Geisha Leaves Alaska

This geisha came to the United States from Japan via Vietnam. She moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where she lived in a glass house for twenty-five years, observing her observers. She moved to Placerville, California, where she lived in her glass house in a storage container's solitude and darkness for a few years before escaping to Fairbanks, Alaska, where she looked out her windows at children playing beneath the midnight sun during summers, yellow birch leaves falling, September snowfalls, northern lights and ice fog during the long winters, moose walking through the yard to nibble on the choke cherry trees and ravens chortling atop tall spruce heavy with snow.

After ten years in Alaska and growing weary of the cold, she rode in the back seat of an old Toyota 4-Runner across the continent to Florida where she now, in her senior years, watches citrus trees blossom and bear fruit and sometimes awakens at night when lightning strikes or large grapefruit fall to earth with a thud. Her glass house, having grown old and fragile would not survive the trip, so she left it in Fairbanks at a landfill transfer station; having never thrown stones, she misses the security and cleanliness it provided. Now dust, always abhorrent, accumulates on her head and mocks her elegance; she is embarrassed by her faded kimono and obi, but, as always, remains silent.

(Photographs by Steve Ketzer, Jr., August 2011: Geisha Leaving Fairbanks)