One Hundred and One Ways

by Mako Yoshikawa

  There was a new ungainliness to all of her movements, an almost touching awkwardness that made her mother bite her lip and smile with narrowed eyes. Although the girls in her school giggled, they winced with her, too, when she miscalculated yet again, ramming her chest into the sharp edge of her desk.

  But the men of the village were fascinated by Yukiko’s breasts. Even the local lord, hovering with milky eyes at the fields’ edge, covertly watched them as they bounced by

  That Yukiko showed signs of being a famous beauty at the age of fourteen, after years of almost remarkable plainness, was not really all that surprising, given the peculiar nature of her appeal. Even when she reached her prime, she would not conform to the standard ideals of Japanese beauty. She was too tall; her skin was not white, but olive; her face was too long and her hair, while strikingly lovely, was almost overpoweringly full. Yet she was breathtaking, perhaps all the more because of the slightly foreign flavor of her looks, at fourteen, in the year that spring failed to turn into summer, when the rains came so heavily the roads turned to mud, the walls of her family’s house rotted, and the crops failed.

  In that year of hardship, the peasants elected an envoy to petition the lord for extra money, but their requests were denied and the lord retreated into his house. Yukiko’s younger brother, always sickly, came down with pneumonia and almost did not recover. He crept around the house like a wraith, his kimono hanging loosely on him, dark shadows beneath his eyes. It was the thought of his well-being that kept Yukiko from damning her father forever for the decision he made concerning her fate. For he never gave her a choice about becoming a geisha. On the twentieth windy, rainy day in August, Akiko, acting on his orders, and crying all the while, brushed out Yukiko’s hair, dressed her in a red kimono borrowed from a cousin, and took her to an old woman in the neighboring village, a former geisha, who bought young girls and sold them in Tokyo. Yukiko fetched a high price, enough money to keep her whole family in rice and pickled plums for two years.

  On the day that Yukiko left, her father hugged her hard. “You are a good girl,” he said gruffly, adding in a lower tone, “Your brother will die otherwise.” It was not an apology, nor even a full acknowledgment of all that she was being asked to give up for the family, but in later years, Yukiko was to recall this last statement, and to appreciate the measure of understanding that it afforded her: a glimpse into the choices, all incomparably bleak, that her father had been forced to face. She had hated him then, and could not bring herself to return his embrace, yet she never forgot those last words.

  Their feet shuffling and their faces red, her older brothers wished her well and said good-bye without meeting her eyes. She had bathed with them, and napped curled up beside them; she had raced them, climbed trees with them, and worked in the fields by their side. They had always staunchly fought for her against the bullies of the village. As she bowed back to them, she heard her younger brother wailing softly inside the house.

  Akiko had to reach her arms up to draw the head of her tall daughter towards her. She promised in her lisping whisper that she would go to Tokyo within two years, before Yukiko’s apprenticeship ended, to buy her and bring her back to Hokkaido. Then she wept like the child that she still almost was, while Yukiko, white-faced but dry-eyed, clung to her for the last time.

  It was a long, hard trip to Tokyo. Along with the ancient geisha and another peasant’s daughter, Yukiko took a train from her village to the southern coast of the island. The crossing to the mainland was rough, a ten-hour ride in a creaky boat over choppy water, and after arriving there, they rode on another train for two days until they reached Tokyo. There they clambered into a rickshaw, pulled by one man. Traveling through streets dense with people and houses, they arrived at nightfall at the geisha house, set on a street lined with red paper lanterns.

  At the geisha house Yukiko served her apprenticeship without undue complaint. She scrubbed the floors, put away futons, and carried buckets of water in and out of the house. Her work as well as her beauty pleased the mistress of the house, and she was signed on as an apprentice and given the music and dance lessons that would prepare her to be a geisha. She was one of the lucky girls. Heavy and dull-witted, the other peasant from Hokkaido was kept on as a servant, and another girl was sold to a brothel, where there was the same work without the fine clothes, the training in the arts, the good food, or the rich clients.

  During her apprenticeship, Yukiko’s function at parties was strictly ornamental. The flirtatious repartee, so much a part of any geisha event, was left to the older women. Yukiko’s face was covered with white pancake makeup and she wore an embroidered kimono that trailed behind her, and an obi that dangled gracefully down her back. She wore clogs with five-inch heels and bells that heralded her arrival, and her hair was piled elaborately high on the top of her head. She towered over most of the men, but she managed to keep her back upright, fighting the urge to slump. Although her feet were still far too large, she had almost grown into her breasts. Under the supervision of an older geisha, she was learning to carry them with grace and dignity, if not with pride.

  She poured tea and sake, bought and fetched rice facial powder and the lipstick that came in big enamel-painted seashells, and she carried the geishas’ kimonos and fans. She practiced dancing until her body ached. Still, there were compensations. Yukiko watched closely, and she knew that the best geishas led lives that revolved around pleasure, and that they were feted and respected by everyone, not just by the clients and the apprentices, but by the merchants and the common people of the city as well. So her first compensation was that she had a goal that made all her hard work seem worthwhile: before her mother came to reclaim her and take her back to Hokkaido, she wanted to sample this life of luxury and leisure; she yearned to become a geisha, if only for a time.

  Her second compensation was her friends. Along with five other young girls, she slept in a small room with a cold bare floor. High on the walls were windows, and at night they slid open and pale faces looked down on them. It became a game the girls played, timing the appearances of those pale faces, and they were soon so skilled at it that they could have whispered and giggled together throughout the whole night, if they only had the energy to do so.

  In the winters, when their communal bedroom was bitterly cold, they slept together in pairs in their futons, and on those nights they whispered and giggled even more loudly together, rendered doubly giddy by the smoothness and the warmth of another person’s skin. The other girls never knew who they would share their futons with, but for Yukiko, it was always the same. She liked all of the apprentices, but her closest friend, and the only girl she ever slept with, was Kaori.

  When Yukiko first arrived at the geisha house, terrified by her new settings, shaken by exhaustion from her long trip, and sick with longing for her mother, Kaori had taken care of her. Hearing Yukiko’s smothered sobs beneath her covers, Kaori had without a word slipped into her futon with her, and offered her the immeasurable comfort of two short, plump arms that reached around her neck, just as her mother’s had done, and a rounded white shoulder on which Yukiko could rest her aching head.

  Kaori and Yukiko soon became inseparable, so much so that they began automatically responding to each other’s names, for no one, not even the other apprentices at the geisha house, could accurately remember which was Kaori and which was Yukiko. This despite the fact that they looked nothing alike, a seemingly ludicrously mismatched pair when they wandered the streets together: standing more than a full head shorter than Yukiko, Kaori was a girl who dimpled when she smiled and also when she frowned. She had a body made of nothing but smooth curves. Her face, pale and round, resembled the moon.

  The daughter of a young geisha who had died while giving birth, Kaori had never lived outside of the geisha house, and she was riveted by Yukiko’s tales of growing up in the country. Yet although she often said how much she, too, would like to go live in Hokkaido, Kaori loved everything about the geisha house, tack
ling even the most backbreaking of chores with a willingness and grace that reminded Yukiko of her mother.

  While it may seem that Kaori’s contentment with her lot was grounded in the fact that she had never known any other way of life, it was actually part of her nature. She met all of what the world threw at her with a wide-eyed smile, a deep-seated calm, and a touch of resignation that would have passed for philosophy in another time and place. Yukiko, who would spend a large part of her life trying to hammer what destiny had given her into the shape she thought it should be, admired Kaori’s stoic acceptance of the all-too-often unwanted offerings of fate, but never came close to attaining any semblance of it. Still, she did learn from Kaori to bear the hard work with a better temper, if not exactly with a good-humored shrug.

  Kaori also opened Yukiko up to the pleasure of studying her own body. They may have been teenagers, in training to learn how to please and service men, but like children, they scratched hard at mosquito bites, picked at scabs, and compared calluses with grave absorption. Alone of all the apprentices, they did not only share a futon in the winter, the solace they derived from each other’s bodies outweighing even the discomfort of sharing a narrow bed in the sticky heat of a Tokyo summer night.

  Kaori’s presence by her side eased the loneliness that Yukiko had felt since her older brothers, shamefaced and tongue-tied, had let her go without an embrace; it chipped away at the block of bitterness she had carried around inside her, ever since her father had given the order for her to be sold. With time, Kaori came to take the place of the sisters that Yukiko never had, and even, eventually, of her mother, too.

  For Akiko never came. She could not write so Yukiko did not get any letters from Hokkaido, although on her seventeenth birthday she received a box filled with an assortment of cheap tea. After throwing out the tea, Yukiko began keeping her hair in the box, and did so until the day she married.

  My mother is not a religious woman, but when she told me these stories about my grandmother, she was practicing what amounted to a kind of sacred ritual of her own: an act of penance for the rift that had opened up between her and her mother, the coolness and the nearly complete silence that would last for twenty-nine years. Consciously or not, my mother had made the decision that it was enough of a punishment to deprive Yukiko of her own presence, the company of her only daughter; it would be going too far to deprive her of me as well. So she told me these stories to make sure that I understood and loved my grandmother; to ensure that when we did finally meet, we would not be at a loss as to how to be friends.

  Although the oldest child and the only girl, my mother slipped through the cracks of her family’s loving but tight hold. She was separated from them, and most of all her mother, by a deep ideological rift. There was a deeply ingrained conservatism in Yukiko, who learned from her own life rather than from books and school; judging that a woman’s power lay in swaying her husband, she set great store in a woman’s charm. My mother, modern before her time and country, prizing intellectual and artistic achievement above all else, was frustrated no end by Yukiko’s attitudes. She tried to be docile, but she balked at Yukiko’s attempts to teach her how to enter a room with showstopping style, and titillate a crowd of men with mere words; she lost her temper trying to get it through to her mother that such lessons were appropriate for an apprentice geisha, and not for a proper young lady from a rich family. They clashed bitterly and often over this and other related issues, their daily antagonism covering and finally masking entirely their basic similarity: the single-mindedness of purpose with which they pursue what they want, and the pigheadedness that leads them to refuse, ever, to let go of their men.

  Deep and old as it is, the struggle of wills between my mother and Yukiko is not the only reason I have never met my grandmother. Responsible, too, is a series of unfortunate circumstances, following each other in such well-timed sequence that it seems as if there is a conspiracy afoot to keep my grandmother and me apart.

  There was, first of all, my father, and his bitterness towards Yukiko for spurning him as a suitor for her daughter’s hand. When he and my mother first moved to America, he refused to let her communicate with her family. In the beginning, in the first flush of love and in the throes of righteous indignation at her parents’ attitude towards her husband, my mother was complicit in this severance of family ties. But after I was born, she went behind his back, and began sending them photographs of me twice a year.

  Later, when the marriage failed, my mother was too poor to pay for the visit, and too proud to ask her parents for help. More than ten years passed before she could even admit to them what they had guessed long before—my father’s desertion and our subsequent poverty. And later still, when my mother got a job with decent pay, she was too busy, and probably too exhausted, to take time off for such a strenuous trip overseas.

  Still, even though my father was to a certain degree responsible, even though finances and timing and the sheer logistics involved in carrying two people halfway around the world have all played a part in keeping my grandmother and me apart, it is difficult for me to avoid blaming my mother for this, the deprivation of my grandmother, as well as for so many other things.

  Unlike other children at school, I did not go to my parents and crawl into bed with them when I had nightmares about nameless beasts. When the nightmares were very bad, I fled up the creaking wooden steps and through the long dark hall to my parents’ bedroom, and there I curled up in a small ball against the door. They often talked for hours through the night: although the actual words were indistinguishable, the murmur of their voices came through low and sweet from the crack beneath the door.

  Usually I crept back comforted to my own bed, but one night, lulled by their voices, I fell asleep on the floor. In the morning, my father nearly tripped over my body when he opened the door; he said something in Japanese and my mother began to laugh. I was four or maybe five by then, and already quite tall with unmanageably long legs, but he lifted me easily and carried me down the wooden steps, she following behind as they whispered to each other in Japanese. I kept my eyes shut, but I think that he, at least, may have known I was awake, shamming sleep for the chance to be the baby once again, held and carried and tucked into bed in the early hours of the morning.

  As they put me into bed, I peeked quickly at them and she caught me looking. I instantly plunged into an explanation of what I had been doing outside my bedroom so late at night, but they stopped me before I could get far. “Go back to sleep,” he said. “You need your rest,” she said. His hand felt warm and heavy over my eyes; she pulled the covers over my body. She laughed again. Then they left my room and went to the kitchen to have their breakfast and tea.

  In the early stages of her marriage, my mother was like that, the kind of person who laughed for no reason. She was also eager, chatty, and apple-cheeked, with a face that was usually lit up with excitement and hair that flew in a tangle all about her head.

  Thinner now, her cheeks neither full nor red, her hair fashioned into a neat and becoming bob, she is barely recognizable as that young woman I have studied so carefully in photographs. The intellect that she had then is still intact, of course, but where she once possessed a keen curiosity about the far-flung corners of the world, as well as an insatiable appetite to experience them, she is now content with merely reading about them in the papers. She hardly ever laughs.

  I was ten when I made the vow that I would never be like my mother. Trudging up the driveway after school, I saw her stationed at her usual spot, ensconced in that hard upright chair by the window. I waved, but she did not respond.

  After kicking my shoes off in the entryway, I entered the spare bedroom and squatted on the ground beside her, maybe two feet away from the left side of her chair. It was early fall, and we sat drenched in full sunlight.

  I took out my latest book report from my knapsack and placed it on my mother’s lap. “I told you Mrs. Jennings would like it,” I said.

  Waiting f
or my mother to respond to the comments, I brushed the carpet in ever-widening circles with my hands. It was while I was making the sixth or seventh circle that I shivered, suddenly and quite literally chilled.

  Having soaked up a day’s worth of sunshine, the carpet felt pleasantly warm for the most part. But in the space immediately to the left of my mother’s chair, where her shadow thrust backward, the carpet was so cool that I knew the sun had not lit upon that spot for hours.

  I looked up at my mother. She sat looking ahead of her, the book report lying unregarded on her lap. Her hair was dank and matted, uncombed as well as unwashed.

  “How long have you been sitting here?” I asked.

  It was the note of urgency in my voice that made her turn. I watched her eyes (… three Mississippi, four Mississippi …) as they came into focus on me. “I don’t know,” she said.

  My father had been gone for a year by then. While it has been many years now since my mother sat in that spot by the window, her romance with Mr. Lewis, our vegetable-bearing neighbor, ran aground just last fall: clearly not all that much has changed.

  Grandmother, I will say. Obaasama, is it any wonder that the thought of my mother’s prolonged pining for my father nags at me? Would it really surprise anyone that it is the image of you—the woman who parlayed a practical arrangement into the longest and most passionate of romances—that I look to as a beacon?

  Whether I like it or not, the lives of my mother and my grandmother are the stars by which I chart my course.

  The phone call comes almost exactly at four. Jarred awake, I scramble madly for the phone and knock it over, so that I have to use the cord to pull up the receiver, as if it were a fish. “Hello? Eric, is that you?” I ask, hoping but knowing it is not, and sure enough, all I hear is that now-familiar wail on the line. I would disconnect the phone at night were it not for the fact that every time I make a move to do so, I am visited by images of my mother falling down the stairs and breaking a wrist or worse, and her or the hospital trying to reach me in vain.