by India Millar
“We asked her where we were, where was our father? She laughed at us.
“‘You have no father,’ she sneered. ‘He has sold you. You are mine now. I am your Auntie, and you will do as I tell you. If you don’t, I can assure you that you will regret it.”
“We didn’t believe her, of course. We didn’t dare say she was lying to her face, but that was what we thought. Once we had eaten, she told us to get up and took us down a corridor to a small room. It had no windows, but overlooked a large area that was crammed full with women and girls. The front of the large room was open, but was covered in a gilded lattice. Some of the women were lounging against the lattice, shouting out to men as they passed, wagging their hands through the bars, blowing kisses and laughing. We had never even imagined anything like this and we just gawped. ‘Auntie’ laughed at us.
“‘You’ll soon get used to it. Once I’ve found a danna for the pair of you, you’ll be joining the girls down there.’
“We felt sick. We stared at her, and she grinned.”
“‘You’re both whole. Both pretty girls. I’ll get an excellent price for your virginity. We’ll have a little gathering in a day or two, after I get word out about you, and we’ll see who the highest bidders are. In the meantime, I’ll leave you here to learn how to mind your manners.’”
We all gasped. A lattice brothel. One of the houses where women were exhibited to the world, to be bought by any passerby for the price of a small coin. The lowest of the low. Compared to such a place, the Hidden House was a palace. Their father must really have hated them.
The twins read our thoughts. Sayo smiled sadly and nodded her head.
“The knowledge that our father must have known what he was sending us to was almost worse than anything. The sort of life he was condemning us to. How he must have hated us. We cried and cried and cried. Auntie came and shouted at us, said we were making ourselves ugly, and she wasn’t having that. She hit us on the back with her cane and threatened that if we didn’t behave, she would find each of us the oldest, the ugliest danna in the whole of Edo to take our virginity.”
“She didn’t though, did she?” I interrupted. “You both had your mizuage here, in the Hidden House. So you must have been whole when you arrived?”
The twins nodded.
“That evening,” Sayo said, “we were paraded before a whole host of men. There must have been at least a dozen of them. In spite of the fact that we stood in front of them with our heads down and slouched to make ourselves look ugly, they all seemed to have a fancy for us. Within moments, they were calling prices to Auntie. Eventually, she must have made a deal because we were taken out and put in a room on our own. Auntie appeared shortly afterward and told us that our mizuage was to be the next day. We were both to be taken together. We said nothing, and she smiled at us, obviously thinking that we had given in.”
“But we hadn’t.” It was Hoshimi’s turn to speak. “It was very late when the house became silent, but as soon as we were sure there was nobody about, we started picking at the screen door. It was barred on the outside, but we used our hair combs to scratch through the reeds until we could get our hands through. Once we could do that, we managed to lift the bar and we slid out. There was no sign of any of the women, so we guessed they were locked away somewhere. The front door was barred from the inside, but that was no problem. We were outside in seconds.”
“Where did you go?” Masaki asked curiously.
“We just walked.” Hoshimi shrugged. “We had no idea where we were, so we just walked and walked and walked. Auntie had taken our shoes away and left us with rough wooden geta, so after a while our feet were so sore they bled. And it started raining, but we didn’t care. We just knew we had to get away from that place. We had decided that we would kill ourselves before we let her take us back. We thought that Father would be sorry when he found out we had done that.” She laughed shortly. “We know now, of course, that it would probably have pleased him, but we were very innocent then. We walked for hours. All the streets looked the same and we were lost within minutes. Eventually, we found ourselves outside the wall of a large house that stood on its own. The wall was stone, and it reminded us of our father’s house, so we thought it was a lucky omen. The door was set back a little and we decided we would sit in the doorjamb, just until the rain stopped. We were so tired and cold and frightened, we must have fallen asleep. Next thing we knew, the door was being opened behind us and we literally fell inside. We tried to get up, to run, but we were stiff from the cold and sitting cramped up, so we could barely stand. A man was staring at us. After a second, he went and closed the door and stood in front of it, so we couldn’t get out. He shouted loudly, and more men appeared. We gave in, then, and just stood there. We were soaking wet and cold and hungry and terrified. If the men took us back to that terrible place behind the lattice, at that moment we wouldn’t have cared. But they didn’t.”
I knew immediately where the twins had ended up. It was the most bizarre coincidence, but then, who knew what the gods were thinking?
“You were at Akira’s house, weren’t you?”
Both twins nodded.
“We didn’t know him then, of course.” Hoshimi—or was it Sayo? I had lost track of which twin was which somewhere along the way—“But it was obvious straight away that he was in charge. As soon as the man shouted, Akira-san appeared. He just stood there, looking at us. Then he clapped his hands and all the men were quiet, and then when he nodded, they just bowed and walked out. He walked round us and looked at us, just like Auntie had done. For a while, we wondered if we might just as well have stayed at the brothel, but when Akira-san spoke, he sounded very kind.
“‘You poor girls,’ he said. ‘You are cold, and wet. And very lost, I think.’
“We both nodded. It was odd, but his sympathy made us want to cry again.
“‘Are you hungry?’ We nodded again. ‘Very well. You shall have a bath, and then I will feed you.’
“He called out, and a maid came running. It was odd, but she didn’t seem at all surprised to see us standing there. Akira-san told her to take us to the bathhouse and get us some clothes, and then bring us back to him when we were ready. And then he bowed to us, as if he recognized our class.
“We barely saw the house as we followed the maid to the bath, but we realized from what we did see that Akira-san must be a very rich man. Everything was luxurious, all the furniture and hangings were of the best, and very tasteful. The bathhouse was even bigger and more well-appointed than the one we had at home. It was wonderful. The maid soaped and rinsed us and helped us into the bath and then left us. We just stood in the water, letting it make us clean again. After a while, the maid came back with lovely, thick drying robes for us. When we were ready, she took us into a little room next door and she and another girl helped us into new kimonos and underthings. We never saw the nasty clothes Auntie had made us wear again.”
Hoshimi—or Sayo—stopped speaking and stared into space.
“So how did you come to be here, in the Hidden House?” Naruko demanded. “And how did you end up as Akira’s creatures?”
The bluntness was rude, but we all wanted to know. The twins glanced at each other, and one of them nodded.
“We will tell you. Akira-san gave us food—delicious food—and tea. And asked how we came to be on his doorstep. We explained. He seemed pleased, and we began to hope that he would not send us back to the brothel.
“‘Please,’ we said. ‘We will do anything, anything we can, but do not send us back to that dreadful place. We will kill ourselves if you do.’
“‘No need for that, girls.’ He smiled, and we relaxed a little. After all, he had fed us and given us lovely clothes. What a kind man he was!
“I don’t think I would call Akira kind,” I said. “You know he’s a yakuza, don’t you? Probably the most feared yakuza in the whole of Edo.”
“We know that now.” Sayo—I think—said. “But we had no idea at the t
ime. He had rescued us, that was all we knew. And we owed him a debt of gratitude.”
We all sighed. We understood that, of course. Debts such as that were a matter of honor and had to be paid back somehow.
“So that’s how you came be here,” I said, and to my amazement both girls shook their head firmly.
“No. Or rather yes, but that’s not the whole story. Akira-san explained that he could not keep us in his house. We could not be maids, that would be too much loss of face for us. In any event, we could neither clean nor cook. There was no use sending us back to our father, he would simply send us back to Auntie. We shuddered at the thought. But there was a way we could repay him, if we were willing.
“We bowed in front of him, banging our heads on the tatami. Anything, we said, anything at all would be better than being sent back to Auntie. To that dreadful place.”
“‘Would you like to be geisha?’ he asked.
“We stared at him, confused. Geisha? Us? We thought about it. It would, certainly, be much better than being in the brothel. Our father had brought geisha to the house frequently, when he had entertained, and we had often thought that the lovely, elegant women were like delicate flowers.
“‘Yes,’ we said, simply. If that was what Akira-san wanted us to do, we would do it without question.
“‘Good,’ he said. ‘But you will not just be geisha, you will be very special geisha.’ And he explained to us about the Hidden House.”
“He told you that you would be expected to sleep with the patrons, not just entertain them?” Masaki asked bluntly. The twins lowered their eyes and nodded.
“We would have been expected to do that if we had stayed at the brothel,” Hoshimi pointed out. “But Akira-san explained that the patrons who were allowed into the Hidden House were very carefully selected. That they were wealthy, high-class men, and that we would never be on public view. We would have lovely clothes and nice things to eat, he said. And he would ensure that we were always protected. Put like that, would it be a great deal worse than being married?”
We nodded ruefully, understanding perfectly what they meant. Virtually all the men who visited us in the Hidden House were married, and most also had mistresses and concubines as well. They treated us far better than they did their wives, and often much better than their mistresses. At the end of the day, was it so different being a slave in the Hidden House than being a slave to a husband? And we knew that upper-class wives, like the twins, would be virtual prisoners in their own homes. They would never be free to go out on their own. They would always be terrified that they might displease their husbands and be put aside. Would always live in fear that they might nor bear their husband a son. Ah, what sort of life was that? No better than ours, that was for sure!
“Akira-san said he would find us some nice men for our mizuage, and if we wanted, we could have it together.”
He had kept his word, I remembered. The twins’ mizuage had been the talk of the Hidden House for weeks. Their danna had been not just young, but rich and handsome, and they had, indeed, lost their virginity together. We had been amazed. If only we had known!
“That’s why you spied for him, then. Passed on everything you heard.”
“No,” both twins said together. “We were grateful to Akira-san for rescuing us, but it was more than just that. He promised that if we did what we were told, he would give us our old life back.”
We thought about this for a moment, staring at the twins curiously, not understanding.
“He couldn’t do that. Your father had sold you,” Naruko pointed out. “You would never make enough money in the Hidden House to buy yourself out. Nobody can.”
I thought of the fortune in gold hidden behind my picture of the kabuki theater and blushed. Fortunately, the other two geisha were staring at the twins and didn’t notice.
“He said he could do it,” Sayo said. “And we believed him. He was obviously very rich and very powerful. We knew of women of our class who had done something dreadful and displeased their husband or their father and who had been sold as courtesans. It happened to a distant cousin of ours, when she dared refuse to marry the man her father had chosen for her husband. He made her go to a brothel to be a courtesan, and we thought that that was the last we would ever see of her, but it wasn’t. She stayed away from the family for three years, and then her father brought her back. She still had to marry the same man in any event, but it shows you that sort of thing does happen. Akira-san said if we did what he wanted us to do and entertained the patrons at the Hidden House and told him everything we saw and heard—not just from the patrons, but you geisha as well—then after a few years he would talk to our father and persuade him to take us back.”
“So you did what he asked,” I said. The twins nodded. “But why did you help me this morning? If that got back to Akira, he wouldn’t be pleased with you.”
“We’ve watched all you geisha for months and months, and thought it must be lovely to be friends, like you are, but we didn’t dare say anything. We knew you called us Akira’s creatures and hated us, but there was nothing we could do about it. Then this morning, Mineko saved Masaki’s life. Bigger would have killed Masaki and laughed about it if Mineko hadn’t offered to take her place. When we realized he was going to kill Mineko instead, we couldn’t take any more. So we helped.”
The twins looked from Masaki to Naruko to me. I spoke—I hoped—for everybody.
“We didn’t know what had happened to you. We thought you were just spies for Akira.” I struggled for words. “If he finds out you’ve betrayed him, if will be very…difficult for you.”
“We know,” both twins said simply. “But things can never be the same now, can they? Even if Bigger doesn’t tell Akira-san about what happened, we can’t go on spying for him. Not now.”
“Yes, you can,” I said firmly. “Bigger isn’t going to say a word to Akira, trust me. He wouldn’t dare, it would mean too much loss of face. But we will have to be even more careful of him in future. He’s going to want his revenge on us. And I don’t see why you can’t go on reporting to Akira. Tell him the truth about what the patrons say—if they’re fool enough to be indiscrete in front of you, it serves them right. But, you know, we always knew you were spying on us so we were always careful not to say anything that mattered in front of you. Now that we’re all friends,” I paused and looked at Naruko and Masaki, who both nodded vigorously, “we can decide between us what you say to Akira.”
The twins smiled, and we smiled with them.
5
When sun and rain join,
There is a rainbow. So do
Pain and joy mingle.
The news about the twins had knocked everything else out of my head. We all spent an entirely pleasurable hour deciding on what gossip they should pass on to Akira in the future. It was only when we started getting very silly about it that we stopped talking and started laughing. The twins laughed louder than anybody. It was so obvious that they were happy and relieved to find they had friends in the Hidden House that I was happy for them.
But truly is it said that the gods do not like us mere humans to have more than our share of pleasure. We had barely finished our discussions when Auntie sent her maid for me.
“You never told me Kiku had visited you,” Auntie said accusingly. “I might never have known if she hadn’t stolen my chair.”
I bowed my head in apology. Auntie had known about Kiku all along; this was about the fact that I hadn’t mentioned it to her.
I helped her to settle into the disputed chair. She had terrible arthritis in her knees, and, like Kiku, found it much easier to sit perched on a chair than to squat cross-legged on the tatami like the rest of us. Was that how she knew Kiku had visited, I wondered? Had the maid really tossed her out of her own chair? Or had she been spying on us? Remembering Kiku’s care to make sure nobody was listening to us, I guessed the truth was that she had been peeping at us from one of her many spy-holes.
“Kiku
looked well,” she said invitingly. She had been spying, then.
“She told me she’s expecting her first child,” I said innocently.
Auntie managed to look surprised. “Really? Well, looks like Mori-san had more kintama than we ever gave him credit for, eh?” I chuckled politely, watching Auntie carefully. “That was all the news she had for you, then?”
I pretended to think about it, and then shrugged. “She said that Mori-san’s business is doing well. He has many foreign barbarian customers.”
“Really?” Auntie paused, obviously waiting for more. When I remained silent, she sniffed. “Ah, well. Times change and nothing we can do about it. The foreign barbarians are here to stay, it seems.”
She signaled for me to help her to stand, and I got up quickly. She was so light, so frail, I could feel her bones beneath her skin. All at once I felt sorry for her. When had this woman we had all been afraid of gotten so old, so very fragile? As if she sensed my pity, Auntie shrugged off my grip and stood erect. She poked me in the chest with a bony finger and thrust her face close to mine.
