Two Geisha: 'We knew the young pilots would fly to Chiran in Kyushu before going on their suicide missions.Each of them was allowed to spend his last night here with a geisha. You can imagine how nasty it was in the winter the girls had to wait outside dressed only in thin kimono-they got frozen to the marrow.' She was expected to stand out there til midnight or even later. If no one had come along asking for her by nine o'clock, the girl would have to hang around in the street trying to persuade passersby to come inside. They had to find a customer every night or they got into trouble. Masujiro Tsukuda: 'The girls had a hard life. It was only after the war that country people started wearing shoes.I reckon it's why they're so feeble.'Ī Spending Spree, Mr. Even in winter I never wore more than a pair of thin cotton shorts. We all had powerful muscles, huge hands and feet, and dark, weather-beaten faces. Susumu Fujii: 'Fishermen seemed almost to belong to a different race from townspeople. The only chance I ever had to do any laundry was at ten or eleven at night, and I'd end up hanging it out to dry by moonlight.' Yasu Nemoto: 'I married a fisherman when I was twenty-five.life for the wives wasn't ever sweet and easy: I was up not long after midnight, I was out on the boats til mid afternoon, then, I had to cook and clean the house-and there were the paddy fields to be tended too. The number of children killed just depended, I'm told, on how strict the local policeman was.'Ī Fisherman's Wife, Mrs.

The Fudo Terrace, Mr.Ryutaro Terauchi: 'The people living in the terrace were all terribly poor.Because everyone was so hard up around here, 'thinning out' the newborn was quite widely practiced. And when she did have to go out maybe on business or to visit a friend, she always went by rickshaw.as the rickshaw passed through town, people would watch it going by and call to each other, 'Quick, come and look it's the lady from such and such house.' It was as if they were looking at someone from a different world.' Fukasaburo Takagi: 'It was also the custom that.an okusan shouldn't go outdoors in the daytime. The horse managed to find its way home and outside the house it neighed to let everyone know it was back.' I remember one evening I got very drunk on shochu and fell asleep splayed out in the back of the cart. Tamotsu Kimura: 'They used to say a carter is 'eaten out of house and home by his horse'.But I suppose the reason I never packed it in was that I was too fond of my horses. Saga's paintings online-for that you'll have to read the book, and I hope that you will. To give you a bit of a feel, I'll share some quotes, along with illustrations. And then, here and there, are memories that come at you like a gut punch.

Many of the memories are filtered through time and have the soft glow of a Japanese woodcut, even the hard things are recalled with a certain realism and even pride. Susumu Saga-and my one criticism is that the illustrations should be larger (though I suspect that reflects a sort of modesty that both the father and son must share).

The narratives are greatly enhanced by watercolors and pen-and-ink drawings created by the author's father, Dr. The vignettes are organized by topics (boatmen and fishing, crafts, etc.) and give a vivid sense of what life was like for ordinary people in rural Japan. Junichi Saga were mostly born in the late 1890s or early part of the 20th century through the memories passed to them by their parents, the narrative stretches back into Japan's Meiji period in the 1860's. The elderly people interviewed during the 1970s by Dr. Midwives and pawnbrokers, fishermen and thatchers spin tales of a different world-one that was still very much a part of Japan's ancient feudal history. Come, sit down by the fire, and listen to the grandparents tell stories about 'how it was in the old days' in a small lakeside town just north of Tokyo.

Yasu brookline