“Clouds pass over the moon”

“Clouds pass over the moon” is a metaphor Mameha uses to refer to menstruation while explaining the female body to Sayuri. The phrase makes a recurring bodily experience easier to approach indirectly, joining Sayuri’s childhood confusion to the knowledge Mameha inherited from her own older sister.

Meaning and Explanation

Mameha describes the monthly bleeding as the passage of clouds over the moon. In her explanation, the image belongs to a broader, deliberately figurative account of the body: she compares women’s internal anatomy to caves where eels seek a home. The lunar phrase thus serves as coded, memorable language within a conversation that does not name its subject plainly.

Sayuri’s Earlier Experience

The metaphor is already familiar to Sayuri because she has menstruated for several years. Her first experience frightened her; she feared she might be dying until Auntie found her washing a bloody rag and explained that bleeding was part of being a woman. Mameha’s explanation therefore does not introduce the experience itself, but gives Sayuri a term for it and places it within the same indirect vocabulary used to discuss the body.

Inherited Knowledge and Narrative Function

Sayuri reflects that a direct explanation might have shocked her, but would have been easier to understand. She later learns that Mameha had received the same eel analogy from her own older sister. The repeated teaching makes the phrase part of an intergenerational chain of explanation: knowledge is passed between women through euphemism, with the moon image offering an oblique way to speak about a subject otherwise approached through metaphor.