Memoirs of a Geisha Read Online Free PDF Page B

Yoroido. I think you’d like it. Why don’t you and Satsu-san come there tomorrow? You’ll see my house and meet my little daughter. Perhaps you’ll stay the night? Just one night, you understand; and then I’ll bring you back to your home again. How would that be?”
    I said it would be very nice. And I did my best to pretend no one had suggested anything out of the ordinary to me. But in my head it was as though an explosion had occurred. My thoughts were in fragments I could hardly piece together. Certainly it was true that a part of me hoped desperately to be adopted by Mr. Tanaka after my mother died; but another part of me was very much afraid. I felt horribly ashamed for even imagining I might live somewhere besides my tipsy house. After Mr. Tanaka had left, I tried to busy myself in the kitchen, but I felt a bit like Satsu, for I could hardly see the things before me. I don’t know how much time passed. At length I heard my father making a sniffling noise, which I took to be crying and which made my face burn with shame. When I finally forced myself to glance his way, I saw him with his hands already tangled up in one of his fishing nets, but standing at the doorway leading into the back room, where my mother lay in the full sun with the sheet stuck to her like skin.
    *  *  *
    The next day, in preparation for meeting Mr. Tanaka in the village, I scrubbed my dirty ankles and soaked for a while in our bath, which had once been the boiler compartment from an old steam engine someone had abandoned in our village; the top had been sawed off and the inside lined with wood. I sat a long while looking out to sea and feeling very independent, for I was about to see something of the world outside our little village for the first time in my life.
    When Satsu and I reached the Japan Coastal Seafood Company, we watched the fishermen unloading their catches at the pier. My father was among them, grabbing fish with his bony hands and dropping them into baskets. At one point he looked toward me and Satsu, and then afterward wiped his face on the sleeve of his shirt. Somehow his features looked heavier to me than usual. The men carried the full baskets to Mr. Tanaka’s horse-drawn wagon and arranged them in the back. I climbed up on the wheel to watch. Mostly, the fish stared out with glassy eyes, but every so often one would move its mouth, which seemed to me like a little scream. I tried to reassure them by saying:
    “You’re going to the town of Senzuru, little fishies! Everything will be okay.”
    I didn’t see what good it would do to tell them the truth.
    At length Mr. Tanaka came out into the street and told Satsu and me to climb onto the bench of the wagon with him. I sat in the middle, close enough to feel the fabric of Mr. Tanaka’s kimono against my hand. I couldn’t help blushing at this. Satsu was looking right at me, but she didn’t seem to notice anything and wore her usual muddled expression.
    I passed much of the trip looking back at the fish as they sloshed around in their baskets. When we climbed up over the ridge leaving Yoroido, the wheel passed over a rock and the wagon tipped to one side quite suddenly. One of the sea bass was thrown out and hit the ground so hard it was jolted back to life. To see it flopping and gasping was more than I could bear. I turned back around with tears in my eyes, and though I tried to hide them from Mr. Tanaka, he noticed them anyway. After he had retrieved the fish and we were on our way again, he asked me what was the matter.
    “The poor fish!” I said.
    “You’re like my wife. They’re mostly dead when she sees them, but if she has to cook a crab, or anything else still alive, she grows teary-eyed and sings to them.”
    Mr. Tanaka taught me a little song—really almost a sort of prayer—that I thought his wife had invented. She sang it for crabs, but we changed the words for the fish:
    Suzuki yo suzuki!
    Jobutsu shite kure!
    Little bass, oh little