 by then and was 
beginning to look a bit womanly, even though Pumpkin still looked very much like a little girl. 
I'd grown nearly as tall as I would ever grow. My body would remain thin and knobby like a 
twig for a year or two more, but my face had already given up its childish softness and was 
now sharp around the chin and cheekbones, and had broadened in such a way as to give a 
true almond shape to my eyes. In the past, men had taken no more notice of me on the 


streets than if I had been a pigeon; now they were watching me when I passed them. I found 
it strange to be the object of attention after being ignored for so long. 

In any case, very early one morning that April, I awoke from a most peculiar dream about a 
bearded man. His beard was so heavy that his features were a blur to me, as if someone had 
censored them from the film. He was standing before me saying something I can't remember, 
and then all at once he slid open the paper screen over a window beside him with a loud 
clack. I awoke thinking I'd heard a noise in the room. The maids were sighing in their sleep. 
Pumpkin lay quietly with her round face sagging onto the pillow. Everything looked just as it 
always did, I'm sure; but my feelings were strangely different. I felt as though I were looking 
at a world that was somehow changed from the one I'd seen the night before-peering out, 
almost, through the very window that had opened in my dream. 

I couldn't possibly have explained what this meant. But I continued thinking about it while I 
swept the stepping-stones in the courtyard that morning, until I began to feel the sort of 
buzzing in my head that comes from a thought circling and circling with nowhere to go, just 
like a bee in a jar. Soon I put down the broom and went to sit in the dirt corridor, where the 
cool air from beneath the foundation of the main house drifted soothingly over my back. And 
then something came to mind that I hadn't thought about since my very first week in Kyoto. 

Only a day or two after being separated from my sister, I had been sent to wash some rags 
one afternoon, when a moth came fluttering down from the sky onto my arm. I flicked it off, 
expecting that it would fly away, but instead it sailed like a pebble across the courtyard and 
lay there upon the ground. I didn't know if it had fallen from the sky already dead or if I had 
killed it, but its little insect death touched me. I admired the lovely pattern on its wings, and 
then wrapped it in one of the rags I was washing and hid it away beneath the foundation of 
the house. 

I hadn't thought about this moth since then; but the moment it came to mind I got on my 
knees and looked under the house until I found it. So many things in my life had changed, 
even the way I looked; but when I unwrapped the moth from its funeral shroud, it was the 
same startlingly lovely creature as on the day I had entombed it. It seemed to be wearing a 
robe in subdued grays and browns, like Mother wore when she went to her mah-jongg 
games at night. Everything about it seemed beautiful and perfect, and so utterly unchanged. 
If only one thing in my life had been the same as during that first week in Kyoto ... As I 
thought of this my mind began to swirl like a hurricane. It struck me that we-that moth and I-
were two opposite extremes. 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? 

The moment this question formed in my mind, I knew with as much certainty as I'd ever 
known anything that sometime during that day I would receive a sign. This was why the 
bearded man had opened the window in my dream. He was saying to me, "Watch for the 
thing that will show itself to you. Because that thing, when you find it, will be your future." 


I had no time for another thought before Auntie called out to me: 

"Chiyo, come here!" 

Well, I walked up that dirt corridor as though I were in a trance. It wouldn't have surprised me 
if Auntie had said, "You want to know about your future? All right, listen closely . . ." But 
instead she just held out two hair ornaments on a squ-are of white silk. 

"Take these," she said to me. "Heaven knows what Hatsumomo was up to last night; she 
came back to the okiya wearing another girl's ornaments. She must have drunk more than 
her usual amount of sake. Go find her at the school, ask whose they are, and return them." 

When I took the ornaments, Auntie gave me a piece of paper with a number of other errands 
written on it as well and told me to come back to the okiya as soon as I had done them all. 

Wearing someone else's hair ornaments home at night may not sound so peculiar, but really 
it's about the same as coming home in someone else's underwear. Geisha don't wash their 
hair every day, you see, because of their fancy hairstyles. So a hair ornament is a very 
intimate article. Auntie didn't even want to touch the things, which is why she was holding 
them on a square of silk. She wrapped them up to give them to me, so that they looked just 
like the bundled-up moth I'd been holding only a few minutes earlier. Of course, a sign 
doesn't mean anything unless you know how to interpret it. I stood there staring at the silk 
bundle in Auntie's hand until she said, "Take it, for heaven's sake!" Later, on my way to the 
school, I unfolded it to have another look at the ornaments. One was a black lacquer comb 
shaped like the setting sun, with a design of flowers in gold around the outside; the other was 
a stick of blond wood with two pearls at the end holding in place a tiny amber sphere. 

I waited outside the school building until I heard the don of the bell signaling the end of 
classes. Soon girls in their blue and white robes came pouring out. Hatsumomo spotted me 
even before I spotted her, and came toward me with another geisha. You may wonder why 
she was at the school at all, since she was already an accomplished dancer and certainly 
knew everything she needed to know about being a geisha. But even the most renowned 
geisha continued to take advanced lessons in dance throughout their careers, some of them 
even into their fifties and sixties. 

"Why, look," Hatsumomo said to her friend. "I think it must be a weed. Look how tall it is!" 
This was her way of ridiculing me for having grown a finger's-width taller than her. 

"Auntie has sent me here, ma'am," I said, "to find out whose hair ornaments you stole last 
night." 

Hatsumomo's smile faded. She snatched the little bundle from my hand and opened it. 

"Why, these aren't mine . . ." she said. "Where did you get them?" 

"Oh, Hatsumomo-san!" said the other geisha. "Don't you remember? You and Kanako took 
out your hair ornaments while the two of you were playing that foolish game with Judge 
Uwazumi. Kanako must have gone home with your hair ornaments, and you went home with 
hers." 

"How disgusting," said Hatsumomo. "When do you think Kanako last washed her hair? 
Anyway, her okiya is right next to yours. Take them for me, would you? Tell her I'll come to 
fetch mine later, and she'd better not try to keep them." 

The other geisha took the hair ornaments and left. 


"Oh, don't go, little Chiyo," Hatsumomo said to me. "There's something I want to show you. 
It's that young girl over there, the one walking through the gate. Her name is Ichikimi." 

I looked at Ichikimi, but Hatsumomo didn't seem to have any more to say about her. "I don't 
know her," I said. 

"No, of course not. She's nothing special. A bit stupid, and as awkward as a cripple. But I just 
thought you'd find it interesting that she's going to be a geisha, and you never will." 

I don't think Hatsumomo could have found anything crueler to say to me. For a year and a 
half now, I'd been condemned to the drudgery of a maid. I felt my life stretching out before 
me like a long path leading nowhere. I won't say I wanted to become a geisha; but I certainly 
didn't want to remain a maid. I stood in the garden of the school a long while, watching the 
young girls my age chat with one another as they streamed past. They may only have been 
heading back for lunch, but to me they were going from one important thing to another with 
lives of purpose, while I on the other hand would go back to nothing more glamorous than 
scrubbing the stones in the courtyard. When the garden emptied out, I stood worrying that 
perhaps this was the sign I'd waited for-that other young girls in Gion would move ahead in 
their lives and leave me behind. This thought gave me such a fright I couldn't stay alone in 
the garden any longer. I walked down to Shijo Avenue and turned toward the Kamo River. 
Giant banners on the Minamiza Theater announced the performance of a Kabuki play that 
afternoon entitled Shiba