“If you no longer have leaves, or bark, or roots, can you go on calling yourself a tree”

The expression “If you no longer have leaves, or bark, or roots, can you go on calling yourself a tree?” gives Sayuri a metaphor for the rupture between her former life as a geisha and her postwar circumstances. Spoken to herself as she watches American soldiers pass through her neighborhood, the question turns outward signs of identity into a problem of survival: when the life that sustained a name and role has been stripped away, what remains of that identity?

Context and Moment

The question arises in the spring of 1946, after Japan’s surrender. Sayuri recalls that people had begun to believe they would endure defeat and that fears about American soldiers had proved unfounded. Watching their trucks pass with neighborhood women, she recognizes how far she has moved from the separate world she once associated with her years in Gion.

The contrast is concrete. Sayuri stands in torn work pants, with unwashed hair, among women whose lives she had rarely considered during her geisha years. With fuel scarce, she can bathe only a few times each week. The encounter makes her former social distinction difficult to maintain: to the passing soldiers, she looks like the other women, and she questions whether she is different from them at all.

Meaning of the Tree

The tree is an image of identity whose parts are also its supports. Leaves, bark, and roots suggest outward presence, protection, and grounding; the question asks whether a name can endure when its underlying conditions have disappeared. Sayuri does not pose it as an abstract riddle. It follows her recognition that the visible markers and circumstances of her former life have been lost.

Her answer is immediate and unsettling: she tells herself that she is a peasant, not a geisha any longer. The expression therefore marks not simply a change in occupation but a crisis in self-recognition. The woman who once inhabited a world set apart from other women now sees herself through the ordinary hardship she shares with them.

Aftermath and Significance

The question’s force lies in the tension between identity and circumstance. Sayuri’s geisha past remains part of her memory, but the present offers little of the life that made that identity tangible. The comparison does not resolve whether the former self has vanished; instead, it registers the fear that a person may lose the conditions by which she knew herself.

The image also gives form to a larger reversal in Sayuri’s life: a cultivated geisha, once associated with fine clothes and carefully maintained hands, now faces postwar scarcity and manual work. The tree metaphor makes that change legible without treating identity as permanent or effortless. It captures the moment when Sayuri cannot confidently call herself what she once was, even as the question itself shows that the old identity still shapes how she understands her loss.