Chapter 29 Chapter Twenty Nine

One night in the spring of 1944, after only three or four months of living with the Arano family, I witnessed the first air raid in my life.The stars were so bright we could see the black silhouettes of the bombers circling overhead, and the stars that were launched—I think so—from the ground and exploded near the ground.We dreaded hearing the dreadful sirens and seeing Kyoto burning before our eyes.If so, whether we live or die, life ends at that moment, because Kyoto is as fragile as a moth's wing, and once destroyed, it can never be rebuilt like Osaka, Tokyo or other cities.But the bombers let us go.Many nights, we watched the fires of Osaka turn the moon red; sometimes, we saw the dust floating in the air like fallen leaves, and we could even see the dust over Kyoto fifty kilometers away.I am worried about the chairman and Nobuo, their company is in Osaka, and their family lives in Kyoto.

Adversity is like a gust of wind that takes from us what could not otherwise be taken away, and after the wind blows, we see ourselves in our true colors.For example, Mr. Arashino's daughter lost her husband in the war, so she devoted herself to two things: one was looking after her baby, and the other was sewing parachutes for soldiers.She has no other purpose in life.She's getting thinner and thinner, and you can tell where every gram of her flesh is going.At the end of the war, she clung to the child as if she were clinging to the edge of a cliff and would fall to the rocks below if she let go.

Knowing myself now that I've been through the ordeal is like waking up to something I've mostly forgotten.In other words, under the gorgeous clothes, skillful dancing, and witty conversation, my life is not complicated, but as simple as a stone falling to the ground.For the past ten years, I have only one purpose in everything I have done, and that is to win the heart of the president.Day after day, I watched the babbling water of the Kamo River shoal below my studio, and sometimes I dropped a flower petal, sometimes a straw, knowing it would be carried to Osaka and then into the sea.I thought, one afternoon the president might sit at the table, look out the window and see the petals or straws, maybe he would think of me.But in an instant, my thoughts trembled again. Maybe the president would see it, but even if he did, he leaned back in his seat and thought of hundreds of things from the petals, and maybe I would not be among them.He's always been nice to me, but he's just such a nice guy.There was never a hint that he recognized me as the girl he had comforted, that he knew I cared about him and thought of him.

One day, I thought for the first time, what if the chairman has always been indifferent to me?Will I wake up until the end of my life, and the man I've been waiting for day and night will never come?I never savored the things I ate, and never appreciated the places I passed by, because I let my life slip away quietly, and I only missed the president.This sadness is unbearable.But what kind of life do I have if I take my thoughts away from him?I would be like a dancer who grew up practicing hard for a gig that never came. A year after the surrender, Mr. Arashino was allowed to make kimonos again.I knew nothing but wearing a kimono, so I had to spend my days in the basement of the annexe of the studio, tending to the boiling dye in the vats.It was a dreadful job, partly because we could only afford tadong, a mixture of tar and coal dust that stinks unimaginably.After a while, Mr. Arano's wife taught me how to collect suitable leaves and branches to make dyes, but there was a strange material that could dye my skin.My delicate dancing hands, once preserved with the best skin creams, were starting to peel off like the skin of an onion and turn livid.

In order to make my skin feel better, Arashino-san asked me to collect commelina in summer.Commelina is a kind of flower, and its juice can be used to soak silk.They generally grow by river ponds during the rainy season.Gathering flowers and plants sounds like a pleasant job, but I soon discovered that commelina is very spooky. It is like an alley that recruits all the insects in western Japan.As long as I pick a handful of flowers, swarms of mosquitoes will attack me.After a miserable week of collecting flowers and herbs, I moved on to the much easier task of squeezing the flowers.But if you've never smelled commelina flower sap... well, by the end of the week, I'm so thankful to be back to burning dye.

I have worked very hard these years, but every night when I go to bed, I always think of Gion.Within a few months of the surrender, all the geisha districts in Japan were reopened, but my mother didn't come to me, and I couldn't go back by myself.She resold kimonos, handicrafts and Japanese knives to Americans, and lived a happy life.So now she and her aunt still live on a small farm in the west of Kyoto and open a shop, and I continue to work and live with the Arashino family. Three years after the war, on a cold November afternoon, Yan came. As soon as he saw me, he asked me why I hadn't gone back.

"To be honest, the decision is not in my hands. I have been waiting for my mother to reopen the art gallery." "Then call your mother and say it's time. I've been waiting patiently for half a year. Go and tell her that your good friend Yan wants you to go back to Gion." After that, he took a small box in one hand and threw it at me. on the mat next to it. "A gift I brought. Open it." "If Mr. Yan gives me a gift, I have to give him mine first." I went to the corner of the room and found a folding fan from my belongings box, which I wanted to give to Nobu a long time ago.A fan seems too light for him, but for a geisha, a fan used for dancing is like a fetish, and this is not an ordinary dancing fan, but when I reach the Inoue school dance master craftsman My teacher gave it to me when I was in grade.I've never heard of a geisha dropping something like this, which is why I decided to give it to him.

I wrapped the fan in a square of cotton cloth and handed it to him.He opened it to look at it, with a look of astonishment on his face. I knew he would be like this, so I tried my best to explain the whole story. "Thank you very much," he said, "but I don't deserve it. Give it to someone who appreciates dancing better than I do." "I won't give it to anyone else. It's part of me and I've given it to Mr. Yeon." "Then, I am very grateful and will cherish it. Now open the box I gave you." Untie the paper bag and rope outside, and open several layers of newspapers, inside is a fist-sized cement.I believe I was as confused when I received the cement as I was when Delay received the fan.

"What you're holding is a piece of rubble from our Osaka factory," Nobu told me. "Two of our four factories were destroyed. It's hard to say whether the whole company will survive the next few years. So you see, if You gave me a part of you in the fan, and I think I gave you a part of me." "If this is a part of Mr. Yeon, I will cherish it." "I didn't give it to you to cherish, it's a piece of cement! I want you to help me turn it into a beautiful piece of jewelry for you to preserve." "If Mr. Yeon knows what to do, please tell me. We'll all be rich!"

"I want you to do something in Gion. If it goes well, our company will be back in a year or two. When I ask you to get this piece of cement back and exchange it for jewelry, that's when I'm finally going to be When you get there." When I heard it, my whole body was as cold as glass, but I didn't show it at all.Nobu told me that a man named Sato had just been appointed as the Deputy Minister of Finance, and was sent by the Americans to review the case of the Iwamura Electric Company— Throughout the war, the chairman refused to accept what the government asked him to do, and when he finally agreed to cooperate, the war was almost over, and although none of the things they made were used on the battlefield, the Americans still listed Iwamura Electric as the same as Mitsubishi. Same chaebol.If the Americans cannot be convinced on this case, Iwamura Electric will be seized and the equipment will be sold as war reparations.Nobu wants me to accompany Sato to the banquet, so that he can lean on our side.

"Your and my destiny are intertwined. I can't be your Danna if Iwamura Electric is not recovered. Maybe the company is destined to recover, just like I am destined to meet you." In the last years of the war, I had learned not to think about what was and was not meant to be.I often tell the women next door that I'm not sure I'll ever go back to Gion, but the truth is, I always knew I'd be able to go back.Whatever my fate is, it's there waiting for me.Over the years, so to speak, I have learned to freeze the water in my personality.Only by stopping the natural flow of my thoughts in this way could I bear the waiting.Now hearing Yen mention my destiny... oh, I feel like he shattered the ice inside me and awakened my long-cherished wish again. "Mr. Yan," I said, "if it's important to make a good impression on the vice minister, you should probably invite the president to the banquet." "You still care about how you get there. If you don't return to Gion by the end of this month, I will be very disappointed." Nobu got up to leave, he had to get back to Osaka before evening.I walked him to the door, helped him into his coat and shoes, and put his fedora on.After that he stood looking at me for a long time.I thought he would say I was beautiful, because he sometimes does when he looks at me for no reason. "My God, Sayuri, you look like a peasant woman!" he said.There was a trace of sadness on his face as he turned away.