by India Millar
Danjuro sighed and finally took me in his arms. He spoke softly, right in my ear. “Ah, Midori-chan. What a shame you are a woman!” Before I had time to bristle at his words, he added, “If you had been born a man, what an actor you would have made. You would have been the shining light of the kabuki, alongside me.”
I was delighted. It was as if Danjuro had read my inner most thoughts. “I would love it,” I admitted candidly.
Danjuro laughed in my ear. “That I cannot give you. I am sorry.”
I felt him begin to rub against me and all thought of acting in the kabuki gave way to more urgent needs.
Danjuro was as excited as I was. It took him only moments to yank off my obi, and my kimono and undergarments followed quickly. In common with all geisha, I had not worn my tabi outside the house, so in what seemed like seconds I stood before him naked.
He slid his hands down my body, wrapping his fingers around my breasts and fondling them. I pressed against him, wanting him to hurry up. Alas, he did, but not how I anticipated. Instead, he forced me onto my knees and jerked his tree of flesh toward me. Obediently, I took him in my mouth, teasing with tongue and lips. So wrought up was Danjuro that it was less than a minute before he was thrusting hard into my mouth and barely a moment later that he achieved bursting of the fruit. So vigorous was his orgasm that I could not contain it. I could feel his juices trickling out of the side of my mouth and down my chin. I could not bring myself to wipe it away, but licked at it with my tongue, determined that I would have every last trace of him inside me. One way or another.
As soon as he was finished, he sat down and put his hand over his face. I rocked back on my heels, torn between worry that I had disappointed him, and disappointment for my own unsatisfied state. I had looked forward to being with him all day, had reached a pitch where I thought I would scream with pleasure if he so much as touched me, and now it was finished. So quickly. So very quickly. I hoped that I would be able to arouse him again, but even that was denied to me. I thought bitterly that even Mori-san had taken the time to give me more pleasure than my lover.
Danjuro wiped his face with his hands and smiled at me. I was relieved that at least he was not angry with me.
“Midori-chan. You have my thanks. Not just for this,” he waved his hand at my discarded clothes and naked body, “but for telling me what was wrong with the play. I am eternally grateful for that. Forgive me, I have given you no pleasure at all. But I have certain things on my mind that I cannot share with you yet. Important things. As soon as I can tell you, I will do so. For now, you should go back to the Hidden House. I will come to you as soon as I can, do not doubt it.”
He smiled, I believe in a tender way, and I scuttled to gather my clothes, obedient to his wishes. He pressed his lips to my forehead before I left, and gently told me to travel safely. He asked if I needed an attendant with me, to see me safe. I shook my head. I would be perfectly safe with Suzume. If it had not been for the fire raging in my sex, I would have walked home on the very air. As it was, I took my bath quickly and closed my door. As soon as the screen was shut, I lay down and reached for my love globes. I rocked myself to sleep, and to satisfaction. It was not Danjuro, but it would have to do.
Chapter Twelve
If sleep is the
Sweet friend of life,
Then why do we fear death?
I had hoped to sleep late the next day. But like so many things in this life, it was not to be. I – the whole house, actually – was roused early.
Auntie was stomping around, braying like an annoyed donkey. She shook all our doors in turn. I could hear her banging her way down the corridor and bellowing at us all to get up. Now! This minute!
We tumbled out, wrapped in nothing but our sleeping robes and the remains of sleep itself, pushing our hair out of our faces and rubbing our eyes in an attempt to at least appear awake. Only the maids, who were always up first, were properly dressed, and they looked terrified. Even Suzume seemed upset.
Auntie shooed us all into one of the big reception rooms and we sat on the tatami, looking at each other curiously. Never did Auntie allow herself to be seen in such a state. Not only was she clearly agitated, but she had not even bothered to put on a wig, and her grey hair hung down her back in her sleeping plait. I think it was that irregularity that disturbed me more than anything and I felt fear clutch at my innards.
Finally certain that she had us all together and had our full attention, Auntie lowered herself down carefully on a pile of futons and stared at us all. Each of us in turn was subject to her stare. I cannot speak for the other girls, but I immediately felt guilty, as though Auntie had found something out that I would rather have kept hidden. My tendresse for Danjuro, perhaps? Or my contempt for poor Mori-san and his fumbling efforts to please me? Whatever it was, I lowered my eyes before Auntie’s glare.
She spoke suddenly, making us all jump. “Carpi is not here.”
We all looked around us and all stared in surprise. No, Carpi was not here. Anxiety clutched me. Surely Carpi had not died. No, Auntie would hardly be carrying on like this if she had. But something had obviously happened to her. Kiku spoke all our thoughts out loud, but softly, as if she feared the answer.
“Has something happened to her, Auntie?”
In the silence, the sound of Auntie grinding her teeth was clearly audible. It was a horrible sound, worse than somebody clicking their knuckle bones, and I set my own teeth in response.
“I have no idea,” Auntie snapped. “Carpi has gone. She has run away.”
The room erupted as everybody started to speak together. No, she couldn’t have! She was too ill! Why would she run away? Where would she go? I sat silently, thinking that it had happened again, that the past had come back to haunt me. I glanced at the others, expecting their faces to mirror my horror, but they were all simply looking amazed.
Did none of them remember poor Fumie? Surely, I could not be the only one who thought of her? But is seemed so. Then I remembered that Fumie had been my friend and had little contact with the other girls.
Auntie clapped her hands together sharply, and obediently as schoolchildren, we all fell silent. I kept my eyes on the tatami, suddenly sure that this was all my fault. Was I the only one who knew that Carpi wanted to commit suicide? Was I the only one who had refused to help her? What was it she had said? Don’t tell anybody else. Yes, I was the only one. I was the only one she had asked to help her, the only one who had betrayed her. Just as I had betrayed Fumie. Now she had run away. And it was all my fault. Again. How much guilt could I live with?
Auntie spoke into the silence. “When did you all see her last?”
“Yesterday afternoon.” Kiku looked around at us, and we all nodded. “She came to see us all for a chat, and she seemed happy then. Much more like her old self. She even said she felt better.”
We all nodded vigorously.
“Nobody saw her any later?” Auntie looked from one to the other of us. We all shook our heads. “Midori!” I jumped and tried not to look guilty. “Midori, when you came in last night from the kabuki, did you notice if Carpi’s door was closed?”
Relief swept over me. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate. I had been in a hurry to get to the bathhouse, but even so, I was sure I would have noticed if Carpi’s door had been open or if a lamp had been lit in her room.
“No.” I shook my head firmly. “I’m sure her door was closed, and the room was in darkness. Did you notice anything, Suzume?”
The maid shook her head. “No, mistress. There was a light in the little reception room, but that was all.”
Masaki nodded and reminded Auntie that she had been entertaining a patron.
Auntie blew out her cheeks. “I was the last one to see her, then. I spoke to her in the late afternoon and made her drink some sake. She said she was going to sleep for a while when I left.”
We all waited, not knowing what to say. Carpi had run away from the Hidden House? Where did she think she wa
s going to go? Who was going to hide her? If Fumie hadn’t escaped, what prayer did Carpi have?
“She has taken her jewelry with her, and the money she had hidden in her room that she had received from her patrons over the years.” Auntie pursed her lips, talking more to herself than to us. “I told her to give it to me so I could put it away safely for her. She must have been planning this for some time.”
“But why, Auntie?” Naruko blurted. “Why would she run away? She was not well, why go now?”
I could tell you that, I thought. But I’m not going to. Although it would be nice to be able to share my guilt this time, to make all of you feel bad that you didn’t notice how ill Carpi really was. Just the same as I hadn’t noticed.
“Perhaps it was her illness that turned her mind.” Auntie frowned. “I don’t know. None of us will know until we get her back. I have already set the Boys to look for her. They will bring her back.”
The unspoken words “and punish her” hung in the air like icicles. We all clutched our robes a little tighter, wondering how we would feel if the Boys were on our trail. I shuddered, suddenly cold.
Auntie dismissed us briskly. Life in the Hidden House would continue as normal, she instructed. Fortunately, because of her ill health, Carpi had no patrons booked. The rest of us would not talk of it, even amongst ourselves. We would not mention it to anybody. Until Carpi returned, she had ceased to exist.
In spite of Auntie’s firm instructions, I could not bring myself to believe life could go on as normal. I returned to my room and sat, staring at the wall. Kiku stuck her head around the door and said something to me, but I didn’t catch her words and didn’t answer. She sighed at me, stuck out her tongue, and left me alone.
Carpi. Carpi had run away. She had asked for my help, and I had denied her. Just as I had denied Fumie. Fumie, whose name was the most beautiful of all the geisha: Poem of Glory.
Fumie was not one of us. She lived in the Green Tea House. She played the samisen and sang and prepared the tea ceremony and whispered witticisms in the ears of enchanted patrons. Of course, she had had her mizuage, just the same as the rest of us, but apart from that, no patron could buy Fumie. Their money could buy her wit, her elegance, but never her body. Unlike us. She was dazzlingly beautiful. At the time, I envied her beauty, but nothing else. She was as much a captive bird as the rest of us geisha, whether in the Green Tea House or the Hidden House. We were all enslaved. All in debt to Auntie, a debt that would never be paid unless some man bought us out. And if that happened, we would simply be owned by a new master.
To this day, I have no idea what brought Fumie into the Hidden House. Perhaps she was bored, perhaps she had heard of the geisha in the Hidden House and wanted to take a look at us, rather like going to the zoo to inspect the caged exotics there. Anyway, I found her standing uncertainly in the corridor outside my room one afternoon and I stared at her with as much interest as she was staring at me.
“Who on earth are you?” Fumie tittered. I was certain that she had changed to “who” from “what” at the last possible moment. I glanced at her expensive kimono and elegant wig and decided that she had wandered in by accident. I don’t know what possessed me, but my first thought was that I had to get her out of the Hidden House before Auntie found her and was furious.
I bowed low. “I think you do not belong here, geisha,” I said politely. “Please allow me to show you out.”
Fumie just giggled. “Well, no. I don’t exactly belong here. I live in the Green Tea House. My name is Fumie. What’s yours?”
“Midori No Me.”
She peered at me with huge, unaffected interest. I was bewildered. How had she found her way across the courtyard to us? None of the Green Tea House girls ever came to see us. Occasionally, on a fine day, they might sit in the inner courtyard with us, but that was it. Otherwise, our worlds did not touch.
That was before I knew Fumie better, and realized she always got her own way. By turns she was innocent, irritating, and fascinating. She was beautiful and witty and talented. And she knew it. Of course she did. Her patrons told her so every single day, and she had no reason to disbelieve them. She even had Auntie under her spell.
When I tried to explain to her that she should not be here, that Auntie would be angry if she found her, she simply giggled. Auntie loved her, she said. She would not mind, whatever she did.
I goggled at her. Auntie loved her? But Fumie was taking my arm and steering me back into my own room. Once inside, she sat down on the tatami, making the simple movement resemble nothing more than a flower head unfolding in the morning sun. She waved her hand for me to sit with her, and I did as I was instructed. I was so fascinated by her, it never even occurred to me to be annoyed that she had walked in and taken over my room as if she owned it.
Fumie was like that, I learned. She was so used to getting everything and anything that she wanted, it was second nature to her. She did not even realize that she might be giving offense. If anybody had tried to tell her off, she would just have giggled at them.
Once seated, she stared at me far more intently than politeness indicated. After a second or two, her beautiful features creased in discontent.
“Are all the girls here like you?” she demanded.
Bewildered, I shook my head. “No. We are all different.”
“Ah.” Fumie seemed pleased. “Good. Which one of you has two heads, then?”
My mouth fell open in disbelief. Who on earth was this rude girl, this one who thought she could walk in here and take over my room and insult us all?
“None of us,” I said indignantly. “What are you talking about?”
Fumie pouted. I daresay that look would conquer any patron, but I am not a man and am not stupid.
“We’ve heard tales in the Green Tea House that all you…geisha in the Hidden House are different from the rest of us. But you look almost normal. Are the rest of them like you? Not much point keeping you locked up if they are.”
Fury gradually turned to amusement. I wondered how old she was. She looked a few years older than me, perhaps fifteen or sixteen at the most, but there was something about her that was essentially childlike. I hid a smile and thought, right, Fumie. You’ve coming looking for freaks, then freaks I will give you.
“Oh, it’s the bits you can’t see that are different.” She looked at me with wide eyes and eager lips. “Not me, you understand, but some of the girls are…different.” I licked my lips, wondering just how much nonsense she would believe. “Some of them have both male and female parts.”
“No!” Fumie was trying to look horrified, but only succeeding in looking fascinated.
I nodded vigorously. “Oh, yes. And one of us has three breasts. And…and,” I racked my brains for something even more bizarre. “And, well, I hesitate to go into personal details when we have only just met, but I myself am not the same as other women.” I tried to look knowing. Fumie’s gaze ran down the front of my loose robe, and she nodded earnestly.
“You’re the one that’s half foreign Barbarian, aren’t you? Yes, I’ve heard tales about the Barbarians.”
I was very grateful she was polite enough not to enquire further. I was fascinated by her, this tiny, beautiful doll of a girl with her perfect features and slender body. She asked if I would like her to sing for me. I nodded, and she stood up immediately and sang a few verses of a popular song. Her singing voice was as sweet and perfect as the rest of her. She smiled at me condescendingly, and I wanted to dislike her, but it was impossible.
Everybody loved Fumie. It was impossible not to. Or at least, so I thought.
For some reason, she seemed to have taken a fancy to me, and after that first day she wandered over often when she did not have a patron. As she had said, Auntie did not seem to mind at all, just instructed me to make sure that Fumie did not visit when any of us Hidden House geisha had our own patrons present.
The other girls regarded her with as much curiosity as she paid to them. I could see
her wondering, Is that the one with three breasts? Is she one of the unfortunates with male and female private parts? I would have explained that I had only been teasing, but I soon realized it would do no good at all. Once Fumie got something into her head, there was no dislodging it.
Oddly, none of the other girls seemed in the least bit interested in my new friend. She did not belong to our world, and if I chose to amuse myself with her, then that was my business. In any event, it would not have mattered if they had tried to be friendly with Fumie. She was the most single-minded person I had ever met. She had decided that I was to be her friend, and that was all there was to it. Apart from avid curiosity, she had no interest at all in the other girls. With the exception of Carpi, who fascinated her.
Fumie would not go near Carpi. When she saw her, she did everything but hide behind my back, and it was only ingrained politeness that stopped her from doing that. But she asked me about Carpi constantly. Had she been born like that? How did she eat, dress, wipe herself when she went to the toilet? Was anything else about her…strange? I answered abruptly. Carpi bore her malformations with immense dignity, and Fumie should honor her and do the same. Fumie sulked for an hour or two and then went back to trying to guess which of the girls had three breasts. She finally decided it was Kiku, and nothing I said could make her change her mind.
In spite of her beauty and apparent freedom, Fumie was just as much a slave as the rest of us. She was always happy to talk about herself, and it did not take long for her to tell me her story. I had a strong sense that some of it was richly embroidered, but Fumie was nothing if not convincing, and it was impossible to untangle truth from pure fiction.
She had, she said, been born on a country estate in Kyoto. Her father had been a high-ranking civil servant, and she had been the only girl amongst four brothers. She did not have to say that she had been a spoiled child, that was obvious. As a child, she had enjoyed the best of everything. She had a naturally good singing voice – stated as a fact, with no false modesty – and her father had had her taught the samisen so she could sing and play to him in the evening. She was amazed that I could read and write; her father never saw any need for such unfeminine accomplishments, but Fumie didn’t bother to question that. After all, it was her we were talking about, and that was always Fumie’s favorite subject.
