Women of the Pleasure Quarters

by Lesley Downer

  “Let me teach you,” she said, suddenly kind. “Last time we met, you asked too many things—you wanted to meet geisha, meet maiko, stay in a geisha house, do this, do that. You must learn to be patient. Take it step by step.”

  “Step by step,” echoed the barman, who seemed to have more authority than one would have expected.

  “When you meet maiko, you do not ask, ‘Why did you become a maiko? What is your training?’ In a gentle way, you say”—putting on a piping little girl voice—“ ‘If you don’t mind, could I ask . . . ?’ And only one thing at a time. You ask too much!”

  Taking out one of her business cards, she penciled a few neat characters on to it.

  “Take this to Mr. Kimura at the union offices in the Kaburenjo,” she said. “We will practice what you will say. I will run through it with you.”

  “Well,” I said, “I guess I’ll introduce myself, tell him that I’ve lived in Japan, show him my books, then say that I want to sit very quietly and watch some classes, maybe meet maiko and talk to them, talk to the teachers . . .”

  “No, no,” she said. “Just say something very modest: ‘I did these books, there’s others too but this is all I have; if possible it would be really wonderful if I could sit in on a dance class . . .’ And don’t say anything else. Then the next time you make your next request. You see?”

  I repeated the words after her in my best high-pitched little girl voice, full of deference and self-deprecation, inserting thanks and apologies after every few words. I was beginning to understand. Within the geisha scheme of things, I was right at the bottom of the pecking order. Here I was, a female, trying to swim along within the geisha community yet ignorant of all their codes. Had I been a man, it would have been natural for me to be an outsider. I would have fitted neatly into the category of customer. The geisha would have indulged me, flirted with me, overwhelmed me with charm and attentiveness. But in this closed, secretive world of women, there was no place for a female who did not know the proper way to behave. My experience must have been akin to that of a new girl entering a geisha house. I was undergoing the most basic geisha training such as would be given to a raw recruit fresh from the countryside.

  And—though she probably disagreed with me—I felt I was learning. Living among the geisha, dealing with them on a day-to-day basis, I found their ways beginning to rub off on me. I found myself carrying my body differently, walking with dainty steps, bowing, nodding, smiling until my face hurt. Most disconcertingly, when I called Japanese who had nothing to do with geisha or the geisha world, I found myself talking with exaggerated politeness in sweet, high-pitched velvety tones: “Oh, that would really be too kind, thank you so, so much!”

  The next day, full of anticipation, I went along to the large concrete Kaburenjo carrying the precious business card. It was a rather unprepossessing building to house such an august body as the geisha union. My hopes rose when I discovered that Mr. Kimura was really quite young, maybe only forty or fifty. He had clipped hair, glasses, and an office worker’s suit. He took me off to a small side office and asked me brusquely what I wanted. I repeated my speech in my most unctuous tones, being as modest and undemanding as it was possible to be.

  “No chance,” he growled. It struck me that, for all my efforts, neither the mama nor anyone else in authority bothered much with politeness at all.

  “I’ll ask them upstairs, but I’m sure they’ll say no,” he said, scowling, and showed me the door. “You can try again next week if you like,” he added, which I now understood to mean “Forget it.” Downcast, I went back to my small sunny room to lick my wounds and ponder my next step.

  The Best Cakes

  Whenever I had time, I went to tea ceremony class. The teacher, a comely, charismatic young man, had two faces. When he was conducting the class he wore hakama, the formal starched and pleated men’s kimono, and took on the persona of the sensei (teacher), barking orders and correcting the smallest mistake. Off duty he was a hip young man who worked as a stylist for a glossy magazine.

  Tea ceremony is a series of precise choreographed movements performed in a spirit of stillness and concentration which also involves the serving and consuming of food and drink. It is somewhere between tai chi and the Roman Catholic mass but on a very small, intimate scale. Being very rusty, I was at the bottom of the class and had to be coaxed to remember even the most basic things, such as to hold my arms as if there were an egg tucked into each armpit. Fortunately the teacher belonged to the same school that I had studied before, so at least I did not have to relearn details like the folding of the silk napkin.

  “For the name, Ippodo; for the history, Kamibayashi; for the taste, Koyama—that’s what we say in Kyoto,” he told us one day, naming the three most famous tea shops in the city. Then he listed the four most famous cake shops. To my relief, the shop where I had bought the mama’s cakes was among them.

  “Do you know Kanshindo?” he added, glancing at me. “You should go there this season. It’s very old, it’s where the geisha buy their cakes. It’s famous for its mizu yokan [a bland slab of red bean paste jelly eaten in summer]. It’s very difficult to find, only Gion people know it. If you take them Kanshindo mizu yokan, the geisha will be very surprised and impressed. Shall I tell you where it is?”

  And he drew me a small sketch map.

  I needed to report back to the mama and take her a gift to thank her for her kindness in introducing me to Mr. Kimura; it was irrelevant that it had not been a success. I called her, made an appointment to visit, and went in search of the cake shop. I walked down Shijo Street, looking carefully. There were plenty of alleys off the main road but nothing where the teacher had indicated. Then I noticed a gap between two buildings just wide enough to slip through. It led to a dark, narrow path lined with blank walls and the closed doors of bars. Halfway along was a small stall, not even a shop, with wrapped slabs of bean jelly in a display case. I bought a couple, wrapped in Kanshindo paper, and carried them off in the Kanshindo carrier bag.

  That evening I went to see the mama. As always, I was precisely on time. As always, she was not there. When she finally appeared, I offered her the cakes, bowing and murmuring in self-deprecating tones, “This is really nothing at all, but please take it.”

  She took the bag and gave me a warm smile.

  “The most delicious cakes!” she said. “You’re learning, little by little.”

  I had also learned to ask no more. I thanked her profusely for her very great kindness and for teaching me so much, apologized for my shortcomings, chatted inconsequentially for a while, then left, feeling pleased with myself.

  I had never guessed that cakes would make such a difference. After that, whenever I was to visit anyone, I always made a pilgrimage to Kanshindo. I became a regular customer. The two apron-clad women who ran the shop took to asking how I was and I always stopped for a chat. And when I proffered my cakes, the geisha would exclaim with delight or nod approvingly and look at me as if to say, “Aha, I can see you know what’s what.” I had found one of the keys to the door.

  Doors Open

  There was another key lying around waiting to be found—or maybe it was a door opening rather than a key.

  One day I was walking home when a geisha caught up with me, scurrying along on her silk-covered sandals. She was tall and slender with a dancer’s long neck and a striking face, handsome rather than beautiful, with a long chin, high cheekbones, thoughtful eyes, and a wide sensuous mouth. She was wearing, as geisha (as opposed to maiko) do, an elegant, understated kimono in shades of pale mauve, with a plain obi, and her hair was swept back. Perhaps it was because she was wearing heavy makeup (though not the white face paint of the maiko, which geisha wear only on formal occasions) that I failed to recognize her though, to my embarrassment, she seemed to know me well.

  “Going home, are you? Or dropping in to the coffee shop?” she asked gaily. Then she mentioned that she was on her way back from Tokyo where she had been performing in a
n odori-kai, a convention for professional dancers, and suddenly I realized who she was.

  Whenever I had seen her before, I had always taken her for a university student or a secretary. When I went for breakfast she was often there, a quiet, serious girl with large owlish glasses who sat at the far end of the counter reading her paper. She usually wore a dress or a simple blouse and skirt over slim bare legs and had short neat hair and a scrubbed clean face. I had always been rather curious about her. She looked like a bit of a bluestocking, very far removed from a geisha, as if, like me, she was an outsider, not really part of this world at all.

  I knew that she was a talented dancer. But plenty of women learned Nihon buyo or jiutamai, the forms of traditional Japanese dance practiced by geisha, as a hobby. It had never occurred to me that such a serious-looking, intellectual young woman might be a geisha herself.

  The following day at breakfast she was not there. By now it was midsummer, approaching the season of the Gion festival. All the geisha had had fans made of hand-crafted paper shaped like gingko leaves and inscribed with their professional names in beautifully brushed black characters, which they handed out as souvenirs. The master and mistress of the coffee shop had a whole collection, pinned up in rows across the wall.

  “Look,” said the master, reading some of the names to me. “And see this one? That’s our Fumiko. You know her. She’s famous, she’s one of the top dancers in the district.”

  I looked blank.

  “She sits just over there. You know, with the big glasses!”

  Something was changing in my perception of the coffee shop and its customers and in their perception of me. For weeks I had gone there simply to have breakfast. Sometimes I chatted to people, often I didn’t. Sometimes some of the older ladies engaged me in conversation. And as I became a familiar face, the plump, motherly owner would inquire how I was getting on with my research.

  I looked at these women I knew so well, with their unmade-up faces, in their slacks and blouses, some still in flimsy nightgowns, with their piled up helmets of lacquered hair. How could I not have realized? All this time I had been scouring the district, making phone calls, using connections, trotting here and there with cakes, when I was already right inside the geisha world.

  In fact it was just as well that I had been so oblivious. For instead of behaving like a journalist and alienating everyone by bombarding them with questions, I had, entirely by accident, done exactly the right thing. I had sat quietly, not being obnoxious, not asking nosy questions, speaking when spoken to, just eating breakfast, day after day. It was a bit like stalking wildlife. They were used to me. I had won their confidence.

  I still did nothing. I was well trained by now. I had plenty of people to meet and places to go. Then several days later the owner leaned across the counter and said in confidential tones, “You wanted to find out about geisha, didn’t you? Hara-san says she’d like to talk to you.”

  I knew Hara-san well, a warm rather beautiful woman in her mid-seventies with a pile of snowy-white hair, large, luminous eyes and a smile which lit up her face. It turned out that she was the okami-san—the owner-mistress—of a teahouse a few doors away from my inn. The word “teahouse,” incidentally, is a literal but rather misleading translation of ochaya. Geisha live in a “geisha house” (okiya) and work in a “teahouse” (ochaya), where there is music, dancing, partying, sometimes food, and always plenty of alcohol; tea is the last thing you would expect to find there.

  I went off to visit Hara-san, taking, of course, Kanshindo cakes. Talking to someone so familiar was an entirely different experience from quizzing a geisha who barely knew me. With childlike innocence, she poured out her heart, showing me photographs of herself as a beautiful, grave-faced young geisha.

  Suddenly doors were flying open. I traipsed in and out of houses with my notebook and tape recorder, listening to stories. Some were uneventful, others extraordinarily moving. I was amazed at the openness with which women would reveal the most harrowing experiences of their youth.

  Now, a good two months after I had first arrived, when I walked down the street maiko recognized me. They stopped to bow and say “Ohayo dosu!,” the quaint geisha phrase for “Good morning,” or “Oné-san, oki-ni,” “Big sister, thank you!” The ones I knew would whisk me off on shopping expeditions, clattering along beside me on their clogs, taking my arm to make sure I was not swept off my feet by one of the lethal passing motorbikes, sheltering me with their oiled paper umbrellas when it rained, chattering and giggling sweetly. I felt pampered, protected, charmed, and hugely honored that they had chosen to befriend me. It was easy to see how beguiling such behavior must be for the wealthy businessmen who were their customers.

  As a single woman, I had always been something of an oddity in Japan. People would ask why I was not married and had no children until, as I passed some unspoken but recognizable age, they became embarrassed even to ask. None of the geisha was remotely interested. After all, they themselves were not married. Some had children, some not. Those who had were single parents. No doubt they assumed that I had the occasional lover, as they did. As I lived among them it began to dawn on me that I—a modern Western career woman—was not far removed from a geisha myself; though when I put this theory to the geisha I knew, they looked distinctly dubious. Perhaps that was the answer. Perhaps they were the original liberated women and the rest of the world had just caught up with them.

  I felt, I realized, extraordinarily at home. In Japan, outside the geisha community, everyone seemed to get up with the lark. Here, like me, they got up late. One would not dream of dropping in to see a geisha before noon. And unlike the punctual Japanese, they were never on time, as I had discovered when I was paying court to the mama-san. It was in many ways the looking-glass image of “real” Japan. All the usual rules were subverted. One should not take the comparison too far. Like Japan, it was a hierarchical, stratified society. But, within the small confines of the geisha communities, it was women, not men, who wielded power; and everyone hoped for girl children, not boys, so that they could carry on the line of geisha. It was a back-to-front world—which was of course the whole point. Men came to the “flower towns” looking for an escape from drab reality in a world of dreams.

  So how had this dream world arisen? This was something I could only understand by looking into the past. Over the following months I sifted through texts to try and understand where the geisha had come from, what their role was in Japanese society, and why Japan had developed this parallel universe. I befriended geisha in Tokyo and in some of the hot spring resorts where Japanese go on holiday. I hung out with different classes and varieties of geisha. And I began to get some clues as to why Japanese men (some, anyway) might be angry at the very notion of my writing a book on geisha.

  Geisha Past and Present

  In this book I put together the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. The first, fourth, sixth, and eighth chapters deal with the history of the geisha, their changing face and role through the centuries, and the many romantic tales, both fact and fiction, which have grown up around them. It is a secret history. In the standard histories of Japan, geisha are never mentioned; yet when I probed a little deeper, I found them there, playing a role in the great events of their day and consorting with the most powerful men of the country as friends, confidantes, mistresses, and sometimes wives. But they are always in the shadows, the women behind the decision makers.

  Today they seem respectable enough; in fact there is a powerful geisha PR lobby driving home the point that geisha are not prostitutes with such insistence that even the most out-of-touch Westerner must have got the message by now. But in Victorian times and before, when geisha were in their heyday, they were the pinnacle of an outrageous alternative society. Like rock and roll stars today, they were the queens of a popular culture created by, with, and for the people, so subversive that the shogunate, the government of the day, spent much its time hopelessly attempting to repress it, or at least keep it within c
ontrollable bounds. Many of the writers who celebrated this culture found themselves in prison from time to time. The woodblock print artists whose work is so familiar to us today made a living portraying the courtesans, geisha, and kabuki actors who were the pin-ups of this alternative society.

  As for the glamorous courtesans and rollicking male geisha who were like court jesters to the wealthy guests, the Japanese will tell you that both professions died out at least a century ago. I found differently . . .

  And what of modern-day geisha? Very few Japanese have ever met one. In the evening the streets of Gion are crowded with Japanese tourists with cameras poised, waiting patiently like birdwatchers for a maiko to flit into view for a few seconds before darting into a nearby teahouse. Only the very wealthy or their guests will ever get to spend an evening in the company of maiko or geisha. Who are these women and why do they do what they do? In the rest of the book I look at the world of the geisha today, from the rites and rituals of geisha life and how a geisha does her makeup and kimono, to how she learns to charm at geisha parties. It is a journey in search of the last remnants of a dying tradition, to record some of these colorful personalities, their customs, their stories, their memories, their present and their past.

  Inevitably I find myself looking at what it means to be a woman in Japan. What is the dividing line between geisha and prostitutes and between wives and geisha? And what of the men who spend their time with geisha? Almost all the people who recorded the geisha and their lives in stories, novels, and woodblock prints were men. In the few surviving writings and paintings by geisha, they portray themselves very differently, not as siren queens but down-to-earth women.