Memoirs of a Geisha (5 page)

Soon we turned onto an avenue that seemed as broad as the whole village of Yoroido. I could hardly see the other side for all the people, bicycles, cars, and trucks. I’d never seen a car before. I’d seen photographs, but I remember being surprised at how . . . well,
cruel
, is the way they looked to me in my frightened state, as though they were designed more to hurt people than to help them. All my senses were assaulted. Trucks rumbled past so close I could smell the scorched rubber odor of their tires. I heard a horrible screech, which turned out to be a streetcar on tracks in the center of the avenue.

I felt terrified as evening settled in around us; but I was never so astonished by anything in my life as by my first glimpse of city lights. I’d never even seen electricity except during part of our dinner at Mr. Tanaka’s house. Here, windows were lit along the buildings upstairs and down, and the people on the sidewalks stood under puddles of yellow glow. I could see pinpoints even at the far reaches of the avenue. We turned onto another street, and I saw for the first time the Minamiza Theater standing on the opposite side of a bridge ahead of us. Its tiled roof was so grand, I thought it was a palace.

At length the rickshaw turned down an alleyway of wooden houses. The way they were all packed together, they seemed to share one continuous facade—which once again gave me the terrible feeling of being lost. I watched women in kimono rushing around in a great hurry on the little street. They looked very elegant to me; though, as I later learned, they were mostly maids.

When we came to a halt before a doorway, Mr. Bekku instructed me to get out. He climbed out behind me, and then as if the day hadn’t been difficult enough, the worst thing of all happened. For when Satsu tried to get out as well, Mr. Bekku turned and pushed her back with his long arm.

“Stay there,” he said to her. “You’re going elsewhere.”

I looked at Satsu, and Satsu looked at me. It may have been the first time we’d ever completely understood each other’s feelings. But it lasted only a moment, for the next thing I knew my eyes had welled up with tears so much I could scarcely see. I felt myself being dragged backward by Mr. Bekku; I heard women’s voices and quite a bit of commotion. I was on the point of throwing myself onto the street when suddenly Satsu’s mouth fell open at something she saw in the doorway behind me.

I was in a narrow entryway with an ancient-looking well on one side and a few plants on the other. Mr. Bekku had dragged me inside, and now he pulled me up onto my feet. There on the step of the entryway, just slipping her feet into her lacquered zori, stood an exquisitely beautiful woman wearing a kimono lovelier than anything I’d ever imagined. I’d been impressed with the kimono worn by the young bucktoothed geisha in Mr. Tanaka’s village of Senzuru; but this one was a water blue, with swirling lines in ivory to mimic the current in a stream. Glistening silver trout tumbled in the current, and the surface of the water was ringed with gold wherever the soft green leaves of a tree touched it. I had no doubt the gown was woven of pure silk, and so was the obi, embroidered in pale greens and yellows. And her clothing wasn’t the only extraordinary thing about her; her face was painted a kind of rich white, like the wall of a cloud when lit by the sun. Her hair, fashioned into lobes, gleamed as darkly as lacquer, and was decorated with ornaments carved out of amber, and with a bar from which tiny silver strips dangled, shimmering as she moved.

This was my first glimpse of Hatsumomo. At the time, she was one of the most renowned geisha in the district of Gion; though of course I didn’t know any of this then. She was a petite woman; the top of her hairstyle reached no higher than Mr. Bekku’s shoulder. I was so startled by her appearance that I forgot my manners—not that I had developed very good manners yet—and stared directly at her face. She was smiling at me, though not in a kindly way. And then she said:

“Mr. Bekku, could you take out the garbage later? I’d like to be on my way.”

There was no garbage in the entryway; she was talking about me. Mr. Bekku said he thought Hatsumomo had enough room to pass.

“You may not mind being so close to her,” said Hatsumomo. “But when I see filth on one side of the street, I cross to the other.”

Suddenly an older woman, tall and knobby, like a bamboo pole, appeared in the doorway behind her.

“I don’t know how anyone puts up with you, Hatsumomo-san,” said the woman. But she gestured for Mr. Bekku to pull me onto the street again, which he did. After this she stepped down into the entryway very awkwardly—for one of her hips jutted out and made it difficult for her to walk—and crossed to a tiny cabinet on the wall. She took from it something that looked to me like a piece of flint, along with a rectangular stone like the kind fishermen use to sharpen their knives, and then stood behind Hatsumomo and struck the flint against the stone, causing a little cluster of sparks to jump onto Hatsumomo’s back. I didn’t understand this at all; but you see, geisha are more superstitious even than fishermen. A geisha will never go out for the evening until someone has sparked a flint on her back for good luck.

After this, Hatsumomo walked away, using such tiny steps that she seemed to glide along with the bottom of her kimono fluttering just a bit. I didn’t know that she was a geisha at the time, for she was worlds above the creature I’d seen in Senzuru a few weeks earlier. I decided she must be some sort of stage performer. We all watched her float away, and then Mr. Bekku handed me over to the older woman in the entryway. He climbed back into the rickshaw with my sister, and the driver raised the poles. But I never saw them leave, because I was slumped down in the entryway in tears.

The older woman must have taken pity on me; for a long while I lay there sobbing in my misery without anyone touching me. I even heard her shush up a maid who came from inside the house to speak with her. At length she helped me to my feet and dried my face with a handkerchief she took from one sleeve of her simple gray kimono.

“Now, now, little girl. There’s no need to worry so. No one’s going to cook you.” She spoke with the same peculiar accent as Mr. Bekku and Hatsumomo. It sounded so different from the Japanese spoken in my village that I had a hard time understanding her. But in any case, hers were the kindest words anyone had said to me all day, so I made up my mind to do what she advised. She told me to call her Auntie. And then she looked down at me, square in the face, and said in a throaty voice:

“Heavens! What startling eyes! You’re a lovely girl, aren’t you? Mother will be thrilled.”

I thought at once that the mother of this woman, whoever she was, must be very old, because Auntie’s hair, knotted tightly at the back of her head, was mostly gray, with only streaks of black remaining.

Auntie led me through the doorway, where I found myself standing on a dirt corridor passing between two closely spaced structures to a courtyard in the back. One of the structures was a little dwelling like my house in Yoroido—two rooms with floors of dirt; it turned out to be the maids’ quarters. The other was a small, elegant house sitting up on foundation stones in such a way that a cat might have crawled underneath it. The corridor between them opened onto the dark sky above, which gave me the feeling I was standing in something more like a miniature village than a house—especially since I could see several other small wooden buildings down in the courtyard at the end. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was a very typical dwelling for the section of Kyoto in which it stood. The buildings in the courtyard, though they gave the impression of another group of tiny houses, were just a small shed for the toilets and a storehouse of two levels with a ladder on the outside. The entire dwelling fitted into an area smaller than Mr. Tanaka’s home in the countryside and housed only eight people. Or rather nine, now that I had arrived.

After I took in the peculiar arrangement of all the little buildings, I noticed the elegance of the main house. In Yoroido, the wood structures were more gray than brown, and rutted by the salty air. But here the wood floors and beams gleamed with the yellow light of electric lamps. Opening off the front hallway were sliding doors with paper screens, as well as a staircase that seemed to climb straight up. One of these doors stood open, so that I was able to see a wood cabinet with a Buddhist altar. These elegant rooms turned out to be for the use of the family—and also Hatsumomo, even though, as I would come to understand, she wasn’t a family member at all. When family members wanted to go to the courtyard, they didn’t walk down the dirt corridor as the servants did, but had their own ramp of polished wood running along the side of the house. There were even separate toilets—an upper one for family and a lower one for servants.

I had yet to discover most of these things, though I would learn them within a day or two. But I stood there in the corridor a long while, wondering what sort of place this was and feeling very afraid. Auntie had disappeared into the kitchen and was talking in a hoarse voice to somebody. At length the somebody came out. She turned out to be a girl about my age, carrying a wooden bucket so heavy with water that she sloshed half of it onto the dirt floor. Her body was narrow; but her face was plump and almost perfectly round, so that she looked to me like a melon on a stick. She was straining to carry the bucket, and her tongue stuck out of her mouth just the way the stem comes out of the top of a pumpkin. As I soon learned, this was a habit of hers. She stuck her tongue out when she stirred her miso soup, or scooped rice into a bowl, or even tied the knot of her robe. And her face was truly so plump and so soft, with that tongue curling out like a pumpkin stem, that within a few days I’d given her the nickname of “Pumpkin,” which everyone came to call her—even her customers many years later when she was a geisha in Gion.

When she had put down the bucket near me, Pumpkin retracted her tongue, and then brushed a strand of hair behind her ear while she looked me up and down. I thought she might say something, but she just went on looking, as though she were trying to make up her mind whether or not to take a bite of me. Really, she did seem hungry; and then at last she leaned in and whispered:

“Where on earth did you come from?”

I didn’t think it would help to say that I had come from Yoroido; since her accent was as strange to me as everyone else’s, I felt sure she wouldn’t recognize the name of my village. I said instead that I’d just arrived.

“I thought I would never see another girl my age,” she said to me. “But what’s the matter with your eyes?”

Just then Auntie came out from the kitchen, and after shooing Pumpkin away, picked up the bucket and a scrap of cloth, and led me down to the courtyard. It had a beautiful mossy look, with stepping-stones leading to a storehouse in the back; but it smelled horrible because of the toilets in the little shed along one side. Auntie told me to undress. I was afraid she might do to me something like what Mrs. Fidget had done, but instead she only poured water over my shoulders and rubbed me down with the rag. Afterward she gave me a robe, which was nothing more than coarsely woven cotton in the simplest pattern of dark blue, but it was certainly more elegant than anything I’d ever worn before. An old woman who turned out to be the cook came down into the corridor with several elderly maids to peer at me. Auntie told them they would have plenty of time for staring another day and sent them back where they’d come from.

“Now listen, little girl,” Auntie said to me, when we were alone. “I don’t even want to know your name yet. The last girl who came, Mother and Granny didn’t like her, and she was here only a month. I’m too old to keep learning new names, until they’ve decided they’re going to keep you.”

“What will happen if they don’t want to keep me?” I asked.

“It’s better for you if they keep you.”

“May I ask, ma’am . . . what is this place?”

“It’s an okiya,” she said. “It’s where geisha live. If you work very hard, you’ll grow up to be a geisha yourself. But you won’t make it as far as next week unless you listen to me very closely, because Mother and Granny are coming down the stairs in just a moment to look at you. And they’d better like what they see. Your job is to bow as low as you can, and don’t look them in the eye. The older one, the one we call Granny, has never liked anyone in her life, so don’t worry about what she says. If she asks you a question, don’t even answer it, for heaven’s sake! I’ll answer for you. The one you want to impress is Mother. She’s not a bad sort, but she cares about only one thing.”

I didn’t have a chance to find out what that one thing was, for I heard a creaking noise from the direction of the front entrance hall, and soon the two women came drifting out onto the walkway. I didn’t dare look at them. But what I could see out of the corner of my eye made me think of two lovely bundles of silk floating along a stream. In a moment they were hovering on the walkway in front of me, where they sank down and smoothed their kimono across their knees.

“Umeko-san!” Auntie shouted—for this was the name of the cook. “Bring tea for Granny.”

“I don’t want tea,” I heard an angry voice say.

“Now, Granny,” said a raspier voice, which I took to be Mother’s. “You don’t have to drink it. Auntie only wants to be sure you’re comfortable.”

“There’s no being comfortable with these bones of mine,” the old woman grumbled. I heard her take in a breath to say something more, but Auntie interrupted.

“This is the new girl, Mother,” she said, and gave me a little shove, which I took as a signal to bow. I got onto my knees and bowed so low, I could smell the musty air wafting from beneath the foundation. Then I heard Mother’s voice again.

“Get up and come closer. I want to have a look at you.”

I felt certain she was going to say something more to me after I’d approached her, but instead she took from her obi, where she kept it tucked, a pipe with a metal bowl and a long stem made of bamboo. She set it down beside her on the walkway and then brought from the pocket of her sleeve a drawstring bag of silk, from which she removed a big pinch of tobacco. She packed the tobacco with her little finger, stained the burnt orange color of a roasted yam, and then put the pipe into her mouth and lit it with a match from a tiny metal box.