Memoirs of a Geisha Read Online Free PDF

“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.
    “I don’t think anyone would ever want to adopt me,” I said.
    “No? You’re a clever girl, aren’t you? Naming your house a ‘tipsy house.’ Saying your father’s head looks like an egg!”
    “But it does look like an egg.”
    “It 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 into the sky. The ball of fire seemed to settle on the ground, but then my mother and I watched as it rose up on the current of the wind, floating straight for us. I felt my mother release me, and then all at once she threw her arms into the fire to scatter it. For a moment we were both awash in sparks and flames; but then the shreds of fire drifted into the trees and burned out, and no one—not even my mother—was hurt.
    *  *  *
    A week or so later, when my fantasies of adoption had had plenty of time to ripen, I came home one afternoon to find Mr. Tanaka sitting across from my father at the little table in our house. I knew they were talking about something serious, because they didn’t even notice me when I stepped into our entryway. I froze there to listen to them.
    “So, Sakamoto, what do you think of my proposal?”
    “I don’t know, sir,” said my father. “I can’t picture the girls living anywhere else.”
    “I understand, but they’d be much better off, and so would you. Just see to it they come down to the village tomorrow afternoon.”
    At this, Mr. Tanaka stood to leave. I pretended I was just arriving so we would meet at the door.
    “I was talking with your father about you, Chiyo-chan,” he said to me. “I live across the ridge in the town of Senzuru. It’s bigger than