Memoirs of a Geisha (9 page)

When Hatsumomo came out of her room, she was wearing all the items I’ve described—though we could see nothing but her underrobe, held shut with a cord around her waist. Also, she wore white socks we call
tabi
, which button along the side with a snug fit. At this point she was ready for Mr. Bekku to dress her. To see him at work, you’d have understood at once just why his help was necessary. Kimono are the same length no matter who wears them, so except for the very tallest women, the extra fabric must be folded beneath the sash. When Mr. Bekku doubled the kimono fabric at the waist and tied a cord to hold it in place, there was never the slightest buckle. Or if one did appear, he gave a tug here or there, and the whole thing straightened out. When he finished his work, the robe always fit the contours of the body beautifully.

Mr. Bekku’s principal job as dresser was to tie the obi, which isn’t as simple a job as it might sound. An obi like the one Hatsumomo wore is twice as long as a man is tall, and nearly as wide as a woman’s shoulders. Wrapped around the waist, it covers the area from the breastbone all the way to below the navel. Most people who know nothing of kimono seem to think the obi is simply tied in the back as if it were a string; but nothing could be further from the truth. A half dozen cords and clasps are needed to keep it in place, and a certain amount of padding must be used as well to shape the knot. Mr. Bekku took several minutes to tie Hatsumomo’s obi. When he was done, hardly a wrinkle could be seen anywhere in the fabric, thick and heavy as it was.

I understood very little of what I saw on the landing that day; but it seemed to me that Mr. Bekku tied strings and tucked fabric at a frantic rate, while Hatsumomo did nothing more than hold her arms out and gaze at her image in the mirror. I felt miserable with envy, watching her. Her kimono was a brocade in shades of brown and gold. Below the waist, deer in their rich brown coloring of autumn nuzzled one another, with golds and rusts behind them in a pattern like fallen leaves on a forest floor. Her obi was plum-colored, interwoven with silver threads. I didn’t know it at the time, but the outfit she wore probably cost as much as a policeman or a shopkeeper might make in an entire year. And yet to look at Hatsumomo standing there, when she turned around to glance back at herself in the free-standing mirror, you would have thought that no amount of money on earth could have made a woman look as glamorous as she did.

All that remained were the final touches on her makeup and the ornaments in her hair. Auntie and I followed Hatsumomo back into her room, where she knelt at her dressing table and took out a tiny lacquer box containing rouge for her lips. She used a small brush to paint it on. The fashion at that time was to leave the upper lip unpainted, which made the lower lip look fuller. White makeup causes all sorts of curious illusions; if a geisha were to paint the entire surface of her lips, her mouth would end up looking like two big slices of tuna. So most geisha prefer a poutier shape, more like the bloom of a violet. Unless a geisha has lips of this shape to begin with—and very few do—she nearly always paints on a more circle-shaped mouth than she actually has. But as I’ve said, the fashion in those days was to paint only the lower lip, and this is what Hatsumomo did.

Now Hatsumomo took the twig of paulownia wood she’d shown me earlier and lit it with a match. After it had burned for a few seconds she blew it out, cooled it with her fingertips, and then went back to the mirror to draw in her eyebrows with the charcoal. It made a lovely shade of soft gray. Next she went to a closet and selected a few ornaments for her hair, including one of tortoiseshell, and an unusual cluster of pearls at the end of a long pin. When she’d slipped them into her hair, she applied a bit of perfume to the bare flesh on the back of her neck, and tucked the flat wooden vial into her obi afterward in case she should need it again. She also put a folding fan into her obi and placed a kerchief in her right sleeve. And with this she turned to look down at me. She wore the same faint smile she had worn earlier, and even Auntie had to sigh, from how extraordinary Hatsumomo looked.

  chapter six

W
hatever any of us may have thought about Hatsumomo, she was like an empress in our okiya since she earned the income by which we all lived. And being an empress she would have been very displeased, upon returning late at night, to find her palace dark and all the servants asleep. That is to say, when she came home too drunk to unbutton her socks, someone had to unbutton them for her; and if she felt hungry, she certainly wasn’t going to stroll into the kitchen to prepare something by herself—such as an
umeboshi ochazuke
, which was a favorite snack of hers, made with leftover rice and pickled sour plums, soaked in hot tea. Actually, our okiya wasn’t at all unusual in this respect. The job of waiting up to bow and welcome the geisha home almost always fell to the most junior of the “cocoons”—as the young geisha-in-training were often called. And from the moment I began taking lessons at the school, the most junior cocoon in our okiya was me. Long before midnight, Pumpkin and the two elderly maids were sound asleep on their futons only a meter or so away on the wood floor of the entrance hall; but I had to go on kneeling there, struggling to stay awake until sometimes as late as two o’clock in the morning. Granny’s room was nearby, and she slept with her light on and her door opened a crack. The bar of light that fell across my empty futon made me think of a day, not long before Satsu and I were taken away from our village, when I’d peered into the back room of our house to see my mother asleep there. My father had draped fishing nets across the paper screens to darken the room, but it looked so gloomy I decided to open one of the windows; and when I did, a strip of bright sunlight fell across my mother’s futon and showed her hand so pale and bony. To see the yellow light streaming from Granny’s room onto my futon . . . I had to wonder if my mother was still alive. We were so much alike, I felt sure I would have known if she’d died; but of course, I’d had no sign one way or the other.

One night as the fall was growing cooler, I had just dozed off leaning against a post when I heard the outside door roll open. Hatsumomo would be very angry if she found me sleeping, so I tried my best to look alert. But when the interior door opened, I was surprised to see a man, wearing a traditional, loose-fitting workman’s jacket tied shut at the hip and a pair of peasant trousers—though he didn’t look at all like a workman or a peasant. His hair was oiled back in a very modern manner, and he wore a closely trimmed beard that gave him the air of an intellectual. He leaned down and took my head in his hands to look me square in the face.

“Why, you’re a pretty one,” he said to me in a low voice. “What’s your name?”

I felt certain he must be a workman, though I couldn’t think why he’d come so late at night. I was frightened of answering him, but I managed to say my name, and then he moistened a fingertip with his tongue and touched me on the cheek—to take off an eyelash, as it turned out.

“Yoko is still here?” he asked. Yoko was a young woman who spent every day from midafternoon until late evening sitting in our maids’ room. Back in those days the okiya and teahouses in Gion were all linked by a private telephone system, and Yoko was kept busier than almost anyone in our okiya, answering that telephone to book Hatsumomo’s engagements, sometimes for banquets or parties six months to a year in advance. Usually Hatsumomo’s schedule didn’t fill up completely until the morning before, and calls continued through the evening from teahouses whose customers wanted her to drop in if she had time. But the telephone hadn’t been ringing much tonight, and I thought probably Yoko had fallen asleep just as I had. The man didn’t wait for me to answer, but gestured for me to keep quiet, and showed himself down the dirt corridor to the maids’ room.

The next thing I heard was Yoko apologizing—for she had indeed fallen asleep—and then she carried on a long conversation with the switchboard operator. She had to be connected with several teahouses before she at least located Hatsumomo and left a message that the Kabuki actor Onoe Shikan had come to town. I didn’t know it at the time, but there was no Onoe Shikan; this was just a code.

After this, Yoko left for the night. She didn’t seem worried that a man was waiting in the maids’ room, so I made up my mind to say nothing to anyone. This turned out to be a good thing, because when Hatsumomo appeared twenty minutes later, she stopped in the entrance hall to say to me:

“I haven’t tried to make your life really miserable yet. But if you ever mention that a man came here, or even that I stopped in before the end of the evening, that will change.”

She was standing over me as she said this, and when she reached into her sleeve for something, I could see even in the dim light that her forearms were flushed. She went into the maids’ room and rolled the door shut behind her. I heard a short muffled conversation, and then the okiya was silent. Occasionally I thought I heard a soft whimper or a groan, but the sounds were so quiet, I couldn’t be sure. I won’t say I knew just what they were doing in there, but I did think of my sister holding up her bathing dress for the Sugi boy. And I felt such a combination of disgust and curiosity that even if I’d been free to leave my spot, I don’t think I could have.

*  *  *

Once a week or so, Hatsumomo and her boyfriend—who turned out to be a chef in a nearby noodle restaurant—came to the okiya and shut themselves in the maids’ room. They met other times in other places as well. I know because Yoko was often asked to deliver messages, and I sometimes overheard. All the maids knew what Hatsumomo was doing; and it’s a measure of how much power she had over us that no one spoke a word to Mother or Auntie or Granny. Hatsumomo would certainly have been in trouble for having a boyfriend, much less for bringing him back to the okiya. The time she spent with him earned no revenue, and even took her away from parties at teahouses where she would otherwise have been making money. And besides, any wealthy man who might have been interested in an expensive, long-term relationship would certainly think less of her and even change his mind if he knew she was carrying on with the chef of a noodle restaurant.

One night just as I was coming back from taking a drink of water at the well in the courtyard, I heard the outside door roll open and slam against the door frame with a bang.

“Really, Hatsumomo-san,” said a deep voice, “you’ll wake everyone . . .”

I’d never really understood why Hatsumomo took the risk of bringing her boyfriend back to the okiya—though probably it was the risk itself that excited her. But she’d never before been so careless as to make a lot of noise. I hurried into my position on my knees, and in a moment Hatsumomo was in the formal entrance hall, holding two packages wrapped in linen paper. Soon another geisha stepped in behind her, so tall that she had to stoop to pass through the low doorway. When she stood erect and looked down on me, her lips looked unnaturally big and heavy at the bottom of her long face. No one would have called her pretty.

“This is our foolish lower maid,” said Hatsumomo. “She has a name, I think, but why don’t you just call her ‘Little Miss Stupid.’ ”

“Well, Little Miss Stupid,” said the other geisha. “Go and get your big sister and me something to drink, why don’t you?” The deep voice I’d heard was hers, and not the voice of Hatsumomo’s boyfriend after all.

Usually Hatsumomo liked to drink a special kind of sake called
amakuchi
—which was very light and sweet. But
amakuchi
was brewed only in the winter, and we seemed to have run out. I poured two glasses of beer instead and brought them out. Hatsumomo and her friend had already made their way down to the courtyard, and were standing in wooden shoes in the dirt corridor. I could see they were very drunk, and Hatsumomo’s friend had feet much too big for our little wooden shoes, so that she could hardly walk a step without the two of them breaking out in laughter. You may recall that a wooden walkway ran along the outside of the house. Hatsumomo had just set her packages down onto that walkway and was about to open one of them when I delivered the beer.

“I’m not in the mood for beer,” she said, and bent down to empty both glasses underneath the foundation of the house.

“I’m in the mood for it,” said her friend, but it was already too late. “Why did you pour mine out?”

“Oh, be quiet, Korin!” Hatsumomo said. “You don’t need more to drink anyway. Just look at this, because you’re going to die from happiness when you see it!” And here, Hatsumomo untied the strings holding shut the linen paper of one package, and spread out upon the walkway an exquisite kimono in different powdery shades of green, with a vine motif bearing red leaves. Really, it was a glorious silk gauze—though of summer weight, and certainly not appropriate for the fall weather. Hatsumomo’s friend, Korin, admired it so much that she drew in a sharp breath and choked on her own saliva—which caused them both to burst out laughing again. I decided the time had come to excuse myself. But Hatsumomo said:

“Don’t go away, Little Miss Stupid.” And then she turned to her friend again and told her, “It’s time for some fun, Korin-san. Guess whose kimono this is!”

Korin was still coughing a good deal, but when she was able to speak, she said, “I wish it belonged to me!”

“Well, it doesn’t. It belongs to none other than the geisha we both hate worse than anyone else on earth.”

“Oh, Hatsumomo . . . you’re a genius. But how did you get Satoka’s kimono?”

“I’m not talking about Satoka! I’m talking about . . . Miss Perfect!”

“Who?”

“Miss ‘I’m-So-Much-Better-Than-You-Are’ . . . that’s who!”

There was a long pause, and then Korin said, “Mameha! Oh, my goodness, it is Mameha’s kimono. I can’t believe I didn’t recognize it! How did you manage to get your hands on it?”

“A few days ago I left something at the Kaburenjo Theater during a rehearsal,” Hatsumomo said. “And when I went back to look for it, I heard what I thought was moaning coming up from the basement stairs. So I thought, ‘It can’t be! This is too much fun!’ And when I crept down and turned on the light, guess who I found lying there like two pieces of rice stuck together on the floor?”

“I can’t believe it! Mameha?”

“Don’t be a fool. She’s much too prissy to do such a thing. It was her maid, with the custodian of the theater. I knew she’d do anything to keep me from telling, so I went to her later and told her I wanted this kimono of Mameha’s. She started crying when she figured out which one I was describing.”

“And what’s this other one?” Korin asked, pointing to the second package that lay on the walkway, its strings still tied.

“This one I made the girl buy with her own money, and now it belongs to me.”

“Her own money?” said Korin. “What maid has enough money to buy a kimono?”

“Well, if she didn’t buy it as she said, I don’t want to know where it came from. Anyway, Little Miss Stupid is going to put it away in the storehouse for me.”

“Hatsumomo-san, I’m not allowed in the storehouse,” I said at once.

“If you want to know where your older sister is, don’t make me say anything twice tonight. I have plans for you. Afterward you may ask me a single question, and I’ll answer it.”

I won’t say that I believed her; but of course, Hatsumomo had the power to make my life miserable in any way she wanted. I had no choice but to obey.

She put the kimono—wrapped in its linen paper—into my arms and walked me down to the storehouse in the courtyard. There she opened the door and flipped a light switch with a loud snap. I could see shelves stacked with sheets and pillows, as well as several locked chests and a few folded futons. Hatsumomo grabbed me by the arm and pointed up a ladder along the outside wall.

“The kimono are up there,” she said.

I made my way up and opened a sliding wooden door at the top. The storage loft didn’t have shelves like the ground-floor level. Instead the walls were lined with red lacquered cases stacked one on top of the next, nearly as high as the ceiling. A narrow corridor passed between these two walls of cases, with slatted windows at the ends, covered over with screens for ventilation. The space was lit harshly just as below, but much more brightly; so that when I had stepped inside, I could read the black characters carved into the fronts of the cases. They said things like
Kata-Komon, Ro
—“Stenciled Designs, Open-Weave Silk Gauze”; and
Kuromontsuki, Awase
—“Black-Crested Formal Robes with Inner Lining.” To tell the truth, I couldn’t understand all the characters at the time, but I did manage to find the case with Hatsumomo’s name on it, on a top shelf. I had trouble taking it down, but finally I added the new kimono to the few others, also wrapped in linen paper, and replaced the case where I’d found it. Out of curiosity, I opened another of the cases very quickly and found it stacked to the top with perhaps fifteen kimono, and the others whose lids I lifted were all the same. To see that storehouse crowded with cases, I understood at once why Granny was so terrified of fire. The collection of kimono was probably twice as valuable as the entire villages of Yoroido and Senzuru put together. And as I learned much later, the most expensive ones were in storage somewhere else. They were worn only by apprentice geisha; and since Hatsumomo could no longer wear them, they were kept in a rented vault for safekeeping until they were needed again.