A Geisha’s Struggle For Happiness
A Geisha’s Struggle For Happiness
A Geisha’s Struggle
For Happiness
“We human beings are only a part of something very much larger. When we walk along, we may crush a beetle or simply cause a change in the air so that a fly ends up where it might never have gone otherwise. And if we think of the same example but with ourselves in the role of the insect, and the larger universe in the role we’ve just played, it’s perfectly clear that we’re affected every day by forces over which we have no more control than the poor beetle has over our gigantic foot as it descends upon it. What are we to do? We must use whatever methods we can to understand the movement of the universe around us and time our actions so that we are not fighting the currents, but moving with them.”
-Author Golden
Eric Lemaire
05/12/06
English Comp II
Professor Everest
The geisha world has been a mystery to those outside the entourage for as long as okia houses have been around. In Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha, a heartfelt and powerful story is told on how an unusually beautiful nine-year-old girl from an impoverished fishing family around the mid 1910’s finds herself torn apart from her family members in the blink of an eye and how she is taken to Kyoto and sold into slavery to a geisha house. The lost of her father, mother, and sister amounts to only a fraction of the pain she is subjected to as she is repeatedly faced with the loss of identity and abandonment of her life, dreams, and loved ones over the course of her life. Poor Chiyo finds herself in a state of hopelessness and one day she is treated with the deepest form of kindness by an elderly man who was accompanied by a geisha. From that day forward, young Chiyo devotes every ounce of energy she possessed in becoming a geisha and perhaps one day meeting this kind stranger yet once again in hopes of living out the remaining of her life happy. This young girl is...
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