
tingled from the sensation that at any moment Hatsumomo might open her door and spot 
me. After I'd shut the closet door again, I rushed into my room and began opening and 
closing the drawers to my makeup stand to give Hatsumomo the impression I'd hid the 
journal there. 

When I came out into the hallway, she was watching me from the doorway of her room, 
wearing a little smile as though she found the whole situation amusing. I tried to look worried


which wasn't too difficult-and carried the brooch with me into Mother's room to lay it on the 
table before her. She put aside the magazine she was reading and held it up to admire it. 

"This is a lovely piece," she said, "but it won't go far on the black market these days. No one 
pays much for jewels like this one." 

"I'm sure Hatsumomo will pay very dearly for it, Mother," I said. "Do you remember the 
brooch I'm supposed to have stolen from her years ago, the one that was added to my 
debts? This is it. I've just found it on the floor near her jewelry box." 

"Do you know," said Hatsumomo, who had come into the room and now stood behind me. "I 
believe Sayuri is right. That is the brooch I lost! Or at least, it looks like it. I never thought I'd 
see it again!" 

"Yes, it's very difficult to find things when you're drunk all the time," I said. "If only you'd 
looked in your jewelry box more closely." 

Mother put the brooch down on the table and went on glowering at Hatsumomo. 

"I found it in her room," Hatsumomo said. "She'd hidden it in her makeup stand." 

"Why were you looking through her makeup stand?" Mother said. 

"I didn't want to have to tell you this, Mother, but Sayuri left something on her table and I was 
trying to hide it for her. I know I should have brought it to you at once, but . . . she's been 
keeping a journal, you see. She showed it to me last year. She's written some very 
incriminating things about certain men, and . . . truthfully, there are some passages about 
you too, Mother." 

I thought of insisting it wasn't true; but none of it mattered in any case. Hatsumomo was in 
trouble, and nothing she was going to say would change the situation. Ten years earlier 
when she had been the okiya's principal earner, she probably could have accused me of 
anything she'd wanted. She could have claimed I'd eaten the tatami mats in her room, and 
Mother would have charged me the cost of new ones. But now at last the season had 
changed; Hatsumomo's brilliant career was dying on the branch, while mine had begun to 
blossom. I was the daughter of the okiya and its prime geisha. I don't think Mother even 
cared where the truth lay. 

"There is no journal, Mother," I said. "Hatsumomo is making it up." 

"Am I?" said Hatsumomo. "I'll just go find it, then, and while Mother reads through it, you can 
tell her how I made it up." 

Hatsumomo went to my room, with Mother following. The hallway floor was a terrible mess. 
Not only had Hatsumomo broken a bottle and then stepped on it, she'd tracked ointment and 
blood all around the upstairs hall-and much worse, onto the tatami mats in her own room, 
Mother's room, and now mine as well. She was kneeling at my dressing table when I looked 
in, closing the drawers very slowly and looking a bit defeated. 

"What journal is Hatsumomo talking about?" Mother asked me. "If there's a journal, I'm 
certain Hatsumomo will find it," I said. At this, Hatsumomo put her hands into her lap and 
gave a little laugh as though the whole thing had been some sort of game, and she'd been 
cleverly outwitted. 


"Hatsumomo," Mother said to her, "you'll repay Sayuri for the brooch you accused her of 
stealing. What's more, I won't have the tatami in this okiya defiled with blood. They'll be 
replaced, and at your expense. This has been a very costly day for you, and it's hardly past 
noon. Shall I hold off calculating the total, just in case you're not quite finished?" 

I don't know if Hatsumomo heard what Mother said. She was too busy glaring at me, and 
with a look on her face I wasn't accustomed to seeing. 

If you'd asked me, while I was still a young woman, to tell you the turning point in my 
relationship with Hatsumomo, I would have said it was my mizuage. But even though it's 
quite true that my mizuage lifted me onto a high shelf where Hatsumomo could no longer 
reach me, she and I might well have gone on living side by side until we were old women, if 
nothing else had happened between us. This is why the real turning point, as I've since come 
to see it, occurred the day when Hatsumomo read my journal, and I discovered the obi 
brooch she'd accused me of stealing. 

By way of explaining why this is so, let me tell you something Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku 
once said during an evening at the Ichiriki Teahouse. I can't pretend I was well acquainted 
with Admiral Yamamoto-who's usually described as the father of the Japanese Imperial 
Navy-but I was privileged to attend parties with him on a number of occasions. He was a 
small man; but keep in mind that a stick of dynamite is small too. Parties always grew noisier 
after the Admiral arrived. That night, he and another man were in the final round of a drinking 
game, and had agreed that the loser would go buy a condom at the nearest pharmacy-just 
for the embarrassment of it, you understand; not for any other purpose. Of course, the 
Admiral ended up winning, and the whole crowd broke into cheers and applause. 

"It's a good thing you didn't lose, Admiral," said one of his aides. "Think of the poor 
pharmacist looking up to find Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku on the other side of the counter!" 

Everyone thought this was very funny, but the Admiral replied that he'd never had any doubt 
about winning. 

"Oh, come now!" said one of the geisha. "Everyone loses from time to time! Even you, 
Admiral!" 

"I suppose it's true that everyone loses at some time," he said. "But never me." 

Some in the room may have considered this an arrogant thing to say, but I wasn't one of 
them. 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." 

I don't think I realized it at the time, but after Hatsumomo and I quarreled over my journal, her 
mind-as the Admiral would have put it-began to be troubled by doubt. She knew that under 
no circumstances would Mother take her side against me any longer; and because of that, 
she was like a fabric taken from its warm closet and hung out of doors where the harsh 
weather will gradually consume it. 

If Mameha were to hear me explaining things in this way, she would certainly speak up and 
say how much she disagreed. Her view of Hatsumomo was quite different from mine. She 
believed Hatsumomo was a woman bent on self-destruction, and that all we needed to do 
was to coax her along a path she was certain to follow in any case. Perhaps Mameha was 


right; I don't know. It's true that in the years since my mizuage, Hatsumomo had gradually 
been afflicted by some sort of disease of the character-if such a thing exists. She'd lost all 
control over her drinking, for example, and of her bouts of cruelty too. Until her life began to 
fray, she'd always used her cruelty for a purpose, just as a samurai draws his sword-not for 
slashing at random, but for slashing at enemies. But by this time in her life, Hatsumomo 
seemed to have lost sight of who her enemies were, and sometimes struck out even at 
Pumpkin. From time to time during parties, she even made insulting comments to the men 
she was entertaining. And another thing: she was no longer as beautiful as 'she'd once been. 
Her skin was waxy-looking, and her features puffy. Or perhaps I was only seeing her that 
way. A tree may look as beautiful as ever; but when you notice the insects infesting it, and 
the tips of the branches that are brown from disease, even the trunk seems to lose some of 
its magnificence. 

Everyone knows that a wounded tiger is a dangerous beast; and for this reason, Mameha 
insisted that we follow Hatsumomo around Gion during the evenings over the next few 
weeks. Partly, Mameha wanted to keep an eye on her, because neither of us would have 
been surprised if she'd sought out Nobu to tell him about the contents of my journal, and 
about all my secret feelings for "Mr. Haa," whom Nobu might have recognized as the 
Chairman. But more important, Mameha wanted to make Hatsumomo's life difficult for her to 
bear. 

"When you want to break a board," Mameha said, "cracking it in the middle is only the first 
step. Success comes when you bounce up and down with all your weight until the board 
snaps in half." 

So every evening, except when she had an engagement she couldn't miss, Mameha came to 
our okiya around dusk and waited to walk out the door behind Hatsumomo. Mameha and I 
weren't always able to stay together, but usually at least one of us managed to follow her 
from engagement to engagement for a portion of the evening. On the first night we did this, 
Hatsumomo pretended to find it amusing. But by the end of the fourth night she was looking 
at us through squinted, angry eyes, and had difficulty acting cheerful around the men she 
tried to entertain. Then early the following week, she suddenly wheeled around in an 
alleyway and came toward us. 

"Let me see now," she said. "Dogs follow their owners. And the two of you are following me 
around, sniffing and sniffing. So I guess you want to be treated like dogs! Shall I show you 
what I do with dogs I don't like?" 

And with this, she drew back her hand 