Geisha Page 10

  WHEN I TURNED TEN in November of 1959 I had to appear in Family Court again. Old Meanie took me. My parents were there when I arrived. I had a lawyer whose name was Mr. Kikkawa. He had greasy hair but was the best lawyer in Kyoto.

  I was supposed to tell the judge where I wanted to live.

  The tension of having to make the choice was unbearable. Whenever I thought about my parents my heart ached. My father leaned over toward me and said, “You don’t have to do it, Masako. You don’t have to stay with them if you don’t want to.” I nodded. And then it happened again. I threw up right there in the courtroom.

  This time the judge didn’t stop the proceedings.

  Instead, he looked me in the eye and asked point blank.

  “Which family do you want to belong to, the Tanakas or the Iwasakis?”

  I stood up, took a deep breath, and said in a clear voice, “I’m going to belong to the Iwasakis.”

  “Are you absolutely sure that is what you want?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  I had already made up my mind what I was going to say but I felt awful when the words came out of my mouth. I felt terrible about hurting my parents. But I said what I said because I loved to dance. That is what tipped the balance in the Iwasakis’ favor. The dance had become my life, and I couldn’t imagine giving it up for anything or anyone. The reason I decided to become an Iwasaki was so that I could continue learning to dance.

  I walked out of the courtroom between my parents, holding tightly onto each one’s hand. I felt such guilt at my betrayal that I couldn’t bear to look at either of them. I was crying. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that my parents had tears running down their faces.

  Old Meanie hailed a cab and the four of us went back to the okiya.

  My father tried to comfort me. “Maybe this is all for the best, Ma-chan,” he said. “I am sure you are having more fun living at the Iwasaki okiya than you would at home. There are so many interesting things for you to do there. But if you ever do want to come home, let me know and I will come get you. Anytime. Day or night. Just call me.”

  I looked at him and said, “I’ve died.”

  My parents turned to leave and walked away. They were both wearing kimono. As their obis receded into the distance I cried out “Dad! Mom!” in my heart. But the words never made it past my lips.

  My father turned back to look at me. I fought my temptation to run after him and, smiling through my tears, sadly waved goodbye. I had made my choice.

  That night Auntie Oima was ecstatic. It was official. I was now the Iwasaki successor. When the paperwork was finished I would become the appointed heir. We had a huge dinner, complete with festive dishes like sea bream and red bean rice and expensive fare like steak. Many people came to offer their congratulations and brought me gifts.

  The party went on for hours. I couldn’t stand it any longer and went into the closet. Auntie Oima couldn’t stop singing suisu-isu-dararattasurasurasuisuisui. Even Old Meanie was laughing out loud. Everyone was overjoyed: Aba, Mother Sakaguchi, the okasan of the branch houses. Even Kuniko.

  I had just said good-bye to my mother and father. For good. I couldn’t believe everyone saw this as a cause for celebration. I was exhausted and my mind was a complete blank. Without thinking, I took one of the black velvet ribbons from my hair, wrapped it around my neck, pulled as hard as I could, and tried to kill myself. It didn’t work. Finally, frustrated, I gave up and dissolved into a puddle of tears.

  The next morning I hid the bruise on my neck and dragged myself to school. I felt completely empty. I somehow made it through that morning and forced myself to go to dance class.

  When I got there, Big Mistress asked me which dance we were working on. “Yozakura [‘cherry blossoms at night’],” I replied.

  “All right then, show me what you remember.”

  I began to dance.

  She began, sternly, to scold me. “No, that’s wrong, Mineko. And that. And that! Stop it Mineko, what is wrong with you today? Stop it! Stop right now, do you hear me? And don’t you dare cry. I can’t stand little girls who cry. You are dismissed!”

  I couldn’t believe it. I had no idea what I had done wrong. I wasn’t crying, but I was thoroughly confused. I kept apologizing but she wouldn’t answer me so finally I left.

  I had just received my first, dreaded, OTOME, and I had no idea why.

  Otome, which means “Stop!” is a punishment unique to the Inoue School. When the teacher gives you an otome you have to immediately stop and leave the studio. And she doesn’t tell you when you will be allowed to return, making it an indefinite suspension. The idea that I might be forbidden to continue dancing was unbearably stressful.

  I didn’t wait for Kuniko but walked home by myself and went straight into the closet, without saying anything to anybody. I was miserable. First the courtroom and now this. Why was Big Mistress so angry?

  Auntie Oima came to the closet door.

  “What happened, Mine-chan? Why did you come home by yourself?”

  “Mine-chan, will you be having dinner?”

  “Mine-chan, would you like to take a bath?”

  I refused to answer.

  I heard one of the Sakaguchi maids come into the room. She said that Mother Sakaguchi needed to see Auntie Oima right away. Auntie Oima hurried off.

  Mother Sakaguchi came right to the point. “We have a bit of a crisis. Ms. Aiko just called. Apparently her assistant mixed up the titles of two pieces, one that Mineko just finished and one that she is learning. Miss Kawabata told Mineko that Sakuramiyotote [“cherry blossom viewing”] was Yozakura[“cherry blossoms at night”] and vice versa. So Mineko danced the wrong dance today and Aiko gave her an otome. Is Mineko okay?”

  “So that’s what happened. No, she’s not okay. She’s in the closet and won’t talk to me. I think she’s really upset.”

  “What are we going to do if she threatens to quit?”

  “We’ll have to convince her not to.”

  “Go home and do your best to get her out of the closet.”

  I concluded that I must have gotten the otome because I wasn’t trying hard enough, that I simply had to do better. So, right there inside the closet, I started to rehearse the dance I was learning and the dance I had just finished. I practiced them for hours. I kept telling myself to concentrate. If I dance these perfectly tomorrow, Big Mistress will be so surprised that maybe she will forget about the otome.

  But, as with many things in Gion Kobu, it was not so simple. I couldn’t just go back to class as if nothing had happened. It didn’t matter whose fault it was. I had gotten the otome so my elders had to petition for my continued enrollment. Off we trooped to Shinmonzen. Mother Sakaguchi, Auntie Oima, Mistress Kasama, Old Meanie, Yaeko, Kun-chan and me.

  Mother Sakaguchi bowed and addressed Big Mistress. “I am so sorry for the unfortunate situation that occurred yesterday. We entreat you to let our Mineko remain a student in your esteemed school.”

  No one said a word about what had actually happened. The reason wasn’t important. What was important was that everyone save face and that I be allowed to continue my training without interruption.

  “Very well, Mother Sakaguchi, I will do as you ask. Mineko, please show us what you are working on.”

  I danced Cherry Blossom Viewing. And then, without being asked, I danced Cherry Blossoms at Night. I did well. When I finished, the room was quiet. I looked around at the mixture of emotions on the women’s faces.

  It struck me that the adult world was a very complicated place.

  I now understand that Big Mistress employed the otome as a powerful teaching tool. She gave me an otome whenever she wanted to force me to push through to the next level of artistry; she consciously used the terror of the otome to galvanize my spirit. It was a test. Would I come back stronger? Or would I give up and quit? I don’t think this is a particularly enlightened educational philosophy, but, in my case at least, it always had the desired effect.

  Bi
g Mistress never gave otome to mediocre dancers, only to those of us whom she was grooming for major roles. The only person who suffered actual consequences from my first otome was the teacher who had given me the wrong information. She was never allowed to instruct me again.

  My adoption officially came through on April 15, 1960. As I had been living in the Iwasaki okiya for the last five years, the change in status didn’t have a great effect on my daily routine. Except for the fact that now I had to sleep upstairs with Old Meanie in her room.

  I had come all the way across the bridge. My childhood home was behind me. The world of the dance lay ahead.

  14

  THE ONLY PLEASANT THING about Yaeko being in the Iwasaki okiya was that her son Masayuki sometimes came to visit. Old Meanie asked Masayuki what he wanted for his thirteenth birthday. He was a very good student and confessed that what he wanted more than anything was a world encyclopedia.

  He came to the Iwasaki okiya on his birthday, January 9, so Old Meanie could give him the present. Masayuki was delighted. We sat in the guesthouse for hours, paging through the fact-filled pages together.

  Formal Japanese reception rooms feature an alcove called a tokonoma, which is used to display treasured curios. Usually these include a hanging scroll depicting a seasonal motif and flowers artfully arranged in a suitable vase. I still remember the scroll that was hanging in the tokonoma that day. It was a New Year’s image, a painting of the sun rising over the mountains. A crane flew across the sun. The cushions we were sitting on were covered in warm brown silk. Had it been summer they would have been covered in cool blue linen.

  Six days later, around eleven in the morning, the telephone rang. As soon as I heard it ring I had a horrible premonition. I knew something bad had happened. The phone call was from my father. He told us that Masayuki was missing. That morning he had gone to the store to buy tofu for breakfast and never come home. They couldn’t find him anywhere.

  Yaeko was attending a luncheon for some foreign ambassadors at Hyotei, an exclusive restaurant that has a four hundred-year-old history, near Nanzenji. After telling my father where she was, Kuniko, Tomiko, and I raced home.

  When we got to our neighborhood we were greeted by a large crowd of policemen and firemen, hovering around the edge of the canal. The officers had found fingernail scratches on the steep embankment. The pebbles on the bank were disturbed. The officials concluded that Masayuki had tripped and fallen, and, even though they couldn’t find a body, they assumed that he had drowned. There was no way anyone could last more than a few minutes in that freezing cold water.

  My brain and heart stopped cold. I couldn’t believe it. The canal. The one that gave us tiny clams for miso soup. The one with the beautiful cherry blossoms. The one that protected our house from the rest of the world. That canal had swallowed my friend. More than my friend. My nephew. I went numb with shock.

  My parents were clearly devastated. My father adored his grandson and I couldn’t bear to look at the pain in his face. I wanted to comfort him but I was no longer his daughter. I hadn’t seen my parents in the two years since that day in court when I declared that I was an Iwasaki, not a Tanaka. I felt awkward. I didn’t know how I was supposed to act. I wished that I had died instead of Masayuki.

  Yaeko waited until the luncheon was over before coming out to the house. To this day I still can’t understand why she continued to sit in that restaurant, eating food and making clever conversation, when she knew that her son was missing. I know the room where she was sitting. It overlooks a garden. The garden has a pond. The pond is fed by a small stream. The stream’s water comes from the same canal that took her son’s life.

  Yaeko arrived around three o’clock. She pointed her finger at me and started screaming like a she-devil. “It should have been you! You are the one who should have died, you worthless piece of nothing! Not my Masayuki.”

  At that moment, I couldn’t have agreed with her more. I would have given anything to exchange my life for his. She blamed my parents. They blamed themselves. It was a horrid mess.

  I tried to be stoical. I thought that was what my father expected. He wouldn’t want me to disgrace myself with tears. And Auntie Oima. She would want me to maintain my composure as well. So I decided that hiding my feelings was a way to honor both families simultaneously.

  I would have to be strong.

  When I returned to the okiya I refused to allow myself the sanctuary of the closet. Masayuki’s body was recovered a week later. It had washed down the canal into the river network of the Kyoto basin and floated south all the way to Fushimi. We held the traditional all-night vigil over the corpse. And then we had his funeral. The town put up a green wire fence on the embankment of the canal.

  It was my first experience of death. And one of the last times I ever visited my parents’ house.

  Yaeko’s hatred of me intensified. Now whenever she walked past me she hissed “I wish you were dead” under her breath. I kept the encyclopedia. Masayuki’s fingerprints were on every page. I became obsessed with death. What happens when you die? Where was Masayuki? Was there some way I could go there too? I thought about it all the time. I was so preoccupied that, for once, I neglected my studies and my lessons. Finally, I decided to question all the old men in the neighborhood. They were closer to death than I was. Maybe one of them knew something.

  I asked Mr. Vegetable Man, and Uncle Hori my calligraphy teacher, and Mr. Nomura the gilder, and Mr. Sugane the laundry man, and the coppersmith. I asked everyone I could think of, but nobody had a definitive answer. I didn’t know where else to turn.

  Meanwhile, spring was approaching and, with it, the entrance exams for junior high school. Old Meanie wanted me to apply to the prestigious junior high school connected to Kyoto Women’s College. But I wasn’t able to focus. In the end, I enrolled in the local public junior high school close to home.

  Yaeko was so furious with my parents that she didn’t want her older son Mamoru to live with them any longer. Yet she was too selfish and irresponsible to find a proper home, like an apartment, where they could live together. She insisted on bringing him to live in the okiya.

  This was not the first time that Yaeko had flaunted the rules. She was always bending them. Her very presence was an aberration. The only geiko allowed to reside in the okiya are the atotori and the young geiko who are still under contract. Yaeko was neither. She may have liked to think she was still an Iwasaki, but her divorce wasn’t final and her last name was Uehara. She had broken her contract with the okiya when she left to be married. She didn’t have the right to live there on either account. As if this was not enough, it is not permitted to reenter an okiya once you leave it.

  Yaeko overrode Auntie Oima and Old Meanie’s objections. She moved Mamoru in and kept breaking the rules. She even sneaked her boyfriends up into her room at night. One morning I staggered into the bathroom half-asleep and bumped into some guy she had brought home the night before. I screamed. The whole household was thrown into turmoil.

  Typical Yaeko.

  It was bad form for a man, any man, to spend the night in an okiya because it cast suspicion on the chastity of its inhabitants. Nothing is left unnoticed, or unremarked, in Gion Kobu. Auntie Oima was never happy when there was a man in the house. When a man had to stay overnight for some reason, even if he were a close male relative, she made him wait until after lunch before leaving, lest anyone see him depart in the morning and get the wrong idea.

  I was twelve. Mamoru was fifteen. He may not have been a full-grown man but his energy changed the atmosphere of the okiya. It didn’t feel as safe to me any longer. He teased me in a way that made me distinctly uncomfortable.

  One time he and two of his friends were up in his room. I went in to bring them tea and they grabbed me and pushed me around. I got scared and ran downstairs. They were laughing. Another time I was in the bath by myself and I heard someone in the changing room. I called out, “Who’s there?” Suzu-chan was doing a chore in the gard
en and her voice came through the window. “Miss Mineko, are you alright?”

  “I’m fine,” I answered.

  I heard the door slam and someone run up the outside stairs to the second story. It had to be Mamoru.

  I knew next to nothing about sex. It was never discussed and I wasn’t particularly curious. The only man I had ever seen naked was my father and that was so many years ago I barely remembered what he looked like.

  So it came as a complete shock when, one evening when I was undressing in the changing room, Mamoru sneaked up silently from behind, grabbed me, threw me brutally to the floor, and tried to rape me.

  It was a hot summer evening but I froze. My mind went blank and my total being went cold with fear. I was too terrified to scream and barely able to put up a struggle. Just then, earning my eternal gratitude, Kun-chan walked in to bring me a fresh towel and a change of clothes.

  She ripped Mamoru off me and violently threw him aside. I thought she was going to murder him. “You filthy bastard!” she yelled. She morphed from her normally placid self into some kind of fierce guardian deity. “You dirty, rotten pig! How dare you put your hands on Mineko? Get the hell out of here. This instant! I’ll kill you if you ever think about touching her again. DO YOU HEAR ME?”

  He tore out of there, like a thief in the night. Kuniko tried to lift me up. I was shaking so hard I couldn’t even stand. My body was covered with bruises.

  She put me to bed. Auntie Oima and Old Meanie were very kind. But I was completely traumatized, caught in a wrenching vise of panic and fear.

  Auntie Oima called Yaeko and Mamoru and, without preamble, commanded them to leave: “I want you out of here this instant. Now. No excuses. Don’t say a word.” Auntie Oima later told me she had never been angrier in her life.

  Yaeko refused to leave. She insisted that she had nowhere to go, which, looking back on it, was probably true. No one could stand her. Old Meanie intervened and said she would help find someplace for Yaeko to go.