Women of the Pleasure Quarters

by Lesley Downer

  Every little Jappy chappie’s gone upon the Geisha—

  Trickiest little Geisha ever seen in Asia!

  I’ve made things hum a bit you know, since I became a Geisha,

  Japanesey, free and easy Tea house girl! 10

  In those politically incorrect times, such lyrics seemed utterly inoffensive.

  But no one apart from those who had been posted to Japan, and certainly no one in San Francisco, had ever seen a real geisha. When they arrived Sada was astonished to find that her fame had preceded her. There were posters, not of the famous actor but of his humble wife, all over the city.

  The troupe performed a melodramatic piece called “The Warrior and the Geisha,” fusing together a couple of different kabuki dramas and ending with a death scene derived from “Musume Dojoji” (The Maiden of Dojo Temple) in which a maiden, maddened with jealousy and rage, dies of a broken heart. Sada’s dancing thrilled audiences across the country. “Mme. Yacco’s death scene at the end of the play revealed tragic force,” enthused the New York Times of December 6, 1899, after the troupe performed in Boston. 11

  Then they sailed for London where they played at the Coronet, the leading theater of the day. The artist William Nicholson painted a portrait of “Sada Yacco” as an old-style courtesan with foot-high lacquered patens and a splendid coiffure spiked with hairpins. She looks somber and dignified, utterly unlike the pin-up of Marie Lloyd.

  In France their visit coincided with the Paris Exposition of 1900, where Japanese arts and crafts excited huge interest. A journalist called Louis Fournier conducted a lengthy interview with Sada and later described her long black kimono and “delicate and childish melancholy face.” As a romantic Frenchman, the question he was most interested in was “What is love in Japan?” This was her reply:

  “ ‘Different—so different,’ she exclaims. ‘In this country men and women love each other freely; it is the custom. Japanese girls do not declare their love so frankly. Often they will die rather than confess it . . . Ah! to me, my friend, love in Japan is very noble, sublime, and sacred!’ ” 12

  Even the young Pablo Picasso did a painting of her in india ink and gouache, entitled Sada Yacco, in which he portrays her dancing in a rather wild and abandoned way, her arms flung over her head, wearing a kimono and obi with a sinister black cloak coiling, serpent-like, around her.

  In Washington President William McKinley had commandeered a box to see the troupe; in Paris, they performed at the presidential palace, where President Emile Loubet had personally presented Sada with a bouquet; and in London the Prince of Wales requested a command performance on a specially built Japanese stage inside Buckingham Palace. Japanese government officials, however, were outraged that their country was being represented by these geisha and actors. As far as snobbish traditional-minded Japanese were concerned, such people were riverbed folk, no different from prostitutes and beggars. To have fun with them and use them for pleasure was one thing. But for such people to be adored and treated as symbols of the mysterious Orient by Westerners, whose opinion the Japanese were very sensitive about, was a scandal. In the long run it just went to show that Westerners would never be able to grasp what Japan was all about. It was a matter for national shame. 13

  Abroad Sada played a geisha or a courtesan in productions specially tailored to suit Western taste. But at home, along with Otojiro, she was instrumental in introducing Shakespeare to the Japanese public. She played Ophelia, Portia, and Desdemona, among other roles, and also founded a school for actresses.

  On one memorable occasion the troupe gave a performance of Othello before a packed house. At the time Otojiro was engaged in an intense affair with a Shimbashi geisha, Kyoka, whom he had seated in the front row. When the time came for Otojiro, as Othello, to smother Sada, who was playing Desdemona, she refused to die. “I don’t want to die, I’m innocent,” she screamed.

  “Please die,” whispered Otojiro desperately. “I swear I’ll never see her again.”

  He kept his word. The couple remained together until Otojiro died in 1911. Later Sada re-met her student lover, the thickset farm boy, now a successful businessman, and lived with him until his death in 1938. She lived to see the Second World War and the devastation that followed and died in 1946 at the age of 74. Thus thanks to her beauty and talent and the doors opened to her as a geisha, Sadayakko was able to rise from impoverished beginnings to become Japan’s first actress and real star. She is celebrated as such to this day. 14

  chapter 7

  inside the pleasure quarters

  Geisha Life

  The night is black

  And I am excited about you.

  My love climbs in me, and you ask

  That I should climb to the higher room.

  Things are hidden in a black night.

  Even the dream is black

  On the black-lacquered pillow,

  Even our talk is hidden.

  Geisha song 1

  The Ichiriki Teahouse

  Ichiriki-tei—“One Strength Teahouse”—is the most splendid teahouse in Kyoto, renowned across Japan. It stands proudly on the corner of Shijo Street, the main shopping area, and Hanami-koji, “Flower-Viewing Alley,” the heart of Gion. The teahouses which press side by side along Flower-Viewing Alley are dark and forbidding, with slatted wooden fencing in front, bamboo screens concealing the windows, and little sign of life except for the red lanterns which hang in the doorways and the discreet wooden plaques which give the names of the geisha and maiko who live there. Behind them stretch warrens of shadowy lanes lined with faceless houses and closed gates. Ichiriki, conversely, is large and showy, a grand two-story edifice whose distinctive terra-cotta-colored walls are a symbol of the city. Nonetheless, it is every bit as firmly closed to all but the most privileged of insiders.

  Whenever I passed by I admired the imposing red walls with their beams and buttressing of blackened wood and peeked wistfully through the heavy brown curtain which hung across the gateway, emblazoned with the characters Ichi riki, “One strength.” Everyone assured me that the outside walls and the curtain were the most I would ever see; as a rank outsider in this closed community, I could never even dream of crossing the threshold.

  Then one day I was in the hair-oil shop on Shijo Street, talking to the elegant, very modern young woman behind the counter whose family had dealt in heavily scented camellia oil for generations. She had grown up on the edge of the geisha world; she was in it but not of it. She was not determined, as the geisha were, to maintain its exclusivity even if that meant it would die out entirely. Almost in passing she asked if I would like to meet the mistress of Ichiriki, whose son happened to go to school with hers. There and then she took me around the corner, brushed through the brown linen curtains, crossed the cobbled courtyard, slid open the doors, and introduced me.

  The mistress was a plump, pretty, confident woman in a pink jumper who wore her hair in a bun like a geisha. There was nothing much, she said with Japanese self-deprecation, just tatami rooms, but if I really wanted to see them, I could. Amazed at my luck, I followed her in stockinged feet as she padded along the dark corridors, glossy with polish, and led me into a large, airy banqueting hall, empty but for acres of straw-colored tatami matting and a few low tables. Ancient wooden screens, brushed with a design of purple irises, concealed the sliding doors. Above another set of doors was an ink sketch of a bald-headed samurai, wearing a blindfold, chasing a bevy of laughing geisha.

  “Oishi Kuranosuke?” I asked.

  She nodded with a glance of approval; I was not just an ignorant foreigner. Oishi Kuranosuke is a romantic hero akin to Bonnie Prince Charlie in the West and quite close to him in dates. A real historical character, he is the protagonist of the much-loved Tale of the Forty-Seven Ronin [leaderless samurai]. According to the story, he whiled away two years in Ichiriki teahouse, play-acting a life of debauchery, in order to put his enemies off the scent before exacting a terrible vengeance for the death of his lord. Purists compla
in that in his time, around 1702, Gion barely existed and had certainly not reached its apogee of splendor; the Ichiriki he knew must have been in the south of the city. But no one in Gion pays the slightest attention to such quibbles.

  Thanks to the Oishi connection, Ichiriki was by far the most successful of the Gion teahouses; there were always people wanting to dissipate an evening at the scene of the most celebrated partying in Japanese history. Ichiriki, the mistress added firmly, had definitely existed in 1702. I didn’t argue the point.

  Beyond the glass doors which formed the outside wall was a small garden laid out like a picture with moss-covered rocks around a stone lantern and a gnarled tree. The mistress showed me the air-conditioning ducts cunningly concealed behind a veneer of ancient bamboo piping and wooden latticework. The teahouses of Gion had been among the first places in Japan to install it. It was a profitable business.

  She too was in the geisha world but not of it. She had moved to Ichiriki when she married Seiichi Sugiura, the thirteenth generation of the Sugiura family which had dominated Gion throughout its history. The ninth, Jiroemon, had been instrumental in reviving Kyoto’s geisha culture when the emperor and his court moved to Edo in 1868, establishing the annual public dances which now formed the pinnacle of the geisha calendar. For three hundred years, the master of Ichiriki had been in charge of the geisha union in Gion. He was like the lord of the manor. The ultimate responsibility for the prosperity and well-being of the whole of Gion rested on his shoulders.

  Seiichi had never had any choice in the matter. No matter what he did or where he went, he was always branded with the mark of Ichiriki. He was “the Ichiriki boy.” Rumor had it that he had been something of a playboy in his youth, who drove fast cars and holidayed in Hawaii. But eventually when his grandfather died he joined the family firm and set to work to learn the business. He was now a pillar of the Gion community. 2

  But the future, said the pretty pink-sweatered mistress, was a worry. In the eighteen years in which she had been at Ichiriki, the number of geisha and teahouses had fallen disastrously. Once upon a time customers used to bring their sons and introduce them. But now most customers were over sixty and their numbers too were plummeting. Instead of going off on a bar crawl for a “second round” and a “third round” of drinking as they used to, people tended to go home after a geisha party. Some of the smaller teahouses were closing down. Ichiriki still thrived. Anyone would grab the chance to spend an evening with the most glamorous geisha in Gion at the historic teahouse. But it could not survive in isolation.

  “If we were a restaurant, it wouldn’t matter if we were the only one left,” she said. We were in one of the upper rooms, looking down on the dark wooden houses along Flower-Viewing Alley. One by one, lanterns began to glow in the dusk. A line of taxis was building up, half blocking the narrow street, ready to ferry the geisha and maiko to their nightly assignations. “But we need geisha and maiko coming and going. That’s the flavor of Gion.

  “It used to be a special world here where patrons—danna-san—took care of the geisha. Geisha ran teahouses but that was just pocket money. Now they have to make a living by that alone. It’s impossible. So they end up closing down.”

  Then she was called out. I sat alone in the banqueting hall, imagining the rowdy parties that had punctuated the last three centuries and the days when glamorous dissidents, from wealthy but powerless merchants in their silks and finery to hot-headed young samurai forced to leave their swords at the door, had gathered here to while away night after night with their geisha lovers.

  After a few minutes the door slid open and a woman slipped in. She folded herself onto her knees in a corner of the big room and sat silently looking at the tatami, nervously twisting her bony hands. She was a wisp of a woman, painfully thin with a graying bun.

  As the guest, it was not my place to begin the conversation. But when the silence became heavy, I tried a little small talk. She must have known Ichiriki for many years, I said. She started reminiscing about how it had been after the war when they tried to get the business going again but everyone had sold their kimonos.

  “I’d just arrived,” she said. She had a thin, reedy voice. “I hated it here. I cried and cried. The maids tormented me. It was so hard to learn all the different ways of doing things.”

  She must be, I realized, the “old mistress,” the mother-in-law of the pink-jumpered young mistress. I never ceased to be amazed by the passion with which older women poured out their feelings. At first I thought it was because I was such an outsider. As a non-Japanese, I was barely human and rendered harmless by my childish foreign accent. Perhaps this was why they felt able to speak of things which could not be shared with their peers. But then I read an interview in an obscure Japanese magazine in which the “old mistress” had said many of the same things. Perhaps it was the privilege of age. She had handed on the mantle of responsibility. No longer “the mistress of Ichiriki,” she was free to be herself. 3

  A couple of visits later, she was delegated to tell me her memories of the history of the place. I waited in the banqueting hall for her to arrive. She slipped in, birdlike and nervous.

  “Customers used to summon their favorite geisha and maiko and sleep with them in those small rooms upstairs,” she began, almost before she had folded to her knees. “Black marketeers would ask for geisha. Most of the patrons were the owners of the weaving factories in Nishijin. They spent the night here with their geisha, or they went to an inn. Some of the wives had horns [the demon horns of jealousy] or pretended not to know. In those days keeping a geisha was a mark of status. It was natural. But after the war all that stopped. That way of thinking was abolished.”

  A Tokyo girl, she had been evacuated to Kyoto with her family during the war. Her father knew a man who had a saké shop and he knew the old master of Ichiriki. The two met up at a tea ceremony and decided that their children should marry. She was eighteen, the “young master” of Ichiriki thirty-three. After the formal introductions, before anything had been decided, she sneaked off to the teahouse to have a look around. It was huge and intimidating. The last thing she wanted was to marry into this famous family with such a long history and weighty place in Kyoto society.

  “I didn’t want to enter a world I didn’t know,” she said in her thin reedy voice. “But my parents said I had to. The Sugiura family promised that I would not have to go to teahouse parties. But as soon as I moved in, I had to. I was the young mistress, I had to.”

  Fresh from Tokyo, she had no idea how things were done in stiff, rather formal Kyoto society, let alone in the arcane world of the geisha. It was a bit like moving from New York to the salons of Washington high society or arriving from Manchester to marry the son of a lord with a luxury home in Mayfair. Even the high-falutin’ dialect of Kyoto was barely comprehensible to her Tokyo ears; worse still, her dowager mother-in-law spoke old Kyoto dialect, like fearsomely posh Victorian English.

  “The maids bullied me. I wasn’t used to dealing with customers. When I made mistakes, they scolded me. The most difficult thing was knowing what to talk about at parties. I couldn’t just sit there and say nothing. My mother-in-law gave me instructions but she spoke old Kyoto dialect and I couldn’t understand, even when I asked her two or three times to repeat it. I used to hide in the toilet and cry. I cried and cried.

  “Right after the war we had lots of foreigners coming. The geisha refused to sleep with foreigners.”

  She led the way up the steep wooden staircase to the upper floor and showed me the big rooms where customers used to “sleep over” with groups of pretty maiko and a couple of maids to make sure things did not get out of hand. There were also several smaller, cozier rooms for danna who wanted to spend the night with a geisha. If a customer had booked a mizuage, that was where he did it.

  “Some of the maiko and geisha hated having to sleep with the danna. They used to complain to me. But they had to do it.”

  Flower Money

  One balmy
night I went for a stroll along the River Kamo. Behind the teahouses of the Pontocho geisha district, below the platforms where drinkers caroused with geisha in the heat of summer, right at the edge of the water there was a broad stony esplanade lined with cobbles, popular with sunbathers, cyclists, and courting couples. That evening it was crowded with the city’s youth in shorts and trainers, letting off fireworks, laughing, and jostling.

  Walking along, I came to a group which seemed to be from another world, though to a seasoned Kyoto-ite, they were such a common sight as to merit barely a second glance. The men were in business suits but looked as if they had been enjoying a well-lubricated evening out, ties askew, faces flushed and glistening with sweat. They yelled with as much abandon as the youths in shorts. With them were four or five maiko, their painted faces glowing white in the reflected neon light, the decorations in their hair sparkling and swinging, their brilliantly colored kimonos absurdly cumbersome, like fancy dress. Some of the men were chasing the maiko, brandishing sparklers. The maiko ran about adroitly on their high clogs, shrieking and giggling.

  It was just innocent fun, young men and women enjoying a summer evening together. But there was one thing that made that group a little different from all the others. The maiko were being paid for every second of their time.

  There was a story I heard about a businessman who had been on his way back to Tokyo. Happening to meet three maiko at Kyoto station, he invited them to join him in the Green Car, the first-class carriage in the Bullet Train. Geisha and maiko always travel first class on any mode of transport and stay only in five-star hotels. It is part of the flower and willow lifestyle. Even an aging geisha who is no longer in huge demand at parties and has limited means would not dream of traveling economy class. She has to keep up appearances even if it bankrupts her.