"So if I might ask... did you buy your entire collection of kimono yourself?"
"How much do you think a geisha earns, Chiyo! A complete collection of kimono doesn't mean two or three robes for each of the seasons. Some men's lives revolve around Gion. They'll grow bored if they see you in the same thing night after night."
I must have looked every bit as puzzled as I felt, for Mameha gave a laugh at the expression on my face.
"Cheer up, Chiyo-chan, there's an answer to this riddle. My danna is a generous man and bought me most of these robes. That's why I'm more successful than Hatsumomo. I have a wealthy danna. She hasn't had one in years."
*
I'd already been in Gion long enough to know something of what Mameha meant by a danna. It's the term a wife uses for her husband-or rather, it was in my day. But a geisha who refers to her danna isn't talking about a husband. Geisha never marry. Or at least those who do no longer continue as geisha.
You see, sometimes after a party with geisha, certain men don't feel satisfied with all the flirting and begin to long for something a bit more. Some of these men are content to make their way to places like Miyagawa-cho, where they'll add the odor of their own sweat to the unpleasant houses I saw on the night I found my sister. Other men work up their courage to lean in bleary-eyed and whisper to the geisha beside them a question about what her "fees" might be. A lower-class geisha may be perfectly agreeable to such an arrangement; probably she's happy to take whatever income is offered her. A woman like this may call herself a geisha and be listed at the registry office; but I think you should take a look at how she dances, and how well she plays shamisen, and what she knows about tea ceremony before you decide whether or not she really is a proper geisha. A true geisha will never soil her reputation by making herself available to men on a nightly basis.
I won't pretend a geisha never gives in casually to a man she finds attractive. But whether she does or not is her private affair. Geisha have passions like everyone else, and they make the same mistakes. A geisha who takes such a risk can only hope she isn't found out. Her reputation is certainly at stake; but more important, so is her standing with her danna, if she has one. What's more, she invites the wrath of the woman who runs her okiya. A geisha determined to follow her passions might take this risk; but she certainly won't do it for spending money she might just as easily earn in some legitimate way.
So you see, a geisha of the first or second tier in Gion can't be bought for a single night, not by anyone. But if the right sort of man is interested in something else-not a night together, but a much longer time-and if he's willing to offer suitable terms, well, in that case a geisha will be happy to accept such an arrangement. Parties and so on are all very nice; but the real money in Gion comes from having a danna, and a geisha without one-such as Hatsumomo-is like a stray cat on the street without a master to feed it.
You might expect that in the case of a beautiful woman like Hatsumomo, any number of men would have been eager to propose themselves as her danna; and I'm sure there were many who did. She had in fact had a danna at one time. But somehow or other she'd so angered the mistress of the Mizuki, which was her principal teahouse, that men who made inquiries forever afterward were told she wasn't available-which they probably took to mean she already had a danna, even though it wasn't true. In damaging her relationship with the mistress, Hatsumomo had hurt no one so much as herself. As a very popular geisha, she made enough money to keep Mother happy; but as a geisha without a danna, she didn't make enough to gain her independence and move out of the okiya once and for all. Nor could she simply change her registration to another teahouse whose mistress might be more accommodating in helping her find a danna; none of the other mistresses would want to damage their relationships with the Mizuki.
Of course, the average geisha isn't trapped in this way. Instead she spends her time charming men in the hopes that one of them will eventually make an inquiry with the mistress of the teahouse about her. Many of these inquiries lead nowhere; the man, when he's investigated, may be found to have too little money; or he may balk when someone suggests he give a gift of an expensive kimono as a gesture of goodwill. But if the weeks of negotiations come to a successful conclusion, the geisha and her new danna conduct a ceremony just like when two geisha become sisters. In most cases this bond will probably last six months or so, perhaps longer-because of course, men tire so quickly of the same thing. The terms of the arrangement will probably oblige the danna to pay off a portion of the geisha's debts and cover many of her living expenses every month-such as the cost of her makeup and perhaps a portion of her lesson fees, and maybe her medical expenses as well. Things of that sort. Despite all these extravagant expenses, he'll still continue to pay her usual hourly fee whenever he spends time with her, just as her other customers do. But he's also entitled to certain "privileges."
These would be the arrangements for an average geisha. But a very top geisha, of which there were probably thirty or forty in Gion, would expect much more. To begin with, she wouldn't even consider tarnishing her reputation with a string of danna, but might instead have only one or two in her entire life. Not only will her danna cover all of her living expenses, such as her registration fee, her lesson fees, and her meals; what's more, he'll provide her with spending money, sponsor dance recitals for her, and buy her gifts of kimono and jewelry. And when he spends time with her, he won't pay her usual hourly fee; he'll probably pay more, as a gesture of goodwill.
Mameha was certainly one of these top geisha; in fact, as I came to learn, she was probably one of the two or three best-known geisha in all of Japan. You may have heard something about the famous geisha Mametsuki, who had an affair with the prime minister of Japan shortly before World War I and caused something of a scandal. She was Mameha's older sister-which is why they both had "Mame" in their names. It's common for a young geisha to derive her name from the name of her older sister.
Having an older sister like Mametsuki was already enough to ensure Mameha a successful career. But in the early 1920s, the Japan Travel Bureau began its first international advertising campaign. The posters showed a lovely photograph of the pagoda from the Toji Temple in southeastern Kyoto, with a cherry tree to one side and a lovely young apprentice geisha on the other side looking very shy and graceful, and exquisitely delicate. That apprentice geisha was Mameha.
It would be an understatement to say that Mameha became famous. The poster was displayed in big cities all over the world, with the words "Come and Visit the Land of the Rising Sun" in all sorts of foreign languages-not only English, but German, French, Russian, and... oh, other languages I've never even heard of. Mameha was only sixteen at the time, but suddenly she found herself being summoned to meet every head of state who came to Japan, and every aristocrat from England or Germany, and every millionaire from the United States. She poured sake for the great German writer Thomas Mann, who afterward told her a long, dull story through an interpreter that went on and on for nearly an hour; as well as Charlie Chaplin, and Sun Yat-sen, and later Ernest Hemingway, who got very drunk and said the beautiful red lips on her white face made him think of blood in the snow. In the years since then, Mameha had grown only more famous by putting on a number of widely publicized dance recitals at the Kabukiza Theater in Tokyo, usually attended by the prime minister and a great many other luminaries.
When Mameha had announced her intention of taking me on as her younger sister, I hadn't known any of these things about her, and it's just as well. Probably I would have felt so intimidated, I couldn't have done much more than tremble in her presence.
*
Mameha was kind enough to sit me down and explain much of this on that day in her apartment. When she was satisfied that I understood her, she said:
"Following your debut, you'll be an apprentice geisha until the age of eighteen. After that you'll need a danna if you're to pay back your debts. A very substantial danna. My job will be to make sure you're well known in Gion by
then, but it's up to you to work hard at becoming an accomplished dancer. If you can't make it at least to the fifth rank by the age of sixteen, nothing I can do will help you, and Mrs. Nitta will be delighted to win her bet with me."
"But, Mameha-san," I said, "I don't understand what dance has to do with it."
"Dance has everything to do with it," she told me. "If you look around at the most successful geisha in Gion, every one of them is a dancer."
*
Dance is the most revered of the geisha's arts. Only the most promising and beautiful geisha are encouraged to specialize in it, and nothing except perhaps tea ceremony can compare to the richness of its tradition. The Inoue School of dance, practiced by the geisha of Gion, derives from Noh theater. Because Noh is a very ancient art that has always been patronized by the Imperial court, dancers in Gion consider their art superior to the school of dance practiced in the Pontocho district across the river, which derives from Kabuki. Now, I'm a great admirer of Kabuki, and in fact I've been lucky enough to have as my friends a number of the most famous Kabuki actors of this century. But Kabuki is a relatively young art form; it didn't exist before the 1700s. And it has always been enjoyed by ordinary people rather than patronized by the Imperial court. There is simply no comparing the dance in Pontocho to the Inoue School of Gion.
All apprentice geisha must study dance, but, as I say, only the promising and attractive ones will be encouraged to specialize and go on to become true dancers, rather than shamisen players or singers. Unfortunately, the reason Pumpkin, with her soft, round face, spent so much of her time practicing shamisen was because she hadn't been selected as a dancer. As for me, I wasn't so exquisitely beautiful that I was given no choice but to dance, like Hatsumomo. It seemed to me I would become a dancer only by demonstrating to my teachers that I was willing to work as hard as necessary.
Thanks to Hatsumomo, however, my lessons got off to a very bad start. My instructor was a woman of about fifty, known to us as Teacher Rump, because her skin gathered at her throat in such a way as to make a little rear end there beneath her chin. Teacher Rump hated Hatsumomo as much as anyone in Gion did. Hatsumomo knew this quite well; and so what do you think she did? She went to her-I know this because Teacher Rump told it to me some years later-and said:
"Teacher, may I be permitted to ask you a favor? I have my eye on one of the students in your class, who seems to me a very talented girl. I'd be extremely grateful if you could tell me what you think of her. Her name is Chiyo, and I'm very, very fond of her. I'd be greatly in your debt for any special help you might give her."
Hatsumomo never needed to say another word after this, because Teacher Rump gave me all the "special help" Hatsumomo hoped she would. My dancing wasn't bad, really, but Teacher Rump began at once to use me as an example of how things should not be done. For example, I remember one morning when she demonstrated a move to us by drawing her arm across her body just so and then stamping one foot on the mats. We were all expected to copy this move in unison; but because we were beginners, when we finished and stamped our feet, it sounded as if a platter stacked with beanbags had been spilled onto the floor, for not a single foot hit the mats at the same moment as any other. I can assure you I'd done no worse at this than anyone else, but Teacher Rump came and stood before me with that little rear end under her chin quivering, and tapped her folding fan against her thigh a few times before drawing it back and striking me on the side of the head with it.
"We don't stamp at just any old moment," she said. "And we don't twitch our chins."
In dances of the Inoue School, the face must be kept perfectly expressionless in imitation of the masks worn in Noh theater. But for her to complain about my chin twitching at the very moment when her own was trembling in anger... well, I was on the edge of tears because she'd struck me, but the other students burst out laughing. Teacher Rump blamed me for the outburst, and sent me out of the classroom in punishment.
I can't say what might have become of me under her care, if Mameha hadn't finally gone to have a talk with her and helped her to figure out what had really happened. However much Teacher Rump might have hated Hatsumomo beforehand, I'm sure she hated her all the more after learning how Hatsumomo had duped her. I'm happy to say she felt so terrible about the way she had treated me that I soon became one of her favorite students.
*
I won't say I had any natural talent of any kind at all, in dance or in anything else; but I was certainly as determined as anyone to work single-mindedly until I reached my goal. Since meeting the Chairman on the street that day back in the spring, I had longed for nothing so much as the chance to become a geisha and find a place for myself in the world. Now that Mameha had given me that chance, I was intent on making good. But with all my lessons and chores, and with my high expectations, I felt completely overwhelmed in my first six months of training. Then after that, I began to discover little tricks that made everything go more smoothly. For example, I found a way of practicing the shamisen while running errands. I did this by practicing a song in my mind while picturing clearly how my left hand should shift on the neck and how the plectrum should strike the string. In this way, when I put the real instrument into my lap, I could sometimes play a song quite well even though I had tried playing it only once before. Some people thought I'd learned it without practicing, but in fact, I'd practiced it all up and down the alleyways of Gion.
I used a different trick to learn the ballads and other songs we studied at the school. Since childhood I've always been able to hear a piece of music once and remember it fairly well the next day. I don't know why, just something peculiar about my mind, I suppose. So I took to writing the words on a piece of paper before going to sleep. Then when I awoke, while my mind was still soft and impressionable, I read the page before even stirring from my futon. Usually this was enough, but with music that was more difficult, I used a trick of finding images to remind me of the tune. For example, a branch falling from a tree might make me think of the sound of a drum, or a stream flowing over a rock might remind me of bending a string on the shamisen to make the note rise in pitch; and I would picture the song as a kind of stroll through a landscape.
But of course, the greatest challenge of all, and the most important one for me, was dance. For months I tried to make use of the various tricks I'd discovered, but they were of little help to me. Then one day Auntie grew furious when I spilled tea onto a magazine she was reading. The strange thing was that I'd been thinking kind thoughts toward her at the very moment she turned on me. I felt terribly sad afterward and found myself thinking of my sister, who was somewhere in Japan without me; and of my mother, who I hoped was at peace in paradise now; and of my father, who'd been so willing to sell us and live out the end of his life alone. As these thoughts ran through my head, my body began to grow heavy. So I climbed the stairs and went into the room where Pumpkin and I slept-for Mother had moved me there after Mameha's visit to our okiya. Instead of laying myself down on the tatami mats and crying, I moved my arm in a sort of sweeping movement across my chest. I don't know why I did it; it was a move from a dance we'd studied that morning, which seemed to me very sad. At the same time I thought about the Chairman and how my life would be so much better if I could rely on a man like him. As I watched my arm sweep through the air, the smoothness of its movement seemed to express these feelings of sadness and desire. My arm passed through the air with great dignity of movement-not like a leaf fluttering from a tree, but like an ocean liner gliding through the water. I suppose that by "dignity" I mean a kind of self-confidence, or certainty, such that a little puff of wind or the lap of a wave isn't going to make any difference.
What I discovered that afternoon was that when my body felt heavy, I could move with great dignity. And if I imagined the Chairman observing me, my movements took on such a deep sense of feeling that sometimes each movement of a dance stood for some little interaction with him. Turning around with my head tipped at an angle might represent
the question, "Where shall we spend our day together, Chairman?" Extending my arm and opening my folding fan told how grateful I felt that he'd honored me with his company. And when I snapped my fan shut again later in the dance, this was when I told him that nothing in life mattered more to me than pleasing him.
chapter thirteen
During the spring of 1934, after I'd been in training for more than two years, Hatsumomo and Mother decided that the time had come for Pumpkin to make her debut as an apprentice geisha. Of course, no one told me anything about it, since Pumpkin was on orders not to speak with me, and Hatsumomo and Mother wouldn't waste their time even considering such a thing. I found out about it only when Pumpkin left the okiya early one afternoon and came back at the end of the day wearing the hairstyle of a young geisha-the so-called momoware, meaning "split peach." When I took my first look at her as she stepped up into the entrance hall, I felt sick with disappointment and jealousy. Her eyes never met mine for more than a flicker of an instant; probably she couldn't help thinking of the effect her debut was having on me. With her hair swept back in an orb so beautifully from her temples, rather than tied at the neck as it had always been, she looked very much like a young woman, though still with her same babyish face. For years she and I had envied the older girls who wore their hair so elegantly. Now Pumpkin would be setting out as a geisha while I remained behind, unable even to ask about her new life.
Then came the day Pumpkin dressed as an apprentice geisha for the first time and went with Hatsumomo to the Mizuki Teahouse, for the ceremony to bind them together as sisters. Mother and Auntie went, though I wasn't included. But I did stand among them in the formal entrance hall until Pumpkin came down the stairs assisted by the maids. She wore a magnificent black kimono with the crest of the Nitta okiya and a plum and gold obi; her face was painted white for the very first time. You might expect that with the ornaments in her hair and the brilliant red of her lips, she should have looked proud and lovely; but I thought she looked more worried than anything else. She had great difficulty walking; the regalia of an apprentice geisha is so cumbersome. Mother put a camera into Auntie's hands and told her to go outside and photograph Pumpkin having a flint sparked on her back for good luck the very first time. The rest of us remained crowded inside the entrance hall, out of view. The maids held Pumpkin's arms while she slipped her feet into the tall wooden shoes we call okobo, which an apprentice geisha always wears. Then Mother went to stand behind Pumpkin and struck a pose as though she were about to spark a flint, even though, in reality, it was always Auntie or one of the maids who did the job. When at last the photograph was taken, Pumpkin stumbled a few steps from the door and turned to look back. The others were on their way out to join her, but I was the one she looked at, with an expression that seemed to say she was very sorry for the way things had turned out.