by Ellis Avery
THE FIRST TIME THEY GAVE a music lesson, at the enormous house of one Lord Mitsuba, Koito and Yukako split the few coins half and half. When I followed Yukako home, the tassels of her obi cord bounced with pleasure as she walked. After that day, she would spend the money on Kuga’s wages or better food for the household, or simply tucked it away—For Father, she’d say—but that first time, she bought herself dango, rice flour balls skewered on a stick, grilled and slathered with sticky sweet sauce and toasted soy powder. She ate a whole skewer and bought another for me.
“It would take dozens of lessons to make what I got for one kimono,” she mused, after we stopped to greet the Pipe Lady. We sat on a bench by the moon-viewing pond, watching the sun ruffle the water. I saw fewer carp than usual: could the Pipe Lady’s family have been eating them? And yet they’d just recently paid to march in one of the summer festivals. Just so, the Mitsubas—their house, though grander than Sumie’s, in a far greater state of disrepair—had paid for music lessons. Yukako looked at the coins in her hand and tucked them back into her sleeve. “This is less money than I go out with to the market every day. But still…” she said.
“It’s different?” I thought of her burning sleeve in the sewing house.
“Un,” she grunted agreement.
“You sound just like your father when you do that.”
11
1871
THE SUMMER OF MEIJI FOUR, after Yukako and Koito had been exchanging lessons for a year, I turned fifteen and the weather turned brutal. The early-summer rains came and went in a brief hot shimmer. In the weeks that oozed toward Obon, the late-summer festival of the dead, the Kamo River slowed to a crawl, and the Migawa and the Canal Street canal—never deep, except in the rainy season—shriveled to dusty trickles in their banks. Even the moon-viewing pond at Sumie’s house shrank by half. In the Northern Seven-House Quarter, Koito’s mother was among those whose health flagged in the sultry heat.
When she wasn’t running to the doctor for the ailing dancer, Inko would come with us to lessons, trotting along behind me with Koito’s shamisen. Except at the Mitsubas’, the grandest house we visited, Inko could always grease her way out of the cloakroom and into the kitchen, where the other servants would give us cold barley tea and press her for stories about Edo, which she would fabricate marvelously. Inko’s most devoted listener was a wide-eyed old gardener at the house of the Tsutamons, a fine samurai family whose son the Mountain had once taught. (Yukako fretted that she would be recognized each time we called, but the young man never appeared.) Bozu, the Tsutamons’ gardener, was named for his hair cropped short like a monk’s or a Westerner’s; his wife and daughter-in-law had died of cholera, and he bounced his tiny grandson on his back as if perpetually surprised by the boy’s existence. “Is it true, in Edo a monk burned his own temple?” he said.
“I know for a fact,” Inko said, though she didn’t, “that he did it after he saw a phoenix in a dream.”
“No, what I heard was he did it when the Emperor passed by with his hair cut short like a foreign devil,” said the cook, giving Bozu’s shorn head a playful cuff.
“And is it true he committed suicide after?” asked the gardener.
“Who wouldn’t, huh?” said Inko.
I liked it when we went to the Mitsubas’ and waited quietly, as we’d been instructed, on the bench in the dim stone-floored cloakroom. We sat fanning ourselves with stiff paper paddles, making faces at each other when the Mitsuba girl played her lessons wrong, chatting in low voices. She loved it that I was as gullible as Bozu, and I played it up to entertain her. “How come everybody gets a new name except me?” I asked one day. “My mistress, your mistress, even you, Miss Namiko.”
“But Namiko’s my real name,” she laughed.
“Liar.”
“No, it is,” she insisted.
“Then who’s Inko?”
“You don’t really think anyone’s parents would name them Inko, do you?” And there I was, giving her that baffled look she loved to mock. “You do!” Sheltered girls were called “daughters kept in boxes,” but in Inko’s opinion, I lent new meaning to the phrase. “Born in a box,” she sighed. “Have you ever seen an inko? It’s a kind of noisy bird.”
“Oh, like you,” I teased.
“You bet,” she said, cawing like a parrot while I tried not to laugh too loud.
I had no hope of impressing her, but she liked me anyway. “Namiko’s pretty,” I said, looking away. “Inko too.” I still wore my hair in a knot held up with a pin: a style for girls past childhood but too young to be worth spending money on a hairdresser. At that moment my bun gave itself up to gravity and the sticky heat that weighed on the city. I took down my hair and Inko reached for it. Lifting my hair with one hand, she fanned the back of my exposed neck as I sat limp-armed and grateful. “Soft,” she whispered.
AS WE PASSED from unlined garments into the gauze of highest summer, I knew Yukako wanted to start teaching music lessons herself, but pride prevented her from asking. Koito, for her part, seemed subdued and distracted, and when she pronounced Yukako ready to trade places, it was with an air of embarrassed surprise. In fact, two days before the Obon festival, when Koito announced to Mitsuba that her little girl was ready to work with the great “Migawa Yuko” herself, she seemed positively gray. Yukako shone that day, coaxing the little girl through her tune as if she’d been born to the task. Even one as indifferent to Japanese music as I (alone in the cloakroom, wishing Inko had come too) could hear that all Yukako’s work was paying off.
After we left, Yukako kept looking back at Koito for some nod, some grunt, some sign of approval. When I congratulated her, as I often did, she looked over to see if Koito would, too, but the older woman remained stony-faced for so long that Yukako finally turned, asking plaintively, “Sensei, I did badly?” Koito’s shamisen case dropped to the ground and her head and shoulders slumped forward.
I went to catch her: was she fainting in the heat? “Sensei, do you want some ice?” I asked. “Some cold barley tea?”
“That was so selfish of me,” apologized Yukako, fanning Koito with her hands, “I had no idea.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” said Koito as we steered her to a bench under a red parasol. It belonged to a stall that sold nothing but shaved ice with syrup, so we got her a bowlful. “It’s all right, I don’t need this, I’m so sorry,” she kept fluttering, but then sighed, rested a hand on her chin, and took a bite. “Oh, it’s good.”
Koito gazed at the sweat forming on the sides of her lacquer bowl. Yukako and I traded an anxious look. “We have the one lesson tomorrow with the Tsutamon family and then none for a few days, because of the Obon festival,” Koito said.
Yukako looked puzzled. “Yes?”
“I think Miss Ura should stay at my house tonight, if it’s all right,” Koito decided.
“What? Why?”
“If need be, she can come tell you to go to teach without me tomorrow,” she said heavily. “My mother may not last the night.”
“Ara!” gasped Yukako. She said all the pained helpless things one says, and then asked, “What are you doing here at all?”
“She asked me to do what I do every day. Otherwise…” oito’s voice wavered.
“I’m so sorry,” said Yukako.
“So,” said the geisha briskly, “unless Miss Ura comes to find you, tomorrow morning at my house?”
Yukako looked back twice with worry as she walked away.
I HAD SEEN KOITO’S mother Akaito once, during the short rainy season that year, not long after a heavy storm leaked into a closet in Yukako’s upstairs room. While clearing it out, Yukako found the brown dress my mother had once made me, trimmed in velvet and reeking of smoke. Through my closed eyes, I could see my mother, my uncle, my little brown-kerchiefed doll. Mott Street, the nuns, the ship, the fire. I stood still a long time with the dress held at arm’s length.
“Put it on?” ukako begged. I hadn’t grown much in height since I was ni
ne, but I had filled out dramatically in the last year: the fabric strained over my new breasts and hips. Who is this? I gasped, looking down at the young woman in my dress. I felt a wave of sadness that my mother had never known me in this body, that I had grown without her. Yukako clapped her hands with delight. “Show o-Chio!” she insisted.
I felt hot with embarrassment and old grief, but I hadn’t seen her so giddy in years. Relenting, I started down the stairs to the kitchen, and suddenly found myself face-to-face with the Mountain. “What’s this?” he exclaimed. Stitches popping, I scrambled back up the stairs. I’ll never wear this dress again, I thought, peeling it off as carefully as possible. I folded it up and combed through the wet things dragged from the closet, fruitlessly searching for my Saint Claire medal. I had asked Yukako and Chio about it years before, once I had the words in Japanese: they had seen neither medal nor chain.
Whenever we went to Koito’s house, Yukako exercised her privilege as sensei to choose the scroll for the display alcove, hanging a different treasure from the Shins’ storeroom tower for each lesson. A few mornings after the storm, when Koito and I entered and bowed with our fans before the alcove to appreciate the flower and scroll, I gasped. Then Koito and Inko gasped as well.
Yukako had hung my dress in the alcove. Inko asked permission for something, and Koito nodded her away. We stared.
Sometimes, in place of a scroll, a painting appeared in the alcove, or a beautiful statue, an Ainu tribal mask, or even a piece of driftwood, magnificently rotted into lace. Was my dress such a precious find? With my fan before me and my hands and body bent precisely into an art-appreciation bow, kneeling by Yukako, all triumph, and Koito, all curiosity and frank appraisal, I looked at my mother’s handiwork on the wall, hanging like a primitive artifact. I felt a great emptiness and, surrounding it, a crust of pride, of indignation, of grief, of shame.
“You wore this?” Koito asked. “Would you wear it for us now?”
“No,” I said.
And then I was spared from saying more by the woman who swept in: the most beautiful old lady I’ve ever seen in my life. Not much younger than the Mountain, in a royal blue robe with a wadded russet train, with Yukako’s height and Koito’s bearing, stood the best dancer of her generation, Koito’s mother Akaito. In seconds she observed the way we were sitting, knelt on the floor with her arms bent precisely like ours (but with more grace), took in an eyeful of my mother’s dress, bowed, and sailed out, leaving Yukako, stunned and meek, to call after her, “Please, won’t you stay for some tea?”
AND SO I WORRIED about Madam Akaito, too, when Koito asked my Older Sister to let me stay overnight. The doctor—with his servant and his pharmacy chest of little drawers—agreed to sit up with the patient until Koito came home from work, or all night if the fever didn’t break. Koito’s cook and Inko agreed to stagger their trips to the bathhouse so that someone could run up to the sickroom at any time. Before Koito had even finished painting on her lead-white face, the doctor declared the night a safe one for the elderly dancer but agreed to stay regardless: though we kept to our watches, we did so with lighter hearts than expected.
After the doctor’s pronouncement, the curiosity I’d kept tamped down with anxiety flared free, and I made myself as helpful as possible in order to find out what a geisha house was really like.
It was just like any other house I’d seen in Kyoto, wood and straw and ribs of bamboo, the kitchen in a packed earth alley that ran the length of the building. Koito’s mother slept upstairs in a room overlooking the garden, while Koito kept her things just behind the parlor where we held lessons: the milky doors slid open to reveal an inner room I had never seen, a little bower of bright fabric and makeup brushes. Beside a lavish mirror, in its own bed of ash, burned a black pellet of neriko incense, fragrant resin suspended in a ball of honey and powdered shell. An exquisitely pretty little girl named Mizushi came over from the geisha house next door to help Koito as she painted her entire face and shoulders white, leaving a snake-tongue of breathing warm flesh exposed at the nape. Then she painted in a pair of dainty eyebrows and a cherry-bud mouth, a hint of rouge at the cheeks.
After Koito painted Mizushi as well, dabbing red on only the young girl’s bottom lip, a balding old silk-voiced dresser from next door—the only man permitted in a geisha’s house, Inko told me—helped Koito into an extravagantly beautiful costume: a set of five nested robes, the outermost a regal sweep of mountains and waterfalls, heavy with silver thread. At one point Koito pointed to a bundle wrapped in cloth: “Tomorrow’s kimono. Could you help Miss Mizu bring it over?” Between us we could barely carry it, and I understood why Koito needed someone to help her into her night’s ensemble: the kimono weighed a third as much as she did. While Mizushi washed Koito’s brushes and laid them out carefully to dry, a chalk ghost flickering in and out of the room, the dresser arranged the next day’s magnificent robes on a rack to air. “Tomorrow’s kimono, I hope,” Koito corrected herself anxiously.
Once Koito was ready, the dresser fit Mizushi into her kimono as carefully as if he were laying a yoke with balanced pails of water across her shoulders. While Koito looked majestic, like a human painting, Mizushi conveyed a kind of stylized antique cuteness, the long ribbons of her obi hanging untied down her back as if in homage to some long-ago little minx who’d run off before her mother could finish dressing her.
Koito ticked off a series of events and gatherings where they’d been invited to make an appearance, and two parties where they were scheduled to perform, one that called for a shamisen player, and one much later that required a minor dancer. “Little Mizu, take my place,” Koito decided, casting a glance upstairs. “I don’t want to be out so late.”
“Older Sister, truly?” Were they really sisters?
“She won’t fuss if I’m home a little early. You’ve practiced the Hotaru and Miyagino-no dances, haven’t you?”
Mizushi’s deep bow half-hid her excitement—as well as her embarrassment that she owed her pleasure to Koito’s misfortune. “Older Sister, I humbly thank you,” she said.
“Everyone likes a fresh face,” sighed Koito.
“NO, THEY’RE NOT SISTERS,” Inko told me as we walked side by side to the bathhouse. We were the same age, but I felt so much younger. “Little Mizu’s her maiko—her apprentice,” she explained. “She came from Madam Suisho’s house next door. They have so many maiko and we have none, so.” Even though people often didn’t finish their sentences—as a way of showing respect to both listener and subject matter—Inko’s voice was so frank and emphatic that it always surprised me when she broke off like that.
“I’ve never seen her before,” I noted.
“You’ve never been here at night,” Inko said, almost reproachfully.
I didn’t know what to say. “So it’s you, the cook, Miss Mizushi, Miss Koito, and her mother, all living together?”
“Mizu sleeps next door with the other maiko. And the women who do the sewing are next door too.”
I nodded. “So why is your Young Mistress going so many places tonight?”
“She makes a little money every place she’s invited to stop in, more at the parties where she dances or plays. It’s embarrassing, though. For a long time there was so little work, but now”—she tilted her chin back toward the house, looking up toward the sickroom—“people feel sorry for Young Mistress, so the geiko office is booking her at every party in the quarter. But where were they before?”
“That’s hard.”
“Can’t be helped.”
I was walking in an extra bathhouse kimono of Inko’s; when I brought my hand to my face I smelled Koito’s neriko incense on the sleeve, complex and intoxicating. “If Miss Mizushi isn’t her real sister, is Mother”—Inko called the lady of the house Mother, although it was clear they were not related—“her real mother?”
“Sure. But Young Mistress grew up in the biggest geiko house in Pontocho. You saw what happened there when things went bad.”
&
nbsp; “But why didn’t she grow up with her own mother?”
Inko was so unlike Koito I was surprised she’d worked for her all this time. Her speech was so straightforward as she explained things. “Well, fifteen years ago, Pontocho was the highest-ranking geiko district and this one was just a sleepy backwater. Still is. Silk merchants, ho hum,” she sniffed. “Well, at least someone’s making money these days. Young Mistress’s mother wanted her girl to have chances she wouldn’t have here, so she adopted Young Mistress out to the best house in Pontocho. She gave her daughter a name she could keep if she wrote it a different way.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She explained it to me once. Mother’s name is Akaito, Aka-ito,” she said, sounding out the two separate kanji. The name meant, literally, Red Thread.
“So Miss Koito’s kanji is Ko-ito? Ko like small?”
“Exactly.” The name meant Little Thread. “But you can also read it Ko-i-to.”
“What is that?”
Inko said ito a different way, so that it meant Famous Beginning. “Her Pontocho mother’s name was Izakura,” Famous Cherry. “And there was a Famous Crane, a Famous Maple, and a Little Famous Snow.”
I remembered the day Yukako hung my mother’s dress in the alcove. When we left, Koito stroked my cheek with her thumb. “It’s hard to grow up without your mother,” she’d said. I remembered the queer glance of recognition she gave me when we first met. I said, “But before you came here from Pontocho, Miss Koito’s mother was all alone. Why would she send her little girl away?”