Women of the Pleasure Quarters

by Lesley Downer

  In Japan in the heyday of the geisha, relations between men and women operated very differently from the way in which we do things in the West. Until recently, all but the lowest classes had arranged marriages. The purpose of marriage was to create an alliance between families; to go against one’s family and marry for love would have been quite unthinkable. It was also—hard though it is to imagine—considered shockingly improper to enjoy sex with one’s wife. The function of conjugal relations was to produce children to perpetuate the family line. As for pleasure, men were expected to find that elsewhere.

  I also look at the Japanese attitude to love and sex, untouched until recently by either the European notion of romantic love or Christian sexual morality. This is a culture in which hedonism, sensualism, and the art of the erotic, not at all the same as sex, were uninhibitedly developed in very sophisticated ways. In the floating world of the geisha, it was love, not sex or sensual pleasure, which was taboo.

  chapter 1

  japan before the geisha

  High-class Courtesans

  and the Culture of Desire

  Because they fall

  we love them—

  the cherry blossoms.

  In this floating world,

  does anything endure?

  Ariwara no Narihira (823–880) 1

  The City of Purple Hills

  and Crystal Streams

  More than a thousand years ago, long before geisha were even thought of, Kyoto was the center of an extraordinarily effete, decadent, and promiscuous culture which transformed love into an art form and beauty into a cult. Centuries later, when pleasure quarters were built where men could transcend their everyday lives and imagine themselves noblemen of leisure, the courtesans and geisha modeled the dreams which they sold on the romantic culture of the Heian princes.

  The Heian period lasted from 794 to 1195, the time of the Vikings, King Canute, and William the Conqueror. It began with the construction of a beautiful new capital in an auspicious location, a wide bowl-shaped valley surrounded by tree-clad hills, with sparkling rivers bordering it to each side. The official name was Heian-kyo, the Capital of Peace and Tranquility. Poets called it the City of Purple Hills and Crystal Streams; we know it as Kyoto.

  There a city grew up of vermilion-painted palaces, slender-pillared temples, and spacious mansions of wood with wattled roofs. Noblemen and princes rumbled up and down the broad mud-paved boulevards in the shadow of the overhanging willows, in lavishly decorated oxcarts attended by retinues of liveried outriders. Under the rule of the emperor and his all-powerful ministers of state, the Fujiwara family, the country basked in three centuries of peace and prosperity. For the pampered aristocrats of the Heian court, it was a time of unending leisure which they filled with the pursuit of art and beauty. They spent their days moon-viewing, mixing incense, writing poems, and playing the game of love.

  In this strange hothouse world, women lived their lives away from the sight of men, hidden in a kind of purdah in windowless unheated houses, shadowy by day and lit with oil lamps and tapers by night. When men came to visit they received them sitting behind latticed screens draped with silk curtains or opaque hangings. When they went out, they traveled concealed behind the closed window blinds of their ox-carriages, though they made sure that there was always an exquisite silk sleeve trailing outside to hint at the beauty within.

  For within their secret world, the Heian noblewomen were articulate, literate, and highly educated. One, named Murasaki Shikibu, was the author of the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji, written around the year 1000, which recounts the romantic adventures of the charismatic Prince Genji. Several of the court women kept diaries in which they recorded their thoughts and feelings in extraordinary detail, leaving us very intimate accounts of what life was like for the aristocrats of those days.

  This was probably one of the most lax societies the world has ever seen. Promiscuity was the norm. Following the Confucian precepts which governed society, marriage was a purely political affair arranged by the parents to create an advantageous alliance between families. Love and marriage had nothing to do with each other. A court lady was more likely to suffer censure for a lapse of taste in the colors of her robes than for her numerous lovers.

  But what made the Heian period most extraordinary was the way in which art and the cult of beauty were bound up with love. For more than sexual desire or gut-wrenching passion, love was an art form, an opportunity to put brush to paper, to immortalize the moment in a small literary gem.

  Having heard that a certain lady was very beautiful or, even more titillating, had beautiful handwriting, a nobleman would sit down to compose a waka, a thirty-one-syllable poem, and brush it, in his finest calligraphy, on delicately hued scented paper. When she received it, the lady would assess the handwriting and color of the paper as well as the wit and appropriateness of the poem before brushing a reply. The nobleman would be waiting with bated breath to see whether her handwriting and poem lived up to expectations.

  If the exchange of poems was satisfactory, he would eventually assay a visit. He would creep in at night and immediately, in the pitch darkness, remove his clothes, lift the silken counterpane, lie down on the hard straw mat next to the lady and without further ado consummate the relationship. Slipping away before dawn, he would then brush an eloquent morning-after poem, bewailing the rising of the sun or the crowing of the cock announcing the hour of farewell. The lady in her turn would brush a reply. Thus through poems they communicated their decision as to whether to continue the affair or not.

  The most famous of all the Heian beauties was Ono no Komachi, a lady-in-waiting in the imperial court. So beautiful, proud, and passionate was she that she has never been forgotten. Her name has come down through the ages as Japan’s all-time femme fatale.

  Her story is recounted in Noh plays and legend. With her raven tresses that cascaded to the floor, a face like a blossom, and eyebrows painted into perfect crescent moons, she drove the noblemen of her day mad with desire. She would glide through the cedar-scented halls in her multilayered gauze and damask robes, oblivious to the thousands of love letters which lay discarded about her chambers. At night she slept in a room bright with tortoiseshell where golden flowers decorated the walls and strings of crystal beads hung in the doorway. When she passed the cup at banquets, people said it was as if the moon lay on her trailing sleeve.

  But she was not just a pretty face. She was brilliant, accomplished, powerful, and tough-minded, a woman of burning passions which she wrote about in waka poems read and loved to this day.

  Of the fickleness of men’s love she wrote:

  A thing which fades

  With no outward sign

  Is the flower

  Of the heart of man

  In this world! 2

  Unlike the maidens of medieval Europe, waiting passively for a knight in shining armor to come courting, she herself burned with fiery passion:

  This night of no moon

  There is no way to meet him.

  I rise in longing—

  My breast pounds, a leaping flame,

  My heart is consumed in fire. 3

  She would only give herself to a man who could prove himself worthy of her. For the most lovelorn of all, a commander of the imperial guard named Fukakusa no Shi’i no Shosho, she devised the sternest of ordeals. He was to come to her house for a hundred nights and sleep outside on a bench used to support the shafts of her chariot before she would even consider his suit. Night after night he hitched up his stiff silk trousers and donned his tall lacquered hat or put on a wide-brimmed wicker hat and straw rain cape and ventured out into the elements. Evading the night watchmen and the barrier guards he walked through wind, rain, and snow, made a notch on the shaft bench, then waited through the night there, shivering. Ninety-nine days had passed and the joyful day, when he was to receive the reward for all his efforts, was dawning when he suddenly died, of heartbreak, perhaps, or exposure.

&nbs
p; For such hard-heartedness, Komachi suffered the cruelest punishment of all—the loss of her beauty. Instead of dying young, like Cleopatra or Helen of Troy, and leaving a beautiful memory, she lived to be a hundred. After the death of Captain Shosho she was spurned and driven from court and ended up a tattered, crazed beggar woman. In folk legend and Noh plays she is portrayed as an ancient withered crone, hideously ugly, haunted by the unhappy spirits of the men who died for love of her.

  Like the cherry blossoms, beauty is all too fleeting; and this is what gives her story its poignancy. The beauty of women can drive men to distraction and to their deaths but in the end men get their revenge: such women die old and alone. Komachi’s tragic end made her all the more the perfect precursor of the geisha. Like her they too came to be regarded with ambivalence. They were sirens, so beautiful that men could not resist them—yet to yield and fall in love with one was to court disaster. At least in legend, if not in real life, Komachi had to be punished for her fearsome powers.

  Shizuka’s Last Dance

  Even at the height of Heian promiscuity, when noblemen had no problem finding a companion for the night and flitted merrily from one aristocratic woman’s chamber to another, there were also prostitutes who offered a different sort of pleasure. At one end of the scale were ordinary prostitutes who wandered the streets, waterways, hills, and woods and were referred to as “wandering women,” “floating women,” and “play women.” At the other extreme were cultivated, refined professionals whom in English we might call courtesans. Some were of good family, fallen upon hard times; others were noted for their beauty, brilliance, or talent. Skilled musicians, dancers, and singers, they were often the invited guests and chosen companions of aristocrats. These high-class courtesans were the original precursors of the geisha. 4

  The most popular of the courtesans were the shirabyoshi dancing women (shirabyoshi literally means “white rhythm”). To heighten their allure, they cross-dressed in white male clothing and manly court caps. They carried swords like men and performed highly charged erotic songs and dances to music with a rhythmic beat. Like the supermodels and rock singers of today, they were stars and the chosen companions of the country’s most powerful men.

  The most celebrated of all was Shizuka Gozen, the concubine of the twelfth-century hero Yoshitsune. (Shizuka, alas, is probably legendary though the great warrior who was her lover is a very important historical figure, a doughty Richard the Lionheart of Japan; the two heroes, Japanese and Western, coincide in both period and story.) She was renowned throughout the country for her extraordinary beauty and also for the power of her dancing, so magical that once, when the country had been suffering from drought for a hundred days, the gods responded by sending rain as soon as she began to dance. This is not as extraordinary as it sounds. Dance began as a way of supplicating the gods in Japan and the women who worked in Shinto shrines often combined the roles of shamaness and prostitute. Centuries later when the first geisha appeared, they claimed the beautiful and spirited dancer as their ancestor. 5

  Shizuka’s story began when her lover, Yoshitsune, was forced to flee Kyoto to escape his wicked half-brother, the shogun (generalissimo) Yoritomo. Besides warriors to defend him, he took with him twelve women with whom he was on intimate terms. But he soon realized that this enormous retinue was slowing him down and sent all the women back, including his favorite, Shizuka, who was pregnant with his child.

  When she reached Kyoto, she was arrested and taken to Yoritomo’s court. There she was interrogated as to Yoshitsune’s whereabouts. But, being plucky as well as beautiful—characteristics which would come to distinguish the geisha too—she refused to give anything away. Far worse was to come. The cruel Yoritomo, discovering that she was pregnant, ordered that if the child was a boy, he should be killed immediately; he could not risk allowing any son of Yoshitsune’s to live. The baby was barely out of Shizuka’s womb when Yoritomo’s retainers snatched him from her arms, took him down to the beach, and dashed his brains out against a rock.

  Before letting her go, Yoritomo was determined to see this most famous of dancers perform. Caring nothing for her feelings, he sent an order for her to dance before him. Disdainfully she refused. Then his retainers persuaded her that she should perform a dance of supplication before the gods at Hachiman Shrine. Too late, she realized that she had been fooled. Yoritomo was watching, hidden behind a bamboo blind.

  Shizuka’s dance is still performed on the Japanese stage. Wearing an exquisite garment of Chinese damask over long white skirts which swirled around her feet like a train and a voluminous long-sleeved overgarment embroidered with diamonds, and with her floor-length hair swept into a loose knot on her head, she unfurled her crimson fan and stepped forward. First she performed one of the erotic shirabyoshi dances after which the dancers were named, singing and dancing with such grace and beauty that everyone who watched was bewitched. Then—when she was sure she had them in the palm of her hand—she burst full-throatedly into a defiant love song. Passionately she sang of Yoshitsune, her love and yearning for him, and her joy that he had successfully managed to evade his evil half-brother Yoritomo. Yoritomo was torn between rage at such effrontery and pleasure at the exquisite beauty of her voice. But she was, after all, a mere woman and therefore harmless, so he let her go unpunished.

  She was still only eighteen. She returned to Kyoto where she cut off her floor-length tresses, shaved her head, and became a nun. A year later, or so the story goes, she died of grief. As for the historical Yoshitsune, he was tracked down and killed.

  Japan’s Great Cultural Renaissance

  Living only for the moment, giving all our time to the pleasures of the moon, the snow, cherry blossoms, and maple leaves. Singing songs, drinking saké, caressing each other, just drifting, drifting. Never giving a care if we have no money, never sad in our hearts. Only like a plant moving on the river’s current; that is what is called ukiyo—the Floating World.

  Ryoi Asai, c. 1661 6

  Had you arrived in Kyoto at the turn of the seventeenth century, you would have found yourself swept along with the mob to the sprawling entertainment district beside the River Kamo, stretching as far as the massive red gates of Yasaka Shrine at the foot of the Eastern Hills. One of the chief attractions was the burgeoning pleasure quarters packed with teahouses and taverns where women—who a century later would become known as geisha—sold tea or saké and might, for a consideration, entertain you with singing, dancing, or more, depending on the depth of your purse. Here and there on open-air stages, under wooden roofs, groups of women performed lively dances to the plink plonk of the shamisen or the tootle of the flute while their audiences lounged on red felt rugs or low platforms, tucking into picnics.

  Kyoto was the official capital of the country and, along with the bustling mercantile city of Osaka, the center of commerce and culture. Artists of the time painted people in festive robes dancing through the streets between red-painted temples and tile-roofed wooden houses, and crowding to see performances of dance, music, and drumming. Outside the wattle fencing surrounding the stages were stalls selling food. Inside, women in rich kimonos, men with wicker hats or samurai swords, even a couple of Portuguese with big collars, bulbous noses, and tall hats, stood watching the shows.

  You could gawk at puppets, wrestling, jugglers, or sword swallowers, laugh at the clowns and jesters, admire the rare animals in cages, try your skill at target practice, shoot darts in the blowpipe parlor, or while away the day in singing and dancing. There you would have felt sorely tempted to fritter away the rest of your life in fun. There was everything a person could want, enough to distract and delight him for the rest of his days. It was an entertainment mecca, a nonstop medieval carnival such as Chaucer might have enjoyed.

  On the other side of the world, a century had passed since the heyday of the Italian Renaissance and the glorious rule of the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I, in Britain. In Japan, after more than four hundred years of warfare and upheaval, there was pea
ce again such as had not been seen since the halcyon days of the pleasure-loving Heian aristocrats. The country had changed beyond all recognition. As the medieval knights—the samurai—fought their bloody civil wars, Kyoto had been burned to ashes time and time again. Now all that was over. The different warring states that made up Japan had been unified, leaving the people free to turn their attention to becoming prosperous and developing the arts of peace. It was the beginning of an extraordinary Japanese Renaissance.

  The man who brought all this about was the great general Ieyasu Tokugawa, who defeated the last of his rival warlords in the Battle of Sekigahara in October 1600 and declared himself shogun and ruler of all Japan. The emperor had always been merely the titular ruler of the country. He spent most of his time isolated in his splendid palace in Kyoto, performing religious rituals, and had no real power. It was Shogun Ieyasu who was the true ruler. He chose as the seat of his military administration the little fishing village of Edo, an area of marshland and rivers a few days’ walk to the east of Kyoto, where he had established his castle a decade earlier. Edo gradually grew in size and importance. Eventually it was to become the great city of Tokyo.

  Determined that the country would never again descend into civil war, the shoguns—Ieyasu and his successors—set about fencing in the population with rigid systems of control. Among other measures, they sealed off the country from the outside world to ensure that no subversive ideas entered to disturb the delicate balance. Foreigners and in particular Catholics were not allowed in and Japanese were not allowed to leave. Anyone breaking these rules was liable to execution. Only one small window was left open—the remote southern port of Nagasaki, where Chinese junks brought their goods and a few Protestant Dutch merchants were allowed to trade.