Memoirs of a Geisha --- Arthur Golden

made a career of entertaining men

i suppose i would have grasped at 抓, 緊握; 抱; 攫取 anything that offered me comfort

He grasped at every opportunity. 他抓住每一個機會。

Shecradled me in her lap at the edge of the clearing

was more than i could bear

She's the year of the cow

and i burst into tears myself the moment i saw her upset

unlike her clothing, the woman herself wasn't lovely at all. Her teeth protruded so badly that her lips didn't quite cover them.

you may think me cruel to describe her so harshly

while i tried my best to soothe myself with these thoughts

Back then, around 1930

I worked up my courage and said to Mr. Bekku, "Won't you please tell us where we're going?"

the young buck-toothed geisha

obi (日本婦女和服上的寬腰帶)

Gion (袛園) (Geisha District of Kyoto)

Okiya (置屋) (It's where geisha live)

I've never been good at the sight of blood

In the corner of his mouth was a giant mole like a piece of food

her silk change purse (省子包)

in her geisha days she'd used a kind of white makeup we call "China Clay", made with a base of lead

astonishing-looking woman

shamisen (a 3-stringed Japanese musical instruement 三味線) (The body is just a little wooden box with cat skin stretched over the top like a drum)

the students practiced in unison

Maybe you're too just too pretty yourself to be able to see it elsewhere

When a geisha wakes up in the morningshe is just like any other woman. Her face may be greasy from sleep, and her breath unpleasant.

this cream was made from nightingale droppings

I was sick with jealousy and shame

The Japanese man, as a rule, feel about a woman's neck and throat the same way that men in the West might feel about a woman's legs. This is why geisha wear the collars of their kimono so low in the back that the first few bumps of the spine are visible.

I felt miserable with envy, watching her

Hatsumomo had the power to make my life miserable in any way she wanted

The collection of kimono was probably twice as valuable as the entire villages of Yoroido and Senzuru put together.

She may have been as cruel as a spider, but she was more lovely chewing on her fingernail than most geisha looked posing for a photograph

futon蒲團

You don't reall think anyone is empty-headed enough to believe your little story.

her breath had a pungent odor when she spoke

Of course you'll do whatever I want you to do. That isn't even a subject for discussion!

just the thought of seeing her again was enough to bring tears to my eyes.

sold her into slavery when she was a little girl

Couldn't the wrong sort of living trun anyone mean?

If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.

beating me halfheartedly as she had before

I was sick with anxiety, and felt a pit inside myself as big and empty as if the whole world were nothing more than a giant hall empty of people.

the embarrassing sound of Granny passing wind with a groan

I was left where i'd stared with nothing but my own loneliness.

My hands were trembling in my lap as I knelt at the table, probably from the force of trying to keep all my terrible thoughts from rising to the surface of my mind.

at once my mind felt like a broken vase that would not stand. I was lost even within the room around me.

Mr. Tanaka had brought me nothing but suffering; but he also changed my horizons forever.

I was living only half in Gion; the other half of me lived in my dreams of going home. This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: tjeu smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes consume us comletely.

of course we can never flee the misery that is within us.

to look a bit womanly

my body would remain thin and knobby 多節的, 多疙瘩的

The past was gone.

But I suppose that for the past year I'd been dead in a way too.

I'd turned around to look in a different direction, so that i no longer faced backward toward the past, but forward toward the future.

the other young girls in Gion would move ahead in their lives and leave me behind

I saw life in all its noisy excitement passing me by

He was looking at me as a musician might look at his instrument just before he begins to play, with understanding and mastery

I'm sure my words carried none of fullness of my feelings

I mean to say that if you have experienced an evening more exciting than any in your life, you're sad to see it end; and yet you still feel grateful that it happened.

Now I understood the thing I'd overlooked; the point wasn't to become a geisha, but to be one. To become a geisha...well, that was hardly a purpose in life. But to be a geisha... i could see it now as a stepping stone to something else.

in Shinto, death is the most impure of all the things that can happen

sutra佛經

Heian period (The Heian period (平安時代) is the last division of classical Japanese history, running from 794 to 1185.[1] The period is named after the capital city of Heian-kyō, or modern Kyōto. It is the period in Japanese history when Buddhism, Taoism and other Chinese influences were at their height. The Heian period is also considered the peak of the Japanese imperial court and noted for its art, especially poetry and literature. Although the Imperial House of Japan had power on the surface, the real power was in the hands of the Fujiwara clan, a powerful aristocratic family who had intermarried with the imperial family. Many emperors actually had mothers from the Fujiwara family.[2] Heian (平安?) means "peace and tranquility" in Japanese.)

and i'm afraid my eyes and my mind weren't communicating well

in rich talc scent (滑石粉; 爽身粉)

He was my bohisattva (佛教用語)菩薩with a thousand arms who would help me.

my whole body was damp with perspiration

the great master of the setoguro style of ceramics who became a Living National Treasure in the years after WWII

looked at me with a benign expression on her perfect, oval face.

had been treated monstrously by Hatsumomo.

She can't bear to have rivals.

For in an instant Mameha seemed able to read my very thought

It's been more than two years now. I've waited so patiently in the hopes that some opportunity might come along.

Water never waits. It changes shape and flows around things, and finds the secret paths no one else has thought about.

I'm sure you're a clever girl, Chiyo, but I don't think that was your cleverest moment. Those of us with water in our personalities don't pick where we'll flow to. All we can do is flow where the landscape of our lives carries us.

I'd certainly learned a great many lessons from life already; but I knew nothing at all about patience.

I worked so hard to overhear Mameha and Mother that it wouldn't have surprised me if i had strained all the muscles in my ears.

remained motionless

It's heartbreaking, the choices people are forced to make in these times.

She'd be thrilled to see you fail.

a facade表面; 外觀
Her honesty was all a facade. 她的誠實只是一種表面現象。

The tea itself is made from tea leaves ground into a powder and then whisked with boiled water into a frothy green mix we call matcha

You see, stage fright drains the feeling from your hands; and when you've already grown accustomed to playing with hands that are numbed and miserable, stage fright presents much less of a problem.

She gave me a pitiful glance

When I say successful, i mean a geisha who has earned her independence.

danna

A true geisha will never soil her reputation by making herself avaliable to men on a nightly basis.

but the real money in Gion gomes from having a danna

In damaging her relationship with the mistress, Hatsumomo had hurt no one so much as herself

In most cases the bond will probably last six monts or so, perhaps longer --- because of course, men tire so quickly of the same thing.

You may have heard something about the famous geisha Mametsuki, who had an affair with the prime minister of Japan shortly before World War I and casued something of a scandal.

She poured sake for the great German writer Thomas Mann... as well as Charlie Chaplin, and Sun Yat-sen, and later Ernest Hemingway

luminaries傑出人物; 才智出眾的人

If you look around at the most successful geisha in Gion, every one of them is a dancer.

Hatsumomo had duped欺騙, 詐騙, 愚弄 her.

I was certainly as determined as anyone to work single-mindedly until I reached my goal.

nothing in life mattered more to me than pleasing him.

I felt sick with disappointment and jealousy

babyish face

with an expression that seemed to say she was very sorry for the way thngs had turned out.

lacquered umbrellas

she understood well that she owed her exalted position to the people who thought highly of her

A girl with a stunning profile will never accidentally give a man the wrong message with it

Then as she neared me her eyes rose to meet mine for just an instant, and very quickly looked away. I must say, i felt an electric jolt; if i'd been a man, i would have thought she'd given herself over very briefly to strong feelings she was struggling to hide.

finding auspicious dates for all the various events that would lead up to my debut --- such as going to the shrine to announce my intentions to the gods

I didn't sleep at all that night. What i had wanted for so long had finally come to pass, and oh, how my stomach churned!

how completely the landscape of my mind had changed.

on the eve of my debut

which i've mentioned

Looking back on it

Dandruff is a great problem among geisha

how provocative the 'split peach' hairstyle really is!

I felt I was someone to be taken seriously; not a girl anymore

go through the ordeal

thanked me for having granted me the wish i'd pleaded for three and a half years earlier, that i should become a geisha.

novice geisha Sayuri

I felt that this new girl, Sayuri, with her gleaming white face and her red lips, had destroyed her.

to act prissy拘謹的

A man is interested in only one thing

I drew my sleeve out of the way enough to show my arm without being too obvious what i was doing.

decrepit衰老的

Now i had to try walking all around Gion in the shoes we call okobo. They're quite tall and made of wood, with lovely lacquered thongs to hold the foot in place.

and now at last my turn had come

So i swallowed my real feelings and followed her up the street.

She always has the best of everything, you know. Just look at her and you can tell

Mameha made a mock-angry face

I wasn't being prim (裝作淑女模樣)

the beautiful tinkling發叮噹聲 sound

I was finding it difficult to believe that these men --- who had paid so considerably to be there, among women wrapped in beautiful, expensive robes - really wanted to hear the same sorts of stories children back in the pond in Yoroido might have told.

in her novitiate

was the one woman i would hae given anything to avoid

""Let's see, where was I? Hatsumomo began. "Oh, yes. Well..."

like a bug on its back

"i'm fourteen, ma'am," I told her, just as politely as i could. "But i'm an old fourteen."

with his thin hair oiled back and his fingersstroking a sake cup in anger

But to see her swallowing so nervously, I could tell she was lying.

But when i thought of its real purpose as I listened to his stories, it ceased to be beautiful at all and became something monstrous instead.

Mameha was very resourceful

beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy

Hatsumomo and Pumpkin will noth pay dearly for this apprentice's award

who every day sinks deeper and deeper into a pit

I turned away from the Chairman with as much difficulty as a hungry child turns away from a plate of food.

it was one of my first efforts at joking with a man

to my astonishment

she's just been thrown off-balance herself. And she won't even find it out until it's too late.

He may just prove to be your rescuer.

I must admit i felt a sickness inside when i heard this. If i was to have a rescuer, i wanted it to be the Chairman and no one else.

But in a moment I understood that she was trying to "lance the boil," as she'd put it.

I went to settle myslef near him and tried to show all the signs of a girl enchanted. Whenever he laughed, for example, i flicked my eyes toward him as though i couldn't resist.

She was captivatingly beautiful

I'd planned to reach into his lap and reclaim it with girlish embarrassment.

It turned out that shortly after we'd visited him, his cat had been bitten by a badger 【動】獾[C]and within a few days was dead from infection

sent me off chaperoned by her maid, Tatsumi

When a man takes a mistress, he doesn't turn around and divorce his wife.

Things went along smoothly with the Doctor, until one afternoon in the middle of March when i did something foolish and very nearly ruined all Mameha's careful planning.

I kept my face like a mask, and felt pleased with myself that i'd given nothing away.

Hatsumomo had outsmarted us somehow.

I'm sure Mameha felt as shocked as i did, but she didn't show it.

The Shirae's gloomy atmosphere seemed as thick as the water in a pond that night.

"the homeless eel"

And when they've made up their minds that it's comfortable, they mark the cave as their territory ... by spitting.

"The first time a woman's cave is explored by a man's eel. That is what we call mizuage."

Except for what he needs to support his family, he spends it in the pursuit of mizuage.

whose every thought was about money and how to get more of it

Once you know this sort of thing, you can never unknow it.

a noodle vendor

we ended up in an embrace

he was renowned in Gion as a "mizuage specialist"

Pumpkin's upcoming adoption

a kind of sweet-rice cake we call ekubo,