There is a very simple reason why the geisha world is under threat. The Henry Higgins generation, who saw becoming the danna of a geisha as a mark of success and an ideal to strive toward, is dying out. For a start, no one has the money anymore. In modern Japan there are very few family-owned businesses left. Most top executives are employees of large impersonal corporations and cannot help themselves to several million yen of the company’s money in order to spend it on a geisha. Added to which, the baby-boomers are rapidly growing into society’s grand old men. But these are modern Japanese men in their fifties. They have grown up in a world where people go to the ballet and the opera or listen to jazz or techno, rather than the melancholy plink plonk of the shamisen. They spend more time in French restaurants or hostess bars than teahouses. Many have never even seen a geisha. Far from seeing them as objects of desire, they think of them as gorgeous fossils or cultural dinosaurs, if they think of them at all.
Nevertheless, teahouse mothers told me that a good proportion of geisha were still supported by danna, maybe one in five. But no one I knew would ever admit to it. It was too sensitive a matter. Geisha knew very well what their image was outside the confines of their small enchanted world. One very popular geisha told me, in tones that brooked no argument, that in the old days maiko had had enormous debts to pay off and that was why they needed a danna. Now there were no debts—the 1958 bill had seen to that—so there was no need for patrons any longer.
That was not strictly true. Constructing a world where men can live out their dreams is not a cheap matter. To play her part to the full, a geisha has to be a walking work of art, gorgeously attired, her wig, makeup, and kimono all of the most exquisite quality. Yet to buy the most basic kimono can cost anything from 200,000 yen ($2,000) up to several million ($20,000 upward); the average kimono costs 350,000–500,000 yen ($3,500–$5,000). And it has to be worn with an obi of equal value. Added to which, one kimono is far from enough. Teahouse customers are regulars who come again and again and it would certainly not do to be seen in the same kimono too many times.
All the geisha adored kimonos and collected them with passion. My white-haired neighbor confessed to having two hundred. As a famous Japanese saying goes, a native of Osaka will bankrupt himself for a great meal, but for a Kyoto-ite the fatal weakness is fine silk. None of this is a problem for a maiko who lives at a geisha house where the house mother lays out her kimono each evening. But for a newly hatched geisha setting up on her own, the initial costs might run as high as 20 million yen ($200,000). Geisha need three kimonos a month—one to wear, one to go to the cleaner’s, and one spare, in case a customer spills his drink over your priceless silk. And each month they need different kimonos. All in all, it comes to about 3 million yen ($30,000) a year for kimonos alone.
Then there are classes, which might come to 100,000 yen a month, plus the exorbitant costs incurred for the various ceremonies marking the rites of passage in a geisha’s life—the debut and the changing of the collar, when a maiko graduates to become a fully-fledged geisha. These cost hundreds of thousands of yen for the proper kimono, fans, bags, and other equipment, for tips to the dressers and other helpers, and gifts to members of the community. There are also enormous costs whenever a geisha takes part in one of the grand public dance performances such as the Cherry Dances. Far from being paid like a professional dancer, she has to pay for the honor of appearing and for her costumes and equipment, plus enormous sums in tips for all the helpers and assistants and monetary gifts to her teachers.
In recent years customers have started offering to sponsor part of the cost. One might pay for the kimono and obi, another for the wig for the new geisha, another for the cost of printing the scarves with the geisha’s name which she hands out to everyone. One very popular maiko who decided to give up before the turning of the collar had had promises from sponsors to pay for everything for the ceremony and been showered with expensive bags and gifts. Nevertheless well into the 1990s there are still men who maintain the tradition of the big spender. Those who can afford it pride themselves on being the sole sponsor for a maiko’s debut or turning of the collar. As to whether the maiko chooses to reward her benefactor in the traditional way, that is strictly between her and him.
Geisha Chic:
The Art of the Kimono
One day when I got back to my inn, I found a note, prettily written on handmade paper with a drawing of a maneki nekko (a lucky “money-beckoning cat”) on the envelope. It was from Koito. There was a journalist from a women’s magazine coming to interview her, she wrote. Could I, the local foreigner, please be there to add a touch of international color to the photograph?
In her idiosyncratic way Koito was the epitome of the modern geisha. She was a star not of the silver screen or the television but of the Internet. She regularly featured in articles in newspapers and magazines and had a lively fan club. Three years ago she had started a website to put across the geisha lifestyle and philosophy, describe its arts, customs, and history, correct misconceptions, and persuade new customers to come.
Rather than Koito, it was Komaki, her maiko, who was the star of the website. She was the first maiko of the cyber age. She had seen Koito on television, looked up her website, and been captivated by the images and descriptions of life in the flower and willow world. She persuaded her father to send Koito an e-mail asking if she could become her apprentice, was accepted, and moved into Koito’s house. But like many maiko, she discovered that there was a lot more to the life than just looking pretty. Her story—her hopes, her disappointments, her growing frustration—formed the gripping day-to-day substance of the website. Even the house cat featured on it. But now, a year later, having gone through with her debut, she had disappeared.
“It’s not easy raising a maiko,” complained Koito, addressing the plump young journalist who was busy scribbling notes. She too was a fan of Koito’s and regularly checked her website. “She got pimples. Everyone was always watching her and passing comments. It made her self-conscious. No one ever told her she was doing well. So she got depressed. I think she might have run away for good.”
We had been sitting rather stiffly on cushions around the low table in one of the tatami rooms upstairs. Koito led us into a dressing room and began lifting flat cardboard boxes out of the shallow drawers of a tall wooden dresser. She took the lid off one to reveal a package of textured handmade paper. Carefully she undid the ribbons. Inside, within another layer of tissue paper, was a swathe of lustrous silk, quail’s-egg gray. She lifted the folds of fabric to reveal a pattern of white grasses. We fingered the soft silk.
“It’s a geisha’s kimono for autumn,” she said. “Autumn grasses.”
Next she brought out a pale mauve kimono, the color of wisteria, then a dark mauve one with a pattern of maple leaves in dark greens and rusty oranges sprinkled with golden and orange chrysanthemums, and put them both aside. The first, she said, was a summer kimono, the second for autumn. Then she showed us a summer kimono of netlike silk in a delicate leaf green the color of a cicada’s wing, with a river specked with leaves rippling along the hem. Finally she brought out a kimono of a rich midnight blue. Wisteria blossoms tumbled in mauve-and-gold fronds around the skirt and across the sleeves. The cat was rolling on its back, playing with the loose ribbons.
“I’ll wear this one,” she said. We helped her refold the others, carefully wrapping them in layers of tissue paper, replacing them in their envelopes and retying the ribbons.
“How do you choose?” we queried. A maiko living in a geisha house had no need to worry about which kimono was appropriate; her house mother would lay out a different kimono each month for her. But Koito was herself a house mother. For her, life was a succession of day-to-day decisions.
It depended, she explained, on the customers, the teahouse, and the occasion for the party. For a congratulatory party or a celebration of some sort, she might wear something dressy, for a small quiet gathering, something more subdued. It went without
saying that she would wear a geisha’s kimono, much more subtly colored than a maiko’s, with sleeves that hung to her hips, not to the ankle, and with the obi tied in a knot without the heavy, swaying ends of the maiko’s.
For a geisha, the art of choosing and wearing a kimono is as important a part of her training as learning traditional dancing or studying the shamisen. The kimono is an art form in its own right, as subtle and complex as tea ceremony, flower arrangement, or brush painting. Woven of the finest, most luxurious silk, kimonos are dyed with designs which are exquisite and often enormously complex; landscapes of palaces, bridges, streams, trees, and birds scroll across a kimono skirt in lavish detail and jewel-like colors.
Traditional arts in Japan are to do not with expressing oneself but learning the form, the kata, the proper way of doing things. The aim is perfection, a perfect promulgation of tradition, the right kimono worn in the right way for the place, the season, and the occasion. A geisha is an artist who transforms herself into a perfect work of art according to rules laid down by tradition.
Everything in traditional Japanese life reflects the season, from the flowers arranged in a vase to the brush painting on a wall to the words one uses when writing a poem. If you visit a teahouse, a geisha house, or a private home in spring, there will be a sprig of spring flowers in a wicker vase and an ink painting, perhaps of a sprouting bamboo, on the wall; in winter there might be a sprig of plum blossoms artfully arranged in a section of bamboo. And every haiku includes a word which refers to the seasons—irises, rain, or a frog to evoke June, a cicada in high summer, snow in winter. In the same way, a geisha naturally chooses a kimono proper to the season. For the cool months, from the typhoons of September through the winter snows to the end of April when the cherry blossoms fall, she wears a double-layered awase kimono of thick silk lined with crepe. In May and June she wears lighter single-layer kimonos and when the steamy days of July and August come, she switches to ro, a silk so fine it is almost transparent.
More muted colors are suitable for winter, fresher ones for the hot months. There are also traditional color combinations for each month: pale green layered on deep purple for January, rose backed with slate blue for October. The designs on the kimono, whether dyed (as in the dressier garments) or woven in, always reflect the season. A geisha naturally selects a kimono with the appropriate flowers, plants, insects, or birds: sprigs of pine in January, plum blossom in February, cherry blossom in the spring, small trout in summer, maple leaves in autumn, and snowflakes in the winter. It is all part of the process of living one’s life as art. 4
Koito had changed into a white cotton under-kimono patterned with red chrysanthemums. Scooping her hair into a net, she knelt in front of the tall narrow mirror of her dressing table and opened the tiny drawers overflowing with brushes and tubs of unguents. She took a breath and settled down to begin her makeup. Absorbed, we watched the transformation, all the more dramatic because this was not a beautiful young maiko but an aging, rather plain woman.
Having covered her face in a layer of eggshell white, she turned her back to the mirror and, using a hand mirror to help her, skillfully painted her back in white, leaving the provocative V of unpainted flesh at the nape of the neck. She penciled in two feathery eyebrows, adding a surreal touch of lipstick to define them, edged her eyes in red and added a line of black, then painted her mouth the color of a ripe cherry.
Then she lifted an enormous box like a hatbox from a cupboard and brought out a gleaming coiffed wig on a stand. She combed it, tidied it, and fitted it over her head, adjusting it until it was perfectly centered and balanced, combed it again, added a few hairpins and turned to look at us. The wig had performed its magic. The “Mount Fuji” widow’s peak and the strange unnatural wings of the wig had transformed the shape of her face, accentuating the delicate pointed chin. The frumpy thirty-year-old had disappeared and a startlingly alluring creature emerged, like a butterfly from a chrysalis, not beautiful, but indubitably sexy and fascinating. Coquettishly, she picked up the mewing cat and held it up to her face, gazing into its sharp black eyes. It put its paws on her shoulders and tried to lick the immaculate alabaster of her face.
Standing up, she put on a red-and-white under-kimono, followed by another of pale pink scattered with small red chrysanthemums, and the thick white brocade collar marking the adult geisha, tying them all in place with ribbons.
“I used to have a dresser,” she said. “But now I do it myself. If you get someone in, you have to fit in with their timing.”
Then she took the lustrous midnight-blue kimono with its mauve-and-pale gold design of wisteria and slipped it over her shoulders, pulling it down to reveal not an ample expanse of bare back like a maiko’s but a titillating flash of white-painted shoulders. The fabric swirled about her feet like water.
In old Japan, sex appeal was all to do with mystery. Far from revealing swathes of naked bosom, midriff, or leg like a Hollywood star on Oscar night, the epitome of desirability was the tayu, the courtesan, swathed in layer upon layer of sumptuous fabric like a Christmas present, with just her tiny bare feet to remind you of the frail flesh of the woman inside. To the Japanese eye, there was an enormous difference in the way geisha and wives—the two poles of Japanese womanhood—wore their kimonos. The geisha was ineffably sexy; but it was a subtle sexiness, a matter of hint and suggestion.
In time I began to be able to see the difference between the kimono a geisha wore when she was dressed to kill with white face and wig and an ordinary one such as a wife would wear. The geisha’s was more ornate, bolder, and more decorative with a strong pattern on the skirt and hem where it would be most visible. It was the same shape and size as a standard one; the kimono is a one-size-fits-all garment which you adjust by folding and tying. But there were a myriad subtle ways in which a geisha tied hers to make it very different from a wife’s, and infinitely sexier.
For a start it was worn looser than a wife would ever dream of, leaving a suggestive flash of pale under-kimono, spangled with red, clearly visible at the sleeve and hem. It sat lower on the shoulders with the collar pulled well down to reveal the painted back and the erotic tongue of bare flesh at the nape of the neck. It was also worn much longer so that it draped to form a train on the ground, eddying gracefully about the feet. A wife, conversely, would wear a kimono with a discreet pattern on the chest or thigh. She would fold and tie it so that it stopped just at the ankle to make a prim asexual cylinder with barely a bulge for bottom or breasts. When walking the geisha held the skirt of her kimono gracefully with the left hand; if a wife needed to lift her kimono skirt, she would hold it with the right hand.
Koito had wrapped herself in a long green obi, winding it round and round her waist and tucking in pads of stiffening and a cushion at the back to give extra bulk, until she was cocooned as thoroughly as an Egyptian mummy. The last touch was a narrow white silk cord. She turned with a coquettish downcast glance. “It’s a long time since I’ve dressed like this,” she confided. Normally she wore the understated kimono and subtle makeup of the day-to-day working geisha. The white makeup, wig, and sumptuous kimono were party wear, for special occasions only.
It was not only her appearance that had changed. Her bearing and the timbre of her voice had changed too, though she was still as chirpy as a Cockney sparrow. As she opened the front door, the cat darted out and disappeared under a nearby parked car. She slipped on a pair of wooden clogs, lower and lighter than a maiko’s hooflike ones, and minced after it, lifting her trailing kimono skirts with her left hand and trilling, “Kitty, Kitty”—“Nekko-chan, Nekko-chan”—in a girlish falsetto. Together we set off down the street to pose for photographs, Koito tripping along, bowing and calling out greetings to everyone we met.
chapter 8
from the flapper years
to the age of neon
No matter what happens
I am in love with Gion.
Even in my sleep
Beneath my pillow
> the waters ripple.
Isamu Yoshii (1886–1960) 1
Cherry Dances in
Turn-of-the-Century Kyoto
Throughout the centuries of the shoguns’ rule, there had always been two hearts in Japan. Although Edo was the center of power where the shogun had his castle, Kyoto-ites could console themselves with the thought that theirs was the emperor’s city, home to the imperial court. They were the upholders of taste, class, and the aristocratic old ways.
For a few years as valiant young samurai crowded the teahouses of Gion, plotting and roistering, Kyoto had seethed with passion and politics. Then suddenly a deathly hush fell. Dust began to gather on the white-walled imperial palace with its red pillars and silent expanses of raked sand. The emperor, the courtiers, the princes, the lords, even the flunkies had gone. The swashbuckling samurai and their geisha mistresses, merchants, writers, and artists packed their possessions, hired palanquin bearers and headed for the glittering streets of the new capital, Edo, now renamed Tokyo.
What was to become of Kyoto? What role did the ancient capital have to play in this brave new world? For a while a pall of gloom hung over the beautiful valley with its purple hills and crystalline rivers. Then the city fathers put their heads together.
They came up with the idea of an international exposition to show off the city’s traditional arts and crafts, already much admired abroad, and build up business. The Kyoto Exposition, the first in Japan, took place in 1871 but had only limited success. Something extra was needed to brighten up the city and bring it back to life.