The Girl Who Played Go (7 page)

My pay at the time only just allowed for me to arrange the occasional dinner and I was in no position to keep a geisha. Time went by and my ardor cooled; I needed more accessible women to brighten the austerity of military life.

Politically that year was like a leaden sky: we dreamed that the storm would break, letting the sun shine through once more. As soldiers, we could neither take a step back nor shy away from the situation, and a number of lieutenants
^[12]
chose martyrdom. There were more and more assassinations, and the young assassins would then hand themselves over to the authorities to prove their loyalty. But neither their own terror nor these voluntary deaths could do anything to jolt our ministers out of their inertia. They were so afraid of a return to the Kamakura era
^[13]
that their only thought was to keep the military as far from power as possible.

We were coming close to the moment of ultimate sacrifice: in order to conquer the world we had to cross a bridge made of our own flesh and blood. Seppuku
^[14]
became fashionable again, a noble form of suicide that requires a long period of mental preparation, and this turned my thoughts away from the apprentice geisha.

One spring day I received a mysterious letter written in a beautiful calligraphy that betrayed its writer’s rigorous education. A woman I did not know asked me to meet her in a teahouse by the Bridge of Willows. Intrigued, I went to the rendezvous. With night falling, I could hear music and laughter in the distance, but the rustling of silk just the other side of the door suggested geishas were passing behind it. Then the screens drew apart and a woman of about forty greeted me with a bow. She wore a kimono in grayish-pink silk with glimpses at the neck of a second, olive-green kimono. A hand-painted cherry tree in blossom scattered its petals over her kimono right to the very ends of her sleeves.

She introduced herself as Sunlight’s mother and welcomed me. I had heard that she herself was a former geisha and that she owned a large teahouse. She told me that she had known my father; I knew that he had been very much in love with a geisha, and asked whether it was she.

She stared at me intently for a moment, then lowered her eyes.

“You have met my daughter,” she said. “Have you enjoyed the evenings you have spent in her company?”

I told her that I very much admired her talents as a musician.

“My daughter is seventeen. She should have moved on and been confirmed as a geisha last year. As you probably know, in this profession an apprentice geisha cannot be given an artist’s status until she has undergone the
mizuage
ceremony. My own experience was worse than a nightmare and I have decided to spare my daughter from a similar calamity. I have asked her to choose her man, and she has chosen you. I have taken the liberty of finding out about you, and you have been spoken of most highly. You are on the threshold of a great military career, but you are young and you would never be able to pay the sum required for this ceremony. That does not matter; I have chosen for my daughter to be happy and I offer her body to you. If you accept this humble request, I shall be eternally grateful to you.”

I was completely astonished by what she had said, and I did not say a word. She came towards me on her knees and bowed low.

“I beg you to consider it,” she said. “Do not trouble yourself with the financial details, I shall take care of that. Consider it, please…”

She stood up and disappeared behind the screens. I found the room oppressively dark. According to tradition, an apprentice geisha should be deflowered by a rich stranger. This initiation is expensive, but it is the crowning status symbol for a man of the world. No apprentice geisha has ever chosen the man who should ravish her, and I had just been asked to transgress this custom scandalously.

I was tormented with doubt and could not give my answer straightaway.

I didn’t see Min yesterday on my way to school and I keep asking myself whether he is ill or whether he doesn’t want to see me anymore. Is he already engaged, like many students of his age? Why should he show any interest in a schoolgirl?

He isn’t at the crossroads this morning, either. Feeling sad and indignant, I am just deciding I will have to forget him when a repeated ringing attracts my attention: I look up and see Min pedaling towards me.

“What are you doing this afternoon?” he cries.

“I’m playing go on the Square of a Thousand Winds,” I can’t help myself answering.

“You can do that another day. I’m inviting you out to lunch,” he says and, without giving me time to decline his invitation, he adds, “I’ll wait for you when you come out of school.”

Before riding past us he throws me a banknote.

“It’s for your rickshaw boy,” he says, “it’ll keep him quiet.”

At noon I come out of school after everyone else and, head lowered, I make my way along the wall. Min is not at the door. I heave a sigh of relief and get into a rickshaw, but then he looms in front of me like a ghost.

He abandons his bicycle and slips onto the seat beside me before I even have time to cry out in surprise. He puts one arm around my shoulders and with the other hand he lowers the blind on the rickshaw so that we are hidden down to our knees. Then he tells the boy to take us to the Hill of Seven Ruins.

The rickshaw trundles through the narrow streets. Inside, sheltered from the stares of passersby under the white tenting yellowed by the sun, Min’s breathing becomes heavier. He brushes my neck lightly with his fingers then buries them in my hair, massaging my nape. I hold my breath, rigid with terror and with an unfamiliar feeling of delight. Beneath the bottom of the blind I can see the rickshaw boy’s legs swinging regularly. Dogs, children and pedestrians skim by on the pavements to either side… I would like this monotonous landscape to go on forever.

On Min’s orders, the rickshaw boy stops outside a restaurant. Min sits himself down as if he were in his own home and orders some noodles. The tiny room is soon filled with the smell of cooking, which blends with the scent of the first spring flowers. The manager serves us and goes back to snooze behind his counter as the midday sun streams in through the open door. I concentrate silently on my food while Min holds forth on the class struggle. When he interrupts himself to say he has never seen a girl eat so voraciously, I don’t rise to his teasing-I find the whole situation exasperating! The young man is obviously accustomed to this sort of tête-à-tête, but I have no idea how a girl in my position should behave. Min saves me from my own confusion by suggesting we go for a walk on the Hill of Seven Ruins.

We start our climb along a shady path where all around us yellow dandelions and purple campanula are in flower. The new grass has grown in dense clumps round the charred granite blocks, the vestiges of a palace that was consumed in flames. Min asks me to sit down on a lotus flower carved in marble, and he stands back to look at me. I find the silence uncomfortable, and sit with my head lowered, bending a buttercup stem with the tip of my shoe.

I don’t know what to do. In the novels at school-Mandarin Ducks and
Wild Butterflies
-a description of a young man and a young woman in a garden would constitute the most awkward scene in a love story: they have so much to say to each other, but a sense of propriety forbids them from betraying their emotions. By comparing the two of us to characters in the sort of books for sale at a train station, I eventually think we are both ridiculous. What does Min expect of me? And what do I expect of him?

I don’t feel anything to compare with the thrill of our first meeting, or with the palpitations I feel every morning as I travel to school and Min simply passes by me. Is our story already coming to an end, and does love exist only in the solitude of my imagination?

Min suddenly puts his hand on my shoulder, making me quiver. I am just about to break free from him when he starts to stroke my face with the tips of his fingers, my eyebrows, eyelids, forehead, chin. Each little move he makes sends shivers through me. My cheeks are burning and I feel ashamed, I am afraid we will be seen through the foliage… but I don’t have the strength to resist.

He draws my head to his; his face approaches inch by inch. I can make out the freckles on his cheeks, the beginnings of a mustache, the misgiving in his eyes. I am too proud to let my fears show and so, instead of fighting, I fall straight into his arms. His lips brush gently onto mine. They are dry but his tongue is moist, and I am amazed when I feel it probe into my mouth. A torrent flows over me.

I have to cry, but the tears won’t come. I scratch his back and he groans. With eyes closed, cheeks flaming and blue rings under his eyes, Min kisses me with the desperate ardor of a collector who has made a rare discovery.

Above the tops of the trees, the town melts away in a light mist. My silence doesn’t discourage him: he takes me to the monastery at the top of the hill and orders some tea from a young monk. After filling my cup, he snaps open some watermelon seeds and looks out over the view, whistling. Avoiding his eyes, and the eyes of the monks who are staring at me, I drain my cup of tea, get up, smooth my crumpled skirt and go back down the steps four at a time.

The sun is sinking, a mask of red lacquer. Beyond the city walls, the melting snow reveals the scorched earth beneath. The villages blend into the parcels of black soil, and the trees flatten out and disappear into the surrounding folds created by the cloak of twilight.

That night I dream that Cousin Lu bursts into my room, comes over to me, takes my hand and presses it to his chest. I am disgusted and I try to shake him off, but his fingers are insistent and I can feel their heat. A strange languorous feeling washes over me.

Horrified, I wake to find I am bathed in sweat.

At the beginning of that autumn I received a letter from a woman asking me to meet her in a park. I was sure this was to be my answer on the subject of the apprentice geisha, and I went to the appointed place at ten o’clock in the morning, having made up my mind to say no.

Under a flaming maple a woman sat on a stone bench dotted with rust-colored lichen. Her hair was knotted in a simple chignon and she was wearing an indigo-blue cotton kimono held at the waist with an orange belt.

I could not believe my eyes: it was Sunlight but, without makeup, her pale lips scarcely pink, she looked like a child of ten. She stood up and bowed in greeting.

“Thank you for coming,” she said.

We sat perched at either end of the bench. She had her back half-turned to me and she remained completely silent.

I could not find the words I had prepared.

After a long while, I asked whether she would like to walk in the park. She walked behind me, taking tiny steps. All the maples were ablaze and the ginkgoes were a bright yellow; the autumn wind wafted their fiery leaves over us. We crossed a wooden bridge, circled a pool of emerald-green water bordered with chrysanthemums, and came to a stop in an open pavilion from which we could gaze out at the cloudless sky and decorative rocks crawling with ivy. The only sounds were the rustling of her kimono and the birdsong. Our shared silence was complicit. I could not break it.

As we left the park, she bowed deeply and walked away.

On the Square of a Thousand Winds I am playing against Wu, the antique dealer, having agreed to give him eight handicap points. When he is beaten, he slinks away with a sigh.

Just one game of go is enough to exhaust most players. They need to eat and sleep in order to return to their normal state, but I react differently: my mind is whirring from the very beginning of the game, and the effort of concentration stimulates a paroxysm of excitement in me. For hours after the game is over I don’t know how to let out the force that’s accumulated within me, and I search in vain for some form of release.

Today, as on every other day, I head for home, taking great powerful strides. The most extraordinary daydreams come to me: I feel as if I no longer belong to the world of mortals; I see myself joining the ranks of the gods.

A man calls out to me and I look up and see Jing crossing the road on a bicycle. There’s a birdcage covered in a blue cloth on the rack behind his seat. He brakes alongside me.

“What are you doing here with that cage?”

He tears off the cloth and proudly shows off two robins.

“These birds love going out for a ride. Usually people swing the cage along as they go for their morning walk. But I could die of boredom walking like an old man, so this is my latest invention.”

I laugh, and he asks whether I would like him to take me home. Darkness has fallen and I can no longer make out the faces of the passersby: I can climb onto his bicycle with no fear of being recognized. I’m holding the cage with my left arm and I put my right arm round Jing’s waist. He sets off and I have to cling to his waistcoat to keep my balance. My fingers slip on the silk and fur, holding firm on a level with his stomach. Under the fur-lined waistcoat he is wearing a cotton tunic. The warmth of his skin burns my hand through the weave of the fabric. With each movement of his legs, the muscles contract and relax beneath my fingers. Disconcerted, I remove my arm, but Jing then leans into a corner, forcing me to hold him all the more tightly.

I ask him to stop beside the back door. The street has high walls on both sides and is poorly lit by one feeble streetlamp. Jing’s cheeks are burning red, he is breathing noisily and fumbling for his handkerchief.

I press mine to his forehead. He thanks me and wipes his face, which is dripping with sweat. Embarrassed by my watching him, he turns towards the wall and unbuttons his tunic to run the handkerchief over his chest. I ask whether he has any news of Min.

“I’m seeing him tomorrow at the university…”

I hand the cage to him and he takes it firmly in his arms.