by Ellis Avery
Inko shrugged. “Oh, she had other blood daughters, other geiko daughters, other maiko. Why, Mizushi used to live here. But remember when they kept changing the era name every year? Mother Akaito had one misfortune after the next. And then two of her girls died in the sickness, one right after her debut as a maiko. Mother had to borrow so much money from Madam Suisho next door. Then doctors’ bills and hard times, so.”
“Ah.”
“Well, one by one, she had to sell off all her girls’ contracts. Now Young Mistress will get everything, the house, the debts, and all.”
“Once I heard her say she had no tree to shade her.”
“Well, she can keep the house and take out a long contract with Suisho, make up the debt that way, I guess. Or she can sell the house to Suisho and find some geiko house to live in as a free agent. Suisho would take her, I think, but…”
“Poor Miss Koito,” I said.
“Poor everybody,” she agreed. The way she said it, I wanted to ask her more, but we’d arrived at the baths.
I was used to the bathhouse at home, and the people there were used to my bulbous body and misshapen face. Though Miss Hazu and her friends, now growing breasts of their own, sniggered at me, the adults respected Chio too much to say anything and the children didn’t know any better. At the geisha bathhouse, however, everyone took in the new face with a nod, or often, on closer look, a sneer. “She’s my cousin,” Inko announced, when people stared. “She’s visiting.” Still feeling their eyes, I hurried through disrobing and scrubbing, then sat like a lump, hunching over my ugly new breasts while Inko chatted with everyone who walked by. “What are you waiting for?” she asked.
I looked over toward the hot bath. “I didn’t want to get in there alone.”
Inko ladled a last rinse across her back and stood. She wore an unmarried woman’s hairstyle under a tented white cloth. Slim and sinewy, she had no hips at all and breasts that barely swelled beneath their brown tips. “You’re fat,” she mused, looking down at me. “They must give you better food over there.” The way she said it, fat didn’t sound so bad. She held out a hand for me to take and hauled me up off my stool. She stood with her arms akimbo, giving me a careful look with her close-set eyes. “It’s funny, though, your middle goes in as much as mine,” she said, poking a spot on the undifferentiated rectangle of her torso. “It’s like your shape is fat.”
“I want to get in the bath,” I said.
“Sorry.”
I was profoundly embarrassed, but I actually liked the way she said it, that my shape was fat. I sat in the bath with my eyes closed, partly out of shyness at being seen by strangers, partly to tease out what she’d said in private. I remembered ladies’ magazines I’d seen in the ship library when I was a little girl, the advertisements for corsets with their baroque fastenings. It was hard, now, to remember words in English, but I dredged it up: I had an hourglass figure.
The one time my heavy breasts gave me pleasure was when I sat in the hot bath. I would choose the darkest corner of the tub and feel the rare weightlessness as they floated up of their own accord. As I sat in the unfamiliar bathhouse with my eyes closed I felt my breasts lick the surface of the water. I touched my little waist and the fat shape of my hips swelling out from it. The thought was absolutely novel to me: I have a body that a corset would flatter. The word I heard in my mind for corset was korusetto.
The only women I saw with breasts or behinds like mine were stout old grandmothers with bellies to match. Like me—once I correctly padded my waist and middle and the small of my back—they looked blocky in kimono. I envied those taut cylindrical girls at the bathhouse who wore their robes so effortlessly, envied Inko her loud, flat ease in the world: she wasn’t pretty—neither was a crow—but she was as buoyant and raucous, as matter-of-factly unaware of her body. I envied Mizushi the beauty that gilded her ambition with charm. I didn’t envy Koito, though all the teeth felt loose in my head when I looked at her: how can you envy an ideal? I didn’t envy Yukako, exactly, when I watched her dress or followed as she walked, light-boned as a scull: I felt something less petty and more frightening. At night when I waited for her to come up from the bath, I thought sometimes about the long single brushstroke of her body and longed to fit mine to it, to press my moony cow breasts flush against her narrow back and weld them flat at last. But imagine, I thought in that geisha bathhouse, there was a word for my body other than ugly, a barely remembered, barely pronounceable word. A-wa-gu-ra-su. I savored it.
Inko’s deadpan voice, always on the brink of laughter, snapped me out of my reverie. “Once, when we lived in Pontocho, Young Mistress went with some customers on a boat to see the water lilies. This time of year, if you go at night and wait until sunrise, they say you can hear them pop open.”
“Really?”
“Well, I didn’t. I just carried the picnic. And no way they did. They got so drunk, staying up all night singing and composing poems. Young Mistress danced in the boat and one of the men almost pushed her in.”
“No!”
“Yes! But then she told him how much her kimono would cost to replace and that sobered him up. For a little while. Then he started talking all colorful to her.”
“Colorful?”
Inko giggled, her voice dropping. “You don’t have to shout it!”
“I’m sorry,” I said, mortified.
Inko covered my ear with her hand and whispered, “He told her how he wanted to do it to her.”
My eyes went huge and round, but I followed her lead and laughed.
BETWEEN THE DOCTOR and the cook, we weren’t even allowed near Koito’s mother, so we set up Koito’s mosquito netting, spread her futon, and waited up to feed her and help her out of her kimono. We lay drowsing on Koito’s futon with the lamp lit for her, burning a pellet of the rolled incense she used to blow away the smell of her lead paint. Lying next to Inko, I whispered my question. “Did your Young Mistress really have to do it with the man in the boat?”
“No!” nko giggled. “Geiko don’t have to do it with anybody. But when they do actually take a patron, why, there’s so much money involved, it’s a major event! Everybody in the neighborhood talks about it.”
“Ara!”
“Most men, they pay geiko to sing and dance and talk and pour sake so that they can think about it, but then they pay prostitutes so they can do it, since they do like to finish what they start. Really, I think just being around a woman they can’t afford gets them excited.”
“Did she do it with Mr. Akio?”
“What do you think?” Inko rolled her eyes, but I could tell she liked being a know-it-all. “But he was her sweetheart so she did it for free. Madam Izakura was so mad when she found out!”
“Were they really going to get married?”
“I don’t know why she believed him. Those are the oldest lies in the water trade. She says ‘I love you’ so he’ll pay. He says ‘I’ll marry you’ so she’ll do it for free.”
Though I knew we were alone—the cook and the doctor were upstairs with Koito’s mother—now I cupped my hand over Inko’s ear. I was so embarrassed to ask, but I kind of liked being embarrassed in front of her, and I knew if anyone would tell me, she would. “What do they do when they do it?” I whispered.
“You really were born in a box,” Inko said, laughing.
I covered my face with my hand, humiliated. I could feel her gesturing so I made a chink with my fingers and looked. “Ara!” I said, putting it together with the floppy roots I’d seen on the bathhouse men, with what I knew of my own body. Sometimes, when I lay up waiting for Yukako, or when she curved around me spoon-fashion at night, I thought my monthlies were early, but they came clear instead. Giggling in bed next to Inko, flushed, I thought they might be early now. “Have you ever done it?” I asked.
“You’re so bad!” Inko swatted my shoulder, grinning. “Well, there was a boy in Pontocho I liked and we did it once or twice, but then he liked somebody else.”
�
��I’m sorry.”
“It was fun too,” she pouted. “I think my parents have somebody for me to marry when my contract’s over, so I guess I’ll do it a lot then, huh?” She laughed broadly.
“Have you met him?” I asked.
“No, but my contract isn’t up for another year and a half anyway, so who knows what could happen.”
“True.” I marveled at Inko. When Yukako and her father faced their greatest hardship, no one had talked of hiring me out. Could I live like Inko, or like Kuga’s son Zoji, bound for years yet to Akio’s father? Could I be so cheerfully indifferent to my future? I liked the absentminded way she thumbed my wrist as she talked to me.
She flicked me a look I couldn’t read, and said, “There was this girl Fumi, she worked in the Izakura house too. When we left and came here, Fumi’s Young Mistress left too; they went to Edo. I miss her. We used to do it all the time.”
“Excuse me?” My heart froze in my ribs when she said this, the same brash way she said everything else. I pulled my hand away from her.
She looked me in the eye, tough and wounded, and she shrugged. “It’s karma from another life, you know? Can’t help it. I bet she’s married now. She probably has a baby.”
I blinked, still stunned. I knew if I lay quietly, soon we’d talk about babies, or fall asleep. Was that what I wanted? I inhaled. No. I reached over, pushing through air suddenly dense with fear, my own. It was labor; it took forever. I took Inko’s hand. And then, the way I copied Yukako’s every gesture in our lessons, I stroked Inko’s wrist with my thumb, gently and persistently, just as she had mine. I felt her sigh. “What did you do?” I asked softly, as if coaxing a bird from the air.
“Me and Fumi?” I had never seen Inko embarrassed. She looked away, then at me, then away. “Everything,” she said, defensive. But it was a dare too.
I held on to her wrist and I lay there, watching the mosquito netting stir in the rare breeze from the garden. It was difficult to breathe. I remembered myself as a little girl, the way I stood watching the cart in the fire, and then the way I leaped inside. “Misete ne?” I whispered, leaping. Show me.
She smiled a nervy, slack-jawed smile, and then she showed me.
She touched me gently, moved down my body, and fit her head between my legs. At first I lay still, rigid with a terror that felt even larger than that enormous moment, and then I eased into her mouth and the fingers she slid into my body. By the end I felt like there were horses inside me, like I was the horse rearing up in the fire. And then, good tea student that I was, I copied her every gesture, at first afraid of the way she shuddered and sweated, then thrilled. When she rested, I took her in my arms and kissed her. “Why are you doing that with your mouth?” she said, so I stopped. I’d once kissed Yukako good night, and she’d said the same thing.
She didn’t pull away, though. “I like it here,” I whispered, my head pillowed on Inko’s chest, my arm around her waist.
“I think we were foreigners in a past life,” said Inko, lost in thought.
“Why?”
“Well, me because my voice is loud and my father makes foreign food,” she said.
“He does?”
“He has a little tempura place in Pontocho.”
“Oh,” I said, confused. The dish had come to Japan from Portugal so long ago, I didn’t know it was foreign.
“And I think you were one, too, because of that Western wrap your mother dressed you in. You look different too,” she said. “And you walked next to me. Sometimes you don’t remember words for things, and I know that’s from the fire, but maybe it’s because last time around you were a foreigner.”
I laughed nervously.
“And that thing with your mouth,” she said, kissing the air. “Young Mistress told me in the West husbands and wives lick each other’s lips; can you imagine?”
It was difficult enough to imagine what we’d just done to each other, but I laughed with her nonetheless.
FROM OUTSIDE CAME the jingle and clop of hair ornaments and wooden sandals. We tied our splayed robes closed and hurried to the entrance as the slatted gate slid open. When Koito and Mizushi came in, Koito went straight upstairs without changing as we laid out the little meal the cook had left for the two of them: pressed rice, salted mackerel and seaweed, cold barley tea. We helped them undress and spread their robes on racks to air, and then the pair left again in their bathhouse kimono, still ghostly white. “When do they take off their makeup?” I wondered as we spread a futon for ourselves, one step up from the earth-floored cloakroom.
“At the bathhouse.”
“Inko, Namiko,” I said, whispering her real name. Beautiful Plant Child, clad in gold flowers and tender new grass. She felt so known to me, and so new. I folded my arm around her and she held my wrist. “Who did you lose in the sickness?” I asked, remembering something she’d said.
“A little sister and my baby brother. There were eight of us, you know?”
“I’m sorry.”
“My mother stopped having children after that. She made the hairdresser give her a widow’s obako hairstyle and wouldn’t let my father near her anymore.”
“Really?”
“I think she just didn’t want to see any more babies go,” she sighed. I stroked her back. “My brother was just born but my sister could talk by then. She’d wave her little arms and say Onetan! Onetan!” Oh, instead of Onesan, Older Sister. It was as heartbreaking as if she’d said Thithter! Thithter!
“I’m so sorry.”
“It can’t be helped,” she said softly, and I held her.
We lay together quietly for a minute. “I’m sorry your mother dressed you up like that and left you,” Inko said. “And then the fire? How awful.”
“She had the sickness too,” I said. “So.”
“She was doing her best.”
“Sometimes I forget her face a little,” I confessed. “Every time we go to the temple, I pray to remember her better.” My voice began to falter.
Inko touched my face and chided me with the gentlest possible words. “I always pray for the same thing.”
“What?” I asked.
“To be happy.”
KOITO CAME HOME from the bathhouse; I heard her and Mizushi bid each other good night, and then she stepped over me as Inko barred the door.
Once Koito padded upstairs, Inko twined around me. I felt her awareness slacken, now that she’d done the night’s last task. When had the thought crossed her mind, I wondered, that I was someone she would want to touch?
“Inko?” I asked, though I felt her start to drift. “Why did you tell me about the man on the boat, you know, and the water lilies?”
“Because that’s what you were like, floating,” she whispered, cupping my breast by way of explanation. Her palm was so soft, holding me the way the water held me. She murmured something to me, half-asleep: “I would have had the best poem.”
I SLEPT LIGHTLY, confused by the different night noises and by my own astonished body. The day starts later in geisha quarters than in other neighborhoods; what woke me the next morning was the absence of Matsu hauling charcoal, the absence of the pointy-chinned tofu man’s hoarse call. I opened my eyes to Inko beside me and, bedded down next to her, the quilted sleeping bulk of Koito’s cook. I lay awake by Inko, nervous and thrilled, and a little lonely for the sound of Chio yanking pots out of their sockets in the stove, for Yukako’s loamy scent.
I helped Inko with all her tasks that morning, marveling daftly at the shape of her neck and hands. When she looked at me and smiled, I felt her fingers inside.
Koito said there was no need for me to go, and Yukako arrived before the cool of the night had wholly burned off, arms laden with the grasses used to decorate homes for Obon. “Did you sleep last night? How is she? Should we still have our lesson?”
“Miss Inko, take these for now,” said Koito. “Sensei, may I ask you something?” She looked, though lovely, drawn and gray. She’d never used the futon we laid out
for her. “Would you come upstairs with me for a moment? It would mean so much to me. Miss Ura, I’m sorry, would you bring up the tray in the kitchen?”
I knelt in the doorway a minute later, surprised at the tray in my hands. In the earthen-floored kitchen I’d been exquisitely aware of Inko unwrapping the Obon grasses, drawing a foot out of her sandal to scratch her calf with a toe, but I hadn’t noticed that the tray I’d taken held sake and cups. Had I brought up the wrong one? The upstairs room was full, between the doctor and his boy, Koito, Yukako, and the woman on the futon, Akaito. A Buddhist rosary in her limp hand, she lay regal and devastated, with a shipwrecked face and pitted skin. The lead in the white paint, I heard later, takes its toll. She looked at Yukako. “You’re here,” she said.
Koito poured for her mother and her guest. Yukako, as puzzled by sake at a time like this as I, poured for Koito. The three women drank, and Yukako’s eyes blinked open with surprise, then understanding. Curious, I dabbed at a bead of sake on the tray and tasted: water. I’d heard it in stories but never believed that people did this, drank water out of a sake cup to say a last farewell. Perhaps Madam Akaito had grown fond of Yukako’s harsh correcting voice downstairs, the way even the mournful barking of the tofu man meant home to me now.
No one said a word. Madam Akaito’s gaze rested on Yukako. Koito sometimes glanced from one face to the other. Looking past the patient’s ravaged face, I realized that she was not so old as I had assumed. She was much younger than the Pipe Lady, in fact, perhaps in her fifties. I knew Yukako’s mother had borne children late: she and Koito’s mother would have been around the same age. Yukako did not have many women her mother’s age in her life, and certainly no one she looked up to: Sumie’s harried mother was much younger, as was Chio, and I knew neither woman filled her with as much awe as the older geisha. As the three women drank in silence, I remained in place, sometimes listening for Inko in the kitchen below, sometimes wondering what Yukako was thinking. “Thank you,” Madam Akaito said.
I WOBBLED PASSABLY through my tea lesson that morning, my whole body blushing at unexpected moments, and then played guest to Koito’s temae, constantly looking past her to the open doorway to see if Inko would appear. Only two kinds of tea were ever made in tea ceremony: “thin” tea, the foamy broth I had tasted my first morning in Baishian, and “thick” tea, a runny paste of moistened tea powder, kneaded instead of beaten, that made my heart knock loud. Already compromised, I was glad Koito was making only thin tea that day. After I drank, I forgot to ask her to finish, and Yukako didn’t prompt me. When I realized my mistake, I saw Koito was making a second bowl. Grief, weariness, and grace radiated calmly from her as she followed Yukako’s maxims: “Make heavy things look light; make light things look heavy.” The dipper of water was a heavy door she slid shut, the bamboo whisk was a great stone bell. And though she looked at no one, only deep into the tea bowl, I felt her attention focused on Yukako in just the way the Mountain told his students to focus on their guests: for you. All this is for you. She set the steaming tea bowl on the mat beside her, and Yukako watched her without a single harsh word. In fact—I looked closer, surprised—her face held the same compassion, the same hesitant tenderness, she’d brought to Madam Akaito upstairs.