Resilience Read Online Free PDF

features. And knew, too, that these gifts of beauty, serenity, and delicacy could make her a sought-after geisha. The first months in training would be a disappointment, surely, as she served as a maid in the household in which she lived. The most tedious chores would be saved for her, a test of her determination, her work ethic. She studied dance and art and the samisen in the morning, worked in the household in the day, and attended to a geisha returning from a night's work sometimes into the early-morning hours. She would have to wait through these months before developing enough skill to become a maiko, an apprentice geisha. But patience was something at which Toshiko excelled.
    Toshiko studied in the famous Fujima-Ryu system, one of the most rigorous courses of training, but one that would, with her beauty, allow her to be one of the top geishas. Over the years, she perfected her dance, her samisen playing, her conversational skills. She planned to leave Gion and join her sister in Tokyo as a full-fledged geisha, with the world in front of her, but first she would return home to her parents in Hiroshima. It was a mild August of 1945, an excellent time for travel.
    Toshiko had been home for two days when, as she arose, she heard the sound of a general alarm throughout her hometown. There had been alarms before in the industrial city, warnings that American bombers might be approaching, but Hiroshima had largely been spared from any bombings. No one was surprised when shortly later the all-clear sounded. Toshiko had waited for the all-clear before leaving to go to the market. August was the month in which schools were not in session, and Toshiko walked past children working at their family store or playing in the alleyways. She was turned back to look at a stickball game in an alley she passed when she was knocked to the ground. It was as if a huge, dense, overwhelming wall of heat had raced down the street and knocked her and everyone around her to the dirt. Or it seemed so, as those like her looked back on it. It was probably hours later that she regained consciousness. Her clothes had been ripped away and her chest and arms were covered with loose charred skin. Her hair was burned away in the back, since she had turned her head to watch the children when the force of the first atomic bomb used in warfare hit her body. She could see only a gray soup of soot and smoke around her, and she could hear the sounds of people moving, wailing, or calling for help. Weakly, she closed her eyes again.
    After months of treatment, Toshiko was able to return to a somewhat normal life. But it could never be the life for which she had planned and trained for a decade. Her hair had grown back and her face was largely unscarred, but her chest had literally been blown off. The scars crept nearly up to her neck and would have shown in the open neckline of the fine kimonos she had acquired as a maiko. The burns made her arms look like the arms of a ninety-year-old woman, and the pattern of the kimono she was wearing that morning was, in places, burned into them. Keloids that looked like smooth boils grew in places on the scars. A geisha was the meeting of a beautiful woman with the skills of dance and the arts. A man in conversation with her was to be flattered, not only in words but by the mere presence of this exquisite creature. And Toshiko, to say the least, was no longer exquisite.
    The life that she had expected, filled with luxuries, prestige, and stimulation, was not going to be. The skills she had so diligently acquired had little value in her new life. Toshiko did begin to teach dance, but there was not much demand in postwar Hiroshima. The American military base that opened on the site of the Japanese air station in Iwakuni provided a new opportunity in the mid-1950s. Young women from Hiroshima found work there as maids and seamstresses in the homes of military families. Toshiko let a friend who worked there tell her employer that