Women of the Pleasure Quarters

by Lesley Downer

  Hanging on the wall was a sumptuous black kimono with a stream in white and pale turquoise swirling across the hem and shoulders. Blossoms and leaves floated along it and there was a stylized bridge across it. There are appropriate kimonos for each season and each event. This was a formal kimono used only for ceremonial occasions. It was made of a light almost transparent silk gauze with a very loose weave called ro, worn in summer.

  Helping Kanosome into the garment, the women tugged the collar and back of the kimono right down to the middle of her back to expose the familiar breathtaking expanse of white skin and the three-pronged tongue of unpainted flesh at the nape of her neck. Tying it in place with ribbons, they took the obi, a weighty band of sumptuous gold brocade and wrapped it round and round her. Then they inserted a cushion to pad the back and tied it all with silken strings so that the two long ends dangled to the floor. They were heaving and tugging so vigorously they had to stop for breath and wipe the sweat from their brows.

  For the final touch, Masami took a small stick of intensely red safflower paste, moistened a thin brush, and carefully painted a tiny petal of red in the center of Kanosome’s lower lip. The upper lip she left white; it is only after a year that the maiko begins to paint her upper lip. Then, after tucking two silver dangling combs into the girl’s coiffure, she handed her a mascara brush and mirror. To everyone’s horror, a black dot appeared on the immaculate white of the face. Masami touched up her handiwork, laughing cheerfully. After all, under all the paint, Kanosome was still a child.

  “What a pretty maiko . . .” said Kanosome’s mother in uncertain tones.

  The teenager had disappeared. In her place was a beautiful painted doll, all lips and eyes etched on the pure white canvas of her face.

  “It’s your own daughter,” smiled the okasan, the proprietress of the house, elegant in a dark blue kimono. Okasan means “mother”; from now on Kanosome would address her by this title. The two mothers could not have been more different. The okasan of the house was slim, elegant, and rather icy, like a nightclub hostess; whereas Kanosome’s real mother was plump, comfortable, and homely. She was giving up one for the other.

  Preparations completed, we swept off to the teahouse, owned by the okasan, where Kanosome was to celebrate the beginning of her professional career as a maiko. The narrow entrance was decorated wall to wall with enormous colorful paintings of the gods of good luck with “Kanosome” brushed in huge black characters on each. Here the family bade her good-bye, watching rather wistfully as she stepped into her high wooden clogs and out into the night.

  “Oki-ni, oki-ni,” she piped, using the Kyoto word for “thank you.” It must have sounded disturbingly affected to her parents’ Tokyo ears. Somehow her demeanor had changed along with her appearance. What on earth had happened to their little girl? She was not even talking the same language as they were anymore.

  Bowing, she set off with her new mother, clattering down the road, her obi swinging heavily behind her. The two would parade through the neighborhood so that Kanosome could be formally introduced to all the teahouse owners. Usually it was a grand parade, the maiko’s moment of glory when, like a Hollywood starlet, trailing a pack of photographers and the odd TV cameraman, she showed herself in all her finery to her public. But the rain had kept the photographers away.

  “You must be proud of her,” said Kanosome’s grandmother to the young father, filming their retreating backs with his video camera.

  “Hmm,” he said slowly. The bland Japanese mask, conveying the illusion that everything is eternally fine, slipped just for an instant. He looked down sadly. “Well,” he said finally. “She really wanted to do it.”

  At the far end of the alley two small figures were silhouetted for a moment, sheltering under a huge oiled paper umbrella, before vanishing from sight around the corner.

  First Steps in the Geisha World

  Harumi was in her second year as a maiko when I met her, even though she was only fifteen. She had wanted to become a maiko so badly that she had left home when she was thirteen to move into Haruta geisha house, and had finished her schooling at the same time as she was beginning her maiko training. I used to see her clip-clopping past my house in her maiko regalia. With her heart-shaped face, large limpid eyes, tiny retroussé nose, and mouth like a bow, she was as perfect as a china doll and the epitome of maiko prettiness.

  I bumped into her when I sat in on classes at the Kaburenjo, the “dance and music practice place” which housed a theater, classrooms, and the offices of the district geisha union. (Despite Mr. Kimura’s intransigence, I had finally managed to gain entry.) Fresh-faced without her makeup, in a plain indigo-and-white cotton summer kimono, she had a simple red ribbon in her waxed hair. She shone in the drumming class where she played the tsuzumi, a small rather beautiful hour-glass shaped drum of gold-painted lacquered wood with a skin made from the hide of a young horse. Looking straight ahead impassively in the prescribed fashion, she rested it on her right shoulder, held it in place with her left hand and beat out a rhythm with the fingers of her right, breaking into a childish giggle when she made a mistake.

  There was something irresistibly attractive about maiko with their combination of little-girl cuteness and teenage vulnerability beneath their archaic coiffures. But they were the most difficult of all to meet; regarded as children, they were fiercely protected by the geisha house mothers. It was also difficult to be invited inside a geisha house. After all, these were private homes, where the geisha and maiko lived. Even when I visited a teahouse, theoretically open for business, I never got further than the home bar, the equivalent of a Victorian parlor, at least for the first few weeks.

  I was curious to venture a little deeper inside this world. Who were these little girls I saw flitting about the streets like butterflies? Why had they chosen this anachronistic lifestyle when so many other options were open to them? What were their day-to-day lives like? Did they have regrets about what they had given up? But the doors always seemed to be closed and I dared not knock too insistently. It was not until I had become a familiar face in the geisha world that one day a geisha, who had befriended me at the local coffee shop, suggested casually that I should meet her neighbor. Thus it was that I ended up sliding open the door of the Haruta geisha house where Harumi lived.

  The Haruta house was a big rambling chaotic house with a yapping lapdog and a constant stream of visitors. Haruta-san herself, the “mother” of the house, was a large, expansive, open-hearted woman who had had, as she told me, a tough life.

  She had been born fifty-two years before in the rural impoverished island of Kyushu, the love-child of a geisha and a wealthy landowner. Her father took her into his household but from the start she was relentlessly bullied by his seven other children. When she was ten she ran away to look for her mother.

  But the mother, who had long since married and had other children, was far from pleased to see her. She told the child that she had not even wanted to have her. She had fallen downstairs to try to induce a miscarriage when she was pregnant with her. She beat her, treated her like a housemaid, and refused to let her go to school, then sold her to a hospital where she was forced to wash filthy rags from morning to night. After four years of utter misery, young Haruta found some pills and swallowed three hundred, hoping to kill herself. She was found, revived, and taken back to Kyushu by her mother’s sister. But at fourteen, she was barely educated; she had missed four years of schooling. And there was no work to be found in Kyushu. Her life still seemed hopeless.

  There was nothing for it but to go back to Osaka and look for work in the “water trade,” the Japanese term for the sex industry. She found a job in a “cabaret,” a low-grade bar not far removed from a brothel. There she became friendly with a woman who was the girlfriend of a Kyoto textile merchant. She persuaded Haruta-san to try the life of a geisha. With the merchant as her guarantor, Haruta ended up in a geisha house in Kyoto. Once again she was at the bottom of the heap, tormented and bullied
. But nothing could be as bad as what she had already gone through. She persevered and in the end inherited the name, the house, and the business.

  The geisha world had been her salvation. When I met her she was the comfortable mother hen to a brood of maiko and geisha, including a couple of children of her own, happily established in Kyoto’s world of women.

  “I’m very kind to the maiko and geisha,” she confided. “That’s not to say I’m not stern. They have to learn to behave properly. But I would never, never treat anyone the way I was treated.”

  Harumi, the youngest maiko in the house, took me upstairs to show me the room she shared with Haruka, her “older sister.” Japanese rooms are usually cramped and tatty but theirs was large, spacious, and airy with fresh tatami matting on the floor, smelling of rice straw. From the open window you could see the tiled roofs of the neighboring houses and the narrow street outside. The room was full of little-girl clutter—piles of stuffed animals, toys, dolls, a bookcase full of books, magazines, and comics and a large mirror which ran the length of one wall, like in a theater dressing room, with drawers underneath it filled with brushes and tubs of unguents and makeup. There were photographs of pop stars, famous geisha, and several pictures of the Hollywood star Leonardo di Caprio pinned along the top. Filling the wall above it was an enormous poster of Masahiro Nakai of the fabulously popular singing group SMAP, heartthrob to millions of Japanese teenage girls.

  Despite her little-girl looks, Harumi was unusually grown up and confident for her age. Maiko often are, perhaps because they leave home so young. She sat on her heels, cuddling the house cat, a tawny-eyed tortoiseshell, and chatted cheerfully in her piping voice, using the quaint, rather stilted Kyoto dialect and geisha forms of words. In her spare time she loved music and films, she told me. She had seen the film Titanic on video four times and adored the star, Leonardo di Caprio. Or she went shopping with a schoolmate who had become a maiko at the same time as she had.

  “Ever since I was ten I’ve yearned to be a maiko,” she piped, smiling prettily. “I would see them sometimes on television and once when we came to Kyoto on a school visit, walking along the street. They looked so beautiful in their kimonos! I dreamed and dreamed of looking like them. I’ve always loved to wear a kimono.”

  Her father, a carpenter, was strongly opposed to the notion of any child of his taking up such a profession. It would also mean that she would have to give up her formal education long before high school. But her mother, a taxi driver, thought it was a good idea.

  “She thought it would be good for me to learn good manners, like going to finishing school. It would help me when I got married.”

  In the past, children sold into the geisha districts often had to work as maids for years. They lived in the geisha house, being treated like dogsbodies but getting the chance to have the patina of the geisha world rub off on them. For Harumi her period as a shikomi (literally “in training”) or tamago (“egg”) lasted just six months. Like the child-maids in the old days, she did a little cleaning, ran errands, and helped the maiko and geisha dress. As in any traditional Japanese apprenticeship, the real purpose was for her to absorb the atmosphere of the house, get a feel for how things were done, and get used to the notion of discipline.

  But the most difficult thing to get used to was wearing traditional Japanese clothing. Instead of running around in jeans or a skirt, like any modern Japanese child, suddenly she was spending her days in a yukata, an ankle-length kimono-like garment that wrapped her knees like a bandage. She also had to hobble around on wooden clogs or dainty slippers so short her heels hung off the back. Her hair, which she tied back in a ponytail, grew wild and shaggy as she coaxed it to become long enough to sculpt into the maiko’s coiffure. And whenever she made the tiniest mistake, someone would be sure to snap at her.

  “Everyone corrects you,” she remembered. “Every person I spoke to told me off every single time I made a mistake. It was so hard to bear!”

  The first thing she had to learn was to speak Kyoto dialect and use the archaic geisha vocabulary. It was like losing all trace of her former self, even the way she talked, which marked which area of the country she came from and what class she was. She also began to learn the gracious ways of the geisha world. Bowing, greeting, speaking in a high-pitched, girlish voice had to become second nature for her. For a start, she had to memorize the names, ranks, and position in the hierarchy of everyone in her geisha district. As she flitted down the narrow lanes, she was eternally bowing and greeting each person that she met with “Ohayo san dosu.” This means “Good morning,” but the words and tone are infinitely softer than the standard Japanese “Ohayo gozaimasu.”

  Every maiko told me the same thing: the worst aspect of the new life was not the dance and music classes, not leaving home and living apart from one’s family, but “human relations”—learning to fit into the geisha community. They had to learn, as I myself had, to put up with being at the very bottom of the geisha hierarchy and to accept without ever answering back the harsh words and endless sniping of the vinegar-tongued “older sisters,” some of whom were in their seventies and eighties. As they said in the geisha world, if someone told you that grass was black, ordinarily you would say, “Don’t be so stupid, of course it isn’t, it’s green!” But a would-be maiko had to learn to agree very quietly that it was indeed black, a wonderful shade of black; in fact she couldn’t imagine why she had never noticed before.

  Throughout the training period the matriarchs—the “mothers” and the “older sisters”—kept a close eye on Harumi’s progress and on her developing skills in language, manners, and the all-important “human relations.” They also got together with the teachers to discuss her aptitude for the various arts. During the mornings she attended normal school, finishing off her standard education, and in the afternoons went to the classrooms in the Kaburenjo to take her first classes in dancing, singing, and playing the drum, flute, and shamisen.

  Then came a dance test to assess her progress as a shikomi. It was the first time Harumi had ever performed in public. Worse still, she had to dance before an audience of the most formidable old ladies of the community. “I was so nervous,” she remembered with a giggle, “having to dance all alone before such important people!”

  That first hurdle overcome, Harumi was ready for the next—minarai, “learning by observation.” Now, for the first time, she would have the thrilling experience she had been dreaming of for so long. She would put on the mask, she would see the alabaster face which henceforth she would present to the world.

  But she was still not yet a maiko. To indicate the lower rank, her obi was only half the length of a maiko’s obi, stretching not from neckline to ground but only to the back of her knees. Woven into it was the crest of the Haruta house.

  “I was so nervous when I went to o-zashiki for the first time,” she said in her little-girl falsetto, stroking the cat and tickling it under the chin. (O is an honorific, zashiki literally means the tatami room where the party takes place.) “I wondered what I should say to the customers. The older sisters helped me. They told me I must pay attention to the customers’ saké cups and fill them quickly so they were never empty. I was so nervous I just sat still, I dared not say a word. The customers told me I looked like a doll! The hairstyle felt so strange. My head was heavy, I could hardly keep it balanced. The kimono felt so heavy too. It was hard just to walk. And when I had to walk in okobo, I thought I would fall! Now I’m used to them. Now I can run in them.”

  She showed me the bolster-shaped lacquered wooden pillow, rounded on the bottom and padded on the top, on which she had to rest her neck to prevent her hair getting mussed. It looked like a medieval torture device. In the past house mothers used to spread brown flaky rice husks under the pillow. If a girl’s head slipped even for a second during the night, the brown flakes would stick to her hair, providing incontrovertible evidence. She would be scolded or worse until she had learned.

  “I hate the pi
llow worst,” she said. “I can’t sleep properly. I have to sleep on my side, I can’t sleep on my back. Then I have to wake up to turn over and change sides.”

  For Harumi, minarai lasted a month, the standard length of time for modern maiko; in the past it might have been a year or more. Every night as she slept her head rolled off the high wooden pillow and ruined her hair. Every day she struggled to paint her face, trying to get the surface alabaster smooth and the features perfectly symmetrical; and every day the face turned out different. Whenever she got something wrong, Haruka, the senior maiko, or Haruta, the house mother, snapped at her.

  Finally, dressed in her minarai kimono, she would set off for the teahouse, the minarai-jaya where her training in proper party behavior took place. All evening she attended at parties, watching and listening, learning how to sit, how to behave, how to chat, how to keep the conversation light and entertaining, and assiduously filling saké cups and changing ashtrays. There was little verbal instruction. In the Japanese way, she was expected to watch carefully and learn by observation, absorbing every detail of this new world.

  chapter 4

  male geisha and dancing girls

  of the eighteenth century

  Wine and women

  Balm for the soul,

  This floating world is

  Women and wine.

  Geisha song 1

  Shichiko the Male Geisha

  The first time I met Shichiko he looked like a very conservative Japanese man. He wore the traditional outfit of baggy trousers and a cotton jacket, all in moss green, immaculately pressed, and carried a fan which he tapped prissily on the table whenever he wanted to make a point. But then I happened to glance at his feet. He was wearing tabi, toed linen socks which Japanese men traditionally wear indoors. Tabi are always white—except for Shichiko’s. His were an intense shade of royal blue covered with dragonflies. And, despite all his attempts to look serious and solemn, a smile or even a laugh kept breaking out across his horsy jut-jawed face.