Women of the Pleasure Quarters (11 page)

“My husband was a customer, one of my
danna-san,
” she told me. “That was how I met him. I remember he really wanted to marry me. He used to say, ‘Leave this life. Let’s get married.’ I’m not going to tell you what his job is or everyone will know who he is. Let’s just say he’s in property.

“He was the top
danna
of Gion. He was twenty years older than me, but that doesn’t mean he was old; I was only twenty or so at the time. We were lovers for three years. We’ve been married thirty years now. I must say, these days I get fed up with having him around the house night after night. I wish he’d go out and ‘play’!”

In Japan, said the irrepressible Reiko, butting in, the wife’s job is to take care of the husband. He might love and adore you and want to make you happy—but that is only when you are courting. Everything changes the moment the ring is on your finger. Once you are married, you suddenly discover that you are not a lover anymore but a mother.

“We’re managers!” she cried. “You get married, you have a baby straight away and after that your hands are full. You’re taking care of the baby, your husband—he’s another baby—and all the family finances. It’s a real nuisance having the husband around the house; he just gets in the way. It makes life much easier for everyone if husbands go off and ‘play.’

“Mine certainly did,” she added. “Probably still does. I certainly don’t think he’s the perfect husband.”

I had put down my fork and was listening aghast at the outrageous turn the conversation had taken. Of course in theory Japanese wives took their husbands’ infidelity for granted, but I had never before heard anyone speak so directly about it.

I was well aware that husbands and wives in Japan often led completely separate lives. When I lived in small-town Japan I had had many very close women friends; but I never seemed to meet their husbands. Couples never did things together as they do in the West. Even in the evening when I went for dinner, the husband was never around.

After I had remarked on this over the course of a year and a half, some of my women friends made a special effort and invited me around to meet their husbands. Then I realized what the problem was. In most cases the couple had absolutely nothing in common apart from the children and the roof over their heads. I wondered how on earth they had ended up together. Some, of course, would have had a marriage arranged by their parents; some, I suspected, simply got married because it was time and the person in question was around and available. The women and the young girls whom I knew never seemed to expect love or to hold out for it, as a Western woman would. Proverbially what a woman looked for in a man were the three
takai,
the three “highs”: to be tall, to have a high salary, and to be the graduate of a top university. Love came a poor second if it made a showing at all.

The prime relationship in most women’s lives, as far as I could see, was not with their husbands but their children. As if to make up for the lack of romantic love in their lives, women overwhelmed their children with love. As for the husbands, their prime relationship seemed to be with their workmates. They worked together all day and in the evening went out together to party or “play.” Often they spent weekends playing golf together.

If a wife was lucky, she would never see her husband at all. He would stagger home drunk last thing at night, fall into bed, and be off to work at the crack of dawn next morning. Some nights he might phone up and say he was working late and was going to spend the night in the city. The wife carefully avoided thinking too much about it. It made it very easy for a Japanese man if he wanted to have an affair.

But I had never before heard a Japanese woman say straight out that she wished her husband would go off and “play” with other women. Reiko and Mrs. Sato were half joking, I suspected. They were also sophisticated Kyoto-ites. They came from old Kyoto families. Reiko had lived for generations side by side with the flower and willow world, the one place where the romantic was allowed to blossom in Japan, while Mrs. Sato had grown up within it. Their attitudes were perhaps more rooted in the past than those of most modern Japanese women.

“My husband had a Taiwanese lover a while ago,” said Reiko. “I got really jealous. But then one day I met her. I liked her, she was sweet. After that I didn’t mind. Even if men play around, we still feel confident just so long as they introduce the girlfriend to us. Once you’ve met her, then you can relax and feel secure.”

“It was like that with my husband’s first wife,” said Mrs. Sato. “I knew her quite well when I was still a geisha. The three of us went out for dinner several times.”

“Didn’t you feel guilty?” I asked, amazed at these revelations.

“Not in the slightest,” said Mrs. Sato, smiling sweetly. “She was a lot older than me. There was no reason to feel bad.”

“I don’t get angry if my husband plays around,” said Reiko. “That’s fine. The only thing is, I have to be the most important. If the other woman gets to be more important to him, that’s when I’d get angry. That was proper behavior in the old days. The wife had to be number one. Wives don’t have lovers, of course,” she added, as if that was perfectly obvious.

“We don’t have time,” said Mrs. Sato. “We’re busy all day long, every day—bringing up the children, cooking perfect meals three times a day . . .”

“The day my husband goes out to ‘play,’ that’s when I can finally relax,” laughed Reiko. “I can always tell. When he gets back, he’s ultra nice to me. He gives me presents or flowers. He’s quiet and well behaved. A husband is like a child; I’m like his mother. If he does something stupid, I tell him off.”

The key thing, they agreed, was to keep the home harmonious and peaceful. If one’s husband was frustrated then he would be in a bad temper and infect everyone else with his bad temper and the whole family would be miserable. But if he went off to “play,” if he had a girlfriend or went to visit a geisha, he would be in a good mood for days afterward. Not only that, he would be contrite and sheepish. There would be harmony in the home.

“If my husband is happy, then I’m happy too,” concluded Reiko. “If my husband is stressed then I get stressed too and we have a row. If he spends time with another woman, he’ll be in a good mood when he gets home. Then we’re all in a good mood.”

Later when Mrs. Sato had gone off to powder her exquisite nose, Reiko confided that her husband was one of the biggest landowners in Kyoto. He owned woods, he owned mountains—in fact, he owned most of Kyoto. I would not have expected less of someone who had been the most famous and beautiful maiko in the entire city.

chapter 3

inside the pleasure quarters

The Maiko of Kyoto

Waiting anxiously for you,

Unable to sleep, but falling into a doze—

Are those words of love

Floating to my pillow,

Or is this too a dream . . . ?

My eyes open and here is my tear-drenched sleeve.

Perhaps it was a sudden rain.

Geisha song
¹

Present and Past

Once I had become an accepted part of the geisha world in Kyoto, I took to spending my days and evenings in geisha houses and teahouses with maiko, geisha, and the “mothers” of the houses—
okami-san
—or chatting to the motley collection of individuals who populated the geisha world. Elderly barmen reminisced about their favorite maiko of decades past and showed off their collections of signed photographs, scented business cards, fans, and the towels which maiko handed out to mark rites of passage in their careers. Men who boasted of being regular customers dropped the names of maiko they were friendly with and talked of taking them bowling on their days off. Shopkeepers along Shijo Street whose families had served the geisha community for generations regaled me with stories of past and present maiko. And whenever I had a spare moment I pored over books on geisha history or read novels written in the days when any love story had a geisha as the heroine and ended not “and then they got married and lived happily ever after” but “and then they committed love suicide.”

It was difficult not to be aware of the enormous gulf between the way maiko and geisha had lived even in the recent past and their present-day lives. The turning point, as everyone always told me, was Showa 33 (1958), the year that prostitution had been made illegal. Yet some of what gave the geisha their special flavor still remained. In the past love had been the forbidden fruit, made all the more romantic because it was illicit. But today too the geisha were somehow beyond the pale—respectable yet not respectable. On the one hand, they were the symbol of Kyoto; posters of maiko inscribed “Welcome to Kyoto!” greeted travelers as they arrived at the central railway station. People on the edges of the geisha world would happily describe their customs and rituals and boast about the geisha they knew. But when I asked if they would let their own daughter become a geisha, they always looked askance and mumbled, “Well, it’s a difficult question.”

It was impossible also not to be aware of the devastating decline in numbers. Old people—both geisha and shopkeepers—remembered the days when the whole area between the River Kamo and the Eastern Hills, from north of Fourth Bridge down to Fifth Bridge, had been a special world. Every dwelling had been a teahouse or geisha house and every shop had served the geisha community. In the 1920s, at the height of the geisha era, there had been 80,000 geisha throughout the country. In Gion alone there were 2,500 geisha and 106 maiko.

When the teahouses reopened after the war, around 1948, there were still 1,200 geisha and 160 maiko in Kyoto. In those days the flower and willow world was a thriving industry, governed by protocol and ritual, with geisha clattering on their wooden clogs from teahouse to teahouse every day to pay their respects to the teahouse mothers and sometimes entertaining from the morning of one day to the small hours of the next. But by 1999 there were just 195 geisha and 55 maiko left, of whom 90 geisha and 22 maiko were in Gion.

I wondered if I was seeing the end of a way of life or if the geisha would somehow survive. What did it mean to be a geisha today? Could they still be called “geisha” when so much of what had made them geisha had disappeared? In modern Japan, they were no longer the heart of the entertainment industry nor, as they had been, sirens and idols, the most desired women of their generation. What role could they play when they had become almost an anachronism?

The kabuki actors, once their fellow leaders of the demimonde, equally disreputable “riverbed folk,” had turned respectable. Stuck in an unchanging Edo-period time warp, they now put on costume dramas for the populace to enjoy. But even if the geisha had wanted to follow this course, it was not open to them. The essence of the flower and willow world was its secrecy. It was open only to a few well-heeled initiates. If the geisha became popular entertainers, their seductive mystery would be lost. But if they did not, how could they survive?

And what of the geishas’ past? Was it a distant memory? In fact, as I discovered early on, it was still very much alive.

“When I think about the old days I always remember them as dark,” said my friend Mr. Kato as we sat with his parents in their printing shop one day. “The buildings were lower, the ceilings were lower—everything was low and dark. When I think of the street then, it was all blacks and browns and reds. Those slatted screens that hang in front of the windows so no one can see in—they were all dark brown.”

There were, he said, plenty of daughters of geisha in his class at primary school. Sometimes there would be rumors, so-and-so’s father is the owner of such-and-such construction company, so-and-so’s father is a doctor or a dentist or an actor. In the rest of Japan people might have thought it was strange; but here in the geisha districts one-parent families were normal. The children certainly never suffered prejudice, in fact no one thought twice about it. The only trouble was, they were spoiled. Every now and then you’d hear them saying, “Uncle’s coming today!” You knew that whenever their father turned up, they got whatever they wanted.

“But there was also a girl from the country. Her parents must have received a ‘preparation fee’.”

“ ‘Preparation fee’?” I queried.

“For having made her and brought her up until then,” he explained as if it was the most normal thing in the world. “They had sent her off to a geisha house to be raised. I felt sorry for her. I remember she was always crying in class. She was the only maid in the house. When she got back from school she had to clean and help the maiko and geisha with their kimonos and makeup. She was busy all the time; she didn’t have any friends. She got two days off a month, the seventh and the twentieth. That was twenty-five years ago. There were quite a few like her at school with me, but she was the only one in my class. I don’t know what became of her. She probably ran away. She’s certainly not around now.”

“Granddad used to mess around with geisha,” rumbled Mr. Kato’s father unexpectedly. We all settled into deferential silence. “My mother, my real mother, that is—I had three or four ‘mothers’—used to have a geisha house. She’d been a geisha herself.”

“Grandma was a geisha? You never told us that before!” gasped Mr. Kato and his mother in unison.

“Granddad ran a Chinese restaurant,” Mr. Kato senior went on imperturbably. “In the war there was no food here so he used to go out to the country to get supplies. My last ‘mother’ was the owner of the inn where he stayed. She was the mistress—the ‘number two wife’—of someone important. In those days guys had children all over the place. That was normal. No one ever asked who anyone else’s parents were. You didn’t go round asking that kind of thing.” Young Mr. Kato and his mother were murmuring and tut-tutting together at these revelations.

In Mr. Kato senior’s time—before the Occupation, the imposition of universal compulsory education to the age of fifteen, and the 1958 law ending licensed prostitution—
zegen,
somewhere between talent-spotters and pimps, used to go out and scour the poorer parts of the countryside for pretty young girls whom they would take back to Kyoto to be trained. In those days maids might arrive in Kyoto at the age of six or seven and, after a period of servitude and training, became maiko at eleven. That was why they wore four-inch-high clogs, to add to their height, for they were not yet fully grown. Modern-day maiko teetering down the street on their clogs sometimes towered above their clients.

There had been many other changes. In prewar days, the majority of the maiko in Kyoto were from geisha families; their mothers, grandmothers, and sometimes great-grandmothers had been geisha. The girls from the countryside were on the bottom rung of the ladder. But in modern times, many daughters of geisha wanted to take up another career or marry a “normal” man and have a “normal” life. At least one elderly ex-geisha I spoke to begged me not to refer to her by her real name, because none of her family, not even her son and daughter, now grandparents themselves and highly respected members of society, had any idea that she had been a geisha.

Modern maiko, conversely, were mainly not from Kyoto and, even if they were, were not from a geisha background. The first criterion was that they had to be pretty; like modeling, this was a career where social background counted for nothing and a pretty face was all. They also had to be fit and healthy, for the maiko training involved hard work and long hours. But the biggest difference was that they had all become maiko out of choice. Some had seen maiko, perhaps on television, perhaps on a school trip to Kyoto, and had been starstruck by these fairytale creatures. Others had studied traditional Japanese dancing and wanted to pursue the art more deeply. In most cases their parents had been horrified at the idea; but the girls wanted so badly to become maiko that they reluctantly gave their consent. It was the exact reverse of the bad old days, when children had been sold by their parents out of desperate poverty.

As far as the old ladies of the geisha community were concerned, the result had been a disturbing drop in standards. Before the war the daughters of geisha began their dancing classes at the age of six years, six months, and six days. In those days it had been a serious profession and children started young, like students of the Bolshoi Ballet. Modernday maiko did not even begin their training until they were fourteen or fifteen—by which time they had had so much so-called education that, instead of listening obediently and repeating again and again, as was expected, they were prone to question every instruction they were given.

As an elegant seventy-year-old, the fourth generation of a family of geisha, told me with a disdainful lift of the eyebrows, “In the old days at least you could expect girls to have basic manners.” Now, she huffed, they knew nothing: how to put on a kimono, how to walk in one, how to kneel and rise elegantly with one knee just an inch or two above the other, or how to open the sliding paper fusuma doors with a discreet motion of the hand, fingers and thumb held straight and pressed together. Some had never sat on tatami before and didn’t even know how to use chopsticks. “You have to teach them everything!” she concluded with an extravagant sigh.

The Maiko’s Robing Ceremony

Most of what goes on in the geisha world happens behind closed doors. It is a little like Hollywood. Every now and then you might spot a geisha or maiko on the street as she flits from teahouse to teahouse or, if you are the guest of someone very wealthy, meet one entertaining at a geisha party. But you only ever see the public face, immaculately made up, eternally composed and gracious. As for the private life of the geisha, that is an entirely different matter, utterly closed to outsiders.

So when I was invited to sit in on the backstage preparations for the debut of a maiko called Kanosome, it was an enormous privilege. The debut—
misedashi,
literally “store opening”—is one of the most momentous rites of passage in the geisha’s career, when she steps out for the first time at the age of fifteen as a fully-fledged maiko on the geisha stage. It would also be an opportunity to witness the putting on of the mask, the moment of transformation when the fresh-faced teenager becomes a denizen of another world.

It was the rainy season in Kyoto by the time Kanosome’s debut came up. Standing on the rickety balcony of the small room where I lived, I looked in dismay at the rain pounding on the roofs, sluicing through the gutters and sweeping in great sheets along the street. The River Kamo, usually a calm little stream with paths along both banks populated by joggers and courting couples, had turned into a savage brown torrent. Mammoth waves, big enough to surf on, surged along with frightening speed.

Nothing, however, would prevent me from going out. Huddled under an umbrella I splashed past the dark shuttered and screened wooden houses of Gion and along the covered pavement of Shijo Street. Dripping, I found the house, slid open the door, and went inside.

Upstairs, Kanosome was kneeling on the floor, her cotton yukata folded down so that her shoulders were bare. The room had the orderly chaos of a theater dressing room with kimonos hanging around the walls and bowls, brushes, and tubs of makeup spread across the floor. At fifteen, she had the face of a classic Japanese beauty such as one sees in woodblock prints, a perfect melon-seed shape with a slightly protruding lower jaw, large wide-apart eyes, well-shaped eyebrows, and a mouth neither too big nor too small. Without makeup she was just a nervous, excited teenager. Despite the waxed medieval hairstyle with its red ribbons, tortoiseshell combs, and decorations, one could imagine her in jeans or school uniform, riding her bicycle, satchel on her back.

Patient, obedient, she sat motionless on her knees while Masami, the senior geisha of the house, massaged her shoulders, then took a knob of soft white wax and rubbed it thoroughly into her face. One of the most popular geisha in the city, Masami was normally to be seen in white face, kimono, and wig. She was lively, entertaining, and beautiful, with a wide face and full laughing mouth. But that day she had a different role to play. In simple pony tail and jeans, she applied herself very seriously to the magical business of transmuting the girl before her into a work of art.

Taking a tub of white makeup, Masami put some into a dish, mixed in a trace of pink, then carefully applied a layer to Kanosome’s face with a wide flat goat’s hair brush, leaving a clean line of unpainted skin at the hairline. It was an extraordinary transformation, as if the girl had put on one of the beautiful but expressionless masks which actors wear in the classical Japanese Noh theater. She had lost the idiosyncratic features of a teenager and become an icon from another age.