ntices, and it dwindles further every day-because of course 
the pace of change never slows, even when we've convinced ourselves it will. On his last 
visit to New York City, the Chairman and I took a walk through Central Park. We happened to 
be talking about the past; and when we came to a path through pine trees, the Chairman 
stopped suddenly. He'd often told me of the pines bordering the street outside Osaka on 
which he'd grown up; I knew as I watched him that he was remembering them. He stood with 
his two frail hands on his cane and his eyes closed, and breathed in deeply the scent of the 
past. 

"Sometimes," he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see." 

As a younger woman I believed that passion must surely fade with age, just as a cup left 
standing in a room will gradually give up its contents to the air. But when the Chairman and I 
returned to my apartment, we drank each other up with so much yearning and need that 
afterward I felt myself drained of all the things the Chairman had taken from me, and yet filled 
with all that I had taken from him. I fell into a sound sleep and dreamed that I was at a 
banquet back in Gion, talking with an elderly man who was explaining to me that his wife, 
whom he'd cared for deeply, wasn't really dead because the pleasure of their time together 
lived on inside him. While he spoke these words, I drank from a bowl of the most 
extraordinary soup I'd ever tasted; every briny sip was a kind of ecstasy. I began to feel that 
all the people I'd ever known who had died or left me had not in fact gone away, but 
continued to live on inside me just as this man's wife lived on inside him. I felt as though I 
were drinking them all in-my sister, Satsu, who had run away and left me so young; my father 
and mother; Mr. Tanaka, with his perverse view of kindness; Nobu, who could never forgive 
me; even the Chairman. The soup was filled with all that I'd ever cared for in my life; and 
while I drank it, this man spoke his words right into my heart. I awoke with tears streaming 
down my temples, and I took the Chairman's hand, fearing that I would never be able to live 
without him when he died and left me. For he was so frail by then, even there in his sleep, 
that I couldn't help thinking of my mother back in Yoroido. And yet when his death happened 
only a few months later, I understood that he left me at the end of his long life just as 
naturally as the leaves fall from the trees. 

I cannot tell you what it is that guides us in this life; but for me, I fell toward the Chairman just 
as a stone must fall toward the earth. When I cut my lip and met Mr. Tanaka, when my 
mother died and I was cruelly sold, it was all like a stream that falls over rocky cliffs before it 
can reach the ocean. Even now that he is gone I have him still, in the richness of my 
memories. I've lived my life again just telling it to you. 

It's true that sometimes when I cross Park Avenue, I'm struck with the peculiar sense of how 
exotic my surroundings are. The yellow taxicabs that go sweeping past, honking their horns; 


the women with their briefcases, who look so perplexed to see a little old Japanese woman 
standing on the street corner in kimono. But really, would Yoroido seem any less exotic if I 
went back there again? As a young girl I believed my life would never have been a struggle if 
Mr. Tanaka hadn't torn me away from my tipsy house. But now I know that our world is no 
more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, 
however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on 
paper. 

Well, People this is THE End!

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