Women of the Pleasure Quarters

by Lesley Downer

  “I hated it when I first went to a teahouse party,” said one who had introduced herself as Kyoko. At twenty-two, she had an elfin face with a tiny turned-up nose, wide quizzical eyes, and a mischievous smile. “I don’t know why. Everyone was perfectly nice to me. I just hated it. I cried. I still sometimes think, ‘I hate this. I don’t want to go to another teahouse party.’ But it’s my life. What can I do?”

  Kyoko’s mother was the owner of the geisha house and had been a famous geisha in her time. She had gone through the geisha training in the Yoshiwara and been a dancer there, which in this environment was akin to having trained in the Royal Ballet; she was a star among the Mukojima geisha. When Kyoko was a child, she was registered at the local primary school under her mother’s name. It was perfectly normal in the area; most of the other children were registered under their mothers’ names too. It was only when she went on to middle school that she realized there was anything unusual about her.

  “One girl asked me, ‘Why are you registered under your mother’s name?’ I went to look. Everyone else was under their father’s. ‘I wonder why?’ I thought. Later my mother told me everything. Round here it’s normal. I never think about it. I met my father a while ago. I thought, ‘Wow, he’s really got old.’ He came for my geisha debut. I talked about it with my mother. At first I thought I’d be a waitress. But in the end I decided to be a geisha.”

  “It’s lonely sometimes,” said Ayako, a homely woman of thirty-nine in an oversize turquoise T-shirt and black slacks who wore her hair girlishly loose. “When I get back to my apartment at five o’clock in the morning and have a can of beer by myself . . . To be single and living alone when you’re in your thirties is kind of strange in Japanese society.”

  Ayako too had a story to tell. She had become a geisha by accident. Eleven years earlier, she had turned up in Mukojima with her suitcase, thinking she had a job as a waitress in a teahouse. It was only after she had been there for a week that she came across a label with the words “Geisha Union” written on it.

  “I thought, ‘It can’t be! I’m in the geisha world, like on TV!’ I wish I’d known about it when I was eighteen, I would have become a geisha straight away.”

  She had left home to be a fashion stylist and had never dared tell her parents about her change of occupation.

  “I once thought I might get married. But it only lasted three seconds,” she chuckled. “There was this guy around. Yeah, it lasted three seconds. Then I thought, ‘Geisha, geisha, I’ll carry on being a geisha. If I get married, that’s it. No more freedom. Jail!’ I see him from time to time. I never think, ‘Should’ve got married.’ When I go home and see my old school friends, I think, ‘Lucky escape! I’m glad I’m a geisha.’ They all have these children. It looks like really hard work.”

  “Wives don’t have sex appeal,” said Kyoko smiling her elfin smile. “You look at a wife, the same age as a single person—no sex appeal at all. It’s because they have children. They turn into mothers, they let themselves go. They don’t know anything about life. But funnily enough, married guys, in Japan, anyway, seem to know more about life than single guys do. You get a single guy of forty or fifty and you think, ‘Something odd there.’ My mother often says so.”

  The witching hour of six o’clock was approaching. Kyoko’s mother came out of the kitchen to tell the women to begin their preparations. At first sight she was a frowzy, slatternly woman in her shapeless dress, pink apron, and uncombed bird’s nest hair. But then she folded elegantly to her knees, propped her chin on her hand, tilted her head, and looked provocatively out of the corner of her eye. Suddenly one could see the fine bones of the face and the grace of the movements. It would only take a little makeup and a kimono and she could have any man on his knees.

  In the kitchen a young woman of twenty-one had arrived and was downing a bowl of rice and boiled beef. She was the han-gyoku, the Tokyo equivalent of a maiko. Han-gyoku means “half-jewel,” “jewel” being “jewel money,” a coy euphemism, like “flower money,” for the geisha’s fee. The han-gyoku, being a trainee, was paid half the standard fee.

  All around there was frantic painting and dressing. The han-gyoku painted her face white—though not as white as a Kyoto maiko and without the erotic tongue of bare flesh at the back of the neck. Then she donned a wig; beginner though she was, her hair was not dressed into a stiff coiffure like a maiko’s. Kyoko, meanwhile, had applied eye shadow and eye liner and painted her lips scarlet, then wrapped herself in a summery white kimono and a shimmering silver-and-blue obi embroidered with a burst of pink-and-white chrysanthemums.

  On my way back to the station, I dropped into the hairdresser’s to say good-bye to Ayako. Gone was the homely, slovenly woman who had sat joking with me. Gazing intently into the mirror as the hairdresser teased the last strands of hair into place, she touched up her face with a powder brush. Her eyes and eyebrows were etched in black, her lips blushed red. In her ink-black kimono, she positively smoldered. These women knew about sex appeal.

  It struck me that the Mukojima geisha were more like the geisha of the past. They created a world where men could live out their fantasies, but it was a world open to ordinary men, not just the elite. Most businessmen, successful though they might be, lacked not only the necessary connections to party in Shimbashi but even the desire. After a hard day’s work, they wanted to relax, eat, drink, and have a laugh in the company of sexy, flirtatious, kimono-clad women, then get up and belt out a karaoké number or two, rather than watch classical dancing or listen to classical singing.

  And despite the low regard in which the Mukojima variety were held by the establishment geisha, they were thriving. Just as geisha seemed on the point of extinction, in Mukojima they offered a service for which there was a demand. They were democratic, they were “people’s geisha.”

  Getting into Hot Water

  How cruel the floating world

  Its solaces how few—

  And soon my unmourned life

  Will vanish with the dew.

  Saikaku Ihara (1642–1693) 4

  The Kyoto geiko and the Tokyo geisha were the aristocrats of the flower and willow world, the highly visible tip of the iceberg. But they were not the end of the story. In the past there had been geisha quarters in every town and every district of every city in Japan, covering the spectrum from refined to raunchy. Most cities still maintained a small community. The numbers might be dwindling, the flower towns withering, but they were not yet extinct.

  But there was another category of geisha who were quite beyond the pale—the geisha of the hot spring resorts, the onsen geisha.

  For all their reputation as workaholics, the Japanese are also hedonists of the first order. Without any puritan ethic to restrain them, they have no compunction about indulging the most sybaritic desires. Foremost among those is the desire to soak away one’s cares in very hot water. Being a volcanic country prone to earthquakes, Japan is peppered with natural hot springs where water, stinking of sulfur or some other healing mineral, spurts out of the ground. Since time immemorial, taking the waters has been a central part of Japanese life, pursued with an almost religious fervor. Like merry Canterbury pilgrims or characters from a Jane Austen novel, people travel from spa to spa, sampling the waters at each.

  The essential spa experience has always been communal. Until Westerners arrived with their hangups about nudity, men and women bathed together without the slightest embarrassment or inhibition. Nowadays, thanks to the intervention of scandalized Victorian missionaries and travelers, baths are divided into ladies’ and men’s sections in all but the most remote parts of the country. But bathing is still a group activity. Naked as nature intended, without any clothing to mark status or wealth, all vestiges of the formality and hierarchy which bedevil everyday life can gently slip away. Leaving the monochrome world of work, bathers step into a parallel universe of fantasy, fun, and play, not far removed from the flower and willow world.

  Such a place is na
turally the domain of the geisha. The main customers at spas tend to be groups of men, business associates, or workmates on an overnighter or a long weekend where they bathe together, eat together, get drunk together, hang out in identical yukata—literally “bath wear”—and sleep all together in one big tatami room. A trip to a spa fulfills the same function, in fact, as a Shimbashi teahouse party. It is the ultimate bonding experience.

  Unfortunately onsen geisha have acquired rather a poor reputation. In fact the very words are sufficient to raise a titter. They are by reputation rather low on arts and high on the ability to entertain in other less salubrious ways. Not to put too fine a point upon it, “onsen geisha” is practically synonymous with “prostitute.” The high-class geisha of the cities hate to be associated with them in any way—so much so that many call themselves geiko rather than geisha. What with the onsen geisha, not to mention Westerners with their prurient notions of “geisha gals,” the word “geisha” itself has become devalued. Thus, although I regaled my geisha friends with tales of my travels to the classy geisha districts of cities such as Fukuoka and Kanazawa, I never mentioned that I had also been to Atami.

  An easy hour’s commute from Tokyo, Atami—“Hot Sea”—is Japan’s capital of fun, cousin to Coney Island or Las Vegas. Within sight of Mount Fuji and sitting atop a major fault line, its waters contain salt and calcium sulfate, said to be calming for the nerves and beneficial for the skin. Once upon a time guests stayed in picturesque little wooden inns. But these days Atami is far from quaint. The guidebooks use words like “sleazy” and “tacky” to describe it. It is a tourist resort of the most vulgar variety, the kind of place where one would expect to find wild geisha parties and clutches of yukata-clad salarymen lurching up and down the narrow streets in various stages of inebriation. It is not at all the sort of place where any self-respecting Westerner who claimed to have the slightest interest in serious Japanese culture would dream of going.

  As the train rounded a bend before pulling into Atami station, I caught a glimpse of the sea sparkling in the distance. But it was soon eclipsed by the jumble of streets and concrete buildings running up and down the hillsides of what had once been a beautiful seaside resort. The sea itself and the streams which ran into it were edged with concrete and the little wooden inns had long since been replaced by multistory concrete slabs. But despite everything there was a gaiety and innocence about the place. It had that heady feeling of a holiday resort entirely devoted to fun.

  I finally found my hotel, a particularly large and imposing concrete monolith just off the main road. There kimono-clad women at the door bowed me in and showed me to my room. In proper onsen style, I flung off my clothes immediately, put on the starched yukata provided by the hotel, and took the lift down to the enormous communal baths in the basement. I slid open the door to the cedar-walled bathing area. Steam swirled out, as hot and clammy as a tropical jungle. I soaped and rinsed on the tiled floor at the side of the bath, then edged myself gingerly into the savagely hot water. As my body took on the lurid red coloring of a boiled octopus (as the Japanese phrase it), the day’s weariness began to evaporate. A few minutes more and I would be ready for a night of partying.

  Yuko

  Yuko was the queen of the Atami geisha. A big-boned, handsome woman, she had been a geisha for thirty years. When I first met her she was off duty, in daytime mode, in a dark-blue blouse and plain knee-length gray skirt. She might have been a middle-aged housewife or an office worker. But there was something about her good-time-girl smile, the way she held herself very straight, her hair, which she wore loose and rippling about her shoulders, and her deep-toned gravelly voice which marked her out as different.

  Yuko was a survivor. Like most of the Atami geisha, she hailed from the southern island of Kyushu, one of the poorest, most underprivileged parts of the country. She arrived in Atami looking for work and eventually became a geisha.

  “My mother and father were angry,” she said. “We don’t do anything bad in the water trade. But it was very low status.”

  The water trade—mizu shobai—was a phrase normally used solely to refer to bar girls, call girls, prostitutes, and others who made a living by selling their bodies. I had never before heard the geishas’ profession referred to in those terms. The grand geisha of Kyoto and Tokyo would have been horrified, I thought. Perhaps for the geisha of Atami the two professions were not as far removed as the Tokyo and Kyoto geisha always insisted they were.

  Had she ever married, I wondered. For a moment her face clouded.

  “Seventeen years ago,” she said slowly. “He wasn’t a customer. I had to give up being a geisha. I had a daughter. It didn’t last even a year. Then I became a geisha again. I had to leave my daughter at a neighbor’s at nights. It was hard.

  “I’m not lonely,” she added, her cast-iron smile back in place. “I live with my daughter. She doesn’t want to be a geisha, she wants to be a nurse. If I’d met someone I liked I might have settled down. But I didn’t want a danna. If you have a danna, you lose your freedom. It’s like being a concubine, you have to sleep with them. Some girls like to have one, some don’t. If you’re popular enough, you don’t need one.

  “Some people meet nice guys. I haven’t, I haven’t fallen in love. But I know people who have.”

  Exactly twenty years ago, she remembered, a guest and a geisha fell desperately in love here in Atami. They had met at a geisha party. But the man was married and had children and couldn’t divorce. For four or five years they saw each other as often as they could. Then one day they disappeared. The man had written a note and left it at his house, saying that they had gone to commit suicide together. His family guessed that he was in Atami with the geisha.

  “We were all terribly shocked. They sent out search parties, they searched and searched in the woods at the foot of Mount Fuji but they couldn’t find them. It must have been five or six years later that they came across the bones. I guess they had taken sleeping pills.

  “My generation, people in their forties, we understood. Twenty- or thirty-year-olds wouldn’t. They wanted to die in beauty.”

  Cherry Blossoms and Golf Flags

  The geisha of Kyoto, said Yuko, were like “a flower in a high place.” Everyone would love the chance to spend time in their company but for most they were completely out of reach. They were too expensive and in any case their doors were open only to the few.

  Atami did not have such a long history. But it offered the pleasures of the geisha world to all comers at an affordable price. Admittedly the pleasures were less refined. Nowadays few customers ever asked for a traditional teahouse party with dancing and games. Men no longer wanted or appreciated such things. An evening with geisha in Atami was more likely to be spent chatting and singing karaoké.

  Not, of course, that the Atami geisha were prostitutes, she added firmly—perish the thought! In that sense they were very far from onsen geisha. The so-called geisha at the hot spring up the road and the ones on the Japan Sea coast—now they were nothing but prostitutes. But in Atami they were decent girls. After all, it was a top government-approved holiday resort. If a man wanted to date a geisha, he could do that, but it would have to be private. Officially sanctioned prostitution was a thing of the past.

  No one knew exactly how many onsen geisha there were. Geisha were not required to register or to have a license, added to which it could not be denied that there were a fair number of “pillow geisha,” women who called themselves geisha but whose dancing and musical skills were far from their most appealing feature. Geisha were part of the onsen experience and Japan was peppered with onsen; thus it seemed likely that there were far more onsen geisha than town geisha, probably several thousand. However, if the situation in Atami was anything to go by, it was a dying profession.

  In Atami, unlike less organized onsen, there was a register of geisha. It was kept at the Atami Geisha Union and arranged by geisha houses, with a dark cherry blossom symbol to indicate a shamisen play
er and a pale cherry blossom to indicate a dancer; a small golf flag indicated a golf player. The key thing with golf, of course, was not to be better than the customer, let alone beat him. The geisha’s job was to stroll around chatting girlishly, playing just well enough not to frustrate the customer, so that he could feel properly gratified when he won.

  But it was becoming harder and harder to make a living as a geisha in Atami. In 1969 there had been 1,200 registered geisha. By 1991 the number had fallen to 800. There were now less than 400; in just eight years the number had halved. Of the 400, 30 had the golf flag beside their name.

  “There just wasn’t the work,” said Yuko. As a result fewer and fewer young women were joining up to become geisha any more and those that did often left to get a “normal” job.

  “Twenty years ago, whenever there was a shamisen player along, we’d dance. If you were a good dancer, you carried on dancing no matter how old you were. But these days there are hardly any guests who want to see that kind of thing. There are hardly any guests who can understand our arts. One geisha gave up and became a maid in a hotel. She used to be one of the most famous dancers in Atami.

  “But tonight is special. Tonight we’ll have a good time. Tonight we’re going to have a traditional teahouse party. These guests came four years ago and loved it and asked to have the same kind of party again. There’ll be lots of saké. You’ll see!”