Eight hundred geisha worked in Gion when I first arrived there. Now the number is less than sixty, with only a handful of apprentices, and it dwindles further every day-because of course the pace of change never slows, e...

"You'll be wrinkled yourself one day.""But some of his wrinkles are the way he's made," I said. "The back of his head is as old as the front, but it's as smooth as an egg." "That isn't a respectful thing to say about you...

"You've got an eggplant on your face, little daughter of Sakamoto."He went to a drawer and took out a small mirror to show it to me. My lip was swollen and blue, just as he'd said."But what I really want to know," he wen...

One afternoon back when I was a child in Yoroido, a little boy named Gisuke climbed a tree to jump into the pond. He climbed much higher than he should have; the water wasn't deep enough. But when we told him not to jump...

It may surprise you to hear that this was the first time in my life anyone had ever really kissed me. General Tottori had sometimes pressed his lips against mine when he was my danna; but it had been utterly passionless....

I cannot tell you what it is that guides us in this life; but for me, I fell toward the Chairman just as a stone must fall toward the earth. When I cut my lip and met Mr. Tanaka, when my mother died and I was cruelly sol...

Now, if you were to imagine that Nishioka Minoru, after already having agreed to become the Chairman's heir, had discovered some new bit of information-such as that the Chairman had recently fathered an illegitimate son ...

For those of you who do not know, the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) is set to be signed if congress passes it on January 21-22 of 2009. The FOCA is the next sick chapter in the book of abortion. If made a law then all lim...

So we get a Surgeon General who's in bed with Pharma and a Head of the Department of Agriculture who used to be a bigwig for Monsanto.What's wrong with this picture? 

My portfolio hit another all time high today.  My bearish bets over the past two days all zipped up and I closed most of them.  I'm only holding 1000 shares of SRS and 500 shrs of DRYS acquired at the close.  I had...