Women of the Pleasure Quarters

by Lesley Downer

  The 1920s, however, were to be the pinnacle. Already people were asking where exactly geisha fitted into the wild new era of speed, sport, and sex, with its fast cars, American movies, gramophones, ice cream, Marxism, moga (“modern gals” with short hair and flapper skirts), and mobo (“modern boys” with slicked-back Harold Lloyd haircuts).

  Geisha had always been fashion leaders. In the nineteenth century, they set the trends in kimono and obi styles which townswomen enthusiastically followed. Geisha had been the first to try Western hairstyles, carry umbrellas, and learn Western dancing. In 1915 the geisha district of Pontocho in Kyoto established a ballroom dancing school and the geisha houses there had on their books “dance geisha” who could offer the tango and the waltz among their gei. 8

  Moreover, for men who wished to enjoy the company of women, or possibly more than just their company, there was now a plethora of choices. The roaring twenties spawned cafés (really bars) across the country and, most famously, up and down the Ginza. There young women, in time-honored fashion, poured men’s drinks for them and chatted flirtatiously. Unlike geisha, they did not need years of training to learn their skills. Nor did a man have to be a tsu connoisseur to appreciate them. Particularly in the years following the great earthquake of 1923, which leveled Tokyo and destroyed what few buildings remained of the old city, cafés were all the rage.

  The favorite tippling place of Kafu Nagai (1879–1959), a famously decadent novelist who reveled in recording the low life of the time, was the Café Tiger. “The interiors and exteriors of Ginza cafés take me back to the days when I was in Paris,” he recorded nostalgically in a published essay.

  In his personal diary he was less diplomatic. “The cafés that are so popular throughout the city are to all appearances like Parisian cafés,” he wrote. “The reality is much different. We try to imitate everything Western and we always make a botch of it. The girls go to work every day and yet they do not receive salaries, and they must depend on gifts from customers for their livelihood. It is quite evident, therefore, that they actually live by prostitution. Fearing rumors and the threats of newspaper reporters, they must appear unwilling to surrender to the blandishments of drunken customers.” 9

  He had personal experience of “rumors and newspaper reporters,” having had problems with a waitress named Ohisa with whom he must have shared a bed. By then he was a famous author. After newspaper and magazine reports linked their names, Ohisa decided that she was entitled to share his wealth and badgered him relentlessly.

  As the ranks of café girls grew, the number of geisha began to fall, until by 1934, there were over 100,000 café girls to 72,000 geisha. It was time for a radical rethink of geisha and their place in society. 10

  What exactly were they? Leaving aside the more dubious country geisha, the grand ladies of Tokyo and Kyoto could in no way be confused with prostitutes, high class or otherwise. They could hardly be countercultural queens, for, with the neat class system of Tokugawa society shaken out of place, there was no longer a counterculture—or, if there was, it was not the sort that would be ruled by geisha.

  Perhaps they should follow the same path as their fellow entertainers, the kabuki actors, who were in the process of undergoing a distinctly ironic transformation from disreputable members of the underclass, frequently prostitutes, to doyens of the public stage. Until the departure of the shoguns, kabuki had been a living, changing theatrical form. But, with the coming of the modern age, it became a historical relic. When new plays were written, they were always set in a timeless, nostalgically remembered Edo Never-Never Land.

  The music and dance of the geisha too had been a living art form, the popular music and dance of its day. Should they now move with the times or, like kabuki, become repositories of the much-loved past? Were they too doomed to live forever in Edo?

  In the mid-1930s, there was much debate on the subject. Geisha, being women, did not contribute. But intellectuals, poets, restaurateurs who employed geisha, politicians, actors, and the director of the Shimbashi Association of Geisha Houses all had their say. Their comments were published as a series of essays in a book called “The Geisha Reader.”

  In it the poet Sakutaro Hagiwara expressed in a neat paragraph what was to become the accepted definition of the role of the geisha: “Our wives at home are engrossed in cookery and children, and our conversations with them are quietly serious, mostly concerning household affairs. Outside of this, men need a totally different sort of companion: a woman with whom we can talk about affairs of the world, about the arts, about ideas. We need someone who is entertaining, knowledgeable, educated. This is what a geisha should be.” He went on to say that they should wear Western clothes, give up the shamisen, and learn the piano. The ideal for the modern geisha, it seemed, was to be the Japanese equivalent of the ancient Greek hetaera, an accomplished companion for gentlemen. 11

  But there were more serious things to worry about than the role of the geisha. Japan had plunged deep into an era which people later spoke of as “the Dark Valley.” The army had grown more and more powerful. Defying the ineffective and corrupt civilian government, troops invaded China and occupied Manchuria. There they set up a puppet state and, as a matter of course, shipped out geisha and prostitutes to entertain the soldiers.

  As army and politicians clashed, there were several attempted coups d’etat and a rash of assassinations. In the growing mood of patriotic fervor, the “thought” police were out in force, clamping down on anything that smacked of subversion. The infatuation with all things Western evaporated. Speaking English and playing the piano were frowned on, while the geisha, a potent symbol of the old days when Japan was great, found business booming once more. Politicos and the military gathered in the grand geisha restaurants of Shimbashi and Akasaka to discuss policy and celebrate victories.

  While intellectuals like Kafu kept their heads down, and sales declined in the grand department stores of the classier sections of town, in the back streets on the wrong side of the river—which had been the heart of the old city of Edo—life went on much as before. There the great event of 1936 was the apprehension of a woman called Sada Abe, known to history as O-sada, who was found wandering the streets with her lover’s severed penis wrapped in a furoshiki, a large kerchief. A low-grade geisha, she had fallen in love with her employer, a restaurant owner, and spent a week with him in a house of assignation. According to one version of events, the grand climax to a week of fevered love-making came when she strangled him. Another has it that he was a philandering pimp and that she strangled him to ensure that he would remain eternally faithful to her.

  In any case, hers was judged to be a crime of passion and she was sentenced to a mere five years’ imprisonment. The public, tired of gloomy news, latched joyfully onto her story and she became something of a romantic heroine. Freed in 1941, she opened a bar in the old city and some years later, in traditional fashion, ended up in a nunnery. Her story was made into one of Japan’s most famous films—Ai no Corrida (In the Realm of the Senses) by the celebrated director Nagisa Oshima.

  The Writer Who Yearned

  for Old Edo

  The bamboo was withered and the stalks were eaten at the base by insects. Chokichi thought they would probably disintegrate if he poked them. An emaciated willow tree drooped its branches, barely touched with green, over the shingled roof of a gate. The geisha Yonehachi must have passed through just such a gate when, of a winter’s afternoon, she secretly visited the sick Tanjiro [hero of The Plum Blossom Calendar, an early nineteenth-century romance]. And it must have been in a room of such a house that Hanjiro, telling ghost stories one rainy night, dared to take his sweetheart’s hand for the first time. Chokichi experienced a strange fascination and sorrow. He wanted to be possessed by that sweet, gentle, suddenly cold and indifferent fate.

  Kafu Nagai, from “The River Sumida,” 1909 12

  In 1909 a young writer named Kafu Nagai (1879–1959) published an achingly lyrical short story entitled �
�The River Sumida.” It established him as a master of exquisite prose and defined him as the chronicler par excellence of the demimonde—the last remnant of the misty world of old Edo which was being blasted away by the cold winds of Westernization. Looking for some romanticized past, he found it above all in the shadowy world of the geisha, prostitutes, strippers, bar girls, and chorus girls.

  The son of a successful Meiji businessman and bureaucrat, Kafu could afford to slum it. Instead of following in his father’s footsteps, he spent most of his youth in the Yoshiwara and the Yanagibashi geisha quarter, devouring old romances and—most shocking of all—writing fiction, an activity which he did his best to conceal from his family. In Edo times, writers and artists had been considered as disreputable as the geisha, actors, and prostitutes they portrayed, an attitude which persisted among conservative families such as Kafu’s.

  Despairing of his son’s feckless lifestyle, his father packed him off to the United States to learn banking, but instead he hung out on the seedier edges of society. The only place where he felt even slightly at home was New York’s Chinatown, in those days a slum teeming with brothels and opium dens. He wrote of the bestiality he saw there, “I thought I had never before heard so poignantly the music of human degradation and collapse.” As for the ragged prostitutes, “I do not hesitate to call them my own dear sisters. I do not ask for light or help. I only await the day when I too shall be able to offer myself to a grain of opium.” 13

  After a few years in Paris and a short stay in London, he was back in Tokyo, pouring out in a torrent of writing his horror at the brutal new Japan. The only place where he glimpsed anything akin to the beauty and passion he had found abroad was among the denizens of the demimonde who still lived the life of old Edo. His diatribes against the loss of the old ways and his swooningly elegiac tales full of decadence and overblown passion soon won him a huge following.

  Urged on by his father, he made a respectable marriage to a merchant’s daughter. But for love he went to geisha. As soon as his father died, he divorced his wife in a matter of weeks (and, as he recorded grumpily, at considerable expense) and married a geisha called Yaeji. They lived in a small ramshackle house with paper screens and doors where they practiced the shamisen together and she helped him prepare paper on which to brush his stories; he wrote contemptuously of “the modern scribbler who does his polemics with a fountain pen on Western-style paper.”

  But less than a year later, when he got home one day, she was gone, unable any longer to tolerate his serial infidelity. He never married again. Instead he lived his life in or near the geisha areas and found his pleasures among geisha, bar girls, dancers, and “waitresses” (who were really unlicensed prostitutes) at the new-fangled cafés. In his fifties he bought a pretty young bespectacled geisha out of indenture and set her up in a little house which became a gathering place for journalists and literary people. Later he bought her a house of assignation with, rumor had it, peepholes through which the aging Kafu could watch the customers and geisha at play. 14

  In many ways he was a strange, misanthropic, rather unattractive character. Apart from his girlfriends he professed to hate everyone except for one writer friend who turned down a top position on a newspaper in order to have more time to drink himself to death, an ambition which he duly achieved. Nevertheless Kafu was a magical writer. He captured better than anyone the disappearing romance of Edo.

  Rivalry is the work which most vividly portrays the suffocating claustrophobia and desperate passions of the world of the geisha. 15

  Yoshioka has every intention of doing the decent thing by Komayo—in other words, buying her. He offers to pay off her indenture, buy her her freedom, set her up in a villa, and become her danna. But, to his astonishment and rage, Komayo does not leap at this proposal. Is it worth losing her independence again, she wonders, for a man who, like all the others, will only prove to be unreliable and leave her in the end? For Yoshioka is, of course, not offering her marriage. He already has a wife and children.

  Komayo, meanwhile, has committed the one mistake which is fatal for a denizen of the floating world: she has fallen in love. Successful geisha make men fall in love with them; but if they lose control of their own feelings, they are doomed. Seduced by Segawa, a handsome young onnagata (a kabuki actor who specializes in women’s roles), Komayo finds herself utterly obsessed with him. Recklessly she throws herself into the emotion. At last, she feels (or Kafu imagines that she feels) she knows the essence of what it is to be a geisha, to live on the edge, experiencing the extremes of passion and pain. “Realizing now that bitterness and pleasure alike were part of being a geisha, Komayo felt that she had tasted for the first time the true flavor of geisha life.”

  She is convinced, against all the odds, that the actor will marry her. Nevertheless, to keep her options open, she agrees to accept as a part-time danna a hideously ugly antiques dealer whom she refers to as “the sea monster.” He provides her with money and in exchange satisfies two of his proclivities: to sleep with a geisha who also from time to time buys the love of a famous kabuki actor and to entertain himself by having sex with a woman who, he knows very well, finds him physically repellent.

  Predictably all this ends in tears. As Komayo behaves in a more and more wifely fashion to the kabuki actor, he becomes bored with her and finally throws her over in favor of a statuesque woman made all the more attractive by being the possessor of a large inheritance. Yoshioka, in his turn, has taken his revenge on the hapless Komayo by buying the freedom of a rival geisha from Komayo’s own house and becoming her danna.

  Thus Komayo has to pay the price for having broken the geisha code by allowing herself to be swept away by her emotions. She is in utter despair. Her life, it seems, is over. She has lost everything. But the way is still open for the story to have a happy ending. The kind old man who runs Komayo’s geisha house wants to retire and decides to pass the business on to her. He gives her the deeds to the house, the use of the name, and the business. Once again she has a future. She can run the geisha house and take care of the geisha that live there. She has finally won financial independence, a far greater prize in the geisha world and certainly much more reliable than winning a man.

  Rivalry is probably the most complete, lovingly observed evocation of the geisha world ever written. Kafu never questions the values of the geisha, though he does point out that the underlying flaw in their lifestyle is their fatal dependence on others. They cannot say no to a customer no matter what he asks. There is a memorable passage which was excised from early versions of the book and only appeared in private editions, describing an encounter which Yoshioka, an insatiable sexual athlete, has with Komayo:

  When, at eleven o’clock, she finally escaped from his embrace, she was breathing great gasps, she could scarcely speak, and she had no will to get up. Entirely satisfied with this state of affairs, Yoshioka sped off into the darkness . . . She sighed, and chagrin and resentment came back with doubled intensity at the thought of the men who had imposed themselves on her in the course of the evening. She was battered to the very core. She wanted only to die. 16

  Armageddon

  In December 1941 Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. The first retaliatory bombing raids by American B-25s came the following April, damaging and demolishing swathes of buildings around the edges of Tokyo. But still the splendid restaurants, where Tokyo’s 9,000 geisha entertained, stayed open for business despite the punishing new tax which the government, desperate for funds, had imposed on such luxurious activities.

  Anyone who could afford it had every intention of carrying on their hedonistic lifestyle. As for the military, they were still partying at teahouses in the spring of 1943 when—for everyone else—rationing was biting hard. Kafu chose to spend his time among the youthful chorus girls of Asakusa in the city’s East End. “In this world apart, there are no ashes of war,” he wrote in his diary.

  Finally even the geisha had to go. On March 4, 1944, Kafu reco
rded regretfully, “From tomorrow restaurants and teahouses are to be banned . . . Geisha have not yet been banned, but they appear to be moving into other trades for want of engagements. Without theaters and geisha, the music of Edo, based upon the shamisen, will perish.” 17

  On their last night the geisha restaurants stayed open almost until dawn. Then the geisha took off their silk kimonos, folded them carefully, and wrapped them in sheets of crisp handmade paper for storage. They put on smocks and mompe (baggy cotton indigo-dyed peasant trousers) and went to work in ammunition factories or to labor through the night sewing uniforms and parachutes. The canniest managed to avoid such a fate by finding someone to marry them, becoming concubines, or persuading their patrons to include them on their lists of company employees. And if, of course, your danna was a member of the military, he would ensure that you were properly cared for.

  Worst of all was 1945, the last year of the war. People sold everything they had and fled to the countryside. In Tokyo, the air-raid sirens whined nearly every night as swarms of B-29s cruised the skies, raining down firebombs in such quantity that the snowflakes turned soot black. The rundown wooden city stood no chance. In a single night, on March 9, some 78,000 people burned to death and 1.5 million were left homeless. The city was reduced to a sea of ashes, rubble, twisted metal, and charred, broken stone walls. The pleasure quarters were utterly destroyed and the theaters (including the beautiful art deco Shimbashi Embujo Theater, built in 1925 for the geisha to perform their annual dances) were reduced to blackened shells. The Yoshiwara, still functioning in defiance of government orders, was burned to a cinder together with hundreds of women who had been locked inside by the brothel-keepers, anxious not to lose their investment.