Women of the Pleasure Quarters (9 page)

She had always daydreamed about being a geisha; she was drawn by the beauty and brightness of the geisha life. But she had never before imagined that it might be possible. To join a geisha house, take classes, and buy the requisite number of kimonos cost a fortune, far more than a girl like her could ever afford. But the gambler had money and, more important, the right connections. He took her to meet the proprietress of a geisha house in one of the five Tokyo flower towns and she was accepted. Thereafter she lived with him and worked as a member of the geisha house.

Then she met Hideo. Compared to the customers at the teahouses where she entertained, he was a boy, not much older than she was. He was smooth-skinned and bespectacled, earnest and serious, part of a fresher, cleaner, more real world than she had ever seen before. He talked intensely about art, aesthetics, music, and the meaning of life. Whatever he said was sincere. He did not flirt or play games like the customers did.

And he had no money. He had only himself to offer. He could not even take her out on a date, let alone support her or buy her expensive kimonos. On the rare occasions when they went out for a meal, she paid. For the first time in her life, here was a man that she could love for himself, not because of what she could get from him.

Their love affair had to be secret. She was not supposed to spend time with anyone who was not a customer, let alone sleep with him. He was getting for nothing what other men paid a fortune for, if they got it at all.

“She was so bright and full of joy,” said the young man wistfully. “She really made me feel alive. I’d been feeling low when I met her. She’d come over and we’d go out drinking. It was as if the sun had come out.”

Then, a year after she met Hideo, a customer who had seen her at teahouse parties took a fancy to her. Following the proper procedure, he approached the teahouse proprietress and said that he would like to become her
danna,
a word that in the geisha world means patron-
cum
-lover, almost like a husband. He was the chairman of an enormous corporation, one of the most powerful and wealthy businessmen in Japan. To become the mistress of a man like this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

There was only one problem. She loved Hideo and she knew that while he would tolerate the professional gambler whom he considered no more than a meal ticket, he would hate it if she had a “real”
danna
. If she became the property of such a man, she would no longer be free to carry on any clandestine relationships; and in any case Hideo would never agree to play second fiddle.

Hideo knew nothing of all this. She did not discuss it with him. Then one Sunday she was invited to the chairman’s country villa. She could not decide what to do. If she went, Hideo would know immediately that something was afoot. If she did not, she might never again have such an opportunity. But she was a girl from the Osaka slums. She had learned the hard way that the only important thing in life was survival.

That weekend she told Hideo that she was going, just for the day, to the customer’s villa.

“I thought, ‘I see,’ ” said Hideo. “ ‘So that’s the way it’s going.’ ”

The next Sunday and the Sunday after that, she went to the chairman’s villa. Finally she accepted his offer to become her
danna;
it was too good to refuse.

“I was too poor for her,” Hideo said regretfully. “Of course I suffered after she had gone. It was unbearable. But I’m proud that I had an affair with her. I don’t regret it, not in the slightest. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. It was the happiest year of my life.”

Women in a Men’s World

Now, as a general rule, where passionate love is the theme in Japanese literature of the best class, it is not that sort of love which leads to the establishment of family relations. It is quite another sort of love,—a sort of love about which the Oriental is not prudish at all,—the mayoi, or infatuation of passion, inspired by merely physical attraction; and its heroines are not the daughters of refined families, but mostly hetarae, or professional dancing girls.

Lafcadio Hearn
⁹

In theory modern Japanese men, born after the war, had little interest in geisha. But, to my surprise, the most unlikely people, when I told them I was researching the geisha, proved to have connections in the flower and willow world which they were eager to show off. One was a rather louche television producer I knew, in his forties, who one day whisked me off to Kagurazaka, literally “Slope of the Music of the Gods,” in the publishing district north of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. One of his directors came with us; the producer made sure I realized that the geisha connection was his, not the director’s.

The first teahouses in Kagurazaka appeared 150 years ago, around the time that the American commodore Matthew Perry was steaming into Tokyo Bay with his black ships, breaching Japan’s closed society. Its geisha (there were sixty-three when I was there) were noted for their elegance and classy dancing, the producer told me as we clambered up the steep little street, brilliant with neon signs. Along the road were bars, restaurants, and pavement carts selling roasted sweet potatoes and grilled octopus. Red paper lanterns swung invitingly outside closed doors.

Opposite the huge vermilion gates of a shrine we ducked into a shadowy cobbled lane. Around a dark corner, where outsiders would not stumble upon it, was a small wooden house with reed blinds swaying in front of the windows. We stopped to admire the intricate weaving of the blinds, then slipped under the linen curtain at the gate and followed stepping stones through a narrow mossy garden to a sliding door.

Inside was a room just big enough for eight customers to sit squashed on high stools along two sides of the bar. The master of the house, a beaming, burly man in a bright red collarless shirt, greeted us. He and Kurota-san, my host, it transpired, were old college chums—which explained why a modern media executive like Mr. Kurota chose to frequent this particular bar in this particular area. He sat us down, plied us with beer and saké, and set about preparing a nonstop succession of succulent dishes of fish, vegetables, and rice.

The real boss was ensconced at a table in the corner—his eighty-five-year-old mother, tiny, trim, and straight-backed, immaculate in a pale moss-colored kimono and an obi the color of dark moss into which was tucked a fob watch which she consulted from time to time. Her black hair was tied back in a bun, revealing a pinched, sharp-featured face with pale, finely lined parchment skin. In her time she had been one of the most celebrated geisha in Kagurazaka and was still a power in the geisha union, Kurota told me, sotto voce. Behind her, taking pride of place on the wall, was a painting of Mount Fuji rising out of gold-tinted clouds with a personal inscription by a famous artist of half a century ago.

“He was one of my lovers,” sniffed the old geisha. “He painted it for me.”

Another group of four businessmen crowded in, filling the tiny bar. Beyond were a couple of tatami rooms, the sliding doors removed from their grooves to make one big open-plan space, where two parties of rowdy businessmen were gathered, enjoying a noisy night out. As the saké flowed, the voices and laughter grew deafening.

Kurota and his friend, loosening their ties as their faces flushed, were quizzing me about the Beatles as they picked at morsels of trout, boiled green soya beans, and tiny beautifully cut vegetables. They were in gray suits with uninspired haircuts though, as media men, they were allowed a degree of wackiness not granted to more buttoned-up executives. In any case, they were off duty, and off duty, once they have consumed a little saké, Japanese men are adept at throwing aside barriers.

“I’m not going to ask your age,” began Kurota with a cheeky sideways glance. “But which musical era do you remember best? The Beatles? The Rolling Stones?”

“Oasis,” I lied. “Blur, Suede, Primal Scream—they were around when I was young.”

The master joined in. He had a comical, weathered face. He had gone into the fashion business, then ran a restaurant, and finally came home to help his mother with her bar.

“I wish I knew who his father was,” Kurota confided under cover of the noise. “Must have been someone famous.” Famous or not, the master was a joker.

“Do you know what
uzura
[quail] is in English?” he chuckled as he served us a dish of raw grated yam topped with seaweed and raw quail’s egg. “It’s the name of the American ex–vice president—Dan Quayle!”

Everyone laughed uproariously.

“Where’s your wife?” I asked Kurota. Here I was in the great modern city of Tokyo with two well-traveled cosmopolitan television producers. Yet, apart from the old geisha, I was the only woman in the whole place. It was rather rude to ask such a direct question; but enough saké had been drunk and I thought I could get away with it.

“At home, sleeping,” said Kurota, unfazed. “She was a magazine editor until we got married. Then she said, ‘I can’t be bothered to work anymore.’ That’s the way it is with Japanese wives. She stays home, has children, and brings them up. Her world is very narrow—the PTA [Parent Teachers Association] and the parents of our children’s friends; that’s about it. I go out and enjoy myself, then get home late and wake her up and she gets angry. She says, ‘Why did you wake me up?’ and goes back to sleep. In the West, people go to the pub for a drink, then go home, get changed, and go out with their wives. But we Japanese can’t do that, our homes are too far away.”

“That’s why we have geisha,” said his friend, butting in. “Ordinary girls are good at having babies and bringing up children. But geisha are good at chatting. You see this old geisha here . . .”

The old geisha was engaged in some outrageous conversation with the four businessmen, fluttering her fan coquettishly while her tongue rattled wickedly. The men, flushed and shiny-faced, returned her banter, guffawing loudly.

“An ordinary old lady would be very cozy,” Kurota’s friend went on. “But the world she knows is very small and the things she can talk about are very few. Geisha know how to please gentlemen, how to make them have a good time. But they wouldn’t make good wives.”

The day after my memorable evening with Mr. Kurota and his friend, I dropped into his offices to thank him for his hospitality. I started chatting about how much I had enjoyed the meal, the company, the old geisha, and the master with his clowning and jokes. But Mr. Kurota had changed. The affable, chummy character of the previous night, who had ribbed me mercilessly about my age and the Beatles, had disappeared. Brusque and businesslike, he changed the subject. Shortly afterward he growled that he had a meeting and left.

Too late, I realized that I had committed an unforgivable faux pas. Whatever had happened in the night-time world of the geisha happened only there. Whatever one said, whatever one did was forgotten the next day. There were no memories and no repercussions. There was no crossover into the real world.

Two Faces of Womanhood

A practical guide to doing business in Japan, published as recently as 1987, offers advice to the Western executive who is invited to a geisha party. The Japanese host would naturally, out of courtesy, invite his wife too if she is traveling with him. What is the executive to do?

The proper response, advises the author, is to make sure that your wife is otherwise engaged. Buy her a ticket to kabuki or the ballet, then “tell your Japanese contact how sorry your wife is not to be able to accept his kind invitation. He will accept your excuse graciously, with a secret sigh of relief!” He reassures the worried Western wife that nothing untoward goes on at a geisha party. “You are not sending your husband off to a den of iniquity.”
¹⁰

Until Westerners turned up in Japan 150-odd years ago, Japanese society operated in a way that seemed perfectly logical and perfectly satisfactory to its members but from an Anglo-Saxon point of view was inconceivably alien—though Mediterranean peoples might have had less trouble coping with it. Marriage, love, sex, and relationships were all conceived of in a way utterly different from in the West.

Initially, given the superior strength of the West, the Japanese made token efforts to appear to do things our way. But it was not until after the Occupation, when the Americans made a radical attempt to impose Western ways on Japan, that any real change began. Most of the men who frequented geisha houses were young before the Second World War and had grown up with prewar assumptions and attitudes. And even men like Kurota and his friend, born well after the war had ended, still lived their lives largely according to the old patterns.

Japanese wives always joked that when their husbands came home from work in the evening, instead of a sugary sweet “Hello, Darling” and a lingering kiss, as in American movies, they would bark “Tea!” followed not long after by “Bath!” It was not that the wives hankered after heart-on-the-sleeve displays of affection. Far from it. The joke was the contrast between the two radically different styles of behavior.

Once, when I was fresh to Japan and naive about such things, I asked a Japanese man of my acquaintance, a lecturer at a highly esteemed university, how to say “darling” in Japanese.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Well, when you call your wife, what do you say?”

He grinned at me, then bellowed “Oi!” like a sergeant major on a parade ground.

Some years later I was supplementing my income by teaching English to a class of businessmen in Tokyo. Racking my brains for something to discuss one evening, I asked them to list the attributes of the ideal girlfriend. Predictably “beauty” was top of the list, followed by “intelligence,” “sense of humor,” etc. Then we turned to the ideal wife. I was expecting a similar list but to my surprise it was turned on its head. “Healthy body” came top, followed by “good child-bearer,” “good with children,” and “good at housekeeping.” “Beautiful,” “intelligent,” and “sense of humor” were right at the bottom.

“What’s wrong with a beautiful wife?” I inquired, puzzled.

“If you had a beautiful, sexy wife, you’d be in trouble,” volunteered one. “You’d be chasing off other men all the time.” In their eyes wives and girlfriends were entirely different species.