by Ellis Avery
I pulled away. “This is your last clean one, too, isn’t it?”
“Not anymore,” ukako said, putting her finger in her mouth and lifting her skirt-panel so the little spot wouldn’t touch anything else.
Gingerly, so as not to dislodge my new paper diaper, I went to bring her clean water. If I had learned how to move around in a kimono, I could learn how to negotiate this too. “The water in the basin’s red,” I said. “I have to go out to the well.”
“No, look at you,” she said. She stood up.
“It’s just a dot,” I consoled her. “You can’t even see it.”
“Yes you can,” she snapped. She sat down in a ball and hid her face in her bare arms. She sighed. No, she was crying. “I can’t do this,” she whispered. “Go to the well and fill two buckets and bring them back and fill a tub and take off my kimono and soak it and sew myself another one before dinner—” She broke off. Since the students and the sewing-women’s departure, she had tied back her kimono sleeves like a servant and followed Chio’s instructions to the letter, laughing at her own crooked work. Now she sobbed. “I didn’t grow up like this. I’m not ready. I can’t.”
When she wept for Akio at sixteen, Yukako had seemed voluptuous, monstrous, womanly. Now, at twenty, she seemed thin and ashy, all girlish knees and elbows. I touched her tentatively, stroking her back. “Yes you can,” I said gently. “You can get used to anything.”
She looked up; she wore the same face that had frightened me the night she came late from Akio’s. Her forehead was smeared, her eyebrow paint printed on her wrists, a black butterfly. “Maybe you can,” she said.
My mouth fell open as the hard points of her words sank into me. My adaptability endeared me to her, but she did not respect it. This was the side of her that desperation revealed: a person who refused to get used to anything. “I’m not going to do this,” she said calmly. “It’s not my job.”
Hurt, I watched as she untied her work-strings and her long sleeves spilled down. She reached into the brazier and lifted out the round iron kettle, holding it up as if to show me. In the shoji-filtered light, I could make out a pattern of sinuous dragonlike horses, iron on iron. Then a hint of smoke curled up my nostrils and I realized that Yukako was holding her sleeve over the brazier on purpose. “What are you doing?” I demanded.
Though a practical brown cotton, Yukako’s kimono was cut in the showy style of an unmarried girl, her sleeves so long that as she stood there, the tip of a sleeve moved among the coals in the brazier, brushing white ash off their red faces. Her expression as she watched was devoid of anything but curiosity. The long banner of her sleeve smoked and charred, then flamed. It looked like a wing. The smell of burning fabric hit me square-on and lifted me into the air in a rage. I tackled her, using my body and my robe to smother her. “Stupid baka fille!” I screamed in three languages.
Her body under mine was hard and narrow. Soon I would be stronger. I was aware of this, and that as much as I wanted to shake or strike her, I didn’t want to give the fire any air. So I held her, like a stack of drying boards. “Don’t ever do that again,” I panted. The air was quiet except for our frightened breathing. When I thought it was safe, I eased away. My own robe was blackened in places and the room stank.
Yukako blinked, stunned. “Hai,” she said. With deliberation, she drizzled Chio’s tea over the remains of her sleeve to make sure any sparks were out, then attended to me and the floor. A charred fleck of cloth made a smear on the tatami, so she took the whole kimono off, inspecting her obi and sashes for damage as carefully as she had mine. When everything was tidily in place, she tied back her sleeves, knelt formally in her kimono undergown, and addressed me. “I’m sorry.”
For hurting my feelings or nearly killing us both? “Thank you,” I said sullenly.
“It was a stupid thing to do. I suppose we should start work again, no?”
We sewed all afternoon in the waning light, and with lamps into the evening. I sat very quietly with my needle. I didn’t want to cozy up to Yukako: I wanted to watch what she did next. She sat quietly, too, perhaps as afraid of herself as I was.
After night fell, Yukako cleared her throat. “Before the Shin family adopted my father, he was a samurai,” she said, tilting her chin in the direction of Sumie’s house. “You know, when they were boys, their father was rich, but they had to go without food for days. They had to go without sleep for nights. The monks would beat them if their heads drooped. They had to stand under a river.” Yukako paused to explain the word for waterfall. I tried to imagine the Mountain and Sumie’s father as boys, side by side in the drilling cold gallons. “Everything to get strong. But look what happened anyway.”
I looked at her, still shaken. What was she driving at? “It’s easy to be a warrior if there’s no war,” she said softly.
I didn’t understand her. I didn’t want to draw her out. She had scared me, and it was hard to forgive her. She tied a knot at the end of her seam and snipped off the thread. “Women get paid to do this,” she said, as if this thought followed logically on the last.
“Not much,” I said, curious in spite of my anger.
“Not much,” she agreed. “We had a sewing-girl for every student.”
We looked bleakly at the pile of sewing before us. “And as hairdressers,” Yukako said.
“What?”
“And o-Chio sells vegetables from Mr. Matsu’s garden.”
Oh. I followed her again. “Those old ladies digging moss out of the Palace wall last year, they probably got paid.”
Yukako gave me a withering smile. “Yes, and whores and geiko make money too.”
“Wait! Who was that lady at your grandmother’s house when we left? The lady with the raindrop pattern?” I dotted moles on my face with my finger, groping for the word.
Yukako touched her face quizzically. “Oh, hokuro! Yes, that poor kuge woman; it’s just the same as before the war; she’s still going from house to house teaching music…”
Sumie’s baby sister, like Yukako, like any samurai girl, studied flower-arranging and shamisen. Even now? From what I heard, Akio’s father was that foolish, selling most of his fine horses to pay keep for a few, but the Pipe Lady’s family too? “You mean they sold the screen and they’re still paying for music lessons?”
Yukako looked at me hard. “Why, yes, they are,” she said. She unwrapped her bound finger and looked at her hands in the lamplight.
On the walk home that night, dressed in one of Yukako’s bathhouse robes, I saw Chio give me an appraising look. “It’ll be hard to find a husband for you,” he finally said as we walked some distance behind Matsu, “considering”—she gestured toward the Shin house to avoid speaking of their misfortune—“and considering”—she gestured toward my queer, big-nosed, droop-eyed face, to avoid speaking of its lack of appeal. With a flash of anger, I thought of Yukako setting her sleeve on fire. I could so find a husband; I could leave; let Yukako pay for her stupidity without me. But then I thought of Matsu snoring, the hair in his ears and nostrils. “I can wait; it’s all right,” I said. Chio nodded grateful approval.
When I came home, Yukako was kneeling in her room with all her silk robes laid around her. She looked up at me and nodded a tiny greeting bow. “Do you remember the way to Koito’s house?”
10
1870
EVEN MORE THAN their beauty, geisha were known for their style. The morning after Yukako burned her sleeve, I shied from her touch. Still shaken, I dressed myself alone for the first time, struggling with my robes and ties. Yukako watched me coolly in her mirror as she painted on her eyebrows. “Not bad,” she said. I could tell she was unhappy with the results, but I didn’t want her help. I yanked and pushed, sweating into my gauze undershirt, and at length she rose. “May I?” she said, in a voice that brooked no refusal. She retied my obi knot and gave it a final pat. “I need you to look good today.”
Koito’s neighborhood, Pontocho, stood across the river from Gion, anothe
r geisha quarter. During the heady time when both the Emperor and the Shogun lived in Miyako, and the years of intrigue that preceded it, the southern rebels—among them, the man who would become the prime minister—drank and plotted in Gion, on the soft slopes of Maruyama, while the Shogun’s loyalists held their parties—and their secret meetings—by the river in Pontocho. Now, since the war, most Gion geisha, including the woman who would become the prime minister’s wife, had followed their patrons to Tokyo, while most Pontocho geisha had stayed behind to mourn men dead or in exile. Only a few lucky ones still had patrons in newly named Kyoto, selling off their treasures one by one.
I walked the single slender street of the unlucky quarter, my wooden sandals clopping on the packed earth. The few other sounds seemed especially loud: a dog trotting up the street behind me, its toes clicking; an old woman splashing water across her stone threshold with a ladle. We both looked up at the sound of a single musician in an upstairs room, rending the street with a wail. A grim look flickered across the old woman’s face as she gave the stones a final splash. And then someone stepped out of a fan shop: I almost shouted. “Miss Inko!”
Koito’s servant wore the same yellow plaid obi as she had four years before. She recognized me. “Are you still with Miss Koito?” I asked. “May I follow you to her house? My Young Mistress wanted to see her—”
“Wait, slow down,” said Inko. Her eyes widened as I explained myself. Yes, she still served Miss Koito. “But we moved in with her mother. You’re lucky you saw me. I’m only here because she sent me out for this—” She pointed at her fan-shop package. “Do you have time to follow me? It’s a long walk.”
I was lucky. There was a family altar by the fan maker’s house: I left a little coin in the box and went with Inko north again. “After you?” she said.
She was offering, I realized, to walk behind me, attentive to the difference in our mistresses’ rank. It seemed silly: I didn’t know where I was going. “Let’s walk side by side,” I said. She gave me a surprised smile. We walked almost three miles north and west to the weavers’ quarter: I heard the sound of beating looms. When a great leafy shrine grove came into view, we turned onto a street of pretty townhouses bursting with screeches and twangs. The discord of women practicing many different tunes on many different instruments was welcome after the sour damp silence of Pontocho. “Here we are,” said Inko. “Kamishichiken.”
“Kami Seven Quarter? Kami, like gods? Hair?”
“Kami like north, silly,” Inko chuckled. “A long time ago the shrine hall burned down in a fire,” she explained, pointing to the nearby grove. “When they rebuilt it, they used the wood left over to build seven geiko houses.”
Oh: the Northern Seven-House Quarter. “It looks different here.” The buildings were unusual—tall, like temples, but close together like city homes: for a moment I could have been in New York. As we approached one of the long-faced houses, I heard a woman singing with a hand drum upstairs. “Young Mistress’s mother,” Inko whispered. “The best dancer of her generation.” I understood the word only later, when I asked Yukako: what I had heard was that Koito’s mother was the best dancer of her height, and I had tried to picture a very tall or very short geisha.
“I’ll do what I can,” said Inko. She brought in the little parcel Yukako had sent with me for Koito, had me wait on the cloakroom bench with a cup of tea, and ten minutes later reappeared. “Can Young Mistress Shin come tomorrow?”
WHEN THEY FACED each other for the first time since that rainy night years before, Koito again stood a step higher, looking down from inside the tatami-floored house while Yukako looked up from the packed-earth cloakroom. For a moment they simply looked at each other, the beauty and the colt. Yukako, holding in her tight jaw and sucked-in breath all the nights she’d spent awake hating this woman, had grown thinner and harder in four years, while Koito seemed as fresh and smooth as before. “Come in, come in,” she said, after kneeling to bow her greetings. “You’ll settle a quarrel between me and my mother. She insists that these sweets are from Toraya and I’m convinced that they’re from Tawaraya. We need an expert.” I’m guessing this is what she said; she used the baroque speech of the singing-girls. What I heard clearly were the names of the two confectionery shops most relied upon by the Shin family. I think it was a ploy to make Yukako relax her guard: sweets had worked on me four years before; they worked on Yukako now.
I think Yukako imagined icily transacting her business with Koito in the cloakroom in a matter of minutes, to minimize her humiliation; she gave me a backward glance as Koito solicitously whisked her inside. What were they saying? I wished I’d gotten a second look at Koito’s ensemble, instead of just a flash of pink and gold. I’d been too absorbed in looking at her face in that first moment as she registered Yukako’s unease: though pleasant, it made me think of a Noh theater mask, white and impassive even without the thick layer of paint she’d worn for Akio. I was sitting with Yukako’s two kimono, primed to get an eyeful the next chance I had, when Inko appeared and asked me to bring in my package.
I followed her to the room of honor by the garden, its shoji doors thrown open to the blooming paulownia tree outside. In a vase in the display alcove, a slender vine wound about a long white feather, while behind it hung a portrait scroll of a calm, graceful-looking old man with funny frog lips. He had long earlobes like Yukako’s—like the statue in the Shin family shrine! And wait—wasn’t the Shin family symbol a great white bird—a crane? The whole room was a letter to Yukako.
The two women faced each other over a low ebony table, where two steamed bean cakes had dainty crescents slivered out of them. “You can stay,” ukako said when I set the large heavy package down beside her. Flustered, I knelt, eyes fixed on the brocade edges of the tatami matting as Koito refused politely twice, as was customary, and then refused a third time. I had never actually heard someone decline a gift a third time, though I knew to do so meant a real refusal. I felt Yukako startle. I looked up.
Koito was layered inside the most brilliant, yet subtlest, plumage the new aniline dyes had to offer. While Yukako bloused up her long kimono at the waist like any practical samurai daughter, Koito’s skirts trailed behind her on the tatami like a fine lady’s; in deference to the season, she wore a robe of peonies—gold-green leaves and creamy pink petals—on a slate field. It was part of a set of five robes; I could see the nested vees of color where the collars of her underrobes were exposed: pale green, deep green, fuchsia, saffron. She wore a gold-on-gold obi in a pattern of feathers, with a deep-pink accent cord and dappled undersash. Clearly she didn’t need Yukako’s kimono. Her complexion was pearly and fine, her expression, as she threw Yukako’s offering back in her face, was not cruel but serious. “I have another idea,” she said.
Yukako listened as Koito wove her proposal in flowery, sidelong phrases. I had no idea what she was saying—conditional verbs, the words art and treasure—but Yukako understood, and knifed a brusque word through the web. “Absolutely not.”
A direct no? I recoiled from the insult, but Koito calmly sipped her tea, Noh-faced, half smiling. My heart beat as fast as it had two days before, when Yukako burned her sleeve. You stupid stupid! How could you so affront someone whose help you’ve come to seek? And at the same time, I wondered, what had Koito proposed that would so offend Yukako? Did she offer to auction off Yukako’s purity? (At fourteen, I knew from bathhouse gossip that a girl’s junketsu was her treasure, and that whores sold theirs—this last repeated with disgust and fascination—but I was a little hazy on the details.) Was my sensible older sister being tempted into a glittering life of sin? Could I go with her?
Koito set down her cup and fired her dart. “Your grandmother taught temae after all, you know.”
Yukako’s spluttering cough dispersed my lurid fancy. The air in the room changed. Yukako gathered herself, stunned. “Indeed.”
“Yes, she taught your mother.”
Koito spoke again, like quick plucked strings. I h
eard secret, and kohki—a word for aristocratic or for opportunity. Yukako had her eyes lowered to the table; she absentmindedly thrust at her sweet with its spicewood pick and ate it in large bites. Koito changed the subject. “In any case, I’ll draw you a map,” she offered. “Shall I send Miss Inko along with you?”
A map? To what? And how would Inko help? I didn’t know; I just heard that Koito was offering one favor piled up on another, and I watched Yukako as she weighed her trepidation about a new place against her distaste for being indebted to this woman. I’m not afraid, her face said. “I can manage,” she decided.
Koito’s eyes lit, briefly, with respect. “As you wish.”
I FOLLOWED YUKAKO down the long way to Pontocho the next day. She gave me her sunshade to hold and squeezed my hand a little by the pawnshop door, as if I were the one who was nervous. I heard an old man’s voice within, and the tick-tick of abacus beads. Upon leaving, Yukako glided quickly through the quarter, her face hidden by her parasol. She took the river route home. I know it was a pawnshop because I had to carry the bundled kimono on the way downtown, but carried nothing on the way home. “Did he give you a lot of money?” I asked.
“Some.”
“Will you spend it on music-teacher lessons from Miss Koito?”
“They’re not for sale,” she said. “I’m going to see if we can’t hire Chio’s daughter back, for a spell.”
“Are we going back to Miss Koito’s house?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Was that a picture of your ancestor she had in the alcove?”
“Yes,” ukako said impatiently, her voice flat and cold. She halted, spread her empty carrying-scarf on the stone embankment, and sat down. I knelt on the cloth beside her, looking down at the Kamo River, and across it at Daimonji, the green hill with the kanji for great carved in its side: dai. Large quick waterbirds blinked in and out of sight, snatching fish out of the river. Yukako threw them a toasted sembei now and then. At first the bits of rice cracker flew up, then arced down, but once the birds took note, they snapped up each cracker before it even reached the top of its tossed arc. We watched the river and the birds, their fluid white flickering bodies. They were wind made flesh. Then Yukako tossed a stone, and a bird snatched it from the air, unharmed. Her face hardened. “Yes!” she hissed, fierce and bright. “I’ll do it.”