Memoirs of a Geisha

by Arthur Golden

  "No one has told me," she said. "Hatsumomo and I have known each other since I was a girl of six and she was nine. When you've watched a creature misbehaving itself over such a long period, there's no secret in knowing what it will do next."

  "I don't know what I did to make her hate me so," I said.

  "Hatsumomo is no harder to understand than a cat. A cat is happy so long as it's lying in the sun with no other cats around. But if it should think someone else is poking around its meal dish... Has anyone told you the story of how Hatsumomo drove young Hatsuoki out of Gion?"

  I told her no one had.

  "What an attractive girl Hatsuoki was," Mameha began. "And a very dear friend of mine. She and your Hatsumomo were sisters. That is to say, they'd both been trained by the same geisha-in this case, the great Tomihatsu, who was already an old woman at the time. Your Hatsumomo never liked young Hatsuoki, and when they both became apprentice geisha, she couldn't bear having her as a rival. So she began to spread a rumor around Gion that Hatsuoki had been caught in a public alleyway one night doing something very improper with a young policeman. Of course there was no truth in it. If Hatsumomo had simply gone around telling the story, no one in Gion would have believed her. People knew how jealous she felt about Hatsuoki. So here's what she did: whenever she came upon someone very drunk-a geisha, or a maid, or even a man visiting Gion, it didn't matter-she whispered the story about Hatsuoki in such a way that the next day the person who'd heard it didn't remember that Hatsumomo had been the source. Soon poor Hatsuoki's reputation was so damaged, it was an easy matter for Hatsumomo to put a few more of her little tricks to use and drive her out."

  I felt a strange relief at hearing that someone besides me had been treated monstrously by Hatsumomo.

  "She can't bear to have rivals," Mameha went on. "That's the reason she treats you as she does."

  "Surely Hatsumomo doesn't see me as a rival, ma'am," I said. "I'm no more a rival to her than a puddle is a rival to the ocean."

  "Not in the teahouses of Gion, perhaps. But within your okiya... Don't you find it odd that Mrs. Nitta has never adopted Hatsumomo as her daughter? The Nitta okiya must be the wealthiest in Gion without an heir. By adopting Hatsumomo, not only would Mrs. Nitta solve that problem, but all of Hatsumomo's earnings would then be kept by the okiya, without a single sen of it paid out to Hatsumomo herself. And Hatsumomo is a very successful geisha! You'd think Mrs. Nitta, who's as fond of money as anyone, would have adopted her a long time ago. She must have a very good reason not to do so, don't you think?"

  I'd certainly never thought of any of this before, but after listening to Mameha, I felt certain I knew exactly what the reason was.

  "Adopting Hatsumomo," I said, "would be like releasing the tiger from its cage."

  "It certainly would. I'm sure Mrs. Nitta knows perfectly well what sort of adopted daughter Hatsumomo would turn out to be-the sort that finds a way to drive the Mother out. In any case, Hatsumomo has no more patience than a child. I don't think she could keep even a cricket alive in a wicker cage. After a year or two, she'd probably sell the okiya's collection of kimono and retire. That, young Chiyo, is the reason Hatsumomo hates you so very much. The Pumpkin girl, I don't imagine Hatsumomo feels too worried about Mrs. Nitta adopting her."

  "Mameha-san," I said, "I'm sure you recall the kimono of yours that was ruined..."

  "You're going to tell me you're the girl who put ink on it."

  "Well... yes, ma'am. And even though I'm sure you know Hatsumomo was behind it, I do hope that someday I'll be able to show how sorry I am for what happened."

  Mameha gazed at me a long while. I had no notion what she was thinking until she said:

  "You may apologize, if you wish."

  I backed away from the table and bowed low to the mats; but before I had a chance to say anything at all, Mameha interrupted me.

  "That would be a lovely bow, if only you were a farmer visiting Kyoto for the first time," she said. "But since you want to appear cultivated, you must do it like this. Look at me; move farther away from the table. All right, there you are on your knees; now straighten out your arms and put your fingertips onto the mats in front of you. Just the tips of your fingers; not your whole hand. And you mustn't spread your fingers at all; I can still see space between them. Very well, put them on the mats... hands together... there! Now that looks lovely. Bow as low as you can, but keep your neck perfectly straight, don't let your head drop that way. And for heaven's sake, don't put any weight onto your hands or you'll look like a man! That's fine. Now you may try it again."

  So I bowed to her once more, and told her again how deeply sorry I was for having played a role in ruining her beautiful kimono.

  "It was a beautiful kimono, wasn't it?" she said. "Well, now we'll forget about it. I want to know why you're no longer training to be a geisha. Your teachers at the school tell me you were doing well right up until the moment you stopped taking lessons. You ought to be on your way to a successful career in Gion. Why would Mrs. Nitta stop your training?"

  I told her about my debts, including the kimono and the brooch Hatsumomo had accused me of stealing. Even after I was finished, she went on looking coldly at me. Finally she said:

  "There's something more you're not telling me. Considering your debts, I'd expect Mrs. Nitta to feel only more determined to see you succeed as a geisha. You'll certainly never repay her by working as a maid."

  When I heard this, I must have lowered my eyes in shame without realizing it; for in an instant Mameha seemed able to read my very thoughts.

  "You tried to run away, didn't you?"

  "Yes, ma'am," I said. "I had a sister. We'd been separated but we managed to find each other. We were supposed to meet on a certain night to run away together... but then I fell off the roof and broke my arm."

  "The roof! You must be joking. Did you go up there to take a last look at Kyoto?"

  I explained to her why I'd done it. "I know it was foolish of me," I said afterward. "Now Mother won't invest another sen in my training, since she's afraid I may run away again."

  "There's more to it than that. A girl who runs away makes the mistress of her okiya look bad. That's the way people think here in Gion. 'My goodness, she can't even keep her own maids from running away!' That sort of thing. But what will you do with yourself now, Chiyo? You don't look to me like a girl who wants to live her life as a maid."

  "Oh, ma'am... I'd give anything to undo my mistakes," I said. "It's been more than two years now. I've waited so patiently in the hopes that some opportunity might come along."

  "Waiting patiently doesn't suit you. I can see you have a great deal of water in your personality. Water never waits. It changes shape and flows around things, and finds the secret paths no one else has thought about-the tiny hole through the roof or the bottom of a box. There's no doubt it's the most versatile of the five elements. It can wash away earth; it can put out fire; it can wear a piece of metal down and sweep it away. Even wood, which is its natural complement, can't survive without being nurtured by water. And yet, you haven't drawn on those strengths in living your life, have you?"

  "Well, actually, ma'am, water flowing was what gave me the idea of escaping over the roof."

  "I'm sure you're a clever girl, Chiyo, but I don't think that was your cleverest moment. Those of us with water in our personalities don't pick where we'll flow to. All we can do is flow where the landscape of our lives carries us."

  "I suppose I'm like a river that has come up against a dam, and that dam is Hatsumomo."

  "Yes, probably that's true," she said, looking at me calmly. "But rivers sometimes wash dams away."

  From the moment of my arrival in her apartment, I'd been wondering why Mameha had summoned me. I'd already decided that it had nothing to do with the kimono; but it wasn't until now that my eyes finally opened to what had been right before me all along. Mameha must have made up her mind to use me in seeking her revenge on Hatsumomo. It was obvious to me they wer
e rivals; why else would Hatsumomo have destroyed Mameha's kimono two years earlier? No doubt Mameha had been waiting for just the right moment, and now, it seemed, she'd found it. She was going to use me in the role of a weed that chokes out other plants in the garden. She wasn't simply looking for revenge; unless I was mistaken, she wanted to be rid of Hatsumomo completely.

  "In any case," Mameha went on, "nothing will change until Mrs. Nitta lets you resume your training."

  "I don't have much hope," I said, "of ever persuading her."

  "Don't worry just now about persuading her. Worry about finding the proper time to do it."

  I'd certainly learned a great many lessons from life already; but I knew nothing at all about patience-not even enough to understand what Mameha meant about finding the proper time. I told her that if she could suggest what I ought to say, I would be eager to speak with Mother tomorrow.

  "Now, Chiyo, stumbling along in life is a poor way to proceed. You must learn how to find the time and place for things. A mouse who wishes to fool the cat doesn't simply scamper out of its hole when it feels the slightest urge. Don't you know how to check your almanac?"

  I don't know if you've ever seen an almanac. To open one and flip through the pages, you'd find it crammed with the most complicated charts and obscure characters. Geisha are a very superstitious lot, as I've said. Auntie and Mother, and even the cook and the maids, scarcely made a decision as simple as buying a new pair of shoes without consulting an almanac. But I'd never checked one in my life.

  "It's no wonder, all the misfortunes you've experienced," Mameha told me. "Do you mean to say that you tried to run away without checking if the day was auspicious?"

  I told her my sister had made the decision when we would leave. Mameha wanted to know if I could remember the date, which I managed to do after looking at a calendar with her; it had been the last Tuesday in October 1929, only a few months after Satsu and I were taken from our home.

  Mameha told her maid to bring an almanac for that year; and then after asking my sign-the year of the monkey-she spent some time checking and cross-checking various charts, as well as a page that gave my general outlook for the month. Finally she read aloud:

  " 'A most inauspicious time. Needles, unusual foods, and travel must be avoided at all costs.' " Here she stopped to look up at me. "Do you hear that? Travel. After that it goes on to say that you must avoid the following things... let's see... 'bathing during the hour of the rooster,' 'acquiring new clothing,' 'embarking on new enterprises,' and listen to this one, 'changing residences.' " Here Mameha closed the book and peered at me. "Were you careful about any of those things?"

  Many people have doubts about this sort of fortune-telling; but any doubts you might have would certainly have been swept away if you'd been there to see what happened next. Mameha asked my sister's sign and looked up the same information about her. "Well," she said after looking at it for a while, "it reads, 'An auspicious day for small changes.' Perhaps not the best day for something as ambitious as running away, but certainly better than the other days that week or the next." And then came the surprising thing. "It goes on to say, 'A good day for travel in the direction of the Sheep,' " Mameha read. And when she brought out a map and found Yoroido, it lay to the north northeast of Kyoto, which was indeed the direction corresponding to the zodiac sign of the Sheep. Satsu had checked her almanac. That was probably what she'd done when she left me there in the room under the stairwell at the Tatsuyo for a few minutes. And she'd certainly been right to do it; she had escaped, while I hadn't.

  This was the moment when I began to understand how unaware I'd been-not only in planning to run away, but in everything. I'd never understood how closely things are connected to one another. And it isn't just the zodiac I'm talking about. We human beings are only a part of something very much larger. When we walk along, we may crush a beetle or simply cause a change in the air so that a fly ends up where it might never have gone otherwise. And if we think of the same example but with ourselves in the role of the insect, and the larger universe in the role we've just played, it's perfectly clear that we're affected every day by forces over which we have no more control than the poor beetle has over our gigantic foot as it descends upon it. What are we to do? We must use whatever methods we can to understand the movement of the universe around us and time our actions so that we are not fighting the currents, but moving with them.

  Mameha took up my almanac again and this time selected several dates over the following weeks that would be auspicious for significant change. I asked whether I should try to speak with Mother on one of the dates, and exactly what I should say.

  "It isn't my intention to have you speak with Mrs. Nitta yourself," she said. "She'll turn you down in an instant. If I were her, so would I! As far as she knows, there's no one in Gion willing to be your older sister."

  I was very sorry to hear her say this. "In that case, Mameha-san, what should I do?"

  "You should go back to your okiya, Chiyo," she said, "and mention to no one that you've spoken with me."

  After this, she gave me a look that meant I should bow and excuse myself right then, which I did. I was so flustered I left without the Kabuki magazines and shamisen strings Mameha had given me. Her maid had to come running down the street with them.

  chapter eleven

  I should explain just what Mameha meant by "older sister," even though at the time, I hardly knew much about it myself. By the time a girl is finally ready to make her debut as an apprentice, she needs to have established a relationship with a more experienced geisha. Mameha had mentioned Hatsumomo's older sister, the great Tomihatsu, who was already an old woman when she trained Hatsumomo; but older sisters aren't always so senior to the geisha they train. Any geisha can act as older sister to a younger girl, as long as she has at least one day's seniority.

  When two girls are bound together as sisters, they perform a ceremony like a wedding. Afterward they see each other almost as members of the same family, calling each other "Older Sister" and "Younger Sister" just as real family members do. Some geisha may not take the role as seriously as they should, but an older sister who does her job properly becomes the most important figure in a young geisha's life. She does a great deal more than just making sure her younger sister learns the proper way of blending embarrassment and laughter when a man tells a naughty joke, or helping her select the right grade of wax to use under her makeup. She must also make sure her younger sister attracts the notice of people she'll need to know. She does this by taking her around Gion and presenting her to the mistresses of all the proper teahouses, to the man who makes wigs for stage performances, to the chefs at the important restaurants, and so on.

  There's certainly plenty of work in all of this. But introducing her younger sister around Gion during the day is only half of what an older sister must do. Because Gion is like a faint star that comes out in its fullest beauty only after the sun has set. At night the older sister must take her younger sister with her to entertain, in order to introduce her to the customers and patrons she's come to know over the years. She says to them, "Oh, have you met my new younger sister, So-and-so? Please be sure to remember her name, because she's going to be a big star! And please permit her to call on you the next time you visit Gion." Of course, few men pay high fees to spend the evening chatting with a fourteen-year-old; so this customer probably won't, in fact, summon the young girl on his next visit. But the older sister and the mistress of the teahouse will continue to push her on him until he does. If it turns out he doesn't like her for some reason... well, that's another story; but otherwise, he'll probably end up a patron of hers in good time, and very fond of her too-just as he is of her older sister.

  Taking on the role of older sister often feels about like carrying a sack of rice back and forth across the city. Because not only is a younger sister as dependent on her older sister as a passenger is on the train she rides; but when the girl behaves badly, it's her older sister who must bea
r responsibility. The reason a busy and successful geisha goes to all this trouble for a younger girl is because everyone in Gion benefits when an apprentice succeeds. The apprentice herself benefits by paying off her debts over time, of course; and if she's lucky, she'll end up mistress to a wealthy man. The older sister benefits by receiving a portion of her younger sister's fees-as do the mistresses of the various teahouses where the girl entertains. Even the wigmaker, and the shop where hair ornaments are sold, and the sweets shop where the apprentice geisha will buy gifts for her patrons from time to time... they may never directly receive a portion of the girl's fees; but certainly they all benefit by the patronage of yet another successful geisha, who can bring customers into Gion to spend money.

  It's fair to say that, for a young girl in Gion, nearly everything depends on her older sister. And yet few girls have any say over who their older sisters will be. An established geisha certainly won't jeopardize her reputation by taking on a younger sister she thinks is dull or someone she thinks her patrons won't like. On the other hand, the mistress of an okiya that has invested a great deal of money in training a certain apprentice won't sit quietly and just wait for some dull geisha to come along and offer to train her. So as a result, a successful geisha ends up with far more requests than she can manage. Some she can turn away, and some she can't... which brings me to the reason why Mother probably did feel-just as Mameha suggested-that not a single geisha in Gion would be willing to act as my older sister.

  Back at the time I first came to the okiya, Mother probably had in mind for Hatsumomo to act as my older sister. Hatsumomo may have been the sort of woman who would bite a spider right back, but nearly any apprentice would have been happy to be her younger sister. Hatsumomo had already been older sister to at least two well-known young geisha in Gion. Instead of torturing them as she had me, she'd behaved herself well. It was her choice to take them on, and she did it for the money it would bring her. But in my case, Hatsumomo could no more have been counted on to help me in Gion and then be content with the few extra yen it would bring her than a dog can be counted on to escort a cat down the street without taking a bite out of it in the alley. Mother could certainly have compelled Hatsumomo to be my older sister-not only because Hatsumomo lived in our okiya, but also because she had so few kimono of her own and was dependent on the okiya's collection. But I don't think any force on earth could have compelled Hatsumomo to train me properly. I'm sure that on the day she was asked to take me to the Mizuki Teahouse and introduce me to the mistress there, she would have taken me instead to the banks of the river and said, "Kamo River, have you met my new younger sister?" and then pushed me right in.