Women of the Pleasure Quarters

by Lesley Downer

  The Businessmen’s Big Night Out

  “This way,” said Yuko, sliding open the door of a large hotel. She slipped out of her silk-covered sandals and led the way down some stairs into a basement and along a corridor to a closed door. From inside came shouts and raucous laughter. She knelt, slid open the door and, hands to the floor in formal greeting, sang out, “Evening, everybody!”

  Yuko in geisha mode was not radically different from Yuko in off-duty mode. She had put on a rather matronly kimono of sheeny green silk and a beige obi with a subtle pattern of chrysanthemums, carefully selected, I thought, to be dressy—it would not do for the guests to think she was not dressing for the occasion—but not intimidatingly glamorous or costly. She had added a little makeup and her hair was swept into a loose bun.

  “This is my guest from England,” she added, gesturing to me. Kneeling alongside her, I bowed, rose to my feet, and followed her rather awkwardly into the banqueting hall.

  It was the size of a village hall, lined with tatami mats, with a stage at one end walled with glimmering gold leaf. Disposed around three sides of the room were fifteen to twenty elderly men in identical indigo-and-white-striped cotton yukata bathrobes. Most sat cross-legged with large expanses of hairy shins and knobbly bare feet on display. In front of each was a small square table of lacquered wood holding a saké cup, a beer glass, and an array of tiny dishes of food.

  Sauntering into the room, Yuko settled me in a corner between a couple of grizzled men.

  “This is Yamada-san,” she said. The ancient craggy-faced gentleman to my right nodded to me, then turned back to his beer. “He’s the leader. He’ll take care of you.”

  The men were members of a businessmen’s club from one of the wealthier Tokyo boroughs and this was their annual outing. Most were in their sixties and seventies with a good proportion in their eighties. The oldest was eighty-eight. All were successful, prosperous men, all owned their own businesses and all, as it happened, represented different professions. To my left was a gray-haired fifty-four-year-old solicitor who described himself as the baby of the group.

  “People of my age find this kind of thing offensive, especially women,” he said, wrinkling his brow severely, anxious to disassociate himself from the unruly oldsters. “That’s why there’s so few people here. Half the club were against having a geisha party for the annual outing. A lot didn’t want to come.”

  Still, he himself was there and a few minutes later he was laughing as loudly as everyone else.

  Besides Yuko, there were three other geisha moving skillfully from group to group, keeping the saké and beer flowing and the conversation sparkling. One was the comedienne, in full regalia with a stiff waxed wig, white face, and ornate gray-and-white kimono with a honeycomb pattern of red-and-mauve chrysanthemums and a red obi. At fifty-something, on her the white makeup looked faintly ghoulish. But as far as she was concerned, that just added to the comic effect. She was the Dolly Parton of the group, shamelessly flaunting her sexuality no matter what her age. But, being Japanese, she revealed not an ample bosom but an ample expanse of back.

  Then there was a chubby-faced twenty-one-year-old, bringing a breath of youth to the proceedings. Like the maiko of Kyoto, she was shy and inarticulate; but such naiveté only made her all the more charming. The cast was completed by the shamisen “older sister,” a tiny birdlike woman of ninety who spoke hardly at all but proved to have a raucous cackle; she laughed loudest and longest at the dirtiest jokes.

  Mr. Yamada, the horse-faced eighty-year-old to my right, had, it transpired, been the most enthusiastic advocate of this particular form of outing. The evening was not far advanced when, twisting a scarf and knotting it rakishly around his head like the lads who carry the portable shrine in a Japanese festival, he grabbed the microphone and began to belt out a song with “older sister” accompanying him on the shamisen. The change of costume released a raffish new persona. He was no longer Mr. Yamada the Company Boss but a wild man who had cast aside all inhibitions for the night. He had brought his wife along. A faded woman with short black hair, she sat on the other side of the room, laughing merrily.

  “Did you catch the words?” asked the chubby-faced solicitor, back in disapproval mode. He seemed to have positioned me, a fellow youngster, as his ally for the night. “ ‘Let’s go to Fukagawa.’ You know about Fukagawa?”

  I knew very well about Fukagawa, once home to the most stylish geisha of all.

  “That means, ‘Let’s go to a whore house!’ ” he tutted sternly.

  Things were hotting up. A beefy man—owner-chairman of a printing company, said the solicitor, my newfound friend—took the stage with his face painted like a doll’s, a ribbon tied around his head and his bathrobe pulled up to his knees, revealing a pair of hefty calves. Hand in hand with Yuko, he performed a comic dance, then took a theatrical peek inside her kimono. Then a frail eighty-four-year-old stepped up in an ornate geisha wig with a red pinafore over his yukata and did a creaky arthritic dance. His reward was more than just a peek inside a kimono. To huge applause Yuko rolled on the floor and the tiny old man rolled on top of her. The ancient shamisen player was cackling with laughter.

  At eight-thirty the party moved on to the karaoké bar in the basement of the hotel. Still in their cotton yukata bathrobes, the men lounged on leather sofas around small tables in the darkened room.

  “I could have any of this lot for thirty thousand yen [$300],” bragged the beefy owner-chairman of a printing company, giving me a nudge. I looked at him, wondering if I had heard right. “Or forty thousand yen [$400] for overnight.”

  “No, fifty thousand yen [$500],” another guest corrected him.

  “That young geisha,” leered the printer. “I could definitely have her.” He paused and edged closer to me.

  “But I don’t want to sleep with those old bags,” he said with a cheeky smile. “I’d rather sleep with you! What about it? I’m single. Let’s get married!”

  Smiling, I told him I’d have to get to know him a bit better first. Somehow my role had subtly changed. At the beginning of the evening I had been the observer, asking questions and making notes. But now the men had found a slot for me in the flower and willow world. As far as they were concerned, they had an extra girl—and this one was free! They weren’t even being billed at 10,000 yen ($100) an hour for me. What was there to do except be a geisha, laugh, be charming, and flirt, with the unshakable determination to creep off at the end of the evening to my solitary bed.

  Another two hours passed. Those members of the party still on their feet stepped into wooden clogs lined up at the entrance to the hotel and headed off in their yukata into the silent neon-lit streets. Occasionally we passed another group of revelers, also in matching hotel-issue yukata, clattering past the darkened shops.

  Finally we came to an open restaurant, a window of light along a dark alley. Squeezed around a small table, the men ordered noodles, rice balls, yakitori (chicken kebabs)—simple fare, very different from the elaborate cuisine on offer at the banquet earlier. Saké and beer were still flowing.

  As the men belted out a chorus of “Let’s go to Yoshiwara,” the comedienne stood up, turned to face the wall, and gyrated rhythmically, rubbing her groin against it. Then she grabbed the young solicitor. He tried to resist, then gave in, laughing. She pulled him on top of her, thrashing her arms and legs in simulated ecstasy. “Aah,” she groaned, pushing him off and sitting up. “Now I’m going to have a baby. What shall I call it?”

  “They’re really drunk, that’s why they’re making so much noise,” explained one man.

  “They’re not that drunk,” muttered Yuko.

  Mr. Yamada was singing at the top of his voice. “Be quiet,” scolded his wife, who was still with the group. “You have the loudest voice of all!”

  At one o’clock the evening came to an abrupt end. Farewells were peremptory, the intimacy suddenly over. The men disappeared into the darkness, clattering along the road to their hotel
.

  “I need to deal with money,” said Yuko. She looked tired and a little sad. “Your hotel is that way, up the hill and around the corner. You can find it.”

  And, having taken care of me so solicitously, she disappeared in the wake of the men, leaving me alone on the dark street. All through the evening she had laughed, bantered, and made sure that everyone was chatting, everyone was happy, and everyone had plenty to drink. Unlike the spoiled young girls who chose to become maiko in Kyoto, the geisha of Atami were working girls not so far removed from the young women from poor families who used to be sold in the bad old prewar days. They had to make a living. Their job was to be eternally bright and cheerful, no matter how they might really feel. Her smile was part of her job. It was for everyone, she had no favorites.

  Was she, perhaps, in need of a little extra income, I wondered. But it seemed an ungenerous thought and I put it out of my mind.

  Snow Country

  The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. The earth lay white under the night sky. The train pulled up at a signal stop. A girl who had been sitting on the other side of the car came over and opened the window in front of Shimamura. The snowy cold poured in.

  Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972) 5

  Not long before I left Japan I took the train through the mountains to the city of Kanazawa on the coast of the Japan Sea, a stretch of country immortalized by the Nobel Prize–winning author Yasunari Kawabata in his 1937 novel, Snow Country. The celebrated first sentences evoke a landscape buried deep in snow, white and magical.

  When Kawabata was writing, men went on solitary excursions to the Snow Country to take the waters and enjoy the companionship of the beautiful white-skinned geisha. Many formed relationships there. But for the geisha who foolishly allowed themselves to fall in love, it was a lonely existence. They would be left pining for months, waiting for the day when their lover stepped unannounced off a train from Tokyo to spend a few precious hours with them—a poignant image which the words “snow country” also evoke. Kawabata’s novel is about one such wealthy dilettante and the geisha who loves him.

  Cut off from the bustling southern plains by the impenetrable mountain ranges of the Japan Alps, the cities of the Japan Sea coast developed a distinctive and robust culture. Kanazawa, the capital of the fabulously rich Maeda lords, became famous for its mansions, gardens, and exquisite handicrafts. It was also known for its refined and elegant geisha, rated as highly as the geiko of Kyoto.

  From the station I took a bus to Higashi-chaya-machi (Eastern “Teahouse Town” or Pleasure Quarter). I had arranged to stay the night in an old geisha house there. The other two geisha districts were Nishi-chaya-machi (Western Pleasure Quarter) and Kazue-machi (Kazue Town). Leaving my bag in a tatami-matted room very similar to the one I had left in Kyoto, I took a stroll along the little main street.

  It was clean, neat, and well preserved, quite disturbingly so. Newly paved with tidy rectangular concrete slabs, it was lined with picturesque old houses of dark wood with shiny tiled roofs. Rows of red lanterns hung along the eaves where the upper floor jutted out above the lower. But behind many of the slatted windows of the ground floors were modern interiors. Most of the people on the street were tourists. It was a geisha theme park, sanitized and lifeless.

  Still, at least the area had found a way of surviving. Hanami-koji—Flower-Viewing Alley—in Gion was heading in the same direction. Camera-toting tourists prowled the street and there were even restaurants where they could dine, very expensively, on traditional Japanese cuisine and be entertained by maiko. But the street still retained that ancient forbidding geisha flavor. The dark wooden houses were firmly closed. None but the boldest of ichigen san—first-timers—would ever dare slide open a door and put a foot inside; and if he did, he would be briskly seen off.

  That was the problem. In order to retain its distinctive character, the geisha world had to remain hermetically sealed. It had to be a special world, cocooned in secrecy and mystery. Once the hoi polloi were able to encroach upon the geisha world it would fade away like dew in the sun. The wonder was not that the geisha were disappearing but rather that they had managed to survive for so long.

  A Tokyo friend had given me an introduction to the president of a construction company, the kind of man who in the old days would have been the danna of a geisha. Having sat me down in a boardroom and given me a formal greeting, he packed me off in a taxi along with one of the vice presidents of the company to meet the gray men who ran the Kanazawa Chamber of Commerce.

  The geisha of Kanazawa were dying out, they told me. After the war there had been about 300 geisha in all in Kanazawa. As recently as 1997, there were still 25 in Higashi, 26 in Nishi, and 13 in Kazue. Now, in a mere two years the numbers had dwindled to 19 in Higashi, 19 in Nishi, and 9 in Kazue. Only one new entrant had joined this year. The danna system was disappearing, partly because income tax had risen hugely compared to the prewar years, greatly reducing the amount of disposable income. Added to this, there were very few family-owned businesses anymore. Company presidents, answerable to a board of shareholders, could not throw around corporate money in the way that independent owners had been able to.

  “Without the support of danna-san the geisha cannot go on,” they said. But geisha, along with the other traditional arts, were an important part of Kanazawa’s heritage. The city officers had decided that they desperately needed to be preserved.

  Accordingly, although they could not hope to match the level of sponsorship which a danna had been able to offer, they had created a variety of schemes. They had made funds available to support young geisha, to cover the cost of their kimonos and classes and to pay for a dance teacher to visit regularly from Tokyo. They had also created a pension fund for elderly geisha.

  The Town Hall had a separate scheme of its own. Through a private donor the city bureaucrats had amassed sufficient funds to provide four or five novice geisha with 300,000 yen ($3,000) for the first year. They would grant a similar sum to the teahouse mother to help support the young geisha and pay for her classes. It was pitifully small. There were, I learned, other cities which subsidized their dwindling geisha communities in the same way—though in Kyoto and Tokyo there was, at the moment at least, no need to do so.

  In exchange for subsidies, the Kanazawa geisha consented to a Faustian pact. They agreed to give a certain number of performances of music and dancing for the public for no charge during July and August each year. They even offered to allow the public, thirty at a time, into the hallowed halls of the union building to watch their rehearsals. In fact, they relinquished their mystique.

  It explained the theme-park look of the Eastern Pleasure Quarter. The geisha of Kanazawa had become civil servants, part of the tourist heritage, carefully preserved like the pink pickled plums that Japanese women laid out to dry in summer. They would not die out, their dance and music would survive—but at a price. It was profoundly ironic that this was what had become of these women, once queens of a subversive alternative culture. Without an edge of the forbidden, of the erotic, of danger, it was just pretty dancing.

  But perhaps it was better that the geisha should survive in some form rather than disappear completely.

  chapter 10

  saying goodbye

  Parting is merely longing,

  never farewell—

  The temple bell sounding

  at dawn.

  Geisha song 1

  Geisha in a Neon World

  Everyone in the geisha world was worried about the future. The problem was not so much the geisha as the growing gap between them and the rest of society. The geisha did not change. They were stuck in a time warp. But Japan had changed hugely and continued to change at dizzying speed. It was the home of Pokémon, Nintendo, and Sony, where women strove for equality in politics and business, where young women chose not to marry because they did not want to spend the rest of their lives mothering men, and where old women, whose husbands had retired, chos
e to get divorced. The country was consumed in a tidal wave of concrete, skyscrapers, neon, traffic, and cool youngsters with dyed brown hair who took amphetamines, listened to house and garage music and went to raves. The geisha were utterly out of synch.

  People often told me that the geisha embodied everything that made Japan Japan. At their most elevated the geisha lived lives dedicated to beauty. They were human works of art, an absurdly anachronistic notion in an aggressively modern society like Japan. If they disappeared, that whole exquisite world—in which every detail, from the placement of the fan in the tea ceremony to the line of a moth wing eyebrow and the intricate weave of an obi, was studied and perfected with loving attention—would die out with them. There was nowhere else where this aesthetic survived.

  As a shamisen teacher who lived her life on the fringes of the geisha world said, “Manners are disappearing in Japan. The only place where the old ways of behavior survive is the flower and willow world. The okiya system—the system of bringing up maiko in geisha houses under the strict supervision of the mothers—preserves good manners because it’s so strict.” If the geisha died out, it would be the end of what made Japan unique, the end of traditional Japanese culture and manners.

  Back in Tokyo, I went to pay a last visit to my geisha friends in Shimbashi. They took me backstage at the Shimbashi Embujo, the only theater built specifically for geisha dance. I had been there earlier in the year to see Azuma Odori, literally “Dances of the East” (Tokyo being in the east and Kyoto in the west), the Shimbashi geishas’ annual dance performance. I could not fail to notice that most of the audience were geisha. Many had come up from Kyoto to see how their rivals were doing.

  At the theater, we dropped in on one of the officials, a plump, floppy-wristed man with shiny oiled hair fixed immovably to the top of his round head. In the old days, he said gloomily, Azuma Odori used to be performed for a whole month in spring and a month in autumn. These days it had shrunk to a mere four days at the end of May, carefully timed to take place between seasons of kabuki.