Geisha Read online

  The hem of a maiko’s kimono is padded with batting to give the train its proper heft and shape. One night someone stuck needles into the padding. After being pricked innumerable times, I went home and sadly pulled twenty-two needles out of the hem of my beautiful kimono.

  The longer these incidents continued the more difficult it was for me to trust anyone or to take anything for granted. And when I did make a mistake, the punishment never seemed to fit the crime. One evening I arrived at an ochaya. It was dark and I couldn’t see who was passing me in the hallway. It was the okasan and she was furious at me for not greeting her properly. She forbade me from entering her ochaya for an entire year. I dealt with the harassment as best I could. In the end, I believe it made me a stronger person.

  I didn’t have one friend among my age group. Some of the older geiko, all of whom were very secure in their own success, went out of their way to be kind. They were among the few who relished the fact that I was such a phenomenon.

  The accounting system of the Gion Kobu immediately translates one’s popularity into concrete numeric terms. The amount of hanadai one earns is equal to the demand for one’s services, and the total is a matter of public record. It didn’t take long for my sales to reach the top. I occupied this position for six years: the five years I was a maiko and the first I was a geiko. After that, I scaled back my schedule slightly. The small decrease in hanadai that resulted was more than made up by the regular tips I received from my large number of clients.

  The word we use to refer to our total earnings is mizuage(not to be confused with the coming-of-age ceremony). The geiko who has the highest mizuage for the previous year is publicly recognized during the annual commencement ceremony that takes place at the Nyokoba School on January 7. I was recognized that first year.

  Right from the beginning I was hired to attend an inordinate number of ozashiki. I visited an average of ten ochaya in an evening, and attended as many ozashiki as I could in each one, rarely spending more than thirty minutes total in any given house. It was not unusual for me to join a party for five minutes or less before I had to get to my next commitment.

  Because I was so popular, customers were billed for a full hour of my time even if I was only with them for a few minutes. In this way, I accumulated many more hanadai than time units worked. Every night. I don’t have the exact figures, but I believe I was earning about $500,000 a year. This was a good deal of money in 1960s Japan, more than that earned by the presidents of most companies. (It is also the reason the notion that geiko perform sexual favors for their clients is so ridiculous. With this much income, why would we?)

  Yet I didn’t take my work in the ozashiki that seriously. I still saw the ozashiki as a venue for my dancing, and didn’t think very much about taking care of the customers. I figured if I was enjoying myself, then the customers were probably enjoying themselves as well, and didn’t go out of my way to try to please them.

  But the geiko were another matter. I wanted their respect and friendship and I did try to please them. At the very least, I wanted them to like me. But nothing I did seemed to work. The more popular I became with the customers the more alienated I became from the other geiko. Most of them treated me shabbily, from the youngest maiko to the older, veteran geiko. I became increasingly frustrated and depressed. Then I had a brainstorm.

  Because I only had time to stay at any given banquet for a short while, there was quite a bit of time left over that needed to be filled by other geiko. So I decided to try to orchestrate the company myself by asking the okasan of the ochaya to invite certain geiko to attend the ozashiki for which I was booked. I coordinated all of this on my way home from the Nyokoba in the afternoon.

  “Okasan, tonight for my engagement with so-and-so, I was wondering if you could ask [this one and that one] to help me out…” The okasan would then call around to the okiya and say that Mineko had specifically asked for so-and-so to work with her that evening. I booked three to five additional geiko per banquet. Multiply this by the number of banquets I attended and the numbers quickly add up. This was work these geiko might not otherwise have received and their appreciation eventually wore down their envy.

  When their pocketbooks began to fill as a result of my asking for them, they couldn’t help but start to treat me better. The harassment gradually began to abate. This only furthered my resolve to stay on top. My clever strategy would only work as long as I was Number One.

  That helped with the women but not the men. I had to learn how to defend myself from them as well. With the women I tried to be friendly and obliging. With the men I was tough.

  One day I was returning from Shimogamo shrine where I had performed a New Year’s dance. It was January 5. I was carrying a “demon dispelling arrow,” a talisman that Shinto shrines sell at the New Year to ward off evil spirits. A middle-aged gentleman was walking toward me. As he brushed past, he turned and, without warning, started to fondle me all over.

  I took the bamboo arrow, grabbed the masher’s right wrist and stabbed the arrow into the back of his hand. The tip was pointed in notches. I ground it down as hard as I could. I drew blood. The man tried to pull his hand away but I hung on with all my might, still jabbing the arrow into him. I stared at him coldly and announced:

  “Alright, mister, we have two choices here. We can go to the police, or you can vow right here and now that you will never do anything like this again, ever, to anyone. It’s up to you. What’s it going to be?”

  He answered immediately, his voice a strangled cry. “I promise I will never do it again. Please let me go.”

  “I want you to look at the scar from this whenever you are tempted to hurt anyone else. And stop.”

  Another time Yuriko and I were walking along Hanamikoji Street. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed three men closing in on us. They looked drunk. I had a bad feeling. Before I could act, one of the men grabbed me from behind and pinned my arms behind my back. The other two started to go after Yuriko and I shouted at her to run. She took off and ducked into an alleyway.

  Meanwhile, the guy who had his arms around me bent down and started to lick the nape of my neck. I was totally disgusted. “It’s not a good idea to mess with today’s women. You’d better be careful from now on,” I said as I looked for an opening. I forced myself to go limp. He relaxed his hold. I grabbed his left hand and sunk my teeth into his wrist. He let out a scream and let go of me. Blood was dripping from his hand. The other two men were staring at me in wide-eyed amazement. They fled.

  My lips were covered in blood. I was steps away from the okiya when a bunch of men came swaggering down the street, clearly trying to impress the women whom they were with. The men surrounded me, leering and snickering. They started to touch me. One of the bamboo strips of the basket I was carrying had broken and was sticking out of the bottom. I snapped it off with my free hand and started waving it in front of my attackers.

  I shouted at them. “So you think you’re cool, do you? You assholes!” Then I took the pointed end of the bamboo and started to claw at the face of the most aggressive of the men. The other men started to move away and I ran off into the house.

  Another time a man tried to molest me at the corner of Shinbashi and Hanamikoji Street. I squirmed out of his clutches, took off one of my okobo and threw it at him. I hit him square on the mark. Once when I was walking from one ochaya to another a drunk came up behind me, grabbed hold of me, and dropped a live cigarette butt down the nape of my kimono. I couldn’t reach behind to get it out so I chased after him and made him take it out himself. It really hurt. I hurried home and took off my kimono. I looked in the mirror and there was a big fat blister on the back of my neck. I took a needle and punctured the skin to let out the fluid, then redid my makeup so it didn’t show. I was able to make it to my next engagement on time. But enough was enough. I started to travel everywhere by taxi, even if my engagements were only a few hundred feet apart.

  Occasionally I ran into problems on the inside of
ochaya as well as outside them. The vast majority of our customers are perfect gentleman, but every now and then there is a bad apple.

  There was one man who came to Gion Kobu almost every night and spent a fortune on ozashiki. He had a bad reputation among the maiko and geiko and I tried to avoid him whenever possible. One night I was waiting next to the kitchen for a flask of hot sake when this man came up to me and started to feel the front of my kimono. “Where are your tits, Mine-chan? Right about here?”

  I had no idea if he got away with this kind of behavior with the other girls, but he certainly wasn’t going to get away with it with me.

  The altar room was right next to the kitchen, and I saw a set of wooden blocks lying on a cushion. These blocks are used to beat time when chanting sutras and are quite heavy. I went in, picked up one of the blocks, and turned toward the obnoxious guy. I must have looked menacing because he took off down the corridor. I ran after him. He sprinted into the garden and I followed, shoeless, long train trailing behind me.

  I chased him up and down the stairs to the second story of the ochaya, not bothering to imagine how this scene must have looked to the other guests. I finally caught up with him back near the kitchen. I bopped him on the head with the block. It made a hollow sound. “Gotcha!” I cried.

  The man just happened to go bald soon after that.

  25

  IDIDN’T NEED THE NUMBERS to tell me that I had become the most popular maiko in Gion Kobu. I only had to look at my schedule. It was booked for a year and a half.

  My schedule was so tight that a prospective client had to confirm any tentative booking a month before the engagement, and, although I always left a couple of slots open for emergencies, these were invariably taken a week in advance. If I did happen to have a few minutes open in my evening’s schedule I would book them on my way home from the Nyokoba, promising five minutes here or ten minutes there. I had Kuniko write down these extra jobs in my appointment ledger while I was eating lunch.

  Basically, I was booked solid for the entire five years that I was a maiko. I worked 7 days a week, 365 days a year, from the time I was fifteen until I was twenty-one. I never took a day off. I worked every Saturday and Sunday. I worked New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.

  I was the only person in the Iwasaki okiya who didn’t take any days off during this time, and, for all I know, I may have been the only one in Gion Kobu as well. At least it was better than not working.

  I didn’t really know how to have fun. Sometimes I went out with friends when I had a bit of free time, but I found being in public exhausting.

  The moment I stepped outside the door I became “Mineko of Gion Kobu.” Admirers surrounded me wherever I went and I felt compelled to act the part. I was always on. If someone wanted to take a picture with me I let him. If someone wanted an autograph I gave it to her. It never stopped.

  I was afraid that if I didn’t maintain the professional demeanor of a maiko at all times I would simply fall apart. In truth, I was much happier at home by myself, thinking my own thoughts, reading a book, or listening to music. That is the only way I could truly relax.

  It’s hard to imagine living in a world where everyone—your friends, your sisters, even your mother—is your rival. I found it very disorienting. I wasn’t able to distinguish friend from foe; I never knew who or what to believe. Inevitably, all of this took a psychological toll and I began to experience emotional problems. I suffered periodic anxiety, insomnia, and difficulty speaking.

  I was afraid that if I didn’t lighten up I was going to get sick. So I decided to become funnier. I bought a bunch of records of comic stories and listened to them every day. I made up my own little routines and tried them out at ozashiki. I pretended that the banquet room was a playground, and that I was there to have a good time.

  It actually helped. I began to feel better and was able to pay more attention to what was going on in the room. Dance and the other art forms can be taught, but how to make an ozashiki sparkle can not. This is something that takes a certain aptitude and years of experience.

  Each ozashiki is different, even within the same ochaya. One can tell much about the status of the guests from how the room has been arranged. How valuable is the scroll hanging in the tokonoma? What dishes are on the table? Where is the food from? A trained geiko grasps these nuances the moment she walks into an ozashiki and modulates her behavior accordingly. The aesthetic training I received from my parents gave me a head start in this direction.

  Next we must know how to steer the entertainment. Does the host enjoy watching dance, engaging in witty conversation, or playing amusing games? When we get to know a customer we commit his or her personal likes and dislikes to memory so that we can better serve him in the future.

  Ochaya are not only used for entertaining. They are also used as venues for sensitive business and political discussions. An ozashiki provides a secluded environment where the participants know they will be comfortable and their privacy will be protected.

  Auntie Oima told me that the reason our hair ornaments have pointed ends is so that we can use them to defend our customers from attack. And that the coral ones worn in the colder months can be used to test the safety of the sake: coral breaks apart in the presence of poison.

  Sometimes the most valuable service a geiko can perform is to become part of the wall, to become invisible. If appropriate, she will position herself near the entrance to the room and let the host know when someone is approaching by making a small signal. Or, if asked to do so, she will inform anyone who is approaching that the guests do not wish to be disturbed.

  One of the specialized jobs in the teahouse is that of the sake heater, or okanban. The okanban fills a flask with sake and places the flask into a pan of simmering water to warm it. It sounds simple, but each guest likes his or her sake served at a certain temperature. The okanban’s skill is to calculate how many degrees of heat will be lost as the sake travels from kitchen to banquet room, so it is the correct temperature when it arrives. This is no small feat. I liked the job of fetching sake because I enjoyed talking to the okanban. They were always full of interesting, behind-the-scenes information.

  As I mentioned before, teahouses tend to have multigenerational relationships with their best clients. One of the ways the ochaya engenders this loyalty is by hiring their client’s progeny as temporary employees. Assistant okanban is a popular position.

  For example, a young man starting college in Kyoto might apply for this job, on his father’s recommendation, in order to help him meet expenses. Everyone benefits from this arrangement. The young man learns how the culture of the ochaya functions from the inside out. He sees how much effort is involved in even the simplest ozashiki and gets to know the local maiko and geiko. The father is helping to educate his son in the sophisticated ways of the adult world. And the ochaya is investing in a future client.

  I continued to devote as much energy as possible to my dance classes. Now that I was a professional dancer I felt like I was finally making real progress. So it came as a shock when I received my second otome.

  It was during rehearsal for the Yukatakai, the summer dances in which all the Gion Kobu geiko participate. I was seventeen. We were rehearsing a group number. Suddenly Big Mistress stopped the action, called my name and told me to leave the stage. I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t made a mistake. The girl next to me had.

  I found Mama Masako and stormed, “That’s it. I’m quitting! I got another otome and this one wasn’t my fault either!”

  Without missing a beat, Mama Masako said, evenly, “Fine. Go ahead. I mean, you didn’t even make a mistake. How dare she embarrass you in front of everybody? You poor thing!”

  She was spurring me on. Boy, could she see right through me. She knew that I always did the opposite of what she told me to do.

  “No, I mean it Mom, I’m really going to quit.”

  “That makes sense. It’s exactly what I’d do if I were in your position.”

/>   “But if I do quit, then I lose face. Maybe I should fool everybody and keep on going. I don’t know…”

  “Well, that is another option…”

  Just then Yaeko walked into the room. She had been eavesdropping on our conversation.

  “You’ve really done it this time, Mineko. You have shamed us all.”

  She meant that my disgrace would cause a loss of face for every geiko associated with our lineage.

  But Mama Masako brushed her off. “This is none of your business, Yaeko. Would you mind going into the other room for a minute?”

  Yaeko’s lips curled into a thin smile. “Of course it’s my business. Her bad behavior is an embarrassment to me as well.”

  Mama said flatly, “Yae, don’t be ridiculous. Would you please get out of here?”

  “Since when do you boss me around?”

  “This is between Mineko and me. I want you to stay out of it.”

  “Well, if that’s how you feel, I’m terribly sorry to have bothered you. Far be it from me to intrude on you and your ‘precious’ Mineko. Like she’s worth it.”

  Yaeko huffed out of the room but her words lingered in my mind. Maybe I was so bad that I really should quit.

  “Forgive me, Mama, I’m really sorry. Perhaps it is better if I give up.”

  “Whatever you decide to do is okay with me.”

  “But, what if it’s like Yaeko says? What if I’ve brought disgrace upon the house?”

  “That’s not a good enough reason. You said it yourself a few minutes ago. You might completely lose face if you quit. If I were you, I would talk to Big Mistress. See what she has to say. I bet she wants you to continue.”

  “You think so? Thank you, Mama. That’s what I’ll do.”

  Mama Masako called Mother Sakaguchi who came rushing over in a car.

  As usual, our contingent sat facing their contingent. Everyone bowed.