She stood rather uncertainly in the entrance like an actress in the wings, composing herself to step out into the spotlight. Outside a taxi had pulled up, almost filling the narrow street with its dark wooden houses. Tucking her wicker-bottomed silk handbag under her arm, she stepped into her high okobo clogs and, bells tinkling, slipped gracefully into the taxi, piping “Oki-ni, oki-ni” as she left. For a moment the geisha soap opera on television was interrupted by the face of Leonardo di Caprio, advertising Orico, a credit card company.
The Wigmaker
One day, during a break in the weather, I took a bus across town to the other side of the city, near the Nishijin weavers’ district and the Kamishichiken geisha district, to visit one of the three wigmakers who among them serviced all the Kyoto geisha. Mr. Imanishi had turned a wing of his rambling house behind Myoshinji Zen temple into a busy workshop where he sat on his heels alongside his two sons, his apprentices in the trade. Here and there about the room were what looked at first glance like human heads stuck on poles. They turned out to be wigs, some with long bedraggled locks, others neatly coiffed, set on egg-shaped wooden molds.
“Wigs used to be all Japanese hair, you know,” said Mr. Imanishi breezily with a grin. He was a roguish man in his sixties with a face like a walnut, a cheeky upturned nose, and a mop of curly gray hair. The hair of the wig on the stand in front of him hung in unappetizing rat’s tails which he was sectioning and combing energetically, slapping on globs of white bintsuke wax.
“But these days Japanese girls are rich,” he went on. “They don’t need to sell their hair. So we use imported Chinese hair, plus yak’s hair for volume. But Japanese hair is the best. That’s what we say, us wigmakers.”
He looped, folded, and pinned the tresses in a process very similar to dressing a maiko’s hair until he had created the glossy coiffure of the geisha, with a swatch of hair at the back, held in place with a stiff silver ribbon. Then he handed me the finished wig. The glossy hair was sticky with wax but the wig itself was astonishingly light and hard. Inside was a framework of duralumin, a sort of aluminum, lined with netting, like the inside of a crash helmet. Western wigs, conversely, have a rubber base.
“Once they decide to change the collar, that’s when we measure them up for their first wig,” explained Mr. Imanishi, wiping his hands on his uncannily clean white linen apron. “I meet the maiko and decide what shape will flatter her face. A round face, I make it look thinner; a thin face, I make it plumper. Those geisha all look pretty, right? That’s the wigmaker’s art, to make a wig that flatters the face. That’s what keeps them coming back.”
Unlike a Western wig, a Japanese wig had a widow’s peak at the front like Mount Fuji. It took, he said, two weeks to make a wig and required several fittings. For the first five days after the changing of the collar, one of his sons went to the geisha house every day to teach the fledgling geisha how to put it on. Once the first parties were over and she had time for more fittings, she ordered a second wig so that she always had one to wear while the other was being reset.
No geisha would dream of being seen in a wig that had a single hair out of place let alone one that was a bit flat or misshapen. In order to ensure that they always had that fresh-from-the-hairdresser look, geisha stored their wigs carefully in wig boxes and had them combed out and reset once a month, a job which took half a day (one and a half hours plus fetching and returning the wig) and cost 23,000 yen ($230) a time. Added to that, a wig had a lifespan of about three years, after which a geisha would need a new one. Each new wig cost 500,000 yen, in the region of $5,000. All in all, it was a sizable expense for the geisha and provided a thriving business for Mr. Imanishi and his fellow wigmakers.
Wigs came into vogue well after the end of the war, around the watershed year of 1958. Before then they had been used mainly in the kabuki theater. Geisha used to go to the hairdresser as maiko do still. For maiko, who were in the process of being trained, it was essential to live the flower and willow life twenty-four hours a day. But geisha were modern women, adults who had chosen to continue the life while it suited them. In their time off, they preferred to have the option of wearing Western clothes and having their hair in a less conspicuous style. Wearing a wig enabled them to switch between the geisha world and everyday life with ease. They could treat being a geisha as a job and the geisha’s outfit as a uniform, to be put on when they started work and taken off afterward. It was a liberation. Thus as the profession itself changed, wigs soared in popularity.
But how on earth, I asked, could one tamp down the enormous amount of hair which most geisha had, and fit a wig on top? Perhaps, said Mr. Imanishi, I should try it myself. Without more ado he swept my hair back and twisted a stretchy net over it, then wound a bandage-like tape around the edges. In seconds my head was as smooth as the egg-shaped molds on which the wigs rested. Then he lifted a wig out of its box. After he had tied a few ribbons and made a few adjustments it fitted perfectly. It felt tight, secure, and heavy, like wearing a crown. He added an ivory comb and some tortoiseshell hairpins and gave me a mirror in which to admire his handiwork.
The effect of a black, glossy, and absurdly stylized geisha wig perched above my European features was, it has to be said, far from flattering, like wearing an enormous piled-up Louis Quatorze wig without the gown, flounces, powder, or perfectly placed round black beauty spot. I hastily dabbed on the reddest lipstick I could find. A good thick layer of white makeup, I could see, would make all the difference. As is normal in Japan to mark the occasion, I lined up with Mr. Imanishi and his family, his baby grandson on my knee, for a group photograph.
I had a final question. He had been boasting of how many geisha he knew and how well he knew them.
“What would you say if your daughter wanted to become a geisha?” I asked.
He looked taken aback.
“Hmm,” he said finally, with an uncertain chuckle. “That’s a difficult question.” It was, it seemed, as outrageous a suggestion as if I had asked a stern Victorian patriarch if he would allow his daughter to become an actress. I could almost hear the music hall refrain: “Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington!” In turn-of-the-millennium Japan, geisha still had the rakish, not-quite-respectable image that actors and actresses used to have a century ago in Britain. To drop their names and boast of how many one knew was one thing. To have one’s own child join the ranks of these glamorous but nonetheless somehow disreputable creatures was quite another.
Mizuage: Becoming a Woman
A hole in the paper wall,
Who has been so guilty?
Through it I hear the breaking of a shamisen string,
Meaning bad luck.
Yet the prediction-seller says
That mine is excellent.
Geisha song 2
Every now and then a friend of a friend named Mr. Mori would phone me and invite me out on a bar crawl. He was a flamboyant character who had taken me under his wing because I was foreign and therefore a guest of his country and, like him, a writer. He loved the company of geisha; but he also knew how to spend time with them without bankrupting himself.
The secret was the “home bar” (homu baa in Japanese). A full-blown geisha party was so exorbitantly expensive that unless one had unlimited means, it was only feasible to throw one when there were very important business guests to be entertained and the whole thing could be paid for on company expenses. In modern Japan, to take over a tatami room in a teahouse in order to down a few flagons of saké with a geisha was insanely expensive. Thus, in order not to price themselves out of the market, most teahouses had developed “home bars,” a small bar with sofas, tables, and a karaoké machine where men could go without booking (provided that they were not first-timers) and have a very expensive but still affordable drink. When Mr. Mori took me out on bar crawls, that was where we went.
One evening around midnight we ended up at a small bar on a quiet backstreet behind Yasaka Shrine, right in the lee of the Easter
n Hills. From the outside it might have been a private house.
“This is a very special geisha,” Mori-san assured me as he slid the door open, slipped out of his shoes, and stepped into the hallway. The mama-san came out to greet us and ushered us into the bar.
A dignified, rather stiff woman, she might have been sixty or seventy. She had a plump round face with even, delicate features which must once have been beautiful. Her hair was swept into the unnaturally black bouffant hairstyle which all the geisha wore and her kimono, crossed high at the neck in matronly style, was a sober dark blue. I felt a little uncomfortable. Her smile was icy. She was perfectly pleasant, yet she seemed to be just going through the motions; she needed our business but in fact would much rather that we had not come. It was as if she was reining in her true feelings with almost noticeable effort.
Mori-san, a buoyant character utterly impervious to subtleties of atmosphere or feeling, was chatting cheerfully about business in the geisha world. Then his face lit up as two young women appeared. These were not maiko but bar girls, leggy students in tiny skirts whose job was to entertain the customers. While he teased and joked with them, the mama-san was left to entertain me.
“Gion must have changed quite a lot since you were first here,” I ventured, carefully avoiding impertinent personal questions. I was amazed at the vehemence of her reply.
“It’s completely different,” she exploded. “Everything has changed. Those days were dark. It was a dark life.”
“Could I ask . . .” I murmured politely, “would you mind telling me . . . I’ve heard music and dance classes were much harsher in those days.”
Suddenly the floodgates opened. I didn’t need to be polite, I hardly needed to speak. With Mori-san distracted by his two companions and no one but a foreigner, utterly outside the geisha community, to hear her, the mama-san poured out her story. Harsh? The classes had been terrible. The older sisters had been tough on her and the house mothers too; and her “older sister” had died suddenly at twenty-five, so there was no one to stand up for her.
“I thought I’d commit suicide many times,” she burst out. “My house mother was famous for her cruelty. Everyone knew it. She was always in a rage. I was like the maid. I did all the cleaning in the house by myself. She’d give me a list of jobs, then go out. If I hadn’t done them all when she got back, she beat me.”
Her father, she said, disappeared when she was four. Her mother was alone and poor. She hadn’t intended to send her child to the geisha district. But her aunt knew of a good position in a geisha house and when she was ten she was packed off to Gion.
“I didn’t know anything about it,” she said fiercely. “I didn’t know anything when I was brought here. I lived in Gion, I went to school, and I never saw my mother again.”
In those days there were no big decisions about whether to stay on or leave. A child who had been purchased from her parents was effectively an indentured slave. She labored under an enormous debt—the money used to pay for her purchase plus the exorbitant costs of the hairstyling and gorgeous kimonos and obis which were an essential part of the job. Until it was repaid, which might be never, she was the property of the geisha house. When the time came for her to go through with her debut and become a maiko, she did so. She had no choice in the matter. And later when the time came to change her collar and start wearing the ofuku hairstyle, she had no choice in that either. Added to which, changing the collar was not simply a colorful ritual as it is for modern maiko. It meant growing up and becoming an adult in a very literal sense.
“It was against the law to force you to have sex with a patron if you didn’t want to, even in those days,” blurted out the mama-san. I hadn’t even dared mention mizuage. “But no one paid any attention. Of course I had it, we all did. It was horrible, he was a horrible man. He was a specialist, a professional deflowerer.”
Amazed at her outburst, I was burning to ask her what a professional deflowerer was. But she obviously thought she had said enough. Then Mori-san and the two students joined in, chatting blithely, and a few minutes later he decided it was time to leave. As we strolled through the dark streets to our next port of call, a late-night noodle shop, I commented with due politeness on how nice she had been.
“ ‘Nice’?” chuckled the irrepressible Mori-san. “I wouldn’t call her ‘nice.’ She’s hard—kibishi—tough as an old boot.” There were reasons for that, I thought. I was beginning to understand why so many of the older women of the geisha community were harsh and sharp-tongued.
A Necessary Rite of Passage
The mama-san was the first but far from the only “older sister” to talk to me about mizuage. For women who were maiko before prostitution was made illegal in 1958—in other words, anyone aged over about fifty-five, which included many of the older members of the community—compulsory deflowering at an early age was simply a part of life. It made no difference whether they were the spoiled children of generations of geisha and had grown up in a wealthy geisha house with maids and servants, or whether they were the children of starving peasants, brought in weeping from the countryside. Children in those days did not have choices. The option of leaving before one’s debut or before the change of collar was simply not available.
Which is not to say that they were unhappy. Japanese practice gaman—“endurance,” “getting on with things,” “putting up with things.” When it is cold, you are cold, you don’t waste energy heating your house. When it is hot, you are hot. Widespread central heating and air-conditioning are recent developments in Japan and older people still do not bother much with them. And if you were told that you had to have mizuage, you just put up with it.
When I asked the older women of the geisha community if they had had mizuage, they looked at me with astonishment as if they could not imagine how anyone could ask such a stupid question.
“Of course,” they would tut impatiently. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be a geisha.”
Before the 1958 watershed, mizuage was not simply something that everyone took for granted but the most crucial step in the maiko’s career. Like a young man’s circumcision, painful but unavoidable, it was an initiation ritual. It marked the transition from maiko to geisha, from girl to woman, and was a prerequisite for changing one’s collar, synonymous with growing up. Until you had had it, you were not a woman. A virgin geisha would have been as much a contradiction in terms as a virgin wife.
From the customer’s point of view, of course, the chance to deflower a maiko was an irresistible opportunity. As everywhere, virgins were highly desirable. And a maiko was the apogee of virgins, the crème de la crème, selected for her beauty, highly accomplished, and trained to be compliant with whatever a man desired. Men were prepared to pay a small fortune for the privilege of deflowering one. It cost several million yen in today’s money, one elderly geisha told me, enough to buy a house.
As for the geisha house, they had invested a lot of money, what with the initial purchase and the costs of raising the girl—classes, training, kimonos, housing, and the rest. The first step toward recouping it was mizuage, one of the most lucrative transactions in the girl’s entire career.
Mizuage began with the courtesans. For the geisha as for them, the cost of the debut was prohibitively expensive. It was simply not possible unless a wealthy sponsor could be found to pay for it. As a bonus, whoever was prepared to lay out the money would have the privilege of being the fledgling courtesan’s first patron. The payment was not for deflowering her but to cover the cost of the debut; though for the young woman the distinction must have seemed academic.
Sometimes by the time a courtesan or geisha came to have her debut, she was not really a virgin. Saikaku, the great seventeenth-century chronicler of the pleasure quarters, wrote rollicking stories about girls who were sold for “deflowering” time and again. The deception could be perpetrated if the girl moved to a new district where no one knew her and she could celebrate her “debut” for the second, third, or fourth time.
The customer would not find out the truth until it was too late and would never dream of losing face by broadcasting his humiliation. To this day a sponsor or sponsors have to be found to pay for a maiko’s debut; though, post–1958, the position no longer carries the same bonus.
In her charmingly self-deprecating autobiography, A Drunken Story of Gion, one of the grand old ladies of the geisha district, Haruyu, who recently passed away in her late eighties, described the terrible embarrassment of being unable to find a danna. She was, she wrote candidly, not hugely attractive. In fact, as the photographs in the book reveal, she was downright plain. But she was the daughter of a teahouse owner and, attractive or not, automatically became a maiko. She came from a family of four sisters and two brothers, though her brothers were sent away practically as soon as they were born to be brought up by their father. Otherwise they would have become shamisen players or dressers; those were the only jobs for men in the geisha district.
At eleven she became a maiko. But when she reached fourteen, the magic age when all her contemporaries were losing their virginity and changing from the ware-shinobu to the ofuku hairstyle, month after month passed and her hair remained resolutely the same. She was so plain that there were no applicants to deflower her. Walking the streets of the geisha districts wearing the little-girl hairstyle that told everyone she was still a virgin, she felt more and more embarrassed and ashamed.
Eventually her “older sister” went to one of the professional deflowerers to beg him to perform the mizuage. Haruyu reported the conversation: “ ‘I don’t want people thinking there’s something wrong with her, like a disability or some sort of physical problem. So would you mind . . .’ asked Older Sister. ‘Do you think you could . . . ? Just so people will know she’s normal.’ ”