had died. I went back to 
those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy 
thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were 
pulling me down toward them. 

With all this water and all this wood, the two of them ought to have made a good balance and 
produced children with the proper arrangement of elements. I'm sure it was a surprise to 
them that they ended up with one of each. For it wasn't just that I resembled my mother and 
had even inherited her unusual eyes; my sister, Satsu, was as much like my father as 
anyone could be. Satsu was six years older than me, and of course, being older, she could 
do things I couldn't do. But Satsu had a remarkable quality of'doing everything in a way that 
seemed like a complete accident. For example, if you asked her to pour a bowl of soup from 
a pot on the stove, she would get the job done, but in a way that looked like she'd spilled it 
into the bowl just by luck. One time she even cut herself with a fish, and I don't mean with a 
knife she was using to clean a fish. She was carrying a fish wrapped in paper up the hill from 
the village when it slid out and fell against her leg in such a way as to cut her with one of its 
fins. 

Our parents might have had other children besides Satsu and me, particularly since my 
father hoped for a boy to fish with him. But when I was seven my mother grew terribly ill with 
what was probably bone cancer, though at the time I had no idea what was wrong. Her only 
escape from discomfort was to sleep, which she began to do the way a cat does-which is to 
say, more or less constantly. As the months passed she slept most of the time, and soon 
began to groan whenever she was awake. I knew something in her was changing quickly, 
but because of so much water in her per