Memoirs of a Geisha Read Online Free PDF

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.”
    â€œI’d better do it myself in that case, sir. My sister isn’t very good at making tea.”
    â€œDr. 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?”
    â€œI suppose I take care of myself these days.”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œWell, 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.
    â€œI don’t think anyone would ever want to adopt me,” I said.
    â€œNo? You’re a clever girl, aren’t you? Naming your house a ‘tipsy house.’ Saying your father’s head looks like an egg!”
    â€œBut it does look like an egg.”
    â€œIt 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