“…and if she felt hungry, she certainly wasn’t going to stroll into the kitchen to prepare something by herself – such as an umeboshi ochazuke, which was a favorite snack of hers, made with leftover rice and pickled sour plums, soaked in hot tea…”
Memoirs of a Geisha
“…she wore white socks we call tabi, which button along the side with a snug fit. At this point she was ready for Mr Bekku to dress her…”
Memoirs of a Geisha
“…Both a housewife and a geisha will begin by taking off their makeup robes and tucking a silk slip around the bare hips; we call this a koshimaki – “hip wrap”…”
Memoris of a Geisha
“… I was expecting something very grand, but it turned out to be nothing more than several dark tatami rooms on the second floor of the school building, filled with desks and accounting books and smelling terribly of cigarettes…”
Memoirs of a Geisha
“…If you’ve never seen a shamisen, you might find it’s a peculiar-looking instrument. Some people call it a Japanese guitar, but actually it’s a good deal smaller than a guitar, with a thin wooden neck that has three large tuning pegs at the end. The body is just a little wooden box with cat skin stretched over the top like a drum. The entire instrument can be taken apat and put into a box or a bag, which is how it is carried about…”
“…Pumpkin assembled her shamisen and began to tune it with her tongue poking out, but I’m sorry to say that her ear was very poor, and the notes went up and down like a boat on the waves, without ever settling down where they were supposed to be…”
Memoirs of a Geisha
“…I didn’t understand what I was seeing at the moment, but I now know that only a tiny part of the compaund was devoted to the school. The massive building in the back was actually the Kaburenjo Theater – where the geisha of Gion perform Dances of the Old Capital every spring…”
Memoirs of a Geisha
“…I turned to find myself looking into the entryway of another okyia. On a shelf inside the door sat a miniature Shinto shrine with an offering of a sweet-rice cake. I wondered if this could be whar Pumpkin had seen; but her eyes were pointed toward the ground…”
“…We had reached Shijo Avenue by now and crossed it in silence. This was the same avenue that had been so crowded the day Mr. Bekku had brought Satsu and me from the station. Now so early in the morning, I could see only a single streetcar in the distance and a few bicylists here and there. When we reached the other side, we continued up a narrow street, and then Pumpkin stopped for the first time since we’d left the okiya…”
Memoirs of a Geisha
“…I almost fekt sick the first time she unfastened her robe and pulled it down from her shoulders, because the skin there and on her neck was bumpy and yellow like an uncooked chickens’s. The problem, as I later learned, was that in her geisha days she’d used a kind of white makeup we call “China Clay”, made with a base of lead. China Clay turned out to be poisonous, to begin with, which probably accounted in part for Granny’s foul disposition…”
Memoirs of a Geisha
“…I felt certain she was going to say something more to me after I’d approached her, but instead she took from her obi, where she kept it tucked, a pipe with a metal bowl and a long stem made of bamboo. She set it down beside her on the walkway and then brought from the pocket of her sleeve a drawstring bag of silk, from which she removed a big pinch of tobacco. She packed the tobacco with her little finger, stained the burnt orange color of a roasted yam, and then put the pipe into her mouth and lit it with a match from a tiny metal box…”
“…Whenever she put her pipe down onto the table with a click, flecks of ash and tobacco flew out of it, and she left them wherever they lay…”
Memoirs of a Geisha
My life in a Book 