Memoirs of a Geisha (10 page)

By the time I returned to the courtyard, Hatsumomo had been up to her room to fetch an inkstone and a stick of ink, as well as a brush for calligraphy. I thought perhaps she wanted to write a note and slip it inside the kimono when she refolded it. She had dribbled some water from the well onto her inkstone and was now sitting on the walkway grinding ink. When it was good and black, she dipped a brush in it and smoothed its tip against the stone—so that all the ink was absorbed in the brush and none of it would drip. Then she put it into my hand, and held my hand over the lovely kimono, and said to me:

“Practice your calligraphy, little Chiyo.”

This kimono belonging to the geisha named Mameha—whom I’d never heard of at the time—was a work of art. Weaving its way from the hem up to the waist was a beautiful vine made of heavily lacquered threads bunched together like a tiny cable and sewn into place. It was a part of the fabric, yet it seemed so much like an actual vine growing there, I had the feeling I could take it in my fingers, if I wished, and tear it away like a weed from the soil. The leaves curling from it seemed to be fading and drying in the autumn weather, and even taking on tints of yellow.

“I can’t do it, Hatsumomo-san!” I cried.

“What a shame, little sweetheart,” her friend said to me. “Because if you make Hatsumomo tell you again, you’ll lose the chance to find your sister.”

“Oh, shut up, Korin. Chiyo knows she has to do what I tell her. Write something on the fabric, Miss Stupid. I don’t care what it is.”

When the brush first touched the kimono, Korin was so excited she let out a squeal that woke one of the elderly maids, who leaned out into the corridor with a cloth around her head and her sleeping robe sagging all around her. Hatsumomo stamped her foot and made a sort of lunging motion, like a cat, which was enough to make the maid go back to her futon. Korin wasn’t happy with the few uncertain strokes I’d made on the powdery green silk, so Hatsumomo instructed me where to mark the fabric and what sorts of marks to make. There wasn’t any meaning to them; Hatsumomo was just trying in her own way to be artistic. Afterward she refolded the kimono in its wrapping of linen and tied the strings shut again. She and Korin went back to the front entryway to put their lacquered zori back on their feet. When they rolled open the door to the street, Hatsumomo told me to follow.

“Hatsumomo-san, if I leave the okiya without permission, Mother will be very angry, and—”

“I’m giving you permission,” Hatsumomo interrupted. “We have to return the kimono, don’t we? I hope you’re not planning to keep me waiting.”

So I could do nothing but step into my shoes and follow her up the alleyway to a street running beside the narrow Shirakawa Stream. Back in those days, the streets and alleys in Gion were still paved beautifully with stone. We walked along in the moonlight for a block or so, beside the weeping cherry trees that drooped down over the black water, and finally across a wooden bridge arching over into a section of Gion I’d never seen before. The embankment of the stream was stone, most of it covered with patches of moss. Along its top, the backs of the teahouses and okiya connected to form a wall. Reed screens over the windows sliced the yellow light into tiny strips that made me think of what the cook had done to a pickled radish earlier that day. I could hear the laughter of a group of men and geisha. Something very funny must have been happening in one of the teahouses, because each wave of laughter was louder than the one before, until they finally died away and left only the twanging of a shamisen from another party. For the moment, I could imagine that Gion was probably a cheerful place for some people. I couldn’t help wondering if Satsu might be at one of those parties, even though Awajiumi, at the Gion Registry Office, had told me she wasn’t in Gion at all.

Shortly, Hatsumomo and Korin came to a stop before a wooden door.

“You’re going to take this kimono up the stairs and give it to the maid there,” Hatsumomo said to me. “Or if Miss Perfect herself answers the door, you may give it to her. Don’t say anything; just hand it over. We’ll be down here watching you.”

With this, she put the wrapped kimono into my arms, and Korin rolled open the door. Polished wooden steps led up into the darkness. I was trembling with fear so much, I could go no farther than halfway up them before I came to a stop. Then I heard Korin say into the stairwell in a loud whisper:

“Go on, little girl! No one’s going to eat you unless you come back down with the kimono still in your hands—and then we just might. Right, Hatsumomo-san?”

Hatsumomo let out a sigh at this, but said nothing. Korin was squinting up into the darkness, trying to see me; but Hatsumomo, who stood not much higher than Korin’s shoulder, was chewing on one of her fingernails and paying no attention at all. Even then, amid all my fears, I couldn’t help noticing how extraordinary Hatsumomo’s beauty was. She may have been as cruel as a spider, but she was more lovely chewing on her fingernail than most geisha looked posing for a photograph. And the contrast with her friend Korin was like comparing a rock along the roadside with a jewel. Korin looked uncomfortable in her formal hairstyle with all its lovely ornaments, and her kimono seemed to be always in her way. Whereas Hatsumomo wore her kimono as if it were her skin.

On the landing at the top of the stairs, I knelt in the black darkness and called out:

“Excuse me, please!”

I waited, but nothing happened. “Louder,” said Korin. “They aren’t expecting you.”

So I called again, “Excuse me!”

“Just a moment!” I heard a muffled voice say; and soon the door rolled open. The girl kneeling on the other side was no older than Satsu, but thin and nervous as a bird. I handed her the kimono in its wrapping of linen paper. She was very surprised, and took it from me almost desperately.

“Who’s there, Asami-san?” called a voice from inside the apartment. I could see a single paper lantern on an antique stand burning beside a freshly made futon. The futon was for the geisha Mameha; I could tell because of the crisp sheets and the elegant silk cover, as well as the
takamakura
—“tall pillow”—just like the kind Hatsumomo used. It wasn’t really a pillow at all, but a wooden stand with a padded cradle for the neck; this was the only way a geisha could sleep without ruining her elaborate hairstyle.

The maid didn’t answer, but opened the wrapping around the kimono as quietly as she could, and tipped it this way and that to catch the reflection of the light. When she caught sight of the ink marring it, she gasped and covered her mouth. Tears spilled out almost instantly onto her cheeks, and then a voice called:

“Asami-san! Who’s there?”

“Oh, no one, miss!” cried the maid. I felt terribly sorry for her as she dried her eyes quickly against one sleeve. While she was reaching up to slide the door closed, I caught a glimpse of her mistress. I could see at once why Hatsumomo called Mameha “Miss Perfect.” Her face was a perfect oval, just like a doll’s, and as smooth and delicate-looking as a piece of china, even without her makeup. She walked toward the doorway, trying to peer into the stairwell, but I saw no more of her before the maid quickly rolled the door shut.

*  *  *

The next morning after lessons, I came back to the okiya to find that Mother, Granny, and Auntie were closed up together in the formal reception room on the first floor. I felt certain they were talking about the kimono; and sure enough, the moment Hatsumomo came in from the street, one of the maids went to tell Mother, who stepped out into the entrance hall and stopped Hatsumomo on her way up the stairs.

“We had a little visit from Mameha and her maid this morning,” she said.

“Oh, Mother, I know just what you’re going to say. I feel terrible about the kimono. I tried to stop Chiyo before she put ink on it, but it was too late. She must have thought it was mine! I don’t know why she’s hated me so from the moment she came here . . . To think she would ruin such a lovely kimono just in the hopes of hurting me!”

By now, Auntie had limped out into the hall. She cried, “
Matte mashita!
” I understood her words perfectly well; they meant “We’ve waited for you!” But I had no idea what she meant by them. Actually, it was quite a clever thing to say, because this is what the audience sometimes shouts when a great star makes his entrance in a Kabuki play.

“Auntie, are you suggesting that I had something to do with ruining that kimono?” Hatsumomo said. “Why would I do such a thing?”

“Everyone knows how you hate Mameha,” Auntie told her. “You hate anyone more successful than you.”

“Does that suggest I ought to be extremely fond of you, Auntie, since you’re such a failure?”

“There’ll be none of that,” said Mother. “Now you listen to me, Hatsumomo. You don’t really think anyone is empty-headed enough to believe your little story. I won’t have this sort of behavior in the okiya, even from you. I have great respect for Mameha. I don’t want to hear of anything like this happening again. As for the kimono, someone has to pay for it. I don’t know what happened last night, but there’s no dispute about who was holding the brush. The maid saw the girl doing it. The girl will pay,” said Mother, and put her pipe back into her mouth.

Now Granny came out from the reception room and called a maid to fetch the bamboo pole.

“Chiyo has enough debts,” said Auntie. “I don’t see why she should pay Hatsumomo’s as well.”

“We’ve talked about this enough,” Granny said. “The girl should be beaten and made to repay the cost of the kimono, and that’s that. Where’s the bamboo pole?”

“I’ll beat her myself,” Auntie said. “I won’t have your joints flaring up again, Granny. Come along, Chiyo.”

Auntie waited until the maid brought the pole and then led me down to the courtyard. She was so angry her nostrils were bigger than usual, and her eyes were bunched up like fists. I’d been careful since coming to the okiya not to do anything that would lead to a beating. I felt hot suddenly, and the stepping-stones at my feet grew blurry. But instead of beating me, Auntie leaned the pole against the storehouse and then limped over to say quietly to me:

“What have you done to Hatsumomo? She’s bent on destroying you. There must be a reason, and I want to know what it is.”

“I promise you, Auntie, she’s treated me this way since I arrived. I don’t know what I ever did to her.”

“Granny may call Hatsumomo a fool, but believe me, Hatsumomo is no fool. If she wants to ruin your career badly enough, she’ll do it. Whatever you’ve done to make her angry, you must stop doing it.”

“I haven’t done anything, Auntie, I promise you.”

“You must never trust her, not even if she tries to help you. Already she’s burdened you with so much debt you may never work it off.”

“I don’t understand . . .” I said, “about
debt?
”

“Hatsumomo’s little trick with that kimono is going to cost you more money than you’ve ever imagined in your life. That’s what I mean about debt.”

“But . . . how will I pay?”

“When you begin working as a geisha, you’ll pay the okiya back for it, along with everything else you’ll owe—your meals and lessons; if you get sick, your doctor’s fees. You pay all of that yourself. Why do you think Mother spends all her time in her room, writing numbers in those little books? You owe the okiya even for the money it cost to acquire you.”

Throughout my months in Gion, I’d certainly imagined that money must have changed hands before Satsu and I were taken from our home. I often thought of the conversation I’d overheard between Mr. Tanaka and my father, and of what Mrs. Fidget had said about Satsu and me being “suitable.” I’d wondered with horror whether Mr. Tanaka had made money by helping to sell us, and how much we had cost. But I’d never imagined that I myself would have to repay it.

“You won’t pay it back until you’ve been a geisha a good long time,” she went on. “And you’ll never pay it back if you end up a failed geisha like me. Is that the way you want to spend your future?”

At the moment I didn’t much care how I spent my future.

“If you want to ruin your life in Gion, there are a dozen ways to do it,” Auntie said. “You can try to run away. Once you’ve done that, Mother will see you as a bad investment; she’s not going to put more money into someone who might disappear at any time. That would mean the end of your lessons, and you can’t be a geisha without training. Or you can make yourself unpopular with your teachers, so they won’t give you the help you need. Or you can grow up to be an ugly woman like me. I wasn’t such an unattractive girl when Granny bought me from my parents, but I didn’t turn out well, and Granny’s always hated me for it. One time she beat me so badly for something I did that she broke one of my hips. That’s when I stopped being a geisha. And that’s the reason I’m going to do the job of beating you myself, rather than letting Granny get her hands on you.”

She led me to the walkway and made me lie down on my stomach there. I didn’t much care whether she beat me or not; it seemed to me that nothing could make my situation worse. Every time my body jolted under the pole, I wailed as loudly as I dared, and pictured Hatsumomo’s lovely face smiling down at me. When the beating was over, Auntie left me crying there. Soon I felt the walkway tremble under someone’s footsteps and sat up to find Hatsumomo standing above me.

“Chiyo, I would be ever so grateful if you’d get out of my way.”

“You promised to tell me where I could find my sister, Hatsumomo,” I said to her.

“So I did!” She leaned down so that her face was near mine. I thought she was going to tell me I hadn’t done enough yet, that when she thought of more for me to do, she would tell me. But this wasn’t at all what happened.

“Your sister is in a
jorou-ya
called Tatsuyo,” she told me, “in the district of Miyagawa-cho, just south of Gion.”

When she was done speaking, she gave me a little shove with her foot, and I stepped down out of her way.

  chapter seven

I
’d never heard the word
jorou-ya
before; so the very next evening, when Auntie dropped a sewing tray onto the floor of the entrance hall and asked my help in cleaning it up, I said to her:

“Auntie, what is a
jorou-ya?
”

Auntie didn’t answer, but just went on reeling up a spool of thread.

“Auntie?” I said again.

“It’s the sort of place Hatsumomo will end up, if she ever gets what she deserves,” she said.

She didn’t seem inclined to say more, so I had no choice but to leave it at that.

My question certainly wasn’t answered; but I did form the impression that Satsu might be suffering even more than I was. So I began thinking about how I might sneak to this place called Tatsuyo the very next time I had an opportunity. Unfortunately, part of my punishment for ruining Mameha’s kimono was confinement in the okiya for fifty days. I was permitted to attend the school as long as Pumpkin accompanied me; but I was no longer permitted to run errands. I suppose I could have dashed out the door at any time, if I’d wanted to, but I knew better than to do something so foolish. To begin with, I wasn’t sure how to find the Tatsuyo. And what was worse, the moment I was discovered missing, Mr. Bekku or someone would be sent to look for me. A young maid had run away from the okiya next door only a few months earlier, and they brought her back the following morning. They beat her so badly over the next few days that her wailing was horrible. Sometimes I had to put my fingers in my ears to shut it out.

I decided I had no choice but to wait until my fifty-day confinement was over. In the meantime, I put my efforts into finding ways to repay Hatsumomo and Granny for their cruelty. Hatsumomo I repaid by scraping up pigeon droppings whenever I was supposed to clean them from the stepping-stones in the courtyard and mixing them in with her face cream. The cream already contained unguent of nightingale droppings, as I’ve mentioned; so maybe it did her no harm, but it did give me satisfaction. Granny I repaid by wiping the toilet rag around on the inside of her sleeping robe; and I was very pleased to see her sniffing at it in puzzlement, though she never took it off. Soon I discovered that the cook had taken it upon herself to punish me further over the kimono incident—even though no one had asked her to—by cutting back on my twice-monthly portions of dried fish. I couldn’t think of how to repay her for this until one day I saw her chasing a mouse down the corridor with a mallet. She hated mice worse than cats did, as it turned out. So I swept mouse droppings from under the foundation of the main house and scattered them here and there in the kitchen. I even took a chopstick one day and gouged a hole in the bottom of a canvas bag of rice, so she’d have to take everything out of all the cabinets and search for signs of rodents.

*  *  *

One evening as I was waiting up for Hatsumomo, I heard the telephone ring, and Yoko came out a moment later and went up the stairs. When she came back down, she was holding Hatsumomo’s shamisen, disassembled in its lacquer carrying case.

“You’ll have to take this to the Mizuki Teahouse,” she said to me. “Hatsumomo has lost a bet and has to play a song on a shamisen. I don’t know what’s gotten into her, but she won’t use the one the teahouse has offered. I think she’s just stalling, since she hasn’t touched a shamisen in years.”

Yoko apparently didn’t know I was confined to the okiya, which was no surprise, really. She was rarely permitted to leave the maid’s room in case she should miss an important telephone call, and she wasn’t involved in the life of the okiya in any way. I took the shamisen from her while she put on her kimono overcoat to leave for the night. And after she had explained to me where to find the Mizuki Teahouse, I slipped into my shoes in the entryway, tingling with nervousness that someone might stop me. The maids and Pumpkin—even the three older women—were all asleep, and Yoko would be gone in a matter of minutes. It seemed to me my chance to find my sister had come at last.

I heard thunder rumble overhead, and the air smelled of rain. So I hurried along the streets, past groups of men and geisha. Some of them gave me peculiar looks, because in those days we still had men and women in Gion who made their living as shamisen porters. They were often elderly; certainly none of them were children. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of the people I passed thought I’d stolen that shamisen and was running away with it.

When I reached the Mizuki Teahouse, rain was beginning to fall; but the entrance was so elegant I was afraid to set foot in it. The walls beyond the little curtain that hung in the doorway were a soft orange hue, trimmed in dark wood. A path of polished stone led to a huge vase holding an arrangement of twisted branches from a maple tree with their brilliant red leaves of fall. At length I worked up my courage and brushed past the little curtain. Near the vase, a spacious entryway opened to one side, with a floor of coarsely polished granite. I remember being astounded that all the beauty I’d seen wasn’t even the entryway to the teahouse, but only the path leading to the entryway. It was exquisitely lovely—as indeed it should have been; because although I didn’t know it, I was seeing for the first time one of the most exclusive teahouses in all of Japan. And a teahouse isn’t for tea, you see; it’s the place where men go to be entertained by geisha.

The moment I stepped into the entryway, the door before me rolled open. A young maid kneeling on the raised floor inside gazed down at me; she must have heard my wooden shoes on the stone. She was dressed in a beautiful dark blue kimono with a simple pattern in gray. A year earlier I would have taken her to be the young mistress of such an extravagant place, but now after my months in Gion, I recognized at once that her kimono—though more beautiful than anything in Yoroido—was far too simple for a geisha or for the mistress of a teahouse. And of course, her hairstyle was plain as well. Still, she was far more elegant than I was, and looked down at me with contempt.

“Go to the back,” she said.

“Hatsumomo has asked that—”

“Go to the back!” she said again, and rolled the door shut without waiting for me to reply.

The rain was falling more heavily now, so I ran, rather than walked, down a narrow alley alongside the teahouse. The door at the back entrance rolled open as I arrived, and the same maid knelt there waiting for me. She didn’t say a word but just took the shamisen case from my arms.

“Miss,” I said, “may I ask? . . . Can you tell me where the Miyagawa-cho district is?”

“Why do you want to go there?”

“I have to pick up something.”

She gave me a strange look, but then told me to walk along the river until I had passed the Minamiza Theater, and I would find myself in Miyagawa-cho.

I decided to stay under the eaves of the teahouse until the rain stopped. As I stood looking around, I discovered a wing of the building visible between the slats of the fence beside me. I put my eye to the fence and found myself looking across a beautiful garden at a window of glass. Inside a lovely tatami room, bathed in orange light, a party of men and geisha sat around a table scattered with sake cups and glasses of beer. Hatsumomo was there too, and a bleary-eyed old man who seemed to be in the middle of a story. Hatsumomo was amused about something, though evidently not by what the old man was saying. She kept glancing at another geisha with her back to me. I found myself remembering the last time I had peered into a teahouse, with Mr. Tanaka’s little daughter, Kuniko, and began to feel that same sense of heaviness I’d felt so long ago at the graves of my father’s first family—as if the earth were pulling me down toward it. A certain thought was swelling in my head, growing until I couldn’t ignore it any longer. I wanted to turn away from it; but I was as powerless to stop that thought from taking over my mind as the wind is to stop itself from blowing. So I stepped back and sank onto the stone step of the entryway, with the door against my back, and began to cry. I couldn’t stop thinking about Mr. Tanaka. He had taken me from my mother and father, sold me into slavery, sold my sister into something even worse. I had taken him for a kind man. I had thought he was so refined, so worldly. What a stupid child I had been! I would never go back to Yoroido, I decided. Or if I did go back, it would only be to tell Mr. Tanaka how much I hated him.

When at last I got to my feet and wiped my eyes on my wet robe, the rain had eased to a mist. The paving stones in the alley sparkled gold from the reflection of the lanterns. I made my way back through the Tominaga-cho section of Gion to the Minamiza Theater, with its enormous tiled roof that had made me think of a palace the day Mr. Bekku brought Satsu and me from the train station. The maid at the Mizuki Teahouse had told me to walk along the river past the Minamiza; but the road running along the river stopped at the theater. So I followed the street behind the Minamiza instead. After a few blocks I found myself in an area without streetlights and nearly empty of people. I didn’t know it at the time, but the streets were empty mostly because of the Great Depression; in any other era Miyagawa-cho might have been busier even than Gion. That evening it seemed to me a very sad place—which indeed I think it has always been. The wooden facades looked like Gion, but the place had no trees, no lovely Shirakawa Stream, no beautiful entryways. The only illumination came from lightbulbs in the open doorways, where old women sat on stools, often with two or three women I took to be geisha on the street beside them. They wore kimono and hair ornaments similar to geisha, but their obi were tied in the front rather than the back. I’d never seen this before and didn’t understand it, but it’s the mark of a prostitute. A woman who must take her sash on and off all night can’t be bothered with tying it behind her again and again.

With the help of one of these women, I found the Tatsuyo in a dead-end alley with only three other houses. All were marked with placards near their doors. I can’t possibly describe how I felt when I saw the sign lettered “Tatsuyo,” but I will say that my body seemed to tingle everywhere, so much that I felt I might explode. In the doorway of the Tatsuyo sat an old woman on a stool, carrying on a conversation with a much younger woman on a stool across the alley—though really it was the old woman who did all the talking. She sat leaning back against the door frame with her gray robe sagging partway open and her feet stuck out in a pair of zori. These were zori woven coarsely from straw, of the sort you might have seen in Yoroido, and not at all like the beautifully lacquered zori Hatsumomo wore with her kimono. What was more, this old woman’s feet were bare, rather than fitted with the smooth silk
tabi
. And yet she thrust them out with their uneven nails just as though she were proud of the way they looked and wanted to be sure you noticed them.

“Just another three weeks, you know, and I’m not coming back,” she was saying. “The mistress thinks I am, but I’m not. My son’s wife is going to take good care of me, you know. She’s not clever, but she works hard. Didn’t you meet her?”

“If I did I don’t remember,” the younger woman across the way said. “There’s a little girl waiting to talk with you. Don’t you see her?”

At this, the old woman looked at me for the first time. She didn’t say anything, but she gave a nod of her head to tell me she was listening.

“Please, ma’am,” I said, “do you have a girl here named Satsu?”

“We don’t have any Satsu,” she said.

I was too shocked to know what to say to this; but in any case, the old woman suddenly looked very alert, because a man was just walking past me toward the entrance. She stood partway and gave him several bows with her hands on her knees and told him, “Welcome!” When he’d entered, she put herself back down on the stool and stuck her feet out again.

“Why are you still here?” the old woman said to me. “I told you we don’t have any Satsu.”

“Yes, you do,” said the younger woman across the way. “Your Yukiyo. Her name used to be Satsu, I remember.”

“That’s as may be,” replied the old woman. “But we don’t have any Satsu for this girl. I don’t get myself into trouble for nothing.”

I didn’t know what she meant by this, until the younger woman muttered that I didn’t look as if I had even a single sen on me. And she was quite right. A sen—which was worth only one hundredth of a yen—was still commonly used in those days, though a single one wouldn’t buy even an empty cup from a vendor. I’d never held a coin of any kind in my hand since coming to Kyoto. When running errands, I asked that the goods be charged to the Nitta okiya.

“If it’s money you want,” I said, “Satsu will pay you.”

“Why should she pay to speak to the likes of you?”

“I’m her little sister.”

She beckoned me with her hand; and when I neared her, she took me by the arms and spun me around.

“Look at this girl,” she said to the woman across the alley. “Does she look like a little sister to Yukiyo? If our Yukiyo was as pretty as this one, we’d be the busiest house in town! You’re a liar, is what you are.” And with this, she gave me a little shove back out into the alley.