Memoirs of a Geisha: Metaphors 6 key examples

Explaining, to the interviewer, the economic realities of the geisha profession, Chiyo uses a metaphor that imagines "unpopular geisha" as falling "deeper and deeper into a pit": 

Of course, no geisha keeps all her earnings, not even Mameha. The teahouse where she earned the fees takes a portion; then a much smaller portion goes to the geisha association; and a portion to her dresser; and right on down the line, including a fee she might pay to an okiya in exchange for keeping her account books and tracking her engagements. She probably keeps only a little more than half of what she earns. Still, it’s an enormous sum when compared with the livelihood of an unpopular geisha, who every day sinks deeper and deeper into a pit.

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When Sayuri is cast instead of Pumpkin in a leading role in an important dance performance, Mameha decides to put additional pressure on Hatsumomo, hoping that she will begin to crack. Using a metaphor drawn from sumo wrestling, Mameha declares that it is time "to toss Hatsumomo from the ring": 

Mother didn’t find out what had happened—Hatsumomo certainly wasn’t going to tell her—until several days afterward, when she heard the rumor during a game of mah-jongg. She came back to the okiya and asked if it was true I’d been given the role. After I told her it was, she walked away with the sort of puzzled look she might have worn if her dog Taku had added up the columns in her account books for her. Of course, Hatsumomo was furious, but Mameha wasn’t concerned about it. The time had come, as she put it, for us to toss Hatsumomo from the ring.

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Mameha develops a plan to get Dr. Crab and Nobu to bid for Sayuri's mizuage, a ceremony in which a winning bidder takes a young geisha's virginity. She prompts Sayuri to flirt with both men, though in the end, it is the Baron who bids against Dr. Crab. At a party, Sayuri escorts Dr. Crab to the restroom and reflects upon Mameha's metaphor that compares the activities of a geisha to stirring soup: 

I bowed at this, and when it was clear that Dr. Crab had nothing further to say, led him down the hallway to the toilet. By the time we returned to the small banquet room, the men had fallen into conversation, thanks to the quiet skills of Mameha, who now sat in the background pouring sake. She often said the role of a geisha was sometimes just to stir the soup. If you’ve ever noticed the way miso settles into a cloud at the bottom of the bowl but mixes quickly with a few whisks of the chopsticks, this is what she meant.

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In a passage that employs both imagery and metaphor, Sayuri describes the elegant landscapes of the Baron's home when she is first invited there for a party: 

The main house dated back to the time of his grandfather, but the gardens, which struck me as a giant brocade of textures, had been designed and built by his father. Apparently the house and gardens never quite fit together until the Baron’s older brother—the year before his assassination—had moved the location of the pond, and also created a moss garden with stepping-stones leading from the moon-viewing pavilion on one side of the house. Black swans glided across the pond with a bearing so proud they made me feel ashamed to be such an ungainly creature as a human being.

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Hatsumomo strikes out in anger when Mother announces that she and Pumpkin will move into a smaller room so that Sayuri might move into the room they previously occupied. She steals Sayuri's journal and accuses Sayuri of making disparaging remarks about clients and Mother. Sayuri uses a series of metaphors that reflect her realization that Hatsumomo's antics no longer threaten her, as her career as a geisha now eclipses that of the aging and increasingly erratic Hatsumomo: 

Ten years earlier when she had been the okiya’s principal earner, she probably could have accused me of anything she’d wanted. She could have claimed I’d eaten the tatami mats in her room, and Mother would have charged me the cost of new ones. But now at last the season had changed; Hatsumomo’s brilliant career was dying on the branch, while mine had begun to blossom. I was the daughter of the okiya and its prime geisha. I don’t think Mother even cared where the truth lay.

“There is no journal, Mother,” I said. “Hatsumomo is making it up.”

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At Nobu's party, Sayuri commits to her plan to have sex with Sato, knowing that Nobu will be disgusted and refuse to be her danna. Her goal, ultimately, is to enter into a relationship with the Chairman instead, as she knows that the Chairman cannot request to be her danna while Nobu, his business partner, is still interested in her. When she leads Sato into a theater on the island, she uses both simile and metaphor to describe her mixed feelings of agency and powerlessness: 

I’m sure you’ll understand that amid the worry, and fear, and disgust that almost overwhelmed me, I’d also been feeling a certain excitement. In the instant before that door opened, I could almost sense my life expanding just like a river whose waters have begun to swell; for I had never before taken such a drastic step to change the course of my own future. I was like a child tiptoeing along a precipice overlooking the sea. And yet somehow I hadn’t imagined a great wave might come and strike me there, and wash everything away.

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