Memoirs of a Geisha | Page 2

she and I-and it was true we both had the same \
peculiar eyes of a sort you
almost never see in Japan. Instead of being dark brown like everyone els\
e's, my mother's eyes were a
translucent gray, and mine are just the same. When I was very young, I t\
old my mother I thought
someone had poked a hole in her eyes and all the ink had drained out, wh\
ich she thought very funny.
The fortunetellers said her eyes were so pale because of too much water \
in her personality, so much that
the other four elements were hardly present at a}}-and this, they explai\
ned, was why her features
matched so poorly. People in the village often said she ought to have be\
en extremely attractive, because
her parents had been. Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mus\
hroom, but you can't put the two
together; this was the terrible trick nature had played on her. She had \
her mother's pouty mouth but her
father's angular jaw, which gave the impression of a delicate picture wi\
th much too heavy a frame. And
her lovely gray eyes were surrounded by thick lashes that must have been\
striking on her father, but in
her case only made her look startled.
My mother always said she'd married my father because she had too much w\
ater in her personality and
he had too much wood in his. People who knew my father understood right \
away what she was talking
about. Water flows from place to place quickly and always finds a crack \
to spill through. Wood, on the
other hand, holds fast to the earth. In my father's case this was a good\
thing, for he was a fisherman, and
a man with wood in his personality is at ease on the sea. In fact, my fa\
ther was more at ease on the sea
than anywhere else, and never left it far behind him. He smelled like th\
e sea even after he had bathed.
When he wasn't fishing, he sat on the floor in our dark front room mendi\
ng a fishing net. And if a
fishing net had been a sleeping creature, he wouldn't even have awakened\
it, at the speed he worked. He
did everything this slowly. Even when he summoned a look of concentratio\
n, you could run outside and
drain the bath in the time it took him to rearrange his features. His fa\
ce was very heavily creased, and
into each crease he had tucked some worry or other, so that it wasn't re\
ally his own face any longer, but
more like a tree that had nests of birds in all the branches. He had to \
struggle constantly to manage it and

always looked worn out from the effort.
When I was six or seven, I learned something about my father I'd never k\
nown. One day I asked him,
"Daddy, why are you so old?" He hoisted up his eyebrows at this, so that\
they formed little sagging
umbrellas over his eyes. And he let out a long breath, and shook his hea\
d and said, "I don't know." When
I turned to my mother, she gave me a look meaning she would answer the q\
uestion for me another time.
The following day without saying a word, she walked me down the hill tow\
ard the village and turned at
a path into a graveyard in the woods. She led me to three graves in the \
corner, with three white marker
posts much taller than I was. They had stern-looking black characters wr\
itten top to bottom on them, but
I hadn't attended the school in our little village long enough to know w\
here one ended and the next
began. My mother pointed to them and said, "Natsu, wife of Sakamoto Mino\
ru." Sakamoto Minoru was
the name of my father. "Died age twenty-four, in the nineteenth year of \
Meiji." Then she pointed to the
next one: "Jinichiro, son of Sakamoto Minoru, died age six, in the ninet\
eenth year of Meiji," and to the
next one, which was identical except for the name, Masao, and the age, w\
hich was three. It took me a
while to understand that my father had been married before, a long time \
ago, and that his whole family
had died. I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I \
stood there that sadness was a
very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlie\
r, as if those graves were
pulling me down toward them.
With all this water and all this wood, the two of them ought to have mad\
e a good balance and produced
children with the proper arrangement of elements. I'm sure it was a surp\
rise to them that they ended up
with one of each. For it wasn't just that