Women of the Pleasure Quarters (30 page)

“I’ve been coming to Kanetanaka for years,” he said as we took our places on the cushions, reclining luxuriously like Edo-period daimyo on the armrests. Mine was the place of honor, with my back to the
tokonoma
alcove. “My father brought me when I was a teenager. We are old friends here.”

Shuko knelt by my side and filled my cup with saké. One by one the geisha sank gracefully to their knees, bowed their heads so that they practically touched the tatami, and gaily introduced themselves. I was used to Japanese formality. Middle-class women of a certain age at, for example, a tea ceremony, engaged in endless bowing and scraping, bombarding one with language larded with baroque polite forms. It was all rather stiff and uncomfortable. But this was different. These were highly sophisticated women. They observed the formalities, they used formal language, yet their behavior was full of gaiety and laughter. They played with the forms, they were not enslaved by them.

It was a little like being surrounded by a flock of gorgeously plumed birds. Cooing softly, covering their mouths with an elegant hand when they giggled, they chatted and bantered, fluttering about, making sure that saké cups and beer glasses were filled and everything was to our liking. Skillfully they kept the conversation light and merry.

Did I know the difference, they asked, between the way a wife and a geisha wore their kimono? I had to confess that I did not. In Kyoto when a geisha was formally dressed, with her kimono low at the back and swirling about her feet, it was obvious. But among the geisha in this room it was difficult to tell. Their kimonos looked every bit as chaste and modest as a married woman’s. Smiling, they explained the telltale signs that communicated to the practiced eye that they were geisha—the kimono tied a little more loosely than a married woman’s and a touch more open at the neck to reveal a tantalizing hint of the collar at the throat and a rakish flash of the under-kimono at the hem and cuff; the hair swept back into a glossy helmet with not a strand out of place.

“Geisha wear kimonos all the time, whereas wives wear them only on special occasions,” explained a geisha who had introduced herself as Kimie. Poised, elegant, she must have been brushing fifty. Her kimono was a deep blue tinged with gray, the color of the sea on a summer’s evening, with a pattern of waves swirling across the sleeves and hem. “We have to carry on all the jobs of everyday life in kimono; so we tie ours a little more loosely.”

After that first evening Kimie and I became friends and she told me her story. She had a pedigree stretching back several generations. Her mother had been a famous beauty in her day and the child of another famous beauty. The family kept a geisha house where generations of youthful geisha had lived. Her father had been the head of one of the country’s vast industrial conglomerates before the war. During the American occupation he was purged and put under house arrest along with other leaders of society and had been unable to visit Kimie and her mother, who was of course not his wife but his second, third, or fourth “wife”; a man in that position would have had several. Kimie never knew him. When she was three he died. By the time she was growing up, she had another “father,” a leading novelist who, like many literary men, enjoyed the louche atmosphere of the geisha districts. He too had a wife and family and stayed over at the geisha house a couple of days a week.

Had she been born in different circumstances, Kimie might have been an academic or a doctor. There was something about her of the bluestocking. She had clearly inherited her father’s brilliance. She was not beautiful. Her long-chinned, rather plain face had faded and lost its definition with the passing of the years though, like all the geisha, she had a powerful presence. She was, I later learned, one of the leading women in the Shimbashi community and hinted once that she was “married”—she had a
danna
—though, like all the geisha, her lips were sealed on that score.

A couple of kimono-clad maids rustled in with trays laden with dishes of exquisite delicacies—vegetables carved into miniature sculptures, a wobbling beige cube of mock tofu made of ground sesame, a deep-purple baby eggplant dabbed with mustard-colored miso paste, each arranged like a small landscape on a porcelain dish or costly slab of stoneware. They laid them out before Mr. Matsumoto and myself on the lacquered table top.

It was a little like being at a dinner party where only two of the guests were served. I felt a little uncomfortable as I picked up my chopsticks, then remembered that in traditional Japanese homes the womenfolk do not dine with the guests. I had spent many dull evenings conversing painfully with the husband or father of the friend I had been invited to visit while she scuttled silently in and out of the room, carrying trays of food. On this occasion I was an honorary man—though fortunately there were geisha present to brighten up the conversation.

The second course was
ayu,
a small sweet river trout grilled whole and cunningly arranged on an oblong dish so that it almost looked as if it were still alive and swimming along. Before I had a chance to dig into mine, Kimie, who had taken Shuko’s place next to me, took it and expertly filleted it with her chopsticks, then divided it into bite-size pieces. As the guest, it would be unthinkable for me to have to perform even the least taxing of chores, such as filleting my own fish. The meal continued with succulent slices of sashimi and a succession of simmered, steamed, and raw dishes followed by rice and pickles in the traditional Japanese order.

Mr. Matsumoto was talking about what made a geisha sexy.

“It’s not physical beauty,” he said. “It’s not the way they look. It’s some indefinable quality, the way in which they interact with men. Take Kimie, for example. She doesn’t seem sexy . . .”

“What?” exclaimed Kimie in mock horror. “In that case, I’m leaving right now!”

“. . . but when she dances she’s extremely sexy.”

Kimie smiled, mollified.

“We have a saying in the geisha world,” said Shuko. “There are five conditions that make a geisha famous.” The other geisha chimed in. “First, to be beautiful but not too beautiful. Shimbashi geisha are homely,” they explained. “We wear plain, simple kimonos, like wives.” Next, to be able to hold one’s drink but never to get drunk. Third, to devote oneself to one’s art. Fourth, to be good at talking but better at listening. “That’s the secret of the geisha’s conversation,” they said. Last, to have a good reputation not just in one’s own district but throughout the geisha community.

The meal over, the maids cleared the table.

“Please sing for us, Shuko-san,” begged Mr. Matsumoto.

“I’m not good enough, I’m embarrassed,” demurred Shuko. Finally persuaded, she knelt and, accompanied by a birdlike older geisha on the shamisen, sang a measured melancholy ditty. There was much applause. She bowed, touching her fingers to the tatami, smiling modestly.

Then Kimie was persuaded to dance. In the room there was an expectant silence. She paused, drew breath, and composed her face to an expression of masklike stillness, then raised her fan in a crisp gesture.

As the elderly geisha sang out a plaintive melody, thrumming her shamisen, Kimie painted a story. With a ripple of her fan she created a river where she, pining for her lover, sat gazing at the lanterns bobbing along it. She turned her hand, palm upward, fingers and thumb fused together like a puppet’s hand, to the sky. There was a bird, a skylark, hovering overhead, reminding her of the fragility and transience of love. A letter came. She seemed to read it and wept, throwing it aside. Each gesture was perfection, finding movement out of stillness and stillness in the heart of movement, refined, controlled, and magical. With the tiniest angle of her head, glance of her eyes, or graceful twist of her hand she created a whole universe of love, passion, loneliness, sadness, and loss. We watched, transfixed. She was no longer a fading middle-aged woman but a siren, ineffably seductive, for whom any man would happily have risked shipwreck.

In the past, I remembered, geisha had been like the opera singers, ballet dancers, and Hollywood stars of today. In their world they still were. It was as if I had spent the evening in the company of Meryl Streep and Michelle Pfeiffer or Gelsey Kirkland and Jessye Norman, who had fussed over me, poured my drink, filleted my fish, beguiled me with their chatter, then risen to their feet to perform for me. I felt privileged and humbled.

Before the evening was over, there was one last mystery I wanted to solve. Why had there been limousines at the entrance to Kanetanaka? Who were the men in black suits and why were they there? The geisha smiled. On this occasion, just for me, they would put aside their code of secrecy. Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, they whispered, had been entertaining in a neighboring room that night.

Honorable Swinging Sleeves

One sign that there was demand for the geisha was the development of fake geisha, a development which the geisha themselves tolerated with resignation. There were of course no fake geisha in Shimbashi; it was far too grand for that. But in Asakusa, the East End which had been where the townsmen lived in the old city of Edo, there were fake geisha who performed for ordinary people at the sort of venues where geisha would never normally be seen. They had also recently sometimes been invited to perform alongside the Asakusa geisha and the
taikomochi
jesters.

They were called
furisode-san,
“honorable swinging sleeves,”
furisode
being the term for the gorgeous long-sleeved kimono worn by maiko and other young women. The
furisode-san
were poor men’s geisha. From the moment they appeared in 1994, they inspired endless articles with headlines like “Goodbye to the geisha!,” concluding from their rise that true geisha were dying out. In reality there were only ten or eleven
furisode-san
as against several thousand geisha; but unlike the geisha, who studiously maintained a culture of silence, the
furisode-san
engaged in clamorous self-promotion.

The young women were actually very different from geisha. They were salaried workers earning 250,000 yen ($2,500) a month, worked five days a week, and had to retire when they reached the age of twenty-five. People liked geisha to be young and pretty; one of the problems with real geisha was that so many were old.

Their training in dance and manners lasted three months. Instead of esoteric classical music, they danced to tapes of popular music—big band music, songs by famous chanteuses, folk music, and the catchy songs sung in karaoké bars. Unlike geisha, the
furisode-san
could be hired to entertain anywhere, even in the most humble of establishments—a soba noodle shop, a sushi bar, or an eel restaurant—and they had no
ichigen san
(“no first-timers”) policy. They would work for anyone willing to pay for them.

One day I happened to hear of a display of
furisode-san
dancing at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Tokyo and went along to see it. There were five dancers, each named after a flower or a fruit: Sakura (Cherry Blossom), Komomo (Peach), Botan (Peony), Ichigo (Strawberry), and Ringo (Apple). They wore long-sleeved kimonos like maiko, though a little less fine and costly looking, and their faces were painted white, but without the two-pronged fork of bare flesh at the nape of the neck.

To me, having been immersed in the geisha world for months and seen the best of geisha dancing, they looked like what they were—young girls who had had just three months of dance training. They had none of the crispness or precision which made geisha dancing so seductive and entrancing to watch. It was like taking beginners out of ballet school and asking them to put on a show or comparing a musical at a village hall to Wagner at Bayreuth.

In a way, seeing the
furisode
confirmed everything the geisha had said. Classical geisha dancing was an acquired taste, it demanded an educated eye, and their singing and music were really quite difficult to appreciate. But in the past the flower and willow world had not been the rarefied experience it was today. Though these geisha arts might seem arcane, they had been the popular music and dance of their time, added to which, there had been many more geisha, enough to entertain, mother, and provide lovers for a much wider stratum of society. In the early years of the twentieth century, the heyday of the geisha, ordinary classy gentlemen—like the writer Kafu Nagai, who was far from inordinately rich—had been able to enjoy their company.

The
furisode-san
were accessible and modern, as geisha had been in the past. Perhaps they would inspire a renewed interest in kimono and classical culture, even if they were not as purist as the geisha might like. They might even increase the market for geisha. But what saddened me was the commercial feel of it. These young women were not particularly interested in their “arts”; their training was something to be got out of the way as quickly as possible. They were really just hostesses in period costume.

The Island on the Far Side

In all the years I had been in Tokyo I had never heard of Mukojima, literally “the island on the far side.” It was off the English-language map. But when I dipped my toe into the waters of the flower and willow world, I began to hear that there was quite a community of geisha there. While Shimbashi and Akasaka boasted about ninety geisha each, in Mukojima there were almost two hundred.

“It isn’t ranked as a flower town,” sniffed Shuko when I asked her, looking disdainfully down her pretty nose.

“Why?” I asked; but that is not a question which is ever asked—or answered—in Japan. The Gion geisha spoke with undisguised contempt of Miyagawa-cho and East Gion, but at least they were recognized as geisha districts. How bad could Mukojima be?

Once upon a time Mukojima was “the island on the far side” of the Sumida, though it was certainly not an island any longer. It was further afield even than the Yoshiwara and well beyond the working-class heartland of Asakusa. In fact it barely felt like Tokyo at all. From the station (it was so far out that the subway had risen above ground to become a railway line) I walked the long, straight suburban streets, lined with faceless houses and shops. The place was strangely depopulated. But dotted among the backstreets, discreetly hidden behind high walls, were large prosperous houses that looked remarkably like teahouses.