I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were pulling me down toward them.

Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.

She paints her face to hide her face. Her eyes are deep water. It is not for Geisha to want. It is not for geisha to feel. Geisha is an artist of the floating world. She dances, she sings. She entertains you, whatever you want. The rest is shadows, the rest is secret.

Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can't put the two together.

Geisha is always called beautiful even if she is not.

My mother once told me I was like water. Water can carve its way even through stone. And when trapped, water makes a new path.

As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past.