Editor's Note: Today we begin a series of excerpts from Arthur Golden's critically acclaimed 1997 novel, Memoirs of a Geisha. We at ModelMinority.com are proud to affirm our commitment to bringing you the very finest in Oriental-American literature.
By Arthur Golden
Excerpted from Memoirs of a Geisha
Random House, 1997
By the spring of 1946, we'd all come to recognize that we would live through the ordeal of defeat. There were even those who believed Japan would one day be renewed. All the stories about invading American soldiers raping and killing us had turned out to be wrong; and in fact, we gradually came to realize that the Americans on the whole were remarkably kind.
One day an entourage of them came riding through the area on their trucks. I stood watching them with the other women from the neighborhood. I'd learned during my years in Gion to regard myself as the inhabitant of a special world that separated me from other women; and in fact, I'd felt so separated all these years that I'd only rarely wondered how other women lived -- even the wives of the men I'd entertained.
Yet there I stood in a pair of torn work pants, with my stringy hair hanging along my back. I hadn't bathed in several days, for we had no fuel to heat the water more than a few times each week. To the eyes of the American soldiers who drove past, I looked no different from the women around me; and as I thought of it, who could say I was any different? If you no longer have leaves, or bark, or roots, can you go on calling yourself a tree?
"I am a peasant," I said to myself, "and not a geisha at all any longer." It was a frightening feeling to look at my hands and see their toughness.
To draw my mind away from my fears, I turned my attention again to the truckloads of soldiers driving past. Weren't these the very American soldiers we'd been taught to hate, who had bombed our cities with such horrifying weapons? Now they rode through our neighborhood, throwing pieces of candy to the children.
