Memoirs of a Geisha

by Arthur Golden

  That evening in the Shirae, I poured sake while Mameha told a story, and all the while Dr. Crab sat with his elbows sticking out so much that he sometimes bumped one of us with them and turned to nod in apology. He was a quiet man, as I discovered; he spent most of his time looking down at the table through his little round glasses, and every so often slipped pieces of sashimi underneath his mustache in a way that made me think of a boy hiding something beneath a floor covering. When we finally left that evening I thought we'd failed and wouldn't see much of him-because normally a man who'd enjoyed himself so little wouldn't bother coming back to Gion. But as it turned out, we heard from Dr. Crab the next week, and nearly every week afterward over the following months.

  *

  Things went along smoothly with the Doctor, until one afternoon in the middle of March when I did something foolish and very nearly ruined all Mameha's careful planning. I'm sure many a young girl has spoiled her prospects in life by refusing to do something expected of her, or by behaving badly toward an important man, or some such thing; but the mistake I made was so trivial I wasn't even aware I'd done anything.

  It happened in the okiya during the course of about a minute, not long after lunch one cold day while I knelt on the wooden walkway with my shamisen. Hatsumomo was strolling past on her way to the toilet. If I'd had shoes I would have stepped down onto the dirt corridor to get out of her way. But as it was, I could do nothing but struggle to get up from my knees, with my legs and arms nearly frozen. If I'd been quicker Hatsumomo probably wouldn't have bothered speaking to me. But during that moment while I rose to my feet, she said:

  "The German Ambassador is coming to town, but Pumpkin isn't free to entertain him. Why don't you ask Mameha to arrange for you to take Pumpkin's place?" After this she let out a laugh, as if to say the idea of my doing such a thing was as ridiculous as serving a dish of acorn shells to the Emperor.

  The German Ambassador was causing quite a stir in Gion at the time. During this period, in 1935, a new government had recently come to power in Germany; and though I've never understood much about politics, I do know that Japan was moving away from the United States during these years and was eager to make a good impression on the new German Ambassador. Everyone in Gion wondered who would be given the honor of entertaining him during his upcoming visit.

  When Hatsumomo spoke to me, I ought to have lowered my head in shame and made a great show of lamenting the misery of my life compared with Pumpkin's. But as it happened, I had just been musing about how much my prospects seemed to have improved and how successfully Mameha and I had kept her plan from Hatsumomo-whatever her plan was. My first instinct when Hatsumomo spoke was to smile, but instead I kept my face like a mask, and felt pleased with myself that I'd given nothing away. Hatsumomo gave me an odd look; I ought to have realized right then that something had passed through her mind. I stepped quickly to one side, and she passed me. That was the end of it, as far as I was concerned.

  Then a few days later, Mameha and I went to the Shirae Teahouse to meet Dr. Crab once again. But as we rolled open the door, we found Pumpkin slipping her feet into her shoes to leave. I was so startled to see her, I wondered what on earth could possibly have brought her there. Then Hatsumomo stepped down into the entryway as well, and of course I knew: Hatsumomo had outsmarted us somehow.

  "Good evening, Mameha-san," Hatsumomo said. "And look who's with you! It's the apprentice the Doctor used to be so fond of."

  I'm sure Mameha felt as shocked as I did, but she didn't show it. "Why, Hatsumomo-san," she said, "I scarcely recognize you... but my goodness, you're aging well!"

  Hatsumomo wasn't actually old; she was only twenty-eight or twenty-nine. I think Mameha was just looking for something nasty to say.

  "I expect you're on your way to see the Doctor," Hatsumomo said. "Such an interesting man! I only hope he'll still be happy to see you. Well, good-bye." Hatsumomo looked cheerful as she walked away, but in the light from the avenue I could see a look of sorrow on Pumpkin's face.

  Mameha and I slipped out of our shoes without speaking a word; neither of us knew what to say. The Shirae's gloomy atmosphere seemed as thick as the water in a pond that night. The air smelled of stale makeup; the damp plaster was peeling in the corners of the rooms. I would have given anything to turn around and leave.

  When we slid open the door from the hallway, we found the mistress of the teahouse keeping Dr. Crab company. Usually she stayed a few minutes even after we'd arrived, probably to charge the Doctor for her time. But tonight she excused herself the moment we entered and didn't even look up as she passed. Dr. Crab was sitting with his back facing us, so we skipped the formality of bowing and went instead to join him at the table.

  "You seem tired, Doctor," Mameha said. "How are you this evening?"

  Dr. Crab didn't speak. He just twirled his glass of beer on the table to waste time-even though he was an efficient man and never wasted a moment if he could help it.

  "Yes, I am rather tired," he said at last. "I don't feel much like talking."

  And with that, he drank down the last of his beer and stood to leave. Mameha and I exchanged looks. When Dr. Crab reached the door to the room, he faced us and said, "I certainly do not appreciate when people I have trusted turn out to have misled me."

  Afterward he left without closing the door.

  Mameha and I were too stunned to speak. At length she got up and slid the door shut. Back at the table, she smoothed her kimono and then pinched her eyes closed in anger and said to me, "All right, Sayuri. What exactly did you say to Hatsumomo?"

  "Mameha-san, after all this work? I promise you I would never do anything to ruin my own chances."

  "The Doctor certainly seems to have thrown you aside as though you're no better than an empty sack. I'm sure there's a reason... but we won't find it out until we know what Hatsumomo said to him tonight."

  "How can we possibly do that?"

  "Pumpkin was here in the room. You must go to her and ask."

  I wasn't at all sure Pumpkin would speak with me, but I said I would try, and Mameha seemed satisfied with this. She stood and prepared to leave, but I stayed where I was until she turned to see what was keeping me.

  "Mameha-san, may I ask a question?" I said. "Now Hatsumomo knows I've been spending time with the Doctor, and probably she understands the reason why. Dr. Crab certainly knows why. You know why. Even Pumpkin may know why! I'm the only one who doesn't. Won't you be kind enough to explain your plan to me?"

  Mameha looked as if she felt very sorry I'd asked this question. For a long moment she looked everywhere but at me, but she finally let out a sigh and knelt at the table again to tell me what I wanted to know.

  *

  "You know perfectly well," she began, "that Uchida-san looks at you with the eyes of an artist. But the Doctor is interested in something else, and so is Nobu. Do you know what is meant by 'the homeless eel'?"

  I had no idea what she was talking about, and I said so.

  "Men have a kind of... well, an 'eel' on them," she said. "Women don't have it. But men do. It's located-"

  "I think I know what you're talking about," I said, "but I didn't know it was called an eel."

  "It isn't an eel, really," Mameha said. "But pretending it's an eel makes things so much easier to understand. So let's think of it that way. Here's the thing: this eel spends its entire life trying to find a home, and what do you think women have inside them? Caves, where the eels like to live. This cave is where the blood comes from every month when the 'clouds pass over the moon,' as we sometimes say."

  I was old enough to understand what Mameha meant by the passage of clouds over the moon, because I'd been experiencing it for a few years already. The first time, I couldn't have felt more panicked if I'd sneezed and found pieces of my brain in the handkerchief. I really was afraid I might be dying, until Auntie had found me washing out a bloody rag and explained that bleeding was just part of being a woman.

  "You may not know
this about eels," Mameha went on, "but they're quite territorial. When they find a cave they like, they wriggle around inside it for a while to be sure that... well, to be sure it's a nice cave, I suppose. And when they've made up their minds that it's comfortable, they mark the cave as their territory... by spitting. Do you understand?"

  If Mameha had simply told me what she was trying to say, I'm sure I would have been shocked, but at least I'd have had an easier time sorting it all out. Years later I discovered that things had been explained to Mameha in exactly the same way by her own older sister.

  "Here's the part that's going to seem very strange to you," Mameha went on, as if what she'd already told me didn't. "Men actually like doing this. In fact, they like it very much. There are even men who do little in their lives besides search for different caves to let their eels live in. A woman's cave is particularly special to a man if no other eel has ever been in it before. Do you understand? We call this 'mizuage.' "

  "We call what 'mizuage'?"

  "The first time a woman's cave is explored by a man's eel. That is what we call mizuage."

  Now, mizu means "water" and age means "raise up" or "place on"; so that the term mizuage sounds as if it might have something to do with raising up water or placing something on the water. If you get three geisha in a room, all of them will have different ideas about where the term comes from. Now that Mameha had finished her explanation, I felt only more confused, though I tried to pretend it all made a certain amount of sense.

  "I suppose you can guess why the Doctor likes to play around in Gion," Mameha continued. "He makes a great deal of money from his hospital. Except for what he needs to support his family, he spends it in the pursuit of mizuage. It may interest you to know, Sayuri-san, that you are precisely the sort of young girl he likes best. I know this very well, because I was one myself."

  As I later learned, a year or two before I'd first come to Gion, Dr. Crab had paid a record amount for Mameha's mizuage-maybe Y=7000 or Y=8000. This may not sound like much, but at that time it was a sum that even someone like Mother-whose every thought was about money and how to get more of it-might see only once or twice in a lifetime. Mameha's mizuage had been so costly partly because of her fame; but there was another reason, as she explained to me that afternoon. Two very wealthy men had bid against each other to be her mizuage patron. One was Dr. Crab. The other was a businessman named Fujikado. Ordinarily men didn't compete this way in Gion; they all knew each other and preferred to reach agreement on things. But Fujikado lived on the other side of the country and came to Gion only occasionally. He didn't care if he offended Dr. Crab. And Dr. Crab, who claimed to have some aristocratic blood in him, hated self-made men like Fujikado-even though, in truth, he was a self-made man too, for the most part.

  When Mameha noticed at the sumo tournament that Nobu seemed taken with me, she thought at once of how much Nobu resembled Fujikado-self-made and, to a man like Dr. Crab, repulsive. With Hatsumomo chasing me around like a housewife chasing a cockroach, I certainly wasn't going to become famous the way Mameha had and end up with an expensive mizuage as a result. But if these two men found me appealing enough, they might start a bidding war, which could put me in the same position to repay my debts as if I'd been a popular apprentice all along. This was what Mameha had meant by "catching Hatsumomo off-balance." Hatsumomo was delighted that Nobu found me attractive; what she didn't realize was that my popularity with Nobu would very likely drive up the price of my mizuage.

  Clearly we had to reclaim Dr. Crab's affections. Without him Nobu could offer what he wanted for my mizuage-that is, if he turned out to have any interest in it at all. I wasn't sure he would, but Mameha assured me that a man doesn't cultivate a relationship with a fifteen-year-old apprentice geisha unless he has her mizuage in mind.

  "You can bet it isn't your conversation he's attracted to," she told me.

  I tried to pretend I didn't feel hurt by this.

  chapter twenty

  Looking back, I can see that this conversation with Mameha marked a shift in my view of the world. Beforehand I'd known nothing about mizuage; I was still a naive girl with little understanding. But afterward I could begin to see what a man like Dr. Crab wanted from all the time and money he spent in Gion. Once you know this sort of thing, you can never unknow it. I couldn't think about him again in quite the same way.

  Back at the okiya later that night, I waited in my room for Hatsumomo and Pumpkin to come up the stairs. It was an hour or so after midnight when they finally did. I could tell Pumpkin was tired from the way her hands slapped on the steps-because she sometimes came up the steep stairway on all fours like a dog. Before closing the door to their room, Hatsumomo summoned one of the maids and asked for a beer.

  "No, wait a minute," she said. "Bring two. I want Pumpkin to join me."

  "Please, Hatsumomo-san," I heard Pumpkin say. "I'd rather drink spit."

  "You're going to read aloud to me while I drink mine, so you might as well have one. Beside, I hate when people are too sober. It's sickening."

  After this, the maid went down the stairs. When she came up a short time later, I heard glasses clinking on the tray she carried.

  For a long while I sat with my ear to the door of my room, listening to Pumpkin's voice as she read an article about a new Kabuki actor. Finally Hatsumomo stumbled out into the hallway and rolled open the door to the upstairs toilet.

  "Pumpkin!" I heard her say. "Don't you feel like a bowl of noodles?"

  "No, ma'am."

  "See if you can find the noodle vendor. And get some for yourself so you can keep me company."

  Pumpkin sighed and went right down the stairs, but I had to wait for Hatsumomo to return to her room before creeping down to follow. I might not have caught up with Pumpkin, except that she was so exhausted she couldn't do much more than wander along at about the speed mud oozes down a hill, and with about as much purpose. When I finally found her, she looked alarmed to see me and asked what was the matter.

  "Nothing is the matter," I said, "except... I desperately need your help."

  "Oh, Chiyo-chan," she said to me-I think she was the only person who still called me that-"I don't have any time! I'm trying to find noodles for Hatsumomo, and she's going to make me eat some too. I'm afraid I'll throw up all over her."

  "Pumpkin, you poor thing," I said. "You look like ice when it has begun to melt." Her face was drooping with exhaustion, and the weight of all her clothing seemed as if it might pull her right onto the ground. I told her to go and sit down, that I would find the noodles and bring them to her. She was so tired she didn't even protest, but simply handed me the money and sat down on a bench by the Shirakawa Stream.

  It took me some time to find a noodle vendor, but at last I returned carrying two bowls of steaming noodles. Pumpkin was sound asleep with her head back and her mouth open as though she were hoping to catch raindrops. It was about two in the morning, and a few people were still strolling around. One group of men seemed to think Pumpkin was the funniest thing they'd seen in weeks-and I admit it was odd to see an apprentice in her full regalia snoring on a bench.

  When I'd set the bowls down beside her and awakened her as gently as I knew how, I said, "Pumpkin, I want so much to ask you a favor, but... I'm afraid you won't be happy when you hear what it is."

  "It doesn't matter," she said. "Nothing makes me happy anymore."

  "You were in the room earlier this evening when Hatsumomo talked with the Doctor. I'm afraid my whole future may be affected by that conversation. Hatsumomo must have told him something about me that isn't true, because now the Doctor doesn't want to see me any longer."

  As much as I hated Hatsumomo-as much as I wanted to know what she'd done that evening-I felt sorry at once for having raised the subject with Pumpkin. She seemed in such pain that the gentle nudge I gave her proved to be too much. All at once several teardrops came spilling onto her big cheeks as if she'd been filling up with them for years.

  "I didn
't know, Chiyo-chan!" she said, fumbling in her obi for a handkerchief. "I had no idea!"

  "You mean, what Hatsumomo was going to say? But how could anyone have known?"

  "That isn't it. I didn't know anyone could be so evil! I don't understand it... She does things for no reason at all except to hurt people. And the worst part is she thinks I admire her and want to be just like her. But I hate her! I've never hated anyone so much before."

  By now poor Pumpkin's yellow handkerchief was smeared with white makeup. If earlier she'd been an ice cube beginning to melt, now she was a puddle.

  "Pumpkin, please listen to me," I said. "I wouldn't ask this of you if I had any other alternative. But I don't want to go back to being a maid all my life, and that's just what will happen if Hatsumomo has her way. She won't stop until she has me like a cockroach under her foot. I mean, she'll squash me if you don't help me to scurry away!"

  Pumpkin thought this was funny, and we both began to laugh. While she was stuck between laughing and crying, I took her handkerchief and tried to smooth the makeup on her face. I felt so touched at seeing the old Pumpkin again, who had once been my friend, that my eyes grew watery as well, and we ended up in an embrace.

  "Oh, Pumpkin, your makeup is such a mess," I said to her afterward.