“Nothing is bleaker than the future, except perhaps the past”

The expression “Nothing is bleaker than the future, except perhaps the past” is Raiha’s darkly comic response to wartime fear among the geisha of Gion. First heard as a joke when the threatened closure of Japan’s geisha districts seemed increasingly certain, the line returns after Raiha’s death in the Tokyo firebombing, acquiring the weight of remembrance as well as humor.

The Joke in Wartime

By about the middle of 1943, the war had changed the atmosphere of daily life. Conditions were worsening, people no longer felt able to enjoy themselves, and the possibility that the military government would close the geisha districts had become difficult to dismiss. The women of Gion faced an uncertain future: if the districts shut, they expected to be sent to work in factories.

Raiha speaks into that collective unease. Her line turns the future’s bleakness against the past’s, refusing to present either direction in time as a source of comfort. The joke does not make the threat disappear; instead, it gives the gathered women a way to acknowledge their fear without pretending it can be solved. They laugh until tears bead in their eyes, a moment of shared release in a period when even having fun could seem unpatriotic.

The Line After Raiha’s Death

The expression returns in Sayuri’s account of the following spring, when she learns that Raiha was killed in the firebombing of Tokyo. Raiha had seemed especially likely to survive: she came from a prominent geisha family, her father belonged to a famous merchant family, and she was apparently reading to young nephews at her father’s estate in Denenchofu when the air raid killed her. Her relative comfort and apparent safety could not protect her.

The remembered joke consequently changes register. In the earlier scene it briefly releases the pressure of fear; after Raiha’s death, its pairing of a bleak future with a bleak past sounds less like a clever turn than an account of how little anyone can know about what lies ahead. Sayuri places Raiha’s death among sharply unequal wartime outcomes: the same raid killed the sumo wrestler Miyagiyama, while Pumpkin survived repeated bombings of the lens factory where she worked outside Osaka. The line’s return is thus bound to the unpredictability of survival, not to a simple lesson that fear was justified or avoidable.

Humor, Memory, and Uncertainty

The expression works through a paradox: if both the future and the past may be bleak, neither offers an uncomplicated refuge. In the first telling, that reversal makes the fear momentarily laughable; in the second, the knowledge of Raiha’s death makes the laughter part of what Sayuri remembers about her. The line carries both versions at once, joining a fleeting communal response to a later act of witness.

Its movement through Sayuri’s narration also changes the reader’s understanding of the scene. Raiha’s joke is first presented within the immediate wartime uncertainty of Gion; only later does her fate give the words their painful afterlife. The recollection preserves not just the sentence but the contrast between the women’s laughter and the danger they could not measure. Its force lies in that contrast: humor briefly sustains a community facing an unknowable future, while memory reveals how little such hope can guarantee.