Memoirs of a Geisha (15 page)

“Why, it’s too pretty a day to be so unhappy.”

Ordinarily a man on the streets of Gion wouldn’t notice a girl like me, particularly while I was making a fool of myself by crying. If he did notice me, he certainly wouldn’t speak to me, unless it was to order me out of his way, or some such thing. Yet not only had this man bothered to speak to me, he’d actually spoken kindly. He’d addressed me in a way that suggested I might be a young woman of standing—the daughter of a good friend, perhaps. For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I’d always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness—a world in which fathers didn’t sell their daughters. The noise and hubbub of so many people living their lives of purpose around me seemed to stop; or at least, I ceased to be aware of it. And when I raised myself to look at the man who’d spoken, I had a feeling of leaving my misery behind me there on the stone wall.

I’ll be happy to try to describe him for you, but I can think of only one way to do it—by telling you about a certain tree that stood at the edge of the sea cliffs in Yoroido. This tree was as smooth as driftwood because of the wind, and when I was a little girl of four or five I found a man’s face on it one day. That is to say, I found a smooth patch as broad as a plate, with two sharp bumps at the outside edge for cheekbones. They cast shadows suggesting eye sockets, and beneath the shadows rose a gentle bump of a nose. The whole face tipped a bit to one side, gazing at me quizzically; it looked to me like a man with as much certainty about his place in this world as a tree has. Something about it was so meditative, I imagined I’d found the face of a Buddha.

The man who’d addressed me there on the street had this same kind of broad, calm face. And what was more, his features were so smooth and serene, I had the feeling he’d go on standing there calmly until I wasn’t unhappy any longer. He was probably about forty-five years old, with gray hair combed straight back from his forehead. But I couldn’t look at him for long. He seemed so elegant to me that I blushed and looked away.

Two younger men stood to one side of him; a geisha stood to the other. I heard the geisha say to him quietly:

“Why, she’s only a maid! Probably she stubbed her toe while running an errand. I’m sure someone will come along to help her soon.”

“I wish I had your faith in people, Izuko-san,” said the man.

“The show will be starting in only a moment. Really, Chairman, I don’t think you should waste any more time . . .”

While running errands in Gion, I’d often heard men addressed by titles like “Department Head” or occasionally “Vice President.” But only rarely had I heard the title “Chairman.” Usually the men addressed as Chairman had bald heads and frowns, and swaggered down the street with groups of junior executives scurrying behind. This man before me was so different from the usual chairman that even though I was only a little girl with limited experience of the world, I knew his company couldn’t be a terribly important one. A man with an important company wouldn’t have stopped to talk to me.

“You’re trying to tell me it’s a waste of time to stay here and help her,” said the Chairman.

“Oh, no,” the geisha said. “It’s more a matter of having no time to waste. We may be late for the first scene already.”

“Now, Izuko-san, surely at some time you yourself have been in the same state this little girl is in. You can’t pretend the life of a geisha is always simple. I should think you of all people—”

“
I’ve
been in the state
she’s
in? Chairman, do you mean . . . making a public spectacle of myself?”

At this, the Chairman turned to the two younger men and asked that they take Izuko ahead to the theater. They bowed and went on their way while the Chairman remained behind. He looked at me a long while, though I didn’t dare to look back at him. At length I said:

“Please, sir, what she says is true. I’m only a foolish girl . . . please don’t make yourself late on my account.”

“Stand up a moment,” he told me.

I didn’t dare disobey him, though I had no idea what he wanted. As it turned out, all he did was take a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe away the grit that had stuck to my face from the top of the stone wall. Standing so close before him, I could smell the odor of talc on his smooth skin, which made me recall the day when the Emperor Taisho’s nephew had come to our little fishing village. He’d done nothing more than step out of his car and walk to the inlet and back, nodding to the crowds that knelt before him, wearing a Western-style business suit, the first I’d ever seen—for I peeked at him, even though I wasn’t supposed to. I remember too that his mustache was carefully groomed, unlike the hair on the faces of the men in our village, which grew untended like weeds along a path. No one of any importance had ever been in our village before that day. I think we all felt touched by nobility and greatness.

Occasionally in life we come upon things we can’t understand because we have never seen anything similar. The Emperor’s nephew certainly struck me that way; and so did the Chairman. When he had wiped away the grit and tears from my face, he tipped my head up.

“Here you are . . . a beautiful girl with nothing on earth to be ashamed of,” he said. “And yet you’re afraid to look at me. Someone has been cruel to you . . . or perhaps life has been cruel.”

“I don’t know, sir,” I said, though of course I knew perfectly well.

“We none of us find as much kindness in this world as we should,” he told me, and he narrowed his eyes a moment as if to say I should think seriously about what he’d just said.

I wanted more than anything to see the smooth skin of his face once more, with its broad brow, and the eyelids like sheaths of marble over his gentle eyes; but there was such a gulf in social standing between us. I did finally let my eyes flick upward, though I blushed and looked away so quickly that he may never have known I met his gaze. But how can I describe what I saw in that instant? He was looking at me as a musician might look at his instrument just before he begins to play, with understanding and mastery. I felt that he could see into me as though I were a part of him. How I would have loved to be the instrument he played!

In a moment he reached into his pocket and brought some- thing out.

“Do you like sweet plum or cherry?” he said.

“Sir? Do you mean . . . to eat?”

“I passed a vendor a moment ago, selling shaved ice with syrup on it. I never tasted one until I was an adult, but I’d have liked them as a child. Take this coin and buy one. Take my handkerchief too, so you can wipe your face afterward,” he said. And with this, he pressed the coin into the center of the handkerchief, wrapped it into a bundle, and held it out to me.

From the moment the Chairman had first spoken to me, I’d forgotten that I was watching for a sign about my future. But when I saw the bundle he held in his hand, it looked so much like the shrouded moth, I knew I’d come upon the sign at last. I took the bundle and bowed low to thank him, and tried to tell him how grateful I was—though I’m sure my words carried none of the fullness of my feelings. I wasn’t thanking him for the coin, or even for the trouble he’d taken in stopping to help me. I was thanking him for . . . well, for something I’m not sure I can explain even now. For showing me that something besides cruelty could be found in the world, I suppose.

I watched him walk away with sickness in my heart—though it was a pleasing kind of sickness, if such a thing exists. I mean to say that if you have experienced an evening more exciting than any in your life, you’re sad to see it end; and yet you still feel grateful that it happened. In that brief encounter with the Chairman, I had changed from a lost girl facing a lifetime of emptiness to a girl with purpose in her life. Perhaps it seems odd that a casual meeting on the street could have brought about such change. But sometimes life is like that, isn’t it? And I really do think if you’d been there to see what I saw, and feel what I felt, the same might have happened to you.

When the Chairman had disappeared from sight, I rushed up the street to search for the shaved ice vendor. The day wasn’t especially hot, and I didn’t care for shaved ice; but eating it would make my encounter with the Chairman linger. So I bought a paper cone of shaved ice with cherry syrup on it, and went to sit again on the same stone wall. The taste of the syrup seemed startling and complex, I think only because my senses were so heightened. If I were a geisha like the one named Izuko, I thought, a man like the Chairman might spend time with me. I’d never imagined myself envying a geisha. I’d been brought to Kyoto for the purpose of becoming one, of course; but up until now I’d have run away in an instant if I could have. Now I understood the thing I’d overlooked; the point wasn’t to become a geisha, but to
be
one. To become a geisha . . . well, that was hardly a purpose in life. But to be a geisha . . . I could see it now as a stepping-stone to something else. If I was right about the Chairman’s age, he was probably no more than forty-five. Plenty of geisha had achieved tremendous success by the age of twenty. The geisha Izuko was probably no more than twenty-five herself. I was still a child, nearly twelve . . . but in another twelve years I’d be in my twenties. And what of the Chairman? He would be no older by that time than Mr. Tanaka was already.

The coin the Chairman had given me was far more than I’d needed for a simple cone of shaved ice. I held in my hand the change from the vendor—three coins of different sizes. At first I’d thought of keeping them forever; but now I realized they could serve a far more important purpose.

I rushed to Shijo Avenue and ran all the way to its end at the eastern edge of Gion, where the Gion Shrine stood. I climbed the steps, but I felt too intimidated to walk beneath the great two-story entrance gate with its gabled roof, and walked around it instead. Across the gravel courtyard and up another flight of steps, I passed through the torii gate to the shrine itself. There I threw the coins into the offertory box—coins that might have been enough to take me away from Gion—and announced my presence to the gods by clapping three times and bowing. With my eyes squeezed tightly shut and my hands together, I prayed that they permit me to become a geisha somehow. I would suffer through any training, bear up under any hardship, for a chance to attract the notice of a man like the Chairman again.

When I opened my eyes, I could still hear the traffic on Higashi-Oji Avenue. The trees hissed in a gust of wind just as they had a moment earlier. Nothing had changed. As to whether the gods had heard me, I had no way of knowing. I could do nothing but tuck the Chairman’s handkerchief inside my robe and carry it with me back to the okiya.

  chapter ten

O
ne morning quite some months later, while we were putting away the
ro
underrobes—the ones made of lightweight silk gauze for hot weather—and bringing out the
hitoe
underrobes instead—the ones with no lining, used in September—I came upon a smell in the entryway so horrible that I dropped the armload of robes I was carrying. The smell was coming from Granny’s room. I ran upstairs to fetch Auntie, because I knew at once that something must be terribly wrong. Auntie hobbled down the stairs as quickly as she could and went in to find Granny dead on the floor; and she had died in a most peculiar manner.

Granny had the only electric space heater in our okiya. She used it every single night except during the summer. Now that the month of September had begun and we were putting away the summer-weight underrobes, Granny had begun to use her heater again. That doesn’t mean the weather was necessarily cool; we change the weight of our clothing by the calendar, not by the actual temperature outdoors, and Granny used her heater just the same way. She was unreasonably attached to it, probably because she’d spent so many nights of her life suffering miserably from the cold.

Granny’s usual routine in the morning was to wrap the cord around the heater before pushing it back against the wall. Over time the hot metal burned all the way through the cord, so that the wire finally came into contact with it, and the whole thing became electrified. The police said that when Granny touched it that morning she must have been immobilized at once, maybe even killed instantly. When she slid down onto the floor, she ended up with her face pressed against the hot metal surface. This was what caused the horrible smell. Happily I didn’t see her after she’d died, except for her legs, which were visible from the doorway and looked like slender tree limbs wrapped in wrinkled silk.

*  *  *

For a week or two after Granny died, we were as busy as you can imagine, not only with cleaning the house thoroughly—because in Shinto, death is the most impure of all the things that can happen—but with preparing the house by setting out candles, trays with meal offerings, lanterns at the entrance, tea stands, trays for money that visitors brought, and so on. We were so busy that one evening the cook became ill and a doctor was summoned; it turned out her only problem was that she’d slept no more than two hours the night before, hadn’t sat down all day, and had eaten only a single bowl of clear soup. I was surprised too to see Mother spending money almost unrestrainedly, making plans for sutras to be chanted on Granny’s behalf at the Chion-in Temple, purchasing lotus-bud arrangements from the undertaker—all of it right in the midst of the Great Depression. I wondered at first if her behavior was a testament to how deeply she felt about Granny; but later I realized what it really meant: practically all of Gion would come tramping through our okiya to pay respects to Granny, and would attend the funeral at the temple later in the week; Mother had to put on the proper kind of show.

For a few days all of Gion did indeed come through our okiya, or so it seemed; and we had to feed tea and sweets to all of them. Mother and Auntie received the mistresses of the various teahouses and okiya, as well as a number of maids who were acquainted with Granny; also shopkeepers, wig makers, and hairdressers, most of whom were men; and of course, dozens and dozens of geisha. The older geisha knew Granny from her working days, but the younger ones had never even heard of her; they came out of respect for Mother—or in some cases because they had a relationship of one kind or another with Hatsumomo.

My job during this busy period was to show visitors into the reception room, where Mother and Auntie were waiting for them. It was a distance of only a few steps; but the visitors couldn’t very well show themselves in; and besides, I had to keep track of which faces belonged to which shoes, for it was my job to take the shoes to the maids’ room to keep the entryway from being too cluttered, and then bring them back again at the proper moment. I had trouble with this at first. I couldn’t peer right into the eyes of our visitors without seeming rude, but a simple glimpse of their faces wasn’t enough for me to remember them. Very soon I learned to look closely at the kimono they wore.

On about the second or third afternoon the door rolled open, and in came a kimono that at once struck me as the loveliest I’d seen any of our visitors wear. It was somber because of the occasion—a simple black robe bearing a crest—but its pattern of green and gold grasses sweeping around the hem was so rich-looking, I found myself imagining how astounded the wives and daughters of the fishermen back in Yoroido would be to see such a thing. The visitor had a maid with her as well, which made me think perhaps she was the mistress of a teahouse or okiya—because very few geisha could afford such an expense. While she looked at the tiny Shinto shrine in our entryway, I took the opportunity to steal a peek at her face. It was such a perfect oval that I thought at once of a certain scroll in Auntie’s room, showing an ink painting of a courtesan from the Heian period a thousand years earlier. She wasn’t as striking a woman as Hatsumomo, but her features were so perfectly formed that at once I began to feel even more insignificant than usual. And then suddenly I realized who she was.

Mameha, the geisha whose kimono Hatsumomo had made me ruin.

What had happened to her kimono wasn’t really my fault; but still, I would have given up the robe I was wearing not to run into her. I lowered my head to keep my face hidden while I showed her and her maid into the reception room. I didn’t think she would recognize me, since I felt certain she hadn’t seen my face when I’d returned the kimono; and even if she had, two years had passed since then. The maid who accompanied her now wasn’t the same young woman who’d taken the kimono from me that night and whose eyes had filled with tears. Still, I was relieved when the time came for me to bow and leave them in the reception room.

Twenty minutes later, when Mameha and her maid were ready to leave, I fetched their shoes and arranged them on the step in the entryway, still keeping my head down and feeling every bit as nervous as I had earlier. When her maid rolled open the door, I felt that my ordeal was over. But instead of walking out, Mameha just went on standing there. I began to worry; and I’m afraid my eyes and my mind weren’t communicating well, because even though I knew I shouldn’t do it, I let my eyes flick up. I was horrified to see that Mameha was peering down at me.

“What is your name, little girl?” she said, in what I took to be a very stern tone.

I told her that my name was Chiyo.

“Stand up a moment, Chiyo. I’d like to have a look at you.”

I rose to my feet as she had asked; but if it had been possible to make my face shrivel up and disappear, just like slurping down a noodle, I’m sure I would have done it.

“Come now, I want to have a look at you!” she said. “Here you are acting like you’re counting the toes on your feet.”

I raised my head, though not my eyes, and then Mameha let out a long sigh and ordered me to look up at her.

“What unusual eyes!” she said. “I thought I might have imagined it. What color would you call them, Tatsumi?”

Her maid came back into the entryway and took a look at me. “Blue-gray, ma’am,” she replied.

“That’s just what I would have said. Now, how many girls in Gion do you think have eyes like that?”

I didn’t know if Mameha was speaking to me or Tatsumi, but neither of us answered. She was looking at me with a peculiar expression—concentrating on something, it seemed to me. And then to my great relief, she excused herself and left.

*  *  *

Granny’s funeral was held about a week later, on a morning chosen by a fortune-teller. Afterward we began putting the okiya back in order, but with several changes. Auntie moved downstairs into the room that had been Granny’s, while Pumpkin—who was to begin her apprenticeship as a geisha before long—took the second-floor room where Auntie had lived. In addition, two new maids arrived the following week, both of them middle-aged and very energetic. It may seem odd that Mother added maids although the family was now fewer in number; but in fact the okiya had always been understaffed because Granny couldn’t tolerate crowding.

The final change was that Pumpkin’s chores were taken away from her. She was told instead to spend her time practicing the various arts she would depend upon as a geisha. Usually girls weren’t given so much opportunity for practice, but poor Pumpkin was a slow learner and needed the extra time if anyone ever did. I had difficulty watching her as she knelt on the wooden walkway every day and practiced her shamisen for hours, with her tongue poking out the side of her mouth like she was trying to lick her cheek clean. She gave me little smiles whenever our eyes met; and really, her disposition was as sweet and kind as could be. But already I was finding it difficult to bear the burden of patience in my life, waiting for some tiny opening that might never come and that would certainly be the only chance I’d ever get. Now I had to watch as the door of opportunity was held wide open for someone else. Some nights when I went to bed, I took the handkerchief the Chairman had given me and lay on my futon smelling its rich talc scent. I cleared my mind of everything but the image of him and the feeling of warm sun on my face and the hard stone wall where I’d sat that day when I met him. He was my bodhisattva with a thousand arms who would help me. I couldn’t imagine how his help would come to me, but I prayed that it would.

Toward the end of the first month after Granny’s death, one of our new maids came to me one day to say I had a visitor at the door. It was an unseasonably hot October afternoon, and my whole body was damp with perspiration from using our old hand-operated vacuum to clean the tatami mats upstairs in Pumpkin’s new room, which had only recently been Auntie’s; Pumpkin was in the habit of sneaking rice crackers upstairs, so the tatami needed to be cleaned frequently. I mopped myself with a wet towel as quickly as I could and rushed down, to find a young woman in the entryway, dressed in a kimono like a maid’s. I got to my knees and bowed to her. Only when I looked at her a second time did I recognize her as the maid who had accompanied Mameha to our okiya a few weeks earlier. I was very sorry to see her there. I felt certain I was in trouble. But when she gestured for me to step down into the entryway, I slipped my feet into my shoes and followed her out to the street.

“Are you sent on errands from time to time, Chiyo?” she asked me.

So much time had passed since I’d tried to run away that I was no longer confined to the okiya. I had no idea why she was asking; but I told her that I was.

“Good,” she said. “Arrange for yourself to be sent out tomorrow afternoon at three o’clock, and meet me at the little bridge that arches over the Shirakawa Stream.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, “but may I ask why?”

“You’ll find out tomorrow, won’t you?” she answered, with a little crinkle of her nose that made me wonder if she was teasing me.

*  *  *

I certainly wasn’t pleased that Mameha’s maid wanted me to accompany her somewhere—probably to Mameha, I thought, to be scolded for what I’d done. But just the same, the following day I talked Pumpkin into sending me on an errand that didn’t really need to be run. She was worried about getting into trouble, until I promised to find a way of repaying her. So at three o’clock, she called to me from the courtyard:

“Chiyo-san, could you please go out and buy me some new shamisen strings and a few Kabuki magazines?” She had been instructed to read Kabuki magazines for the sake of her education. Then I heard her say in an even louder voice, “Is that all right, Auntie?” But Auntie didn’t answer, for she was upstairs taking a nap.

I left the okiya and walked along the Shirakawa Stream to the arched bridge leading into the Motoyoshi-cho section of Gion. With the weather so warm and lovely, quite a number of men and geisha were strolling along, admiring the weeping cherry trees whose tendrils drooped onto the surface of the water. While I waited near the bridge, I watched a group of foreign tourists who had come to see the famous Gion district. They weren’t the only foreigners I’d ever seen in Kyoto, but they certainly looked peculiar to me, the big-nosed women with their long dresses and their brightly colored hair, the men so tall and confident, with heels that clicked on the pavement. One of the men pointed at me and said something in a foreign language, and they all turned to have a look. I felt so embarrassed I pretended to find something on the ground so I could crouch down and hide myself.

Finally Mameha’s maid came; and just as I’d feared, she led me over the bridge and along the stream to the very same doorway where Hatsumomo and Korin had handed me the kimono and sent me up the stairs. It seemed terribly unfair to me that this same incident was about to cause still more trouble for me—and after so much time had passed. But when the maid rolled open the door for me, I climbed up into the gray light of the stairway. At the top we both stepped out of our shoes and went into the apartment.