Chapter One

Suppose that you and I were sitting in a quiet room overlooking a garden, chatting and sipping at our cups of green tea while we talked about something that had happened a long while ago, and I said to you, "That afternoon when I met so-and-so . . . was the very best afternoon of my life, and also the very worst afternoon." I expect you might put down your teacup and say, "Well, now, which was it? Was it the best or the worst? Because it can't possibly have been both!" Ordinarily I'd have to laugh at myself and agree with you. But the truth is that the afternoon when I met Mr. Tanaka Ichiro really was the best and the worst of my life. He seemed so fascinating to me, even the fish smell on his hands was a kind of perfume. If I had never known him, I'm sure I would not have become a geisha.
I wasn't born and raised to be a Kyoto geisha. I wasn't even born in Kyoto. I'm a fisherman's daughter from a little town called Yoroido on the Sea of Japan. In all my life I've never told more than a handful of people anything at all about Yoroido, or about the house in which I grew up, or about my mother and father, or my older sister-and certainly not about how I became a geisha, or what it was like to be one. Most people would much rather carry on with their fantasies that my mother and grandmother were geisha, and that I began my training in dance when I was weaned from the breast, and so on. As a matter of fact, one day many years ago I was pouring a cup of sake for a man who happened to mention that he had been in Yoroido only the previous week. Well, I felt as a bird must feel when it has flown across the ocean and comes upon a creature that knows its nest. I was so shocked I couldn't stop myself from saying:
"Yoroido! Why, that's where I grew up!"
This poor man! His face went through the most remarkable series of changes. He tried his best to smile, though it didn't come out well because he couldn't get the look of shock off his face.
"Yoroido?" he said. "You can't mean it."
I long ago developed a very practiced smile, which I call my "Noh smile" because it resembles a Noh mask whose features are frozen. Its advantage is that men can interpret it however they want; you can imagine how often I've relied on it. I decided I'd better use it just then, and of course it worked. He let out all his breath and tossed down the cup of sake I'd poured for him before giving an enormous laugh I'm sure was prompted more by relief than anything else.
"The very idea!" he said, with another big laugh. "You, growing up in a dump like Yoroido. That's like making tea in a bucket!" And when he'd laughed again, he said to me, "That's why you're so much fun, Sayurisan. Sometimes you almost make me believe your little jokes are real."
I don't much like thinking of myself as a cup of tea made in a bucket, but I suppose in a way it must be true. After all, I did grow up in Yoroido, and no one would suggest it's a glamorous spot. Hardly anyone ever visits it. As for the people who live there, they never have occasion to leave. You're probably wondering how I came to leave it myself.
That's where my story begins.
In our little fishing village of Yoroido, I lived in what I called a "tipsy house." It stood near a cliff where the wind off the ocean was always blowing.
As a child it seemed to me as if the ocean had caught a terrible cold, because it was always wheezing and there would be spells when it let out a huge sneeze-which is to say there was a burst of wind with a tremendous spray.
I decided our tiny house must have been offended by the ocean sneezing in its face from time to time, and took to leaning back because it wanted to get out of the way. Probably it would have collapsed if my father hadn't cut a timber from a wrecked fishing boat to prop up the eaves, which made the house look like a tipsy old man leaning on his crutch.
Inside this tipsy house I lived something of a lopsided life. Because from my earliest years I was very much like my mother, and hardly at all like my father or older sister.
My mother said it was because we were made just the same, she and I-and it was true we both had the same peculiar eyes of a sort you almost never see in Japan.
Instead of being dark brown like everyone else's, my mother's eyes were a translucent gray, and mine are just the same. When I was very young, I told my mother I thought someone had poked a hole in her eyes and all the ink had drained out, which she thought very funny. The fortunetellers said her eyes were so pale because of too much water in her personality, so much that the other four elements were hardly present at all-and this, they explained, was why her features matched so poorly. People in the village often said she ought to have been extremely attractive, because her parents had been. Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can't put the two together; this was the terrible trick nature had played on her. She had her mother's pouty mouth but her father's angular jaw, which gave the impression of a delicate picture with much too heavy a frame. And her lovely gray eyes were surrounded by thick lashes that must have been striking on her father, but in her case only made her look startled.
My mother always said she'd married my father because she had too much water in her personality and he had too much wood in his. People who knew my father understood right away what she was talking about. Water flows from place to place quickly and always finds a crack to spill through. Wood, on the other hand, holds fast to the earth. In my father's
case this was a good thing, for he was a fisherman, and a man with wood in his personality is at ease on the sea. In fact, my father was more at ease on the sea than anywhere else, and never left it far behind him. He smelled like the sea even after he had bathed. When he wasn't fishing, he sat on the floor in our dark front room mending a fishing net. And if a fishing net had been a sleeping creature, he wouldn't even have awakened it, at the speed he worked.
He did everything this slowly.
Even when he summoned a look of concentration, you could run outside and drain the bath in the time it took him to rearrange his features. His face was very heavily creased, and into each crease he had tucked some worry or other, so that it wasn't really his own face any longer, but more like a tree that had nests of birds in all the branches.
He had to struggle constantly to manage it and always looked worn out from the effort.
When I was six or seven, I learned something about my father I'd never known.
One day I asked him, "Daddy, why are you so old?" He hoisted up his eyebrows at this, so that they formed little sagging umbrellas over his eyes. And he let out a long breath, and shook his head and said, "I don't know." When I turned to my mother, she gave me a look meaning she would answer the question for me another time. The following day without saying a word, she walked me down the hill toward the village and turned at a path into a graveyard in the woods. She led me to three graves in the corner, with three white marker posts much taller than I was. They had stern-looking black characters written top to bottom on them, but I hadn't attended the school in our little village long enough to know where one ended and the next began. My mother pointed to them and said, "Natsu, wife of Sakamoto Minoru." Sakamoto Minoru was the name of my father. "Died age twenty-four, in the nineteenth year of Meiji."
Then she pointed to the next one: "Jinichiro, son of Sakamoto Minoru, died age six, in the nineteenth year of Meiji," and to the next one, which was identical except for the name, Masao, and the age, which was three. It took me a while to understand that my father had been married before, a long time ago, and that his whole family had died.
I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were pulling me down toward them.
With all this water and all this wood, the two of them ought to have made a good balance and produced children with the proper arrangement of elements. I'm sure it was a surprise to them that they ended up with one of each. For it wasn't just that I resembled my mother and had even inherited her unusual eyes; my sister, Satsu, was as much like my father as anyone could be. Satsu was six years older than me, and of course, being older, she could do things I couldn't do. But Satsu had a remarkable quality of doing everything in a way that seemed like a complete accident. For example, if you asked her to pour a bowl of soup from a pot on the stove, she would get the job done, but in a way that looked like she'd spilled it into the bowl just by luck.
One time she even cut herself with a fish, and I don't mean with a knife she was using to clean a fish. She was carrying a fish wrapped in paper up the hill from the village when it slid out and fell against her leg in such a way as to cut her with one of its fins.
Our parents might have had other children besides Satsu and me, particularly since my father hoped for a boy to fish with him. But when I was seven my mother grew terribly ill with what was probably bone cancer, though at the time I had no idea what was wrong. Her only escape from discomfort was to sleep, which she began to do the way a cat does-which is to say, more or less constantly. As the months passed she slept most of the time, and soon began to groan whenever she was awake. I knew something in her was changing quickly, but because of so much water in her personality, this didn't seem worrisome to me.
Sometimes she grew thin in a matter of months but grew strong again just as quickly. But by the time I was nine, the bones in her face had begun to protrude, and she never gained weight again afterward.
I didn't realize the water was draining out of her because of her illness. Just as seaweed is naturally soggy, you see, but turns brittle as it dries, my mother was giving up more and more of her essence.
Then one afternoon I was sitting on the pitted floor of our dark front room, singing to a cricket I'd found that morning, when a voice called out at the door:
"Oi! Open up! It's Dr. Miura!"
Dr. Miura came to our fishing village once a week, and had made a point of walking up the hill to check on my mother ever since her illness had begun. My father was at home that day because a terrible storm was coming. He sat in his usual spot on the floor, with his two big spiderlike hands tangled up in a fishing net. But he took a moment to point his eyes at me and raise one of his fingers. This meant he wanted me to answer the door.
Dr. Miura was a very important man-or so we believed in our village. He had studied in Tokyo and reportedly knew more Chinese characters than anyone. He was far too proud to notice a creature like me. When I opened the door for him, he slipped out of his shoes and stepped right past me into the house.
"Why, Sakamoto-san," he said to my father, "I wish I had your life, out on the sea fishing all day. How glorious! And then on rough days you take a rest. I see your wife is still asleep," he went on. "What a pity. I thought I might examine her."
"Oh?" said my father.
"I won't be around next week, you know. Perhaps you might wake her for me?"
My father took a while to untangle his hands from the net, but at last he stood.
"Chiyo-chan," he said to me, "get the doctor a cup of tea."
My name back then was Chiyo. I wouldn't be known by my geisha name, Sayuri, until years later.
My father and the doctor went into the other room, where my mother lay sleeping. I tried to listen at the door, but I could hear only my mother groaning, and nothing of what they said. I occupied myself with making tea, and soon the doctor came back out rubbing his hands together and looking very stern.
My father came to join him, and they sat together at the table in the center of the room.
"The time has come to say something to you, Sakamoto-san," Dr. Miura began. "You need to have a talk with one of the women in the village. Mrs. Sugi, perhaps. Ask her to make a nice new robe for your wife."
"I haven't the money, Doctor," my father said.
"We've all grown poorer lately. I understand what you're saying. But you owe it to your wife. She shouldn't die in that tattered robe she's wearing."
"So she's going to die soon?"
"A few more weeks, perhaps. She's in terrible pain. Death will release her."
After this, I couldn't hear their voices any longer; for in my ears I heard a sound like a bird's wings flapping in panic. Perhaps it was my heart, I don't know. But if you've ever seen a bird trapped inside the great hall of a temple, looking for some way out, well, that was how my mind was reacting.
It had never occurred to me that my mother wouldn't simply go on being sick. I won't say I'd never wondered what might happen if she should die; I did wonder about it, in the same way I wondered what might happen if our house were swallowed up in an earthquake. There could hardly be life after such an event.
"I thought I would die first," my father was saying.
"You're an old man, Sakamoto-san. But your health is good. You might have four or five years. I'll leave you some more of those pills for your wife. You can give them to her two at a time, if you need to."
They talked about the pills a bit longer, and then Dr. Miura left.
My father went on sitting for a long while in silence, with his back to me. He wore no shirt but only his loose-fitting skin; the more I looked at him, the more he began to seem like just a curious collection of shapes and textures. His spine was a path of knobs. His head, with its discolored splotches, might have been a bruised fruit. His arms were sticks wrapped in old leather, dangling from two bumps. If my mother died, how could I go on living in the house with him? I didn't want to be away from him; but whether he was there or not, the house would be just as empty when my mother had left it.
At last my father said my name in a whisper. I went and knelt beside him.
"Something very important," he said.
His face was so much heavier than usual, with his eyes rolling around almost as though he'd lost control of them. I thought he was struggling to tell me my mother would die soon, but all he said was:
"Go down to the village. Bring back some incense for the altar."
Our tiny Buddhist altar rested on an old crate beside the entrance to the kitchen; it was the only thing of value in our tipsy house. In front of a rough carving of Amida, the Buddha of the Western Paradise, stood tiny black mortuary tablets bearing the Buddhist names of our dead ancestors.
"But, Father . . . wasn't there anything else?"
I hoped he would reply, but he only made a gesture with his hand that meant for me to leave.
The path from our house followed the edge of the sea cliffs before turning inland toward the village. Walking it on a day like this was difficult, but I remember feeling grateful that the fierce wind drew my mind from the things troubling me. The sea was violent, with waves like stones chipped into blades, sharp enough to cut. It seemed to me the world itself was feeling just as I felt. Was life nothing more than a storm that constantly washed away what had been there only a moment
before, and left behind something barren and unrecognizable?
I'd never had such a thought before. To escape it, I ran down the path until the village came into view below me. Yoroido was a tiny town, just at the opening of an inlet. Usually the water was spotted with fishermen, but today I could see just a few boats coming back-looking to me, as they always did, like water bugs kicking along the surface. The storm was coming in earnest now; I could hear its roar. The fishermen on the inlet began to soften as they disappeared within the curtain of rain, and then they were gone completely. I could see the storm climbing the slope toward me. The first drops hit me like quail eggs, and in a matter of seconds I was as wet as if I'd fallen into the sea.
Yoroido had only one road, leading right to the front door of the Japan Coastal Seafood Company; it was lined with a number of houses whose front rooms were used for shops. I ran across the street toward the Okada house, where dry goods were sold; but then something happened to me-one of those trivial things with huge consequences, like losing
your step and falling in front of a train. The packed dirt road was slippery in the rain, and my feet went out from under me. I fell forward onto one side of my face. I suppose I must have knocked myself into a daze, because I remember only a kind of numbness and a feeling of something in my mouth I wanted to spit out.
I heard voices and felt myself turned onto my back; I was lifted and carried. I could tell they were taking me into the Japan Coastal Seafood Company, because I smelled the odor of fish wrapping itself around me. I heard a slapping sound as they slid a catch of fish from one of the wooden tables onto the floor and laid me on its slimy surface. I knew I was wet from the rain, and bloody too, and that I was barefoot and dirty, and wearing peasant clothing. What I didn't know was that this was the moment that would change everything. For it was in this condition I found myself looking up into the face of Mr. Tanaka Ichiro.
I'd seen Mr. Tanaka in our village many times before. He lived in a much larger town nearby but came every day, for his family owned the Japan Coastal Seafood Company. He didn't wear peasant clothing like the fishermen, but rather a man's kimono, with kimono trousers that made him look to me like the illustrations you may have seen of samurai. His skin was smooth and tight as a drum; his cheekbones were shiny hillocks, like the crisp skin of a grilled fish. I'd always found him fascinating. When I was in the street throwing a beanbag with the other children and Mr. Tanaka happened to stroll out of the seafood company, I always stopped what I was doing to watch him.
I lay there on that slimy table while Mr. Tanaka examined my lip, pulling it down with his fingers and tipping my head this way and that. All at once he caught sight of my gray eyes, which were fixed on his face with such fascination, I couldn't pretend I hadn't been staring at him.
He didn't give me a sneer, as if to say that I was an impudent girl, and he didn't look away as if it made no difference where I looked or what I thought. We stared at each other for a long moment-so long it gave me a chill even there in the muggy air of the seafood company.
"I know you," he said at last. "You're old Sakamoto's little girl."
Even as a child I could tell that Mr. Tanaka saw the world around him as it really was; he never wore the dazed look of my father. To me, he seemed to see the sap bleeding from the trunks of the pine trees, and the circle of brightness in the sky where the sun was smothered by clouds. He lived in the world that was visible, even if it didn't always please him to be there. I knew he noticed the trees, and the mud, and the children in the street, but I had no reason to believe
he'd ever noticed me.
Perhaps this is why when he spoke to me, tears came stinging to my eyes.
Mr. Tanaka raised me into a sitting position. I thought he was going to tell me to leave, but instead he said, "Don't swallow that blood, little girl. Unless you want to make a stone in your stomach. I'd spit it onto the floor, if I were you."
"A girl's blood, Mr. Tanaka?" said one of the men. "Here, where we bring the fish?"
Fishermen are terribly superstitious, you see. They especially don't like women to have anything to do with fishing. One man in our village, Mr. Yamamura, found his daughter playing in his boat one morning. He beat her with a stick and then washed out the boat with sake and lye so strong it bleached streaks of coloring from the wood.
Even this wasn't enough; Mr. Yamamura had the Shinto priest come and bless it. All this because his daughter had done nothing more than play where the fish are caught.
And here Mr. Tanaka was suggesting I spit blood onto the floor of the room where the fish were cleaned.
"If you're afraid her spit might wash away some of the fish guts," said Mr. Tanaka, "take them home with you. I've got plenty more."
"It isn't the fish guts, sir."
"I'd say her blood will be the cleanest thing to hit this floor since you or I were born. Go ahead," Mr. Tanaka said, this time talking to me. "Spit it out."
There I sat on that slimy table, uncertain what to do. I thought it would be terrible to disobey Mr. Tanaka, but I'm not sure I would have found the courage to spit if one of the men hadn't leaned to the side and pressed a finger against one nostril to blow his nose onto the floor.
After seeing this, I couldn't bear to hold anything in my mouth a moment longer, and spat out the blood just as Mr. Tanaka had told me to do. All the men walked away in disgust except Mr. Tanaka's assistant, named Sugi. Mr. Tanaka told him to go and fetch Dr. Miura.
"I don't know where to find him," said Sugi, though what he really meant, I think, was that he wasn't interested in helping.
I told Mr. Tanaka the doctor had been at our house a few minutes earlier.
"Where is your house?" Mr. Tanaka asked me.
"It's the little tipsy house up on the cliffs."
"What do you mean . . . 'tipsy house'?"
"It's the one that leans to the side, like it's had too much to drink."
Mr. Tanaka didn't seem to know what to make of this. "Well, Sugi, walk up toward Sakamoto's tipsy house and look for Dr. Miura. You won't have trouble finding him. Just listen for the sound of his patients screaming when he pokes them."
I imagined Mr. Tanaka would go back to his work after Sugi had left; but instead he stood near the table a long while looking at me. I felt my face beginning to burn. Finally he said something I thought was very clever.
"You've got an eggplant on your face, little daughter of Sakamoto."
He went to a drawer and took out a small mirror to show it to me.
My lip was swollen and blue, just as he'd said.
"But what I really want to know," he went on, "is how you came to have such extraordinary eyes, and why you don't look more like your father?"
"The eyes are my mother's," I said. "But as for my father, he's so wrinkled I've never known what he really looks like."
"You'll be wrinkled yourself one day."
"But some of his wrinkles are the way he's made," I said. "The back of his head is as old as the front, but it's as smooth as an egg."
"That isn't a respectful thing to say about your father," Mr. Tanaka told me. "But I suppose it's true."
Then he said something that made my face blush so red, I'm sure my lips looked pale.
"So how did a wrinkled old man with an egg for a head father a beautiful girl like you?"
In the years since, I've been called beautiful more often than I can remember.
Though, of course, geisha are always called beautiful, even those who aren't. But when Mr. Tanaka said it to me, before I'd ever heard of such a thing as a geisha, I could almost believe it was true.

After Dr. Miura tended to my lip, and I bought the incense my father had sent me for, I walked home in a state of such agitation, I don't think there could have been more activity inside me if I'd been an anthill. I would've had an easier time if my emotions had all pulled me in the same direction, but it wasn't so simple. I'd been blown about like a scrap of paper in the wind. Somewhere between the various thoughts about my mother-somewhere past the discomfort in my lip-there nestled a pleasant thought I tried again and again to bring into focus.
It was about Mr. Tanaka. I stopped on the cliffs and gazed out to sea, where the waves even after the storm were still like sharpened stones, and the sky had taken on the brown tone of mud. I made sure no one was watching me, and then clutched the incense to my chest and said Mr. Tanaka's name into the whistling wind, over and over, until I felt satisfied I'd heard the music in every syllable. I know it sounds foolish of me-and indeed it was.
But I was only a confused little girl.
After we'd finished our dinner and my father had gone to the village to watch the other fishermen play Japanese chess, Satsu and I cleaned the kitchen in silence. I tried to remember how Mr. Tanaka had made me feel, but in the cold quiet of the house it had slipped away from me.
Instead I felt a persistent, icy dread at the thought of my mother's illness. I found myself wondering how long it would be until she was buried out in the village graveyard along with my father's other family. What would become of me afterward? With my mother dead, Satsu would act in her place, I supposed. I watched my sister scrub the iron pot that had cooked our soup; but even though it was right before her-even though her eyes were pointed at the thing-I could
tell she wasn't seeing it. She went on scrubbing it long after it was clean. Finally I said to her:
"Satsu-san, I don't feel well."
"Go outside and heat the bath," she told me, and brushed her unruly hair from her eyes with one of her wet hands.
"I don't want a bath," I said. "Satsu, Mommy is going to die-"
"This pot is cracked. Look!"
"It isn't cracked," I said. "That line has always been there."
"But how did the water get out just then?"
"You sloshed it out. I watched you."
For a moment I could tell that Satsu was feeling something very strongly, which translated itself onto her face as a look of extreme puzzlement, just as so many of her feelings did. But she said nothing further to me. She only took the pot from the stove and walked toward the door to dump it out.

Chapter two


The following morning, to take my mind off my troubles, I went swimming in the pond just inland from our house amid a grove of pine trees. The children from the village went there most mornings when the weather was right. Satsu came too sometimes, wearing a scratchy bathing dress she'd made from our father's old fishing clothes. It wasn't a very good bathing dress, because it sagged at her chest whenever she bent over, and one of the boys would scream, "Look! You can see Mount Fuji!" But she wore it just the same.
Around noontime, I decided to return home for something to eat. Satsu had left much earlier with the Sugi boy, who was the son of Mr. Tanaka's assistant. She acted like a dog around him. When he went somewhere, he looked back over his shoulder to signal that she should follow, and she always did. I didn't expect to see her again until dinner-time, but as I
neared the house I caught sight of her on the path ahead of me, leaning against a tree. If you'd seen what was happening, you might have understood it right away; but I was only a little girl. Satsu had her scratchy bathing dress up around her shoulders and the Sugi boy was playing around with her "Mount Fujis," as the boys called them.
Ever since our mother first became ill, my sister had grown a bit pudgy. Her breasts were every bit as unruly as her hair. What amazed me most was that their unruliness appeared to be the very thing the Sugi boy found fascinating about them. He jiggled them with his hand, and pushed them to one side to watch them swing back and settle against her chest. I knew I shouldn't be spying, but I couldn't think what else to do with myself while the path ahead of me was blocked. And then suddenly I heard a man's voice behind me say:
"Chiyo-chan, why are you squatting there behind that tree?"
Considering that I was a little girl of nine, coming from a pond where I'd been swimming; and considering that as yet I had no shapes or textures on my body to conceal from anyone . . . well, it's easy to guess what I was wearing.
When I turned-still squatting on the path, and covering my nakedness with my arms as best I could-there stood Mr. Tanaka. I could hardly have been more embarrassed.
"That must be your tipsy house over there," he said. "And over there, that looks like the Sugi boy. He certainly looks busy! Who's that girl with him?"
"Well, it might be my sister, Mr. Tanaka. I'm waiting for them to leave."
Mr. Tanaka cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, and then I heard the sound of the Sugi boy running away down the path. My sister must have run away too, for Mr. Tanaka told me I could go home and get some clothes now. "When you see that sister of yours," he said to me, "I want you to give her this."
He handed me a packet wrapped in rice paper, about the size of a fish head. "It's some Chinese herbs," he told me. "Don't listen to Dr. Miura if he tells you they're worthless. Have your sister make tea with them and give the tea to your mother, to ease the pain. They're very precious herbs. Make sure not to waste them."
"I'd better do it myself in that case, sir. My sister isn't very good at making tea."
Dr. Miura told me your mother is sick," he said. "Now you tell me your sister can't even be trusted to make tea! With your father so old, what will become of you, Chiyo-chan? Who takes care of you even now?"
"I suppose I take care of myself these days."
"I know a certain man. He's older now, but when he was a boy about your age, his father died. The very next year his mother died, and then his older brother ran away to Osaka and left him alone. Sounds a bit like you, don't you think?"
Mr. Tanaka gave me a look as if to say that I shouldn't dare to disagree.
"Well, that man's name is Tanaka Ichiro," he went on. "Yes, me . . . although back then my name was Morihashi Ichiro. I was taken in by the Tanaka family at the age of twelve. After I got a bit older, I was married to the daughter and adopted. Now I help run the family's seafood company. So things turned out all right for me in the end, you see. Perhaps something like that might happen to you too."
I looked for a moment at Mr. Tanaka's gray hair and at the creases in his brow like ruts in the bark of a tree. He seemed to me the wisest and most knowledgeable man on earth. I believed he knew things I would never know; and that he had an elegance I would never have; and that his blue kimono was finer than anything I would ever have occasion to wear. I sat before him naked, on my haunches in the dirt, with my hair tangled and my face dirty, with the smell of pond water on my skin.
"I don't think anyone would ever want to adopt me," I said.
"No? You're a clever girl, aren't you? Naming your house a 'tipsy house.' Saying your father's head looks like an egg!"
"But it does look like an egg."
"It wouldn't have been a clever thing to say otherwise. Now run along, Chiyo-chan," he said. "You want lunch, don't you? Perhaps if your sister's having soup, you can lie on the floor and drink what she spills."
From that very moment on, I began to have fantasies that Mr. Tanaka would adopt me. Sometimes I forget how tormented I felt during this period. I suppose I would have grasped at anything that offered me comfort. Often when I felt troubled, I found my mind returning to the same image of my mother, long before she ever began groaning in the
mornings from the pain's inside her. I was four years old, at the obon festival in our village, the time of year when we welcomed back the spirits of the dead. After a few evenings of ceremonies in the graveyard, and fires outside the entrances of the houses to guide the spirits home, we gathered on the festival's final night at our Shinto shrine, which
stood on rocks overlooking the inlet. Just inside the gate of the shrine was a clearing, decorated that evening with colored paper lanterns strung on ropes between the trees. My mother and I danced together for a while with the rest of the villagers, to the music of drums and a flute; but at last I began to feel tired and she cradled me in her lap at the edge
of the clearing. Suddenly the wind came up off the cliffs and one of the lanterns caught fire. We watched the flame burn through the cord, and the lantern came floating down, until the wind caught it again and rolled it through the air right toward us with a trail of gold dust streaking into the sky. The ball of fire seemed to settle on the ground, but then my
mother and I watched as it rose up on the current of the wind, floating straight for us. I felt my mother release me, and then all at once she threw her arms into the fire to scatter it. For a moment we were both awash in sparks and flames; but then the shreds of fire drifted into the trees and burned out, and no one-not even my mother-was hurt.
A week or so later, when my fantasies of adoption had had plenty of time to ripen, I came home one afternoon to find Mr. Tanaka sitting across from my father at the little table in our house. I knew they were talking about something serious, because they didn't even notice me when I stepped into our entryway. I froze there to listen to them.
"So, Sakamoto, what do you think of my proposal?"
"I don't know, sir," said my father. "I can't picture the girls living anywhere else."
"I understand, but they'd be much better off, and so would you. Just see to it they come down to the village tomorrow afternoon."
At this, Mr. Tanaka stood to leave. I pretended I was just arriving so we would meet at the door.
"I was talking with your father about you, Chiyo-chan," he said to me. "I live across the ridge in the town of Senzuru. It's bigger than Yoroido. I think you'd like it. Why don't you and Satsu-san come there tomorrow? You'll see my house and meet my little daughter. Perhaps you'll stay the night? Just one night, you understand; and then I'll bring you back to
your home again. How would that be?"
I said it would be very nice. And I did my best to pretend no one had suggested anything out of the ordinary to me. But in my head it was as though an explosion had occurred. My thoughts were in fragments I could hardly piece together. Certainly it was true that a part of me hoped desperately to be adopted by Mr. Tanaka after my mother died; but another part of me was very much afraid. I felt horribly ashamed for even imagining I might live somewhere besides my tipsy house. After Mr. Tanaka had left, I tried to busy myself in the kitchen, but I felt a bit like Satsu, for I could hardly see the things before me. I don't know how much time passed. At length I heard my father making a sniffling noise, which I took to be crying and which made my face burn with shame.
When I finally forced myself to glance his way, I saw him with his hands already tangled up in one of his fishing nets, but standing at the doorway leading into the back room, where my mother lay in the full sun with the sheet stuck to her like skin.
The next day, in preparation for meeting Mr. Tanaka in the village, I scrubbed my dirty ankles and soaked for a while in our bath, which had once been the boiler compartment from an old steam engine someone had abandoned in our village; the top had been sawed off and the inside lined with wood. I sat a long while looking out to sea and feeling very
independent, for I was about to see something of the world outside our little village for the first time in my life.
When Satsu and I reached the Japan Coastal Seafood Company, we watched the fishermen unloading their catches at the pier. My father was among them, grabbing fish with his bony hands and dropping them into baskets. At one point he looked toward me and Satsu, and then afterward wiped his face on the sleeve of his shirt. Somehow his features looked heavier to me than usual. The men carried the full baskets to Mr. Tanaka's horse-drawn wagon and arranged them in the
back. I climbed up on the wheel to watch. Mostly, the fish stared out with glassy eyes, but every so often one would move its mouth, which seemed to me like a little scream. I tried to reassure them by saying:
"You're going to the town of Senzuru, little fishies! Everything will be okay."
I didn't see what good it would do to tell them the truth. At length Mr. Tanaka came out into the street and told Satsu and me to climb onto the bench of the wagon with him. I sat in the middle, close enough to feel the fabric of Mr. Tanaka's kimono against my hand. I couldn't help blushing at this. Satsu was looking right at me, but she didn't seem to notice anything and wore her usual muddled expression.
I passed much of the trip looking back at the fish as they sloshed around in their baskets. When we climbed up over the ridge leaving Yoroido, the wheel passed over a rock and the wagon tipped to one side quite suddenly. One of the sea bass was thrown out and hit the ground so hard it was jolted back to life. To see it flopping and gasping was more than I could bear. I turned back around with tears in my eyes, and though I tried to hide them from Mr. Tanaka, he noticed them anyway. After he had retrieved the fish and we were on our way again, he asked me what was the matter. "The poor fish!" I said.
"You're like my wife. They're mostly dead when she sees them, but if she has to cook a crab, or anything else still alive, she grows teary-eyed and sings to them."
Mr. Tanaka taught me a little song-really almost a sort of prayer-that I thought his wife had invented. She sang it for crabs, but we changed the words for the fish:
Suzuki yo suzuki!
Jobutsu shite kure!
Little bass, oh little bass!
Speed yourself to Buddhahood!
Then he taught me another song, a lullaby I'd never heard before. We sang it to a flounder in the back lying in a low basket by itself, with its two button-eyes on the side of its head shifting around.
Nemure yo, ii karei yo!
Niwa ya makiba ni
Tori mo hitsuji mo
Minna nemurelia
Hoshi wa mado kara
Gin no hikari o
Sosogu, kono yorul
Go to sleep, you good flounder!
When all are sleeping
Even the birds and the sheep
In the gardens and in the fields-
The stars this evening
Will pour their golden light
From the window.
We topped the ridge a few moments later, and the town of Senzuru came into view below us. The day was drab, everything in shades of gray. It was my first look at the world outside Yoroido, and I didn't think I'd missed much. I could see the thatched roofs of the town around an inlet, amid dull hills, and beyond them the metal-colored sea, broken with
shards of white. Inland, the landscape might have been attractive but for the train tracks running across it like a scar.
Senzuru was mainly a dirty, smelly town. Even the ocean had a terrible odor, as if all the fish in it were rotting. Around the legs of the Pier, pieces of vegetables bobbed like the jellyfish in our little inlet.
The boats were scratched up, some of their timbers cracked; they looked to me as if they'd been fighting with one another.
Satsu and I sat a long while on the pier, until at length Mr. Tanaka called us inside the Japan Coastal Seafood Company's headquarters and led us down a long corridor. The corridor couldn't have smelled more strongly of fish guts if we had actually been inside a fish. But down at the end, to my surprise, was an office, lovely to my nine-year-old eyes. Inside the
doorway, Satsu and I stood in our bare feet on a slimy floor of stone. Before us, a step led up to a platform covered with tatami mats. Perhaps this is what impressed me so; the raised flooring made everything look grander. In any case, I considered it the most beautiful room I'd ever seen-though it makes me laugh now to think that the office of a fish
wholesaler in a tiny town on the Japan Sea could have made such an impression on anyone.
On the platform sat an old woman on a cushion, who rose when she saw us and came down to the edge to arrange herself on her knees. She was old and cranky-looking, and I don't think you could ever meet anyone who fidgeted more. When she wasn't smoothing her kimono, she was wiping something from the corner of her eye or scratching her nose, all the while sighing as though she felt very sorry there was so much fidgeting to be done.
Mr. Tanaka said to her, "This is Chiyo-chan and her older sister, Satsu-san."
I gave a little bow, to which Mrs. Fidget responded with a nod. Then she gave the biggest sigh she'd given yet, and began to pick with one hand at a crusty patch on her neck. I would have liked to look away, but her eyes were fixed on mine.
"Well! You're Satsu-san, are you?" she said. But she was still looking right at me.
"I'm Satsu," said-my sister.
"When were you born?"
Satsu still seemed unsure which of us Mrs. Fidget was addressing, so I answered for her. "She's the year of the cow," I said.
The old woman reached out and patted me with her fingers. But she did it in a most peculiar way, by poking me several times in the jaw. I knew she meant it as a pat because she wore a kindly look.
"This one's rather pretty, isn't she? Such unusual eyes! And you can see that she's clever. Just look at her forehead." Here she turned to my sister again and said, "Now, then. The year of the cow; fifteen years old; the planet Venus; six, white. Hmm . . . Come a bit closer."
Satsu did as she was told. Mrs. Fidget began to examine her face, not only with her eyes but with her fingertips. She spent a long while checking Satsu's nose from different angles, and her ears. She pinched the lobes a number of times, then gave a grunt to indicate she was done with Satsu and turned to me.
"You're the year of the monkey. I can tell it just looking at you. What a great deal of water you have! Eight, white; the planet Saturn. And a very attractive girl you are. Come closer."
Now she proceeded to do the same thing to me, pinching my ears and so on. I kept thinking of how she'd scratched at the crusty patch on her neck with these same fingers. Soon she got to her feet and came down onto the stone floor where we stood. She took a while getting her crooked feet into her zori, but finally turned toward Mr. Tanaka and gave him a look he seemed to understand at once, because he left the room, closing the door behind him.
Mrs. Fidget untied the peasant shirt Satsu was wearing and removed it. She moved Satsu's bosoms around a bit, looked under her arms, and then turned her around and looked at her back. I was in such a state of shock, I could barely bring myself to watch. I'd certainly seen Satsu naked before, but the way Mrs. Fidget handled her body seemed even more indecent to me than when Satsu had held her bathing dress up for the Sugi boy. Then, as if she hadn't done enough already, Mrs. Fidget yanked Satsu's pants to the floor, looked her up and down, and turned her around facing front again.
"Step out of your pants," she said.
Satsu's face was more confused than I'd seen it in a long while, but she stepped out of her pants and left them on the slimy stone floor. Mrs. Fidget took her by the shoulders and seated her on the platform. Satsu was completely naked; I'm sure she had no more idea why she should be sitting there than I did. But she had no time to wonder about it either, for
in an instant Mrs. Fidget had put her hands on Satsu's knees and spread them apart. And without a moment's hesitation she reached her hand between Satsu's legs. After this I could no longer bring myself to watch.
I think Satsu must have resisted, for Mrs. Fidget gave a shout, and at the same moment I heard a loud slap, which was Mrs. Fidget smacking Satsu on the leg-as I could tell later from the red mark there. In a moment Mrs. Fidget was done and told Satsu to put her clothes back on. While she was dressing, Satsu gave a big sniff. She may have been crying, but I didn't dare look at her.
Next, Mrs. Fidget came straight at me, and in a moment my own pants were down around my knees, and my shirt was taken off me just as Satsu's had been. I had no bosoms for the old woman to move around, but she looked under my arms just as she'd done with my sister, and turned me around too, before seating me on the platform and pulling my
pants off my legs. I was terribly frightened of what she would do, and when she tried to spread my knees apart, she had to slap me on the leg just as she'd slapped Satsu, which made my throat begin to burn from holding back my tears. She put a finger between my legs and gave what felt to me like a pinch, in such a way that I cried out. When she told me to dress again, I felt as a dam must feel when it's holding back an entire river. But I was afraid if Satsu or I began to sob like little children, we might look bad in Mr. Tanaka's eyes.
"The girls are healthy," she said to Mr. Tanaka when he came back into the room, "and very suitable. Both of them are intact. The older one has far too much wood, but the younger one has a good deal of water. Pretty too, don't you think? Her older sister looks like a peasant beside her!"
"I'm sure they're both attractive girls in their way," he said. "Why don't we talk about it while I walk you out? The girls will wait here for me."
When Mr. Tanaka had closed the door behind them, I turned to see Satsu sitting on the edge of the platform, gazing upward toward the ceiling. Because of the shape of her face, tears were pooled along the tops of her nostrils, and I burst into tears myself the moment I saw her upset. I felt myself to blame for what had happened, and wiped her face with the
corner of my peasant shirt.
"Who was that horrible woman?" she said to me.
"She must be a fortune-teller. Probably Mr. Tanaka wants to learn as much about us as he can . . ."
"But why should she look at us in that horrible way!"
"Satsu-san, don't you understand?" I said. "Mr. Tanaka is planning to adopt us."
When she heard this, Satsu began to blink as if a bug had crawled into her eye. "What are you talking about?" she said. "Mr. Tanaka can't adopt us."
"Father is so old . . . and now that our mother is sick, I think Mr. Tanaka is worried about our future. There won't be anyone to take care of us."
Satsu stood, she was so agitated to hear this. In a moment her eyes had begun to squint, and I could see she was hard at work willing herself to believe that nothing was going to take us from our tipsy house. She was squeezing out the things I'd told her in the same way you might squeeze water from a sponge. Slowly her face began to relax again, and she sat
down once more on the edge of the platform. In a moment she was gazing around the room as if we'd never had the conversation at all.
Mr. Tanaka's house lay at the end of a lane just outside the town. The glade of pine trees surrounding it smelled as richly as the ocean back on the seacliffs at our house; and when I thought of the ocean and how I would be trading one smell for another, I felt a terrible emptiness I had to pull myself away from, just as you might step back from a cliff after peering over it. The house was grander than anything in Yoroido, with enormous eaves like our village shrine. And when Mr. Tanaka stepped up into his entryway he left his shoes right where he walked out of them, because a maid came and stowed them on a shelf for him. Satsu and I had no shoes to put away, but just as I was about to walk into the house, I felt something strike me softly on my backside, and a pine cone fell onto the wood floor between my feet. I turned to see a young girl about my age, with very short hair, running to hide behind a tree. She peered out to smile at me with a triangle of empty space between her front teeth and then ran away, looking back over her shoulder so I'd be certain to chase her. It may sound peculiar, but I'd never had the experience of actually meeting another little girl. Of course I knew the girls in my village, but we'd grown up together and had never done anything that might be called "meeting." But Kuniko-for that was the name of Mr. Tanaka's little daughter-was so friendly from the first instant I saw her, I thought it might be easy for me to move from one world into another.
Kuniko's clothing was much more refined than mine, and she wore zori; but being the village girl I was, I chased her out into the woods barefoot until I caught up to her at a sort of playhouse made from the sawed-off branches of a dead tree. She'd laid out rocks and pine cones to make rooms. In one she pretended to serve me tea out of a cracked cup; in
another we took turns nursing her baby doll, a little boy named Taro who was really nothing more than a canvas bag stuffed with dirt. Taro loved strangers, said Kuniko, but he was very frightened of earthworms; and by a most peculiar coincidence, so was Kuniko. When we encountered one, Kuniko made sure I carried it outside in my fingers before poor Taro should burst into tears.
I was delighted at the prospect of having Kuniko for a sister. In fact, the majestic trees and the pine smell-even Mr. Tanaka - all began to seem almost insignificant to me in comparison. The difference between life here at the Tanakas' house and life in Yoroido was as great as the difference between the odor of something cooking and a mouthful of
delicious food.
As it grew dark, we washed our hands and feet at the well, and went inside to take our seats on the floor around a square table. I was amazed to see steam from the meal we were about to eat rising up into the rafters of a ceiling high above me, with electric lights hanging down over our heads. The brightness of the room was startling; I'd never seen such a thing before. Soon the servants brought our dinner-grilled salted sea bass, pickles, soup, and steamed rice-but the moment we began to eat, the lights went out. Mr. Tanaka laughed; this happened quite often, apparently. The servants went around lighting lanterns that hung on wooden tripods.
No one spoke very much as we ate. I'd expected Mrs. Tanaka to be glamorous, but she looked like an older version of Satsu, except that she smiled a good deal. After dinner she and Satsu began playing a game of go, and Mr. Tanaka stood and called a maid to bring his kimono jacket.
In a moment Mr. Tanaka was gone, and after a short delay, Kuniko gestured to me to follow her out the door. She put on straw zori and lent me an extra pair. I asked her where we were going.
"Quietly!" she said. "We're following my daddy. I do it every time he goes out. It's a secret."
We headed up the lane and turned on the main street toward the town of Senzuru, following some distance behind Mr. Tanaka. In a few minutes we were walking among the houses of the town, and then Kuniko took my arm and pulled me down a side street. At the end of a stone walkway between two houses, we came to a window covered with paper screens
that shone with the light inside. Kuniko put her eye to a hole torn just at eye level in one of the screens. While she peered in, I heard the sounds of laughter and talking, and someone singing to the accompaniment of a shamisen. At length she stepped aside so I could put my own eye to the hole. Half the room inside was blocked from my view by a folding screen,
but I could see Mr. Tanaka seated on the mats with a group of three or four men. An old man beside him was telling a story about holding a ladder for a young woman and peering up her robe; everyone was laughing except Mr. Tanaka, who gazed straight ahead toward the part of the room blocked from my view. An older woman in kimono came with a glass for him, which he held while she poured beer. Mr. Tanaka struck me as an island in the midst of the sea, because although everyone else was enjoying the story-even the elderly woman pouring the beer-Mr. Tanaka just went on staring at the other end of the table. I took my eye from the hole to ask Kuniko what sort of place this was.
"It's a teahouse," she told me, "where geisha entertain. My daddy comes here almost every night. I don't know why he likes it so. The women pour drinks, and the men tell stories-except when they sing songs. Everybody ends up drunk."
I put my eye back to the hole in time to see a shadow crossing the wall, and then a woman came into view. Her hair was ornamented with the dangling green bloom of a willow, and she wore a soft pink kimono with white flowers like cutouts all over it. The broad obi tied around her middle was orange and yellow. I'd never seen such elegant clothing. None of the women in Yoroido owned anything more sophisticated than a cotton robe, or perhaps linen, with a simple pattern in indigo. But unlike her clothing, the woman herself wasn't lovely at all. Her teeth protruded so badly that her lips didn't quite cover them, and the narrowness of her head made me wonder if she'd been pressed between two boards as a baby. You may think me cruel to describe her so harshly; but it struck me as odd that even though no one could have called her a beauty, Mr. Tanaka's eyes were fixed on her like a rag on a hook. He went on watching her while everyone else laughed, and when
she knelt beside him to pour a few more drops of beer into his glass, she looked up at him in a way that suggested they knew each other very well.
Kuniko took another turn peeking through the hole; and then we went back to her house and sat together in the bath at the edge of the pine forest. The sky was extravagant with stars, except for the half blocked by limbs above me. I could have sat much longer trying to understand all I'd seen that day and the changes confronting me . . . but Kuniko had grown so sleepy in the hot water that the servants soon came to help us out.
Satsu was snoring already when Kuniko and I lay down on our futons beside her, with our bodies pressed together and our arms intertwined. A warm feeling of gladness began to swell inside me, and I whispered to Kuniko, "Did you know I'm going to come and live with you?" I thought the news would shock her into opening her eyes, or maybe even sitting up. But it didn't rouse her from her slumber. She let out a groan, and then a moment later her breath was warm and moist, with the rattle of sleep in it.

Chapter three

Back at home my mother seemed to have grown sicker in the day I'd been away. Or perhaps it was just that I'd managed to forget how ill she really was. Mr. Tanaka's house had smelled of smoke and pine, but ours smelled of her illness in a way I can't even bear to describe. Satsu was working in the village during the afternoon, so Mrs. Sugi came to help me bathe my mother. When we carried her out of the house, her rib cage was broader than her shoulders, and even the whites of her eyes were cloudy. I could only endure seeing her this way by remembering how I'd once felt stepping out of the bath with her while she was strong and healthy, when the steam had risen from our pale skin as if we were two pieces of boiled radish. I found it hard to imagine that this woman, whose back I'd so often scraped with a stone, and whose flesh had always seemed firmer and smoother to me than Satsu's, might be dead before even the end of summer.

That night while lying on my futon, I tried to picture the whole confusing situation from every angle to persuade myself that things would somehow be all right. To begin with, I wondered, how could we go on living without my mother? Even if we did survive and Mr. Tanaka adopted us, would my own family cease to exist? Finally I decided Mr. Tanaka wouldn't
adopt just my sister and me, but my father as well. He couldn't expect my father to live alone, after all. Usually I couldn't fall asleep until I'd managed to convince myself this was true, with the result that I didn't sleep much during those weeks, and mornings were a blur.

On one of these mornings during the heat of the summer, I was on my way back from fetching a packet of tea in the village when I heard a crunching noise behind me. It turned out to be Mr. Sugi-Mr. Tanaka's assistant-running up the path. When he reached me, he took a long while to catch his breath, huffing and holding his side as if he'd just run all the way from Senzuru. He was red and shiny like a snapper, though the day hadn't grown hot yet. Finally he said:

"Mr. Tanaka wants you and your sister ... to come down to the village ... as soon as you can."

I'd thought it odd that my father hadn't gone out fishing that morning. Now I knew why: Today was the day.

"And my father?" I asked. "Did Mr. Tanaka say anything about him?"

"Just get along, Chiyo-chan," he told me. "Go and fetch your sister."

I didn't like this, but I ran up to the house and found my father sitting at the table, digging grime out of a rut in the wood with one of his fingernails. Satsu was putting slivers of charcoal into the stove. It seemed as though the two of them were waiting for something horrible to happen.

I said, "Father, Mr. Tanaka wants Satsu-san and me to go down to the village."

Satsu took off her apron, hung it on a peg, and walked out the door. My father didn't answer, but blinked a few times, staring at the point where Satsu had been. Then he turned his eyes heavily toward the floor and gave a nod. I heard my mother cry out in her sleep from the back room.

Satsu was almost to the village before I caught up with her. I'd imagined this day for weeks already, but I'd never expected to feel as frightened as I did. Satsu didn't seem to realize this trip to the village was any different from one she might have made the day before. She hadn't even bothered to clean the charcoal off her hands; while wiping her hair away she ended up with a smudge on her face. I didn't want her to meet Mr. Tanaka in this condition, so I reached up to rub off the mark as our mother might have done. Satsu knocked my hand away.

Outside the Japan Coastal Seafood Company, I bowed and said good morning to Mr. Tanaka, expecting he would be happy to see us. Instead he was strangely cold. I suppose this should have been my first clue that things weren't going to happen just the way I'd imagined. When he led us to his horse-drawn wagon, I decided he probably wanted to drive us to his house so that his wife and daughter would be in the room when he told us about our adoption.

"Mr. Sugi will be riding in the front with me," he said, "so you and Shizu-san had better get into the back." That's just what he said: "Shizu-san." I thought it very rude of him to get my sister's name wrong that way, but she didn't seem to notice. She climbed into the back of the wagon and sat down among the empty fish baskets, putting one of her hands flat onto the slimy planks. And then with that same hand, she wiped a fly from her face, leaving a shiny patch on her cheek. I didn't feel as indifferently about the slime as Satsu did. I couldn't think about anything but the smell, and about how satisfied I would feel to wash my hands and perhaps even my clothes when we reached Mr. Tanaka's house.

During the trip, Satsu and I didn't speak a word, until we topped the hill overlooking Senzuru, when all of a sudden she said:

"A train."

I looked out to see a train in the distance, making its way toward the town. The smoke rolled downwind in a way that made me think of the skin being shed from a snake. I thought this was clever and tried explaining it to Satsu, but she didn't seem to care. Mr. Tanaka would have appreciated it, I thought, and so would Kuniko. I decided to explain it to both of them when we reached the Tanakas' home.

Then suddenly I realized we weren't headed in the direction of Mr. Tanaka's home at all.

The wagon came to a stop a few minutes later on a patch of dirt beside the train tracks, just outside the town. A crowd of people stood with sacks and crates piled around them. And there, to one side of them, was Mrs. Fidget, standing beside a peculiarly narrow man wearing a stiff kimono. He had soft black hair, like a cat's, and held in one of his hands a cloth bag suspended from a string. He struck rne as out of place in Senzuru, particularly there beside the farmers and the fishermen with their crates, and an old hunched woman wearing a rucksack of yams. Mrs. Fidget said something to him, and when he turned and peered at us, I decided at once that I was frightened of him.

Mr. Tanaka introduced us to this man, whose name was Bekku. Mr. Bekku said nothing at all, but only looked closely at me and seemed puzzled by Satsu.

Mr. Tanaka said to him, "I've brought Sugi with me from Yoroido. Would you like him to accompany you? He knows the girls, and I can spare him for a day or so."

"No, no," said Mr. Bekku, waving his hand.

I certainly hadn't expected any of this. I asked where we were going, but no one seemed to hear me, so I came up with an answer for myself. I decided Mr. Tanaka had been displeased by what Mrs. Fidget had told him about us, and that this curiously narrow man, Mr. Bekku, planned to take us somewhere to have our fortunes told more completely. Afterward we
would be returned to Mr. Tanaka.

While I tried my best to soothe myself with these thoughts, Mrs. Fidget, wearing a pleasant smile, led Satsu and me some distance down the dirt platform. When we were too far away for the others to hear us, her smile vanished and she said:

"Now listen to me. You're both naughty girls!" She looked around to be sure no one was watching and then hit us on the tops of our heads. She didn't hurt me, but I cried out in surprise. "If you do something to embarrass me," she went on, "I'll make you pay for it! Mr. Bekku is a stern man; you must pay attention to what he says! If he tells you to
crawl under the seat of the train, you'll do it. Understand?" From the expression on Mrs. Fidget's face, I knew I should answer her or she might hurt me. But I was in such shock I couldn't speak. And then just as I'd feared, she reached out and began pinching me so hard on the side of my neck that I couldn't even tell which part of me hurt. I felt as if I'd
fallen into a tub of creatures that were biting me everywhere, and I heard myself whimper. The next thing I knew, Mr. Tanaka was standing beside us.

"What's going on here?" he said. "If you have something more to say to these girls, say it while I'm standing here. There's no cause for you to treat them this way."

"I'm sure we have a great many more things to talk about. But the train is coming," Mrs. Fidget said. And it was true: I could see it curling around a turn not far in the distance.

Mr. Tanaka led us back up the platform to where the farmers and old women were gathering up their things. Soon the train came to a stop before us. Mr. Bekku, in his stiff kimono, wedged himself between Satsu and me and led us by our elbows into the train car. I heard Mr. Tanaka say something, but I was too confused and upset to understand it. I couldn't
trust what I heard. It might have been:

Mata yol "We'll meet again!"

Or this:

Matte yol "Wait!"

Or even this:

Ma . . . deyol "Well, let's go!"

When I peered out the window, I saw Mr. Tanaka walking back toward his cart and Mrs. Fidget wiping her hands all over her kimono.

After a moment, my sister said, "Chiyo-chan!"

I buried my face in my hands; and honestly I would have plunged in anguish through the floor of the train if I could have. Because the way my sister said my name, she hardly needed to say anything more.

"Do you know where we're going?" she said to me.

I think all she wanted was a yes or no answer. Probably it didn't matter to her what our destination was-so long as someone knew what was happening. But, of course, I didn't. I asked the narrow man, Mr. Bekku, but he paid me no attention. He was still staring at Satsu as if he had never seen anything like her before. Finally he squeezed his face into a
look of disgust and said:

"Fish! What a stench, the both of you!"

He took a comb from his drawstring bag and began tearing it through her hair. I'm certain he must have hurt her, but I could see that watching the countryside pass by outside the window hurt her even more. In a moment Satsu's lips turned down like a baby's, and she began to cry. Even if she'd hit me and yelled at me, I wouldn't have ached as much as I
did watching her whole face tremble. Everything was my fault. An old peasant woman with her teeth bared like a dog's came over with a carrot for Satsu, and after giving it to her asked where she was going.

"Kyoto," Mr. Bekku answered.

I felt so sick with worry at hearing this, I couldn't bring myself to look Satsu in the eye any longer. Even the town of Senzuru seemed a remote, faraway place. As for Kyoto, it sounded as foreign to me as Hong Kong, or even New York, which I'd once heard Dr. Miura talk about. For all I knew, they ground up children in Kyoto and fed them to dogs.

We were on that train for many hours, without food to eat. The sight of Mr. Bekku taking a wrapped-up lotus leaf from his bag, and unwrapping it to reveal a rice ball sprinkled with sesame seeds, certainly got my attention. But when he took it in his bony fingers and pressed it into his mean little mouth without so much as looking at me, I felt as if I couldn't take another moment of torment. We got off the train at last in a large town, which I took to be Kyoto; but after a time another train pulled into the station, and we boarded it. This one did take us to Kyoto. It was much more crowded than the first train had been, so that we had to stand. By the time we arrived, as evening was approaching, I felt as sore as a rock must feel when the waterfall has pounded on it all day long.

I could see little of the city as we neared Kyoto Station. But then to my astonishment, I caught a glimpse of rooftops reaching as far as the base of hills in the distance. I could never have imagined a city so huge. Even to this day, the sight of streets and buildings from a train often makes me remember the terrible emptiness and fear I felt on that curious day when I first left my home.

Back then, around 1930, a fair number of rickshaws still operated in Kyoto. In fact, so many were lined up before the station that I imagined no one went anywhere in this big city unless it was in a rickshaw-which couldn't have been further from the truth. Perhaps fifteen or twenty of them sat pitched forward onto their poles, with their drivers squatting nearby, smoking or eating; some of the drivers even lay curled up asleep right there in the filth of the street.

Mr. Bekku led us by our elbows again, as if we were a couple of buckets he was bringing back from the well. He probably thought I'd have run away if he'd let go of me a moment; but I wouldn't have. Wherever he was taking us, I preferred it to being cast out alone into that great expanse of streets and buildings, as foreign to me as the bottom of the sea.

We climbed into a rickshaw, with Mr. Bekku squeezed tightly on the bench between us. He was a good deal bonier under that kimono even than I suspected. We pitched back as the driver raised the poles, and then Mr. Bekku said, "Tominaga-cho, in Gion."

The driver said nothing in reply, but gave the rickshaw a tug to get it moving and then set off at a trot. After a block or two I worked up my courage and said to Mr. Bekku, "Won't you please tell us where we're going?"

He didn't look as if he would reply, but after a moment he said, "To your new home."

At this, my eyes filled with tears. I heard Satsu weeping on the other side of Mr. Bekku and was just about to let out a sob of my own when Mr. Bekku suddenly struck her, and she let out a loud gasp. I bit my lip and stopped myself so quickly from crying any further that I think the tears themselves may have come to a halt as they slid down my cheeks.

Soon we turned onto an avenue that seemed as broad as the whole village of Yoroido. I could hardly see the other side for all the people, bicycles, cars, and trucks. I'd never seen a car before. I'd seen photographs, but I remember being surprised at how . . . well, cruel, is the way they looked to me in my frightened state, as though they were designed more to hurt people than to help them. All my senses were assaulted. Trucks rumbled past so close I could smell the scorched rubber odor of their tires. I heard a horrible screech, which turned out to be a streetcar on tracks in the center of the avenue.

I felt terrified as evening settled in around us; but I was never so astonished by anything in my life as by my first glimpse of city lights. I'd never even seen electricity except during part of our dinner at Mr. Tanaka's house. Here, windows were lit along the buildings upstairs and down, and the people on the sidewalks stood under puddles of yellow glow. I could see pinpoints even at the far reaches of the avenue. We turned onto another street, and I saw for the first time the Mi-namiza
Theater standing on the opposite side of a bridge ahead of us. Its tiled roof was so grand, I thought it was a palace.

At length the rickshaw turned down an alleyway of wooden houses. The way they were all packed together, they seemed to share one continuous facade-which once again gave me the terrible feeling of being lost. I watched women in kimono rushing around in a great hurry on the little street. They looked very elegant to me; though, as I later learned, they were mostly maids.

When we came to a halt before a doorway, Mr. Bekku instructed me to get out. He climbed out behind me, and then as if the day hadn't been difficult enough, the worst thing of all happened. For when Satsu tried to get out as well, Mr. Bekku turned and pushed her back with his long arm.

"Stay there," he said to her. "You're going elsewhere."

I looked at Satsu, and Satsu looked at me. It may have been the first time we'd ever completely understood each other's feelings. But it lasted only a moment, for the next thing I knew my eyes had welled up with tears so much I could scarcely see. I felt myself being dragged backward by Mr. Bekku; I heard women's voices and quite a bit of commotion. I was on the point of throwing myself onto the street when suddenly Satsu's mouth fell open at something she saw in the doorway behind me.

I was in a narrow entryway with an ancient-looking well on one side and a few plants on the other. Mr. Bekku had dragged me inside, and now he pulled me up onto my feet. There on the step of the entryway, just slipping her feet into her lacquered zori, stood an exquisitely beautiful woman wearing a kimono lovelier than anything I'd ever imagined. I'd been impressed with the kimono worn by the young bucktoothed geisha in Mr. Tanaka's village of Senzuru; but this one was a water blue, with swirling lines in ivory to mimic the current in a stream. Glistening silver trout tumbled in the current, and the surface of the water was ringed with gold wherever the soft green leaves of a tree touched it. I had no doubt the gown was woven of pure silk, and so was the obi, embroidered in pale greens and yellows. And her clothing wasn't the only
extraordinary thing about her; her face was painted a kind of rich white, like the wall of a cloud when lit by the sun. Her hair, fashioned into lobes, gleamed as darkly as lacquer, and was decorated with ornaments carved out of amber, and with a bar from which tiny silver strips dangled, shimmering as she moved.

This was my first glimpse of Hatsumomo. At the time, she was one of the most renowned geisha in the district of Gion; though of course I didn't know any of this then. She was a petite woman; the top of her hairstyle reached no higher than Mr. Bekku's shoulder. I was so startled by her appearance that I forgot my manners-not that I had developed very good
manners yet-and stared directly at her face. She was smiling at me, though not in a kindly way. And then she said:

"Mr. Bekku, could you take out the garbage later? I'd like to be on my way."

There was no garbage in the entryway; she was talking about me. Mr. Bekku said he thought Hatsumomo had enough room to pass.

"You may not mind being so close to her," said Hatsumomo. "But when I see filth on one side of the street, I cross to the other."

Suddenly an older woman, tall and knobby, like a bamboo pole, appeared in the doorway behind her.

"I don't know how anyone puts up with you, Hatsumomo-san," said the woman. But she gestured for Mr. Bekku to pull me onto the street again, which he did. After this she stepped down into the entry-way very awkwardly-for one of her hips jutted out and made it difficult for her to walk-and crossed to a tiny cabinet on the wall. She took from it something that looked to me like a piece of flint, along with a rectangular stone like the kind fishermen use to sharpen their knives, and then stood behind Hatsumomo and struck the flint against the stone, causing a little cluster of sparks to jump onto Hatsumomo's back. I didn't understand this at all; but you see, geisha are more superstitious even than fishermen. A geisha will never go out for the evening until someone has sparked a flint on her back for good luck.

After this, Hatsumomo walked away, using such tiny steps that she seemed to glide along with the bottom of her kimono fluttering just a bit. I didn't know that she was a geisha at the time, for she was worlds above the creature I'd seen in Senzuru a few weeks earlier. I decided she must be some sort of stage performer. We all watched her float away, and
then Mr. Bekku handed me over to the older woman in the entryway. He climbed back into the rickshaw with my sister, and the driver raised the poles. But I never saw them leave, because I was slumped down in the entryway in tears.

The older woman must have taken pity on me; for a long while I lay there sobbing in my misery without anyone touching me. I even heard her shush up a maid who came from inside the house to speak with her. At length she helped me to my feet and dried my face with a handkerchief she took from one sleeve of her simple gray kimono.

"Now, now, little girl. There's no need to worry so. No one's going to cook you." She spoke with the same peculiar accent as Mr. Bekku and Hatsumomo. It sounded so different from the Japanese spoken in my village that I had a hard time understanding her. But in any case, hers were the kindest words anyone had said to me all day, so I made up my mind to
do what she advised. She told me to call her Auntie. And then she looked down at me, square in the face, and said in a throaty voice:

"Heavens! What startling eyes! You're a lovely girl, aren't you? Mother will be thrilled."

I thought at once that the mother of this woman, whoever she was, must be very old, because Auntie's hair, knotted tightly at the back of her head, was mostly gray, with only streaks of black remaining.

Auntie led me through the doorway, where I found myself standing on a dirt corridor passing between two closely spaced structures to a courtyard in the back. One of the structures was a little dwelling like my house in Yoroido-two rooms with floors of dirt; it turned out to be the maids' quarters. The other was a small, elegant house sitting up on foundation stones in such a way that a cat might have crawled underneath it. The corridor between them opened onto the dark sky above, which gave me the feeling I was standing in something more like a miniature village than a house-especially since I could see several other small wooden buildings down in the courtyard at the end. I didn't know it at the time, but this was a very typical dwelling for the section of Kyoto in which it stood. The buildings in the courtyard, though they gave the impression of another group of tiny houses, were just a small shed for the toilets and a storehouse of two levels with a ladder on the outside. The entire dwelling fitted into an area smaller than Mr. Tanaka's home in the countryside and housed only eight people. Or rather nine, now that I had arrived.

After I took in the peculiar arrangement of all the little buildings, I noticed the elegance of the main house. In Yoroido the wood structures were more gray than brown, and rutted by the salty air. But here the wood floors and beams gleamed with the yellow light of electric lamps. Opening off the front hallway were sliding doors with paper screens, as well as a staircase that seemed to climb straight up. One of these doors stood open, so that I was able to see a wood cabinet with a Buddhist altar. These elegant rooms turned out to be for the use of the family-and also Hatsumomo, even though, as I would come to understand, she wasn't a family member at all. When family members wanted to go to the courtyard, they didn't walk down the dirt corridor as the servants did, but had their own ramp of polished wood running along the side of the house. There were even separate toilets-an upper one for family and a lower one for servants.

I had yet to discover most of these things, though I would learn them within a day or two. But I stood there in the corridor a long while, wondering what sort of place this was and feeling very afraid. Auntie had disappeared into the kitchen and was talking in a hoarse voice to somebody. At length the somebody came out. She turned out to be a girl about my age, carrying a wooden bucket so heavy with water that she sloshed half of it onto the dirt floor. Her body was narrow; but her face was plump and almost perfectly round, so that she looked to me like a melon on a stick. She was straining to carry the bucket, and her tongue stuck out of her mouth just the way the stem comes out of the top of a pumpkin. As I soon learned, this was a habit of hers. She stuck her tongue out when she stirred her miso soup, or scooped rice into a bowl, or even tied the knot of her robe. And her face was truly so plump and so soft, with that tongue curling out like a pumpkin stem, that within a few days I'd given her the nickname of "Pumpkin," which everyone came to call her-even her customers many years later when she was a geisha in Gion.

When she had put down the bucket near me, Pumpkin retracted her tongue, and then brushed a strand of hair behind her ear while she looked me up and down. I thought she might say something, but she just went on looking, as though she were trying to make up her mind whether or not to take a bite of me. Really, she did seem hungry; and then at last she
leaned in and whispered:

"Where on earth did you come from?"

I didn't think it would help to say that I had come from Yoroido; since her accent was as strange to me as everyone else's, I felt sure she wouldn't recognize the name of my village. I said instead that I'd just arrived.

"I thought I would never see another girl my age," she said to me. But what's the matter with your eyes?"

Just then Auntie came out from the kitchen, and after shooing Pumpkin away, picked up the bucket and a scrap of cloth, and led me down to the courtyard. It had a beautiful mossy look, with stepping-stones leading to a storehouse in the back; but it smelled horrible because of the toilets in the little shed along one side. Auntie told me to undress. I was afraid she might do to me something like what Mrs. Fidget had done, but instead she only poured water over my shoulders and rubbed me down with the rag. Afterward she gave me a robe, which was nothing more than coarsely woven cotton in the simplest pattern of dark blue, but it was certainly more elegant than anything I'd ever worn before. An old woman who turned out to be the cook came down into the corridor with several elderly maids to peer at me. Auntie told them they
would have plenty of time for staring another day and sent them back where they'd come from.

"Now listen, little girl," Auntie said to me, when we were alone. "I don't even want to know your name yet. The last girl who came, Mother and Granny didn't like her, and she was here only a month. I'm too old to keep learning new names, until they've decided they're going to keep you."

"What will happen if they don't want to keep me?" I asked.

"It's better for you if they keep you."

"May I ask, ma'am . . . what is this place?"

"It's an okiya," she said. "It's where geisha live. If you work very hard, you'll grow up to be a geisha yourself. But you won't make it as far as next week unless you listen to me very closely, because Mother and Granny are coming down the stairs in just a moment to look at you. And they'd better like what they see. Your job is to bow as low as you can, and don't look them in the eye. The older one, the one we call Granny, has never liked anyone in her life, so don't worry about what she says. If she asks you a question, don't even answer it, for heaven's sake! I'll answer for you. The one you want to impress is Mother. She's not a bad sort, but she cares about only one thing."

I didn't have a chance to find out what that one thing was, for I heard a creaking noise from the direction of the front entrance hall, and soon the two women came drifting out onto the walkway. I didn't dare look at them. But what I could see out of the corner of my eye made me think of two lovely bundles of silk floating along a stream. In a moment they
were hovering on the walkway in front of me, where they sank down and smoothed their kimono across their knees.

"Umeko-san!" Auntie shouted-for this was the name of the cook. "Bring tea for Granny."

"I don't want tea," I heard an angry voice say.

"Now, Granny," said a raspier voice, which I took to be Mother's. "You don't have to drink it. Auntie only wants to be sure you're comfortable."

"There's no being comfortable with these bones of mine," the old woman grumbled. I heard her take in a breath to say something more, but Auntie interrupted.

"This is the new girl, Mother," she said, and gave me a little shove, which I took as a signal to bow. I got onto my knees and bowed so low, I could smell the musty air wafting from beneath the foundation. Then I heard Mother's voice again.

"Get up and come closer. I want to have a look at you."

I felt certain she was going to say something more to me after I'd approached her, but instead she took from her obi, where she kept it tucked, a pipe with a metal bowl and a long stem made of bamboo. She set it down beside her on the walkway and then brought from the pocket of her sleeve a drawstring bag of silk, from which she removed a big pinch of
tobacco. She packed the tobacco with her little finger, stained the burnt orange color of a roasted yam, and then put the pipe into her mouth and lit it with a match from a tiny metal box.

Now she took a close look at me for the first time, puffing on her pipe while the old woman beside her sighed. I didn't feel I could look at Mother directly, but I had the impression of smoke seeping out of her face like steam from a crack in the earth. I was so curious about her that my eyes took on a life of their own and began to dart about. The more I saw of her, the more fascinated I became. Her kimono was yellow, with willowy branches bearing lovely green and orange leaves; it was made of silk gauze as delicate as a spider's web. Her obi was every bit as astonishing to me. It was a lovely gauzy texture too, but heavier-looking, in russet and brown with gold threads woven through. The more I looked at her clothing, the less I was aware of standing there on that dirt corridor, or of wondering what had become of my sister-and my mother and father-and what would become of me. Every detail of this woman's kimono was enough to make me forget myself. And then I came upon a rude shock: for there above the collar of her elegant kimono was a face so mismatched to the clothing that it was as though I'd been patting a cat's body only to discover that it had a bulldog's head. She was a
hideous-looking woman, though much younger than Auntie, which I hadn't expected. It turned out that Mother was actually Auntie's younger sister-though they called each other "Mother" and "Auntie," just as everyone else in the okiya did. Actually they weren't really sisters in the way Satsu and I were. They hadn't been born into the same family; but Granny had adopted them both.

I was so dazed as I stood there, with so many thoughts running through my mind, that I ended up doing the very thing Auntie had told me not to do. I looked straight into Mother's eyes. When I did she took the pipe from her mouth, which caused her jaw to fall open like a trapdoor. And even though I knew I should at all costs look down again, her peculiar
eyes were so shocking to me in their ugliness that I could do nothing but stand there staring at them. Instead of being white and clear, the whites of her eyes had a hideous yellow cast, and made me think at once of a toilet into which someone had just urinated. They were rimmed with the raw lip of her lids, in which a cloudy moisture was pooled; and all
around them the skin was sagging.

I drew my eyes downward as far as her mouth, which still hung open. The colors of her face were all mixed up: the rims of her eyelids were red like meat, and her gums and tongue were gray. And to make things more horrible, each of her lower teeth seemed to be anchored in a little pool of blood at the gums. This was due to some sort of deficiency in Mother's diet over the past years, as I later learned; but I couldn't help feeling, the more I looked at her, that she was like a tree that has begun to lose its leaves. I was so shocked by the whole effect that I think I must have taken a step back, or let out a gasp, or in some way given her some hint of my feelings, for all at once she said to me, in that raspy voice of hers:

"What are you looking at!"

"I'm very sorry, ma'am. I was looking at your kimono," I told her. "I don't think I've ever seen anything like it."

This must have been the right answer-if there was a right answer-because she let out something of a laugh, though it sounded like a cough.

"So you like it, do you?" she said, continuing to cough, or laugh, I couldn't tell which. "Do you have any idea what it cost?"

"No, ma'am."

"More than you did, that's for certain."

Here the maid appeared with tea. While it was served I took the opportunity to steal a glance at Granny. Whereas Mother was a bit on the plump side, with stubby fingers and a fat neck, Granny was old and shriveled. She was at least as old as my father, but she looked as if she'd spent her years stewing herself into a state of concentrated meanness. Her gray hair made me think of a tangle of silk threads, for I could see right through them to her scalp. And even her scalp looked mean, because of patches where the skin was colored red or brown from old age. She wasn't frowning exactly, but her mouth made the shape of a frown in its natural state anyway.

She took in a great big breath in preparation to speak; and then as she let it out again she mumbled, "Didn't I say I don't want any tea?"
After this, she sighed and shook her head, and then said to me, "How old are you, little girl?"

"She's the year of the monkey," Auntie answered for me.

"That fool cook is a monkey," Granny said.

"Nine years old," said Mother. "What do you think of her, Auntie?"

Auntie stepped around in front of me and tipped my head back to look at my face. "She has a good deal of water."

"Lovely eyes," said Mother. "Did you see them, Granny?"

"She looks like a fool to me," Granny said. "We don't need another monkey anyway."

"Oh, I'm sure you're right," Auntie said. "Probably she's just as you say. But she looks to me like a very clever girl, and adaptable; you can see that from the shape of her ears."

"With so much water in her personality," Mother said, "probably she'll be able to smell a fire before it has even begun. Won't that be nice, Granny? You won't have to worry any longer about our storehouse burning with all our kimono in it."

Granny, as I went on to learn, was more terrified of fire than beer is of a thirsty old man.

"Anyway, she's rather pretty, don't you think?" Mother added.

"There are too many pretty girls in Gion," said Granny. "What we need is a smart girl, not a pretty girl. That Hatsumomo is as pretty as they come, and look at what a fool she is!"

After this Granny stood, with Auntie's help, and made her way back up the walkway. Though I must say that to watch Auntie's clumsy gait-because of her one hip jutting out farther than the other-it wasn't at all obvious which of the two women had the easier time walking. Soon I heard the sound of a door in the front entrance hall sliding open and then shut again, and Auntie came back.

"Do you have lice, little girl?" Mother asked me.

"No," I said.

"You're going to have to learn to speak more politely than that. Auntie, be kind enough to trim her hair, just to be sure."

Auntie called a servant over and asked for shears.

"Well, little girl," Mother told me, "you're in Kyoto now. You'll learn to behave or get a beating. And it's Granny gives the beatings around here, so you'll be sorry. My advice to you is: work very hard, and never leave the okiya without permission. Do as you're told; don't be too much trouble; and you might begin learning the arts of a geisha two or three months from now. I didn't bring you here to be a maid. I'll throw you out, if it comes to that."

Mother puffed on her pipe and kept her eyes fixed on me. I didn't dare move until she told me to. I found myself wondering if my sister was standing before some other cruel woman, in another house somewhere in this horrible city. And I had a sudden image in my mind of my poor, sick mother propping herself on one elbow upon her futon and looking around to see where we had gone. I didn't want Mother to see me crying, but the tears pooled in my eyes before I could think of how to stop them. With my vision glazed, Mother's yellow kimono turned softer and softer, until it seemed to sparkle. Then she blew out a puff of her smoke, and it disappeared completely.

Chapter four



During those first few days in that strange place, I don't think I could have felt worse if I'd lost my arms and legs, rather than my family and my home. I had no doubt life would never again be the same. All I could think of was my confusion and misery; and I wondered day after day when I might see Satsu again. I was without my father, without my mother-without even the clothing I'd always worn. Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived. I remember one moment drying rice bowls in the kitchen, when all at once I felt so disoriented I had to stop what I was doing to stare for a long while at my hands; for I could scarcely understand that this person drying the bowls was actually me. Mother had told me I could begin my training within a few months if I worked hard and behaved myself. As I learned from Pumpkin, beginning my training meant going to a school in another section of Gion to take lessons in things like music, dance, and tea ceremony. All the girls studying to be geisha took classes at this same school. I felt sure I'd find Satsu there when I was finally permitted to go; so by the end of my first week, I'd made up my mind to be as obedient as a cow following along on a rope, in the hopes that Mother would send me to the school right away.

Most of my chores were straightforward. I stowed away the futons in the morning, cleaned the rooms, swept the dirt corridor, and so forth. Sometimes I was sent to the pharmacist to fetch ointment for the cook's scabies, or to a shop on Shijo Avenue to fetch the rice crackers Auntie was so fond of. Happily the worst jobs, such as cleaning the toilets, were the responsibility of one of the elderly maids. But even though I worked as hard as I knew how, I never seemed to make the good impression I hoped to, because my chores every day were more than I could possibly finish; and the problem was made a good deal worse by Granny.

Looking after Granny wasn't really one of my duties-not as Auntie described them to me. But when Granny summoned me I couldn't very well ignore her, for she had more seniority in the okiya than anyone else. One day, for example, I was about to carry tea upstairs to Mother when I heard Granny call out:

"Where's that girl! Send her in here!"

I had to put down Mother's tray and hurry into the room where Granny was eating her lunch.

"Can't you see this room is too hot?" she said to me, after I'd bowed to her on my knees. "You ought to have come in here and opened the window."

"I'm sorry, Granny. I didn't know you were hot."

"Don't I look hot?"

She was eating some rice, and several grains of it were stuck to her lower lip. I thought she looked more mean than hot, but I went directly to the window and opened it. As soon as I did, a fly came in and began buzzing around Granny's food.

"What's the matter with you?" she said, waving at the fly with her chopsticks. "The other maids don't let in flies when they open the window!"

I apologized and told her I would fetch a swatter.

"And knock the fly into my food? Oh, no, you won't! You'll stand right here while I eat and keep it away from me."

So I had to stand there while Granny ate her food, and listen to her tell me about the great Kabuki actor Ichimura Uzaemon XIV, who had taken her hand during a moon-viewing party when she was only fourteen. By the time I was finally free to leave, Mother's tea had grown so cold I couldn't even deliver it. Both the cook and Mother were angry with me.

The truth was, Granny didn't like to be alone. Even when she needed to use the toilet, she made Auntie stand just outside the door and hold her hands to help her balance in a squatting position. The odor was so overpowering, poor Auntie nearly broke her neck trying to get her head as far away from it as possible. I didn't have any jobs as bad as this one, but Granny did often call me to massage her while she cleaned her ears with a tiny silver scoop; and the task of massaging her was a good deal worse than you might think. I almost felt sick the first time she unfastened her robe and pulled it down from her shoulders, because the skin there and on her neck was bumpy and yellow like an uncooked chicken's. The problem, as I later learned, was that in her geisha days she'd used a kind of white makeup we call "China Clay," made with a base of lead. China Clay turned out to be poisonous, to begin with, which probably accounted in part for Granny's foul disposition. But also as a younger woman Granny had often gone to the hot springs north of Kyoto. This would have been fine except that the lead-based makeup was very hard to remove; traces of it combined with some sort of chemical in the water to make a dye that ruined her skin. Granny wasn't the only one afflicted by this problem. Even during the early years of World War II, you could still see old women on the streets in Gion with sagging yellow necks.

One day after I'd been in the okiya about three weeks, I went upstairs much later than usual to straighten Hatsumomo's room. I was terrified of Hatsumomo, even though I hardly saw her because of the busy life she led. I worried about what might happen if she found me alone, so I always tried to clean her room the moment she left the okiya for her dance lessons. Unfortunately, that morning Granny had kept me busy until almost noon.

Hatsumomo's room was the largest in the okiya, larger in floor space than my entire house in Yoroido. I couldn't think why it should be so much bigger than everyone else's until one of the elderly maids told me that even though Hatsumomo was the only geisha in the okiya now, in the past there'd been as many as three or four, and they'd all slept together in that one room. Hatsumomo may have lived alone, but she certainly made enough mess for four people. When I went up to her room that day, in addition to the usual magazines strewn about, and brushes left on the mats near her tiny makeup stand, I found an apple core and an empty whiskey bottle under the table. The window was open, and the wind must have knocked down the wood frame on which she'd hung her kimono from the night before-or perhaps she'd tipped it over before going to bed drunk and hadn't yet bothered to pick it up. Usually Auntie would have fetched the kimono by now, because it was her responsibility to care for the clothing in the okiya, but for some reason she hadn't. Just as I was standing the frame erect again, the door slid open all at once, and I turned to see Hatsumomo standing there.

"Oh, it's you," she said. "I thought I heard a little mousie or something. I see you've been straightening my room! Are you the one who keeps rearranging all my makeup jars? Why do you insist on doing that?"

"I'm very sorry, ma'am," I said. "I only move them to dust underneath."

"But if you touch them," she said, "they'll start to smell like you. And then the men will say to me, 'Hatsumomo-san, why do you stink like an ignorant girl from a fishing village?' I'm sure you understand that, don't you? But let's have you repeat it back to me just to be sure. Why don't I want you to touch my makeup?"

I could hardly bring myself to say it. But at last I answered her. "Because it will start to smell like me."

"That's very good! And what will the men say?" "They'll say, 'Oh, Hatsumomo-san, you smell just like a girl from a fishing village.'"

"Hmm . . . there's something about the way you said it that I don't like. But I suppose it will do. I can't see why you girls from fishing villages smell so bad. That ugly sister of yours was here looking for you the other day, and her stench was nearly as bad as yours."

I'd kept my eyes to the floor until then; but when I heard these words, I looked Hatsumomo right in the face to see whether or not she was telling me the truth.

"You look so surprised!" she said to me. "Didn't I mention that she came here? She wanted me to give you a message about where she's living. Probably she wants you to go find her, so the two of you can run away together."

"Hatsumomo-san-"

"You want me to tell you where she is? Well, you're going to have to earn the information. When I think how, I'll tell you. Now get out." I didn't dare disobey her, but just before leaving the room I stopped, thinking perhaps I could persuade her.

"Hatsumomo-san, I know you don't like me," I said. "If you would be kind enough to tell me what I want to know, I'll promise never to bother you again."

Hatsumomo looked very pleased when she heard this and came walking toward me with a luminous happiness on her face. Honestly, I've never seen a more astonishing-looking woman. Men in the street sometimes stopped and took their cigarettes from their mouths to stare at her. I thought she was going to come whisper in my ear; but after she'd stood over me smiling for a moment, she drew back her hand and slapped me.

"I told you to get out of my room, didn't I?" she said.

I was too stunned to know how to react. But I must have stumbled out of the room, because the next thing I knew, I was slumped on the wood floor of the hallway, holding my hand to my face. In a moment Mother's door slid open.

"Hatsumomo!" Mother said, and came to help me to my feet. "What have you done to Chiyo?"

"She was talking about running away, Mother. I decided it would be best if I slapped her for you. I thought you were probably too busy to do it yourself."

Mother summoned a maid and asked for several slices of fresh ginger, then took me into her room and seated me at the table while she finished a telephone call. The okiya's only telephone for calling outside Gion was mounted on the wall of her room, and no one else was permitted to use it. She'd left the earpiece lying on its side on the shelf, and when she took it up again, she seemed to squeeze it so hard with her stubby fingers that I thought fluid might drip onto the mats.

"Sorry," she said into the mouthpiece in her raspy voice. "Hatsumomo is slapping the maids around again."

During my first few weeks in the okiya I felt an unreasonable affection for Mother-something like what a fish might feel for the fisherman who pulls the hook from its lip. Probably this was because I saw her no more than a few minutes each day while cleaning her room. She was always to be found there, sitting at the table, usually with an account book from the bookcase open before her and the fingers of one hand flicking the ivory beads of her abacus. She may have been organized about keeping her account books, but in every other respect she was messier even than Hatsumomo. Whenever she put her pipe down onto the table with a click, flecks of ash and tobacco flew out of it, and she left them wherever they lay. She didn't like anyone to touch her futon, even to change the sheets, so the whole room smelled like dirty linen. And the paper screens over the windows were stained terribly on account of her smoking, which gave the room a gloomy cast.

While Mother went on talking on the telephone, one of the elderly maids came in with several strips of freshly cut ginger for me to hold against my face where Hatsumomo had slapped me. The com-motion of the door opening and closing woke Mother's little dog, Taku, who was an ill-tempered creature with a smashed face. He seemed to have only three pastimes in life-to bark, to snore, and to bite people who tried to pet him. After the maid had left again, Taku came and laid himself behind me. This was one of his little tricks; he liked to put himself where I would step on him by accident, and then bite me as soon as I did it. I was beginning to feel like a mouse caught in a sliding door, positioned there between Mother and Taku, when at last Mother hung up the telephone and came to sit at the table. She stared at me with her yellow eyes and finally said:

"Now you listen to me, little girl. Perhaps you've heard Hatsu-momo lying. Just because she can get away with it doesn't mean you can. I want to know . . . why did she slap you?"

"She wanted me to leave her room, Mother," I said. "I'm terribly sorry."

Mother made me say it all again in a proper Kyoto accent, which I found difficult to do. When I'd finally said it well enough to satisfy her, she went on:

"I don't think you understand your job here in the okiya. We all of us think of only one thing-how we can help Hatsumomo be successful as a geisha. Even Granny. She may seem like a difficult old woman to you, but really she spends her whole day thinking of ways to be helpful to Hatsumomo."

I didn't have the least idea what Mother was talking about. To tell the truth, I don't think she could have fooled a dirty rag into believing Granny was in any way helpful to anyone.

"If someone as senior as Granny works hard all day to make Hatsumomo's job easier, think how much harder you have to work." "Yes, Mother, I'll continue working very hard." "I don't want to hear that you've upset Hatsumomo again. The other little girl manages to stay out of her way; you can do it too."

"Yes, Mother . . . but before I go, may I ask? I've been wondering if anyone might know where my sister is. You see, I'd hoped to send a note to her."

Mother had a peculiar mouth, which was much too big for her face and hung open much of the time; but now she did something with it I'd never seen her do before, which was to pinch her teeth together as though she wanted me to have a good look at them. This was her way of smiling-though I didn't realize it until she began to make that coughing noise that was her laugh.

"Why on earth should I tell you such a thing?" she said. After this, she gave her coughing laugh a few more times, before waving her hand at me to say that I should leave the room.

When I went out, Auntie was waiting in the upstairs hall with a chore for me. She gave me a bucket and sent me up a ladder through a trapdoor onto the roof. There on wooden struts stood a tank for collecting rainwater. The rainwater ran down by gravity to flush the little second-floor toilet near Mother's room, for we had no plumbing in those days, even in the kitchen. Lately the weather had been dry, and the toilet had begun to stink. My task was to dump water into the tank so that Auntie could flush the toilet a few times to clear it out.

Those tiles in the noonday sun felt like hot skillets to me; while I emptied the bucket, I couldn't help but think of the cold water of the pond where we used to swim back in our village on the seashore. I'd been in that pond only a few weeks earlier; but it all seemed so far away from me now, there on the roof of the okiya. Auntie called up to me to pick the weeds from between the tiles before I came back down. I looked out at the hazy heat lying on the city and the hills surrounding us like prison walls. Somewhere under one of those rooftops, my sister was probably doing her chores just as I was. I thought of her when I bumped the tank by accident, and water splashed out and flowed toward the street.

About a month after I'd arrived in the okiya, Mother told me the time had come to begin my schooling. I was to accompany Pumpkin the following morning to be introduced to the teachers. Afterward, Hatsumomo would take me to someplace called the "registry office," which I'd never heard of, and then late in the afternoon I would observe her putting on her makeup and dressing in kimono. It was a tradition in the okiya for a young girl, on the day she begins her training, to observe the most senior geisha in this way.

When Pumpkin heard she would be taking me to the school the following morning, she grew very nervous.

"You'll have to be ready to leave the moment you wake up," she told me. "If we're late, we may as well drown ourselves in the sewer ..."

I'd seen Pumpkin scramble out of the okiya every morning so early her eyes were still crusty; and she often seemed on the point of tears when she left. In fact, when she clopped past the kitchen window in her wooden shoes, I sometimes thought I could hear her crying. She hadn't taken to her lessons well-not well at all, as a matter of fact. She'd arrived in the okiya nearly six months before me, but she'd only begun attending the school a week or so after my arrival. Most days when she came back around noon, she hid straightaway in the maids' quarters so no one would see her upset.

The following morning I awoke even earlier than usual and dressed for the first time in the blue and white robe students wore. It was nothing more than unlined cotton decorated with a childlike design of squares; I'm sure I looked no more elegant than a guest at an inn looks wearing a robe on the way to the bath. But I'd never before worn anything nearly so glamorous on my body.

Pumpkin was waiting for me in the entryway with a worried look. I was just about to slip my feet into my shoes when Granny called me to her room.

"No!" Pumpkin said under her breath; and really, her face sagged like wax that had melted. "I'll be late again. Let's just go and pretend we didn't hear her!"

I'd like to have done what Pumpkin suggested; but already Granny was in her doorway, glowering at me across the formal entrance hall. As it turned out, she didn't keep me more than ten or fifteen minutes; but by then tears were welling in Pumpkin's eyes. When we finally set out, Pumpkin began at once to walk so fast I could hardly keep up with her.

"That old woman is so cruel!" she said. "Make sure you put your hands in a dish of salt after she makes you rub her neck."

"Why should I do that?"

"My mother used to say to me, 'Evil spreads in the world through touch.'And I know it's true too, because my mother brushed up against a demon that passed her on the road one morning, and that's why she died. If you don't purify your hands, you'll turn into a shriveled-up old pickle, just like Granny."

Considering that Pumpkin and I were the same age and in the same peculiar position in life, I'm sure we would have talked together often, if we could have. But our chores kept us so busy we hardly had time even for meals-which Pumpkin ate before me because she was senior in the okiya. I knew that Pumpkin had come only six months before me, as I've mentioned. But I knew very little else about her. So I asked:

"Pumpkin, are you from Kyoto? Your accent sounds like you are."

"I was born in Sapporo. But then my mother died when I was five, and my father sent me here to live with an uncle. Last year my uncle lost his business, and here I am."

"Why don't you run away to Sapporo again?"

"My father had a curse put on him and died last year. I can't run away. I don't have anywhere to go."

"When I find my sister," I said, "you can come with us. We'll run away together."

Considering what a difficult time Pumpkin was having with her lessons, I expected she would be happy at my offer. But she didn't say anything at all. We had reached Shijo Avenue by now and crossed it in silence. This was the same avenue that had been so crowded the day Mr. Bekku had brought Satsu and me from the station. Now, so early in the morning, I could see only a single streetcar in the distance and a few bicyclists here and there. When we reached the other side, we continued up a narrow street, and then Pumpkin stopped for the first time since we'd left the okiya.

"My uncle was a very nice man," she said. "Here's the last thing I heard him say before he sent me away. 'Some girls are smart and some girls are stupid,' he told me. 'You're a nice girl, but you're one of the stupid ones. You won't make it on your own in the world. I'm sending you to a place where people will tell you what to do. Do what they say, and you'll always be taken care of.' So if you want to go out on your own, Chiyo-chan, you go. But me, I've found a place to spend my life. I'll work as hard as I have to so they don't send me away. But I'd sooner throw myself off a cliff than spoil my chances to be a geisha like Hatsumomo."

Here Pumpkin interrupted herself. She was looking at something behind me, on the ground. "Oh, my goodness, Chiyo-chan," she said, "doesn't it make you hungry?"

I turned to find myself looking into the entryway of another okiya. On a shelf inside the door sat a miniature Shinto shrine with an offering of a sweet-rice cake. I wondered if this could be what Pumpkin had seen; but her eyes were pointed toward the ground. A few ferns and some moss lined the stone path leading to the interior door, but I could see nothing else there. And then my eye fell upon it. Outside the entryway, just at the edge of the street, lay a wooden skewer with a single bite of charcoal-roasted squid remaining. The vendors sold them from carts at night. The smell of the sweet basting sauce was a torment to me, for maids like us were fed nothing more than rice and pickles at most meals, with soup once a day, and small portions of dried fish twice a month. Even so, there was nothing about this piece of squid on the ground that I found appetizing. Two flies were walking around in circles on it just as casually as if they'd been out for a stroll in the park.

Pumpkin was a girl who looked as if she could grow fat quickly, given the chance. I'd sometimes heard her stomach making noises from hunger that sounded like an enormous door rolling open. Still, I didn't think she was really planning to eat the squid, until I saw her look up and down the street to be sure no one was coming.

"Pumpkin," I said, "if you're hungry, for heaven's sake, take the sweet-rice cake from that shelf. The flies have already claimed the squid."

"I'm bigger than they are," she said. "Besides, it would be sacrilege to eat the sweet-rice cake. It's an offering."

And after she said this, she bent down to pick up the skewer.

It's true that I grew up in a place where children experimented with eating anything that moved. And I'll admit I did eat a cricket once when I was four or five, but only because someone tricked me. But to see Pumpkin standing there holding that piece of squid on a stick, with grit from the street stuck to it, and the flies walking around . . . She blew on it to try to get rid of them, but they just scampered to keep their balance.

"Pumpkin, you can't eat that," I said. "You might as well drag your tongue along on the paving stones!"

"What's so bad about the paving stones?" she said. And with this-I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it myself-Pumpkin got down on her knees and stuck out her tongue, and gave it a long, careful scrape along the ground. My mouth fell open from shock. When Pumpkin got to her feet again, she looked as though she herself couldn't quite believe what she'd done. But she wiped her tongue with the palm of her hand, spat a few times, and then put that piece of squid between her teeth and slid it off the skewer.

It must have been a tough piece of squid; Pumpkin chewed it the whole way up the gentle hill to the wooden gate of the school complex. I felt a knot in my stomach when I entered, because the garden seemed so grand to me. Evergreen shrubs and twisted pine trees surrounded a decorative pond full of carp. Across the narrowest part of the pond lay a stone slab. Two old women in kimono stood on it, holding lacquered umbrellas to block the early-morning sun. As for the buildings, I didn't understand what I was seeing at the moment, but I now know that only a tiny part of the compound was devoted to the school. The massive building in the back was actually the Kaburenjo Theater-where the geisha of Gion perform Dances of the Old Capital every spring.

Pumpkin hurried to the entrance of a long wood building that I thought was servants' quarters, but which turned out to be the school. The moment I stepped into the entryway, I noticed the distinctive smell of roasted tea leaves, which even now can make my stomach tighten as though I'm on my way to lessons once again. I took off my shoes to put them into the cubby nearest at hand, but Pumpkin stopped me; there was an unspoken rule about which cubby to use. Pumpkin was among the most junior of all the girls, and had to climb the other cubbies like a ladder to put her shoes at the top. Since this was my very first morning I had even less seniority; I had to use the cubby above hers.

"Be very careful not to step on the other shoes when you climb," Pumpkin said to me, even though there were only a few pairs. "If you step on them and one of the girls sees you do it, you'll get a scolding so bad your ears will blister."

The interior of the school building seemed to me as old and dusty as an abandoned house. Down at the end of the long hallway stood a group of six or eight girls. I felt a jolt when I set eyes on them, because I thought one might be Satsu; but when they turned to look at us I was disappointed. They all wore the same hairstyle-the wareshinobu of a young apprentice geisha-and looked to me as if they knew much more about Gion than either Pumpkin or I would ever know.

Halfway down the hall we went into a spacious classroom in the traditional Japanese style. Along one wall hung a large board with pegs holding many tiny wooden plaques; on each plaque was written a name in fat, black strokes. My reading and writing were still poor; I'd attended school in the mornings in Yoroido, and since coming to Kyoto had spent an hour every afternoon studying with Auntie, but I could read very few of the names. Pumpkin went to the board and took, from a shallow box on the mats, a plaque bearing her own name, which she hung on the first empty hook. The board on the wall, you see, was like a sign-up sheet.

After this, we went to several other classrooms to sign up in just the same way for Pumpkin's other lessons. She was to have four classes that morning-shamisen, dance, tea ceremony, and a form of singing we call nagauta. Pumpkin was so troubled about being the last student in all of her classes that she began to wring the sash of her robe as we left the school for breakfast in the okiya. But just as we slipped into our shoes, another young girl our age came rushing across the garden with her hair in disarray. Pumpkin seemed calmer after seeing her.

We ate a bowl of soup and returned to the school as quickly as we could, so that Pumpkin could kneel in the back of the classroom to assemble her shamisen. If you've never seen a shamisen, you might find it a peculiar-looking instrument. Some people call it a Japanese guitar, but actually it's a good deal smaller than a guitar, with a thin wooden neck that has three large tuning pegs at the end. The body is just a little wooden box with cat skin stretched over the top like a drum. The entire instrument can be taken apart and put into a box or a bag, which is how it is carried about. In any case, Pumpkin assembled her shamisen and began to tune it with her tongue poking out, but I'm sorry to say that her ear was very poor, and the notes went up and down like a boat on the waves, without ever settling down where they were supposed to be. Soon the classroom was full of girls with their shamisens, spaced out as neatly as chocolates in a box. I kept an eye on the door in the hopes that Satsu would walk through it, but she didn't.

A moment later the teacher entered. She was a tiny old woman with a shrill voice. Her name was Teacher Mizumi, and this is what we called her to her face. But her surname of Mizumi sounds very close to nezumi-"mouse"; so behind her back we called her Teacher Nezumi-Teacher Mouse.

Teacher Mouse knelt on a cushion facing the class and made no effort at all to look friendly. When the students bowed to her in unison and told her good morning, she just glowered back at them without speaking a word. Finally she looked at the board on the wall and called out the name of the first student.

This first girl seemed to have a very high opinion of herself. After she'd glided to the front of the room, she bowed before the teacher and began to play. In a minute or two Teacher Mouse told the girl to stop and said all sorts of unpleasant things about her playing; then she snapped her fan shut and waved it at the girl to dismiss her. The girl thanked her, bowed again, and returned to her place, and Teacher Mouse called the name of the next student.

This went on for more than an hour, until at length Pumpkin's name was called. I could see that Pumpkin was nervous, and in fact, the moment she began to play, everything seemed to go wrong. First Teacher Mouse stopped her and took the shamisen to retune the strings herself. Then Pumpkin tried again, but all the students began looking at one another, for no one could tell what piece she was trying to play. Teacher Mouse slapped the table very loudly and told them all to face straight ahead; and then she used her folding fan to tap out the rhythm for Pumpkin to follow. This didn't help, so finally Teacher Mouse began to work instead on Pumpkin's manner of holding the plectrum. She nearly sprained every one of Pumpkin's fingers, it seemed to me, trying to make her hold it with the proper grip. At last she gave up even on this and let the plectrum fall to the mats in disgust. Pumpkin picked it up and came back to her place with tears in her eyes.

After this I learned why Pumpkin had been so worried about being the last student. Because now the girl with the disheveled hair, who'd been rushing to the school as we'd left for breakfast, came to the front of the room and bowed.

"Don't waste your time trying to be courteous to me!" Teacher Mouse squeaked at her. "If you hadn't slept so late this morning, you might have arrived here in time to learn something."

The girl apologized and soon began to play, but the teacher paid no attention at all. She just said, "You sleep too late in the mornings. How do you expect me to teach you, when you can't take the trouble to come to school like the other girls and sign up properly? Just go back to your place. I don't want to be bothered with you."

The class was dismissed, and Pumpkin led me to the front of the room, where we bowed to Teacher Mouse.

"May I be permitted to introduce Chiyo to you, Teacher," Pumpkin said, "and ask your indulgence in instructing her, because she's a girl of very little talent."

Pumpkin wasn't trying to insult me; this was just the way people spoke back then, when they wanted to be polite. My own mother would have said it the same way.

Teacher Mouse didn't speak for a long while, but just looked me over and then said, "You're a clever girl. I can see it just from looking at you. Perhaps you can help your older sister with her lessons."

Of course she was talking about Pumpkin.

"Put your name on the board as early every morning as you can," she told me. "Keep quiet in the classroom. I tolerate no talking at all! And your eyes must stay to the front. If you do these things, I'll teach you as best I can."

And with this, she dismissed us.

In the hallways between classes, I kept my eyes open for Satsu, but I didn't find her. I began to worry that perhaps I would never see her again, and grew so upset that one of the teachers, just before beginning the class, silenced everyone and said to me:

"You, there! What's troubling you?"

"Oh, nothing, ma'am. Only I bit my lip by accident," I said. And to make good on this-for the sake of the girls around me, who were staring-I gave a sharp bite on my lip and tasted blood.

It was a relief to me that Pumpkin's other classes weren't as painful to watch as the first one had been. In the dance class, for example, the students practiced the moves in unison, with the result that no one stood out. Pumpkin wasn't by any means the worst dancer, and even had a certain awkward grace in the way she moved. The singing class later in the morning was more difficult for her since she had a poor ear; but there again, the students practiced in unison, so Pumpkin was able to hide her mistakes by moving her mouth a great deal while singing only softly.

At the end of each of her classes, she introduced me to the teacher. One of them said to me, "You live in the same okiya as Pumpkin, do you?"

"Yes, ma'am," I said, "the Nitta okiya," for Nitta was the family name of Granny and Mother, as well as Auntie.

"That means you live with Hatsumomo-san."

"Yes, ma'am. Hatsumomo is the only geisha in our okiya at present."

"I'll do my best to teach you about singing," she said, "so long as you manage to stay alive!"

After this the teacher laughed as though she'd made a great joke, and sent us on our way.

Chapter five



That afternoon Hatsumomo took me to the Gion Registry Office. I was expecting something very grand, but it turned out to be nothing more than several dark tatami rooms on the second floor of the school building, filled with desks and accounting books and smelling terribly of cigarettes. A clerk looked up at us through the haze of smoke and nodded us into the back room. There at a table piled with papers sat the biggest man I'd ever seen in my life. I didn't know it at the time, but he'd once been a sumo wrestler; and really, if he'd gone outside and slammed his weight into the building itself, all those desks would probably have fallen off the tatami platform onto the floor. He hadn't been a good enough sumo wrestler to take a retirement name, as some of them do; but he still liked to be called by the name he'd used in his wrestling days, which was Awajiumi. Some of the geisha shortened this playfully to Awaji, as a nickname.

As soon as we walked in, Hatsumomo turned on her charm. It was the first time I'd ever seen her do it. She said to him, "Awaji-san!" but the way she spoke, I wouldn't have been surprised if she had run out of breath in the middle, because it sounded like this: 'Awaaa-jii-saaaannnnnnnn!"

It was as if she were scolding him. He put down his pen when he heard her voice, and his two big cheeks shifted up toward his ears, which was his way of smiling.

"Mmm . . . Hatsumomo-san," he said, "if you get any prettier, I don't know what I'm going to do!"

It sounded like a loud whisper when he spoke, because sumo wrestlers often ruin their voice boxes, smashing into one another's throats the way they do.

He may have been the size of a hippopotamus, but Awajiumi was a very elegant dresser. He wore a pin-striped kimono and kimono trousers. His job was to make certain that all the money passing through Gion flowed where it was supposed to; and a trickle from that river of cash flowed directly into his pocket. That isn't to say that he was stealing; it was just the way the system worked. Considering that Awajiumi had such an important job, it was to every geisha's advantage to keep him happy, which was why he had a reputation for spending as much time out of his elegant clothes as in them.

She and Awajiumi talked for a long time, and finally Hatsumomo told him she'd come to register me for lessons at the school. Awajiumi hadn't really looked at me yet, but here he turned his giant head. After a moment he got up to slide open one of the paper screens over the window for more light.

"Why, I thought my eyes had fooled me," he said. "You should have told me sooner what a pretty girl you brought with you. Her eyes . . . they're the color of a mirror!"

"A mirror?" Hatsumomo said. "A mirror has no color, Awaji-san."

"Of course it does. It's a sparkly gray. When you look at a mirror, all you see is yourself, but I know a pretty color when I find it."

"Do you? Well, it isn't so pretty to me. I once saw a dead man fished out of the river, and his tongue was just the same color as her eyes."

"Maybe you're just too pretty yourself to be able to see it else where," Awajiumi said, opening an account book and picking up his pen. "Anyway, let's register the girl. Now . . . Chiyo, is it? Tell me youij full name, Chiyo, and your place of birth."

The moment I heard these words, I had an image in my mind of Satsu staring up at Awajiumi, full of confusion and fear. She must have been in this same room at some time or other; if I had to register, surely she'd had to register too.

"Sakamoto is my last name," I said. "I was born in the town of! Yoroido. You may have heard of it, sir, because of my older sister! Satsu?"

I thought Hatsumomo would be furious with me; but to my surprise she seemed almost pleased about the question I'd asked.

"If she's older than you, she'd have registered already," Awajiumi said. "But I haven't come across her. I don't think she's in Gion at all."

Now Hatsumomo's smile made sense to me; she'd known in advance what Awajiumi would say. If I'd felt any doubts whether she really had spoken to my sister as she claimed, I felt them no longer. There were other geisha districts in Kyoto, though I didn't know much about them. Satsu was somewhere in one of them, and I was determined to find her.

When I returned to the okiya, Auntie was waiting to take me to the bathhouse down the street. I'd been there before, though only with the elderly maids, who usually handed me a small towel and a scrap of soap and then squatted on the tile floor to wash themselves while I did the same. Auntie was much kinder, and knelt over me to scrub my back. I was surprised that she had no modesty whatever, and slung her tube-shaped breasts around as if they were nothing more than bottles. She even whacked me on the shoulder with one several times by accident.

Afterward she took me back to the okiya and dressed me in the first silk kimono I'd ever worn, a brilliant blue with green grasses all around the hem and bright yellow flowers across the sleeves and chest. Then she led me up the stairs to Hatsumomo's room. Before going in, she gave me a stern warning not to distract Hatsumomo in any way, or do anything that might make her angry. I didn't understand it at the time, but now I know perfectly well why she was so concerned. Because, you see, when a geisha wakes up in the morning she is just like any other woman. Her face may be greasy from sleep, and her breath unpleasant. It may be true that she wears a startling hairstyle even as she struggles to open her eyes; but in every other respect she's a woman like any other, and not a geisha at all. Only when she sits before her mirror to apply her makeup with care does she become a geisha. And I don't mean that this is when she begins to look like one. This is when she begins to think like one too.

In the room, I was instructed to sit about an arm's length to the side of Hatsumomo and just behind her, where I could see her face in the tiny dressing mirror on her makeup stand. She was kneeling on a cushion, wearing a cotton robe that clung to her shoulders, and gathering in her hands a half dozen makeup brushes in various shapes. Some of them were broad like fans, while others looked like a chopstick with a dot of soft hair at the end. Finally she turned and showed them to me.

"These are my brushes," she said. "And do you remember this?" She took from the drawer of her makeup stand a glass container of stark white makeup and waved it around in the air for me to see. "This is the makeup I told you never to touch."

"I haven't touched it," I said.

She sniffed the closed jar several times and said, "No, I don't think you have." Then she put the makeup down and took up three pigment sticks, which she held out for me in the palm of her hand.

"These are for shading. You may look at them."

I took one of the pigment sticks from her. It was about the size of a baby's finger, but hard and smooth as stone, so that it left no trace of color on my skin. One end was wrapped in delicate silver foil that was flecking away from the pressure of use.

Hatsumomo took the pigment sticks back and held out what looked to me like a twig of wood burned at one end.

"This is a nice dry piece of paulownia wood," she said, "for drawing my eyebrows. And this is wax." She took two half-used bars of wax from their paper wrapping and held them out for me to see.

"Now why do you suppose I've shown you these things?"

"So I'll understand how you put on your makeup," I said.

"Heavens, no! I've shown them to you so you'll see there isn't any magic involved. What a pity for you! Because it means that makeup alone won't be enough to change poor Chiyo into something beautiful."

Hatsumomo turned back to face the mirror and sang quietly to herself as she opened a jar of pale yellow cream. You may not believe me when I tell you that this cream was made from nightingale droppings, but it's true. Many geisha used it as a face cream in those days, because it was believed to be very good for the skin; but it was so expensive that Hatsumomo put only a few dots around her eyes and mouth. Then she tore a small piece of wax from one of the bars and, after softening it in her fingertips, rubbed it into the skin of her face, and afterward of her neck and chest. She took some time to wipe her hands clean on a rag, and then moistened one of her flat makeup brushes in a dish of water and rubbed it in the makeup until she had a chalky white paste. She used this to paint her face and neck, but left her eyes bare, as well as the area around her lips and nose. If you've ever seen a child cut holes in paper to make a mask, this was how Hatsumomo looked, until she dampened some smaller brushes and used them to fill in the cutouts. After this she looked as if she'd fallen face-first into a bin of rice flour, for her whole face was ghastly white. She looked like the demon she was, but even so, I was sick with jealousy and shame. Because I knew that in an hour or so, men would be gazing with astonishment at that face; and I would still be there in the okiya, looking sweaty and plain.

Now she moistened her pigment sticks and used them to rub a reddish blush onto her cheeks. Already during my first month in the okiya, I'd seen Hatsumomo in her finished makeup many times; I stole looks at her whenever I could without seeming rude. I'd noticed she used a variety of tints for her cheeks, depending on the colors of her kimono. There was nothing unusual in this; but what I didn't know until years later was that Hatsumomo always chose a shade much redder than others might have used. I can't say why she did it, unless it was to make people think of blood. But Hatsumomo was no fool; she knew how to bring out the beauty in her features.

When she'd finished applying blush, she still had no eyebrows or lips. But for the moment she left her face like a bizarre white mask and asked Auntie to paint the back of her neck. I must tell you something about necks in Japan, if you don't know it; namely, that Japanese men, as a rule, feel about a woman's neck and throat the same way that men in the West might feel about a woman's legs. This is why geisha wear the collars of their kimono so low in the back that the first few bumps of the spine are visible; I suppose it's like a woman in Paris wearing a short skirt. Auntie painted onto the back of Hatsumomo's neck a design called sanbon-ashi-"three legs." It makes a very dramatic picture, for you feel as if you're looking at the bare skin of the neck through little tapering points of a white fence. It was years before I understood the erotic effect it has on men; but in a way, it's like a woman peering out from between her fingers. In fact, a geisha leaves a tiny margin of skin bare all around the hairline, causing her makeup to look even more artificial, something like a mask worn in Noh drama. When a man sits beside her and sees her makeup like a mask, he becomes that much more aware of the bare skin beneath.

While Hatsumomo was rinsing out her brushes, she glanced several times at my reflection in the mirror. Finally she said to me:

"I know what you're thinking. You're thinking you'll never be so beautiful. Well, it's perfectly true."

"I'll have you know," said Auntie, "that some people find Chiyo-chan quite a lovely girl."

"Some people like the smell of rotting fish," said Hatsumomo. And with that, she ordered us to leave the room so she could change into her underrobe.

Auntie and I stepped out onto the landing, where Mr. Bekku stood waiting near the full-length mirror, looking just as he had on the day he'd taken Satsu and me from our home. As I'd learned during my first week in the okiya, his real occupation wasn't dragging girls from their homes at all; he was a dresser, which is to say that he came to the okiya every day to help Hatsumomo put on her elaborate kimono.

The robe Hatsumomo would wear that evening was hanging on a stand near the mirror. Auntie stood smoothing it until Hatsumomo came out wearing an underrobe in a lovely rust color, with a pattern of deep yellow leaves. What happened next made very little sense to me at the time, because the complicated costume of kimono is confusing to people who aren't accustomed to it. But the way it's worn makes perfect sense if it's explained properly.

To begin with, you must understand that a housewife and a geisha wear kimono very differently. When a housewife dresses in kimono, she uses all sorts of padding to keep the robe from bunching unattractively at the waist, with the result that she ends up looking perfectly cylindrical, like a wood column in a temple hall. But a geisha wears kimono so frequently she hardly needs any padding, and bunching never seems to be a problem. Both a housewife and a geisha will begin by taking off their makeup robes and tucking a silk slip around the bare hips; we call this a koshimaki-"hip wrap." It's followed by a short-sleeved kimono undershirt, tied shut at the waist, and then the pads, which look like small contoured pillows with strings affixed for tying them into place. In Hatsumomo's case, with her traditional small-hipped, willowy figure, and her experience of wearing kimono for so many years, she didn't use padding at all.

So far, everything the woman has put on will be hidden from the eye when she is fully dressed. But the next item, the underrobe, isn't really an undergarment at all. When a geisha performs a dance, or sometimes even when she walks along the street, she might raise the hem of her kimono in her left hand to keep it out of the way. This has the effect of exposing the underrobe below the knees; so, you see, the pattern and fabric of the underrobe must be coordinated with the kimono. And, in fact, the underrobe's collar shows as well, just like the collar of a man's shirt when he wears a business suit. Part of Auntie's job in the okiya was to sew a silk collar each day onto the underrobe Hatsumomo planned to wear, and then remove it the next morning for cleaning. An apprentice geisha wears a red collar, but of course Hatsumomo wasn't an apprentice; her collar was white.

When Hatsumomo came out of her room, she was wearing all the items I've described-though we could see nothing but her underrobe, held shut with a cord around her waist. Also, she wore white socks we call tabi, which button along the side with a snug fit. At this point she was ready for Mr. Bekku to dress her. To see him at work, you'd have understood at once just why his help was necessary. Kimono are the same length no matter who wears them, so except for the very tallest women, the extra fabric must be folded beneath the sash. When Mr. Bekku doubled the kimono fabric at the waist and tied a cord to hold it in place, there was never the slightest buckle. Or if one did appear, he gave a tug here or there, and the whole thing straightened out. When he finished his work, the robe always fit the contours of the body beautifully.

Mr. Bekku's principal job as dresser was to tie the obi, which isn't as simple a job as it might sound. An obi like the one Hatsumomo wore is twice as long as a man is tall, and nearly as wide as a woman's shoulders. Wrapped around the waist, it covers the area from the breastbone all the way to below the navel. Most people who know nothing of kimono seem to think the obi is simply tied in the back as if it were a string; but nothing could be further from the truth. A half dozen cords and clasps are needed to keep it in place, and a certain amount of padding must be used as well to shape the knot. Mr. Bekku took several minutes to tie Hatsumomo's obi. When he was done, hardly a wrinkle could be seen anywhere in the fabric, thick and heavy as it was.

I understood very little of what I saw on the landing that day; but it seemed to me that Mr. Bekku tied strings and tucked fabric at a frantic rate, while Hatsumomo did nothing more than hold her arms out and gaze at her image in the mirror. I felt miserable with envy, watching her. Her kimono was a brocade in shades of brown and gold. Below the waist, deer in their rich brown coloring of autumn nuzzled one another, with golds and rusts behind them in a pattern like fallen leaves on a forest floor. Her obi was plum-colored, interwoven with silver threads. I didn't know it at the time, but the outfit she wore probably cost as much as a policeman or a shopkeeper might make in an entire year. And yet to look at Hatsumomo standing there, when she turned around to glance back at herself in the free-standing mirror, you would nave thought that no amount of money on earth could have made a woman look as glamorous as she did.

All that remained were the final touches on her makeup and the ornaments in her hair. Auntie and I followed Hatsumomo back into her room, where she knelt at her dressing table and took out a tiny lacquer box containing rouge for her lips. She used a small brush to paint it on. Thefashion at that time was to leave the upper lip unpainted, which made the lower lip look fuller. White makeup causes all sorts of curious illusions; if a geisha were to paint the entire surface of her lips, her mouth would end up looking like two big slices of tuna. So most geisha prefer a poutier shape, more like the bloom of a violet. Unless a geisha has lips of this shape to begin with-and very few do-she nearly always paints on a more circle-shaped mouth than she actually has. But as I've said, the fashion in those days was to paint only the lower lip, and this is what Hatsumomo did.

Now Hatsumomo took the twig of paulownia wood she'd shown me earlier and lit it with a match. After it had burned for a few seconds she blew it out, cooled it with her fingertips, and then went back to the mirror to draw in her eyebrows with the charcoal. It made a lovely shade of soft gray. Next she went to a closet and selected a few ornaments for her hair, including one of tortoiseshell, and an unusual cluster of pearls at the end of a long pin. When she'd slipped them into her hair, she applied a bit of perfume to the bare flesh on the back of her neck, and tucked the flat wooden vial into her obi afterward in case she should need it again. She also put a folding fan into her obi and placed a kerchief in her right sleeve. And with this she turned to look down at me. She wore the same faint smile she had worn earlier, and even Auntie had to sigh, from how extraordinary Hatsumomo looked.

Chapter six



Whatever any of us may have thought about Hatsumomo, she was like an empress in our okiya since she earned the income by which we all lived. And being an empress she would have been very displeased, upon returning late at night, to find her palace dark and all the servants asleep. That is to say, when she came home too drunk to unbutton her socks, someone had to unbutton them for her; and if she felt hungry, she certainly wasn't going to stroll into the kitchen to prepare something by herself-such as an umeboshi ochazuke, which was a favorite snack of hers, made with leftover rice and pickled sour plums, soaked in hot tea. Actually, our okiya wasn't at all unusual in this respect. The job of waiting up to bow and welcome the geisha home almost always fell to the most junior of the "cocoons"-as the young geisha-in-training were often called. And from the moment I began taking lessons at the school, the most junior cocoon in our okiya was me. Long before midnight, Pumpkin and the two elderly maids were sound asleep on their futons only a meter or so away on the wood floor of the entrance hall; but I had to go on kneeling there, struggling to stay awake until sometimes as late as two o'clock in the morning. Granny's room was nearby, and she slept with her light on and her door opened a crack. The bar of light that fell across my empty futon made me think of a day, not long before Satsu and I were taken away from our village, when I'd peered into the back room of our house to see my mother asleep there. My father had draped fishing nets across the paper screens to darken the room, but it looked so gloomy I decided to open one of the windows; and when I did, a strip of bright sunlight fell across my mother's futon and showed her hand so pale and bony. To see the yellow light streaming from Granny's room onto my futon ... I had to wonder if my mother was still alive. We were so much alike, I felt sure I would have known if she'd died; but of course, I'd had no sign one way or the other.

One night as the fall was growing cooler, I had just dozed off leaning against a post when I heard the outside door roll open. Hatsumomo would be very angry if she found me sleeping, so I tried my best to look alert. But when the interior door opened, I was surprised to see a man, wearing a traditional, loose-fitting workman's jacket tied shut at the hip and a pair of peasant trousers-though he didn't look at all like a workman or a peasant. His hair was oiled back in a very modern manner, and he wore a closely trimmed beard that gave him the air of an intellectual. He leaned down and took my head in his hands to look me square in the face.

"Why, you're a pretty one," he said to me in a low voice. "What's your name?"

I felt certain he must be a workman, though I couldn't think why he'd come so late at night. I was frightened of answering him, but I managed to say my name, and then he moistened a fingertip with his tongue and touched me on the cheek-to take off an eyelash, as it turned out.

"Yoko is still here?" he asked. Yoko was a young woman who spent every day from midafternoon until late evening sitting in our maids' room. Back in those days the okiya and teahouses in Gion were all linked by a private telephone system, and Yoko was kept busier than almost anyone in our okiya, answering that telephone to book Hatsumomo's engagements, sometimes for banquets or parties six months to a year in advance. Usually Hatsumomo's schedule didn't fill up completely until the morning before, and calls continued through the evening from teahouses whose customers wanted her to drop in if she had time. But the telephone hadn't been ringing much tonight, and I thought probably Yoko had fallen asleep just as I had. The man didn't wait for me to answer, but gestured for me to keep quiet, and showed himself down the dirt corridor to the maids' room.

The next thing I heard was Yoko apologizing-for she had indeed fallen asleep-and then she carried on a long conversation with the switchboard operator. She had to be connected with several teahouses before she at last located Hatsumomo and left a message that the Kabuki actor Onoe Shikan had come to town. I didn't know it at the time, but there was no Onoe Shikan; this was just a code.

After this, Yoko left for the night. She didn't seem worried that a man was waiting in the maids' room, so I made up my mind to say nothing to anyone. This turned out to be a good thing, because when Hatsumomo appeared twenty minutes later, she stopped in the entrance hall to say to me:

"I haven't tried to make your life really miserable yet. But if you ever mention that a man came here, or even that I stopped in before the end of the evening, that will change."

She was standing over me as she said this, and when she reached into her sleeve for something, I could see even in the dim light that her forearms were flushed. She went into the maids' room and rolled the door shut behind her. I heard a short muffled conversation, and then the okiya was silent. Occasionally I thought I heard a soft whimper or a groan, but the sounds were so quiet, I couldn't be sure. I won't say I knew just what they were doing in there, but I did think of my sister holding up her bathing dress for the Sugi boy. And I felt such a combination of disgust and curiosity that even if I'd been free to leave my spot, I don't think I could have.

Once a week or so, Hatsumomo and her boyfriend-who turned out to be a chef in a nearby noodle restaurant-came to the okiya and shut themselves in the maids'room. They met other times in other places as well. I know because Yoko was often asked to deliver messages, and I sometimes overheard. All the maids knew what Hatsumomo was doing; and it's a measure of how much power she had over us that no one spoke a word to Mother or Auntie or Granny. Hatsumomo would certainly have been in trouble for having a boyfriend, much less for bringing him back to the okiya. The time she spent with him earned no revenue, and even took her away from parties at teahouses where she would otherwise have been making money. And besides, any wealthy man who might have been interested in an expensive, long-term relationship would certainly think less of her and even change his mind if he knew she was carrying on with the chef of a noodle restaurant.

One night just as I was coming back from taking a drink of water at the well in the courtyard, I heard the outside door roll open and slam against the door frame with a bang.

"Really, Hatsumomo-san," said a deep voice, "you'll wake everyone"

I'd never really understood why Hatsumomo took the risk of bringing her boyfriend back to the okiya-though probably it was the risk itself that excited her. But she'd never before been so careless as to make a lot of noise. I hurried into my position on my knees, and in a moment Hatsumomo was in the formal entrance hall, holding two packages wrapped in linen paper. Soon another geisha stepped in behind her, so tall that she had to stoop to pass through the low doorway. When she stood erect and looked down on me, her lips looked unnaturally big and heavy at the bottom of her long face. No one would have called her pretty.

"This is our foolish lower maid," said Hatsumomo. "She has a name, I think, but why don't you just call her 'Little Miss Stupid.'"

"Well, Little Miss Stupid," said the other geisha. "Go and get your big sister and me something to drink, why don't you?" The deep voice I'd heard was hers, and not the voice of Hatsumomo's boyfriend after all.

Usually Hatsumomo liked to drink a special kind of sake called amakuchi-which was very light and sweet. But amakuchi was brewed only in the winter, and we seemed to have run out. I poured two glasses of beer instead and brought them out. Hatsumomo and her friend had already made their way down to the courtyard, and were standing in wooden shoes in the dirt corridor. I could see they were very drunk, and Hatsumomo's friend had feet much too big for our little wooden shoes, so that she could hardly walk a step without the two of them breaking out in laughter. You may recall that a wooden walkway ran along the outside of the house. Hatsumomo had just set her packages down onto that walkway and was about to open one of them when I delivered the beer.

"I'm not in the mood for beer," she said, and bent down to empty both glasses underneath the foundation of the house.

"I'm in the mood for it," said her friend, but it was already too late. "Why did you pour mine out?"

"Oh, be quiet, Korin!" Hatsumomo said. "You don't need more to drink anyway. Just look at this, because you're going to die from happiness when you see it!" And here, Hatsumomo untied the strings holding shut the linen paper of one package, and spread out upon the walkway an exquisite kimono in different powdery shades of green, with a vine motif bearing red leaves. Really, it was a glorious silk gauze-though of summer weight, and certainly not appropriate for the fall weather. Hatsumomo's friend, Korin, admired it so much that she drew in a sharp breath and choked on her own saliva-which caused them both to burst out laughing again. I decided the time had come to excuse myself. But Hatsumomo said:

"Don't go away, Little Miss Stupid." And then she turned to her friend again and told her, "It's time for some fun, Korin-san. Guess whose kimono this is!"

Korin was still coughing a good deal, but when she wras able to speak, she said, "I wish it belonged to me!"

"Well, it doesn't. It belongs to none other than the geisha we both hate worse than anyone else on earth."

"Oh, Hatsumomo . . . you're a genius. But how did you get Satoka's kimono?"

"I'm not talking about Satoka! I'm talking about. . . Miss Perfect!"

"Who?"

"Miss I'm-So-Much-Better-Than-You-Are' . . . that's who!"

There was a long pause, and then Korin said, "Mameha! Oh, my goodness, it is Mameha's kimono. I can't believe I didn't recognize it! How did you manage to get your hands on it?"

"A few days ago I left something at the Kaburenjo Theater during a rehearsal," Hatsumomo said. "And when I went back to look for it, I heard what I thought was moaning coming up from the basement stairs. So I thought, 'It can't be! This is too much fun!' And when I crept down and turned on the light, guess who I found lying there like two pieces of rice stuck together on the floor?"

"I can't believe it! Mameha?"

"Don't be a fool. She's much too prissy to do such a thing. It was her maid, with the custodian of the theater. I knew she'd do anything to keep me from telling, so I went to her later and told her I wanted this kimono of Mameha's. She started crying when she figured out which one I was describing."

"And what's this other one?" Korin asked, pointing to the second package that lay on the walkway, its strings still tied.

"This one I made the girl buy with her own money, and now it belongs to me."

"Her own money?" said Korin. "What maid has enough money to buy a kimono?"

"Well, if she didn't buy it as she said, I don't want to know where it came from. Anyway, Little Miss Stupid is going to put it away in the storehouse for me."

"Hatsumomo-san, I'm not allowed in the storehouse," I said at once.

"If you want to know where your older sister is, don't make me say anything twice tonight. I have plans for you. Afterward you may ask me a single question, and I'll answer it."

I won't say that I believed her; but of course, Hatsumomo had the power to make my life miserable in any way she wanted. I had no choice but to obey.

She put the kimono-wrapped in its linen paper-into my arms and walked me down to the storehouse in the courtyard. There she opened the door and flipped a light switch with a loud snap. I could see shelves stacked with sheets and pillows, as well as several locked chests and a few folded futons. Hatsumomo grabbed me by the arm and pointed up a ladder along the outside wall.

"The kimono are up there," she said.

I made my way up and opened a sliding wooden door at the top. The storage loft didn't have shelves like the ground-floor level. Instead the walls were lined with red lacquered cases stacked one on top of the next, nearly as high as the ceiling. A narrow corridor passed between these two walls of cases, with slatted windows at the ends, covered over with screens for ventilation. The space was lit harshly just as below, but much more brightly; so that when I had stepped inside, I could read the black characters carved into the fronts of the cases. They said things like Kata-Komon, Ro-"Stenciled Designs, Open-Weave Silk Gauze"; and Kuromontsuki, Awase-"Black-Crested Formal Robes with Inner Lining." To tell the truth, I couldn't understand all the characters at the time, but I did manage to find the case with Hatsumomo's name on it, on a top shelf. I had trouble taking it down, but finally I added the new kimono to the few others, also wrapped in linen paper, and replaced the case where I'd found it. Out of curiosity, I opened another of the cases very quickly and found it stacked to the top with perhaps fifteen kimono, and the others whose lids I lifted were all the same. To see that storehouse crowded with cases, I understood at once why Granny was so terrified of fire. The collection of kimono was probably twice as valuable as the entire villages of Yoroido and Senzuru put together. And as I learned much later, the most expensive ones were in storage somewhere else. They were worn only by apprentice geisha; and since Hatsumomo could no longer wear them, they were kept in a rented vault for safekeeping until they were needed again.

By the time I returned to the courtyard, Hatsumomo had been up to her room to fetch an inkstone and a stick of ink, as well as a brush for calligraphy. I thought perhaps she wanted to write a note and slip it inside the kimono when she refolded it. She had dribbled some water from the well onto her inkstone and was now sitting on the walkway grinding ink. When it was good and black, she dipped a brush in it and smoothed its tip against the stone-so that all the ink was absorbed in the brush and none of it would drip. Then she put it into my hand, and held my hand over the lovely kimono, and said to me: "Practice your calligraphy, little Chiyo."

This kimono belonging to the geisha named Mameha-whom I'd never heard of at the time-was a work of art. Weaving its way from the hem up to the waist was a beautiful vine made of heavily lacquered threads bunched together like a tiny cable and sewn into place. It was a part of the fabric, yet it seemed so much like an actual vine growing there, I had the feeling I could take it in my fingers, if I wished, and tear it away like a weed from the soil. The leaves curling from it seemed to be fading and drying in the autumn weather, and even taking on tints of yellow.

"I can't do it, Hatsumomo-san!" I cried.

"What a shame, little sweetheart," her friend said to me. "Because if you make Hatsumomo tell you again, you'll lose the chance to find your sister."

"Oh, shut up, Korin. Chiyo knows she has to do what I tell her. Write something on the fabric, Miss Stupid. I don't care what it is."

When the brush first touched the kimono, Korin was so excited she let out a squeal that woke one of the elderly maids, who leaned out into the corridor with a cloth around her head and her sleeping robe sagging all around her. Hatsumomo stamped her foot and made a sort of lunging motion, like a cat, which was enough to make the maid go back to her futon. Korin wasn't happy with the few uncertain strokes I'd made on the powdery green silk, so Hatsumomo instructed me where to mark the fabric and what sorts of marks to make. There wasn't any meaning to them; Hatsumomo was just trying in her own way to be artistic. Afterward she refolded the kimono in its wrapping of linen and tied the strings shut again. She and Korin went back to the front entryway to put their lacquered zori back on their feet. When they rolled open the door to the street, Hatsumomo told me to follow. "Hatsumomo-san, if I leave the okiya without permission, Mother will be very angry, and-"

"I'm giving you permission," Hatsumomo interrupted. "We have to return the kimono, don't we? I hope you're not planning to keep me waiting."

So I could do nothing but step into my shoes and follow her up the alleyway to a street running beside the narrow Shiralcawa Stream. Back in those days, the streets and alleys in Gion were still paved beautifully with stone. We walked along in the moonlight for a block or so, beside the weeping cherry trees that drooped down over the black water, and finally across a wooden bridge arching over into a section of Gion I'd never seen before. The embankment of the stream was stone, most of it covered with patches of moss. Along its top, the backs of the teahouses and okiya connected to form a wall. Reed screens over the windows sliced the yellow light into tiny strips that made me think of what the cook had done to a pickled radish earlier that day. I could hear the laughter of a group of men and geisha. Something very funny must have been happening in one of the teahouses, because each wave of laughter was louder than the one before, until they finally died away and left only the twanging of a shamisen from another party. For the moment, I could imagine that Gion was probably a cheerful place for some people. I couldn't help wondering if Satsu might be at one of those parties, even though Awajiumi, at the Gion Registry Office, had told me she wasn't in Gion at all.

Shortly, Hatsumomo and Korin came to a stop before a wooden door.

"You're going to take this kimono up the stairs and give it to the maid there," Hatsumomo said to me. "Or if Miss Perfect herself answers the door, you may give it to her. Don't say anything; just hand it over. We'll be down here watching you."

With this, she put the wrapped kimono into my arms, and Korin rolled open the door. Polished wooden steps led up into the darkness. I was trembling with fear so much, I could go no farther than halfway up them before I came to a stop. Then I heard Korin say into the stairwell in a loud whisper:

"Go on, little girl! No one's going to eat you unless you come back down with the kimono still in your hands-and then we just might. Right, Hatsumomo-san?"

Hatsumomo let out a sigh at this, but said nothing. Korin was squinting up into the darkness, trying to see me; but Hatsumomo, who stood not much higher than Korin's shoulder, was chewing on one of her fingernails and paying no attention at all. Even then, amid all my fears, I couldn't help noticing how extraordinary Hatsumomo's beauty was. She may have been as cruel as a spider, but she was more lovely chewing on her fingernail than most geisha looked posing for a photograph. And the contrast with her friend Korin was like comparing a rock along the roadside with a jewel. Korin looked uncomfortable in her formal hairstyle with all its lovely ornaments, and her kimono seemed to be always in her way. Whereas Hatsumomo wore her kimono as if it were her skin.

On the landing at the top of the stairs, I knelt in the black darkness and called out:

"Excuse me, please!"

I waited, but nothing happened. "Louder," said Korin. "They aren't expecting you."

So I called again, "Excuse me!"

"Just a moment!" I heard a muffled voice say; and soon the door rolled open. The girl kneeling on the other side was no older than Satsu, but thin and nervous as a bird. I handed her the kimono in its wrapping of linen paper. She was very surprised, and took it from me almost desperately.

"Who's there, Asami-san?" called a voice from inside the apartment. I could see a single paper lantern on an antique stand burning beside a freshly made futon. The futon was for the geisha Mameha; I could tell because of the crisp sheets and the elegant silk cover, as well as the takamakura-"tall pillow"-just like the kind Hatsumomo used. It wasn't really a pillow at all, but a wooden stand with a padded cradle for the neck; this was the only way a geisha could sleep without ruining her elaborate hairstyle.

The maid didn't answer, but opened the wrapping around the kimono as quietly as she could, and tipped it this way and that to catch the reflection of the light. When she caught sight of the ink marring it, she gasped and covered her mouth. Tears spilled out almost instantly onto her cheeks, and then a voice called:

"Asami-san! Who's there?"

"Oh, no one, miss!" cried the maid. I felt terribly sorry for her as she dried her eyes quickly against one sleeve. While she was reaching up to slide the door closed, I caught a glimpse of her mistress. I could see at once why Hatsumomo called Mameha "Miss Perfect." Her face was a perfect oval, just like a doll's, and as smooth and delicate-looking as a piece of china, even without her makeup. She walked toward the doorway, trying to peer into the stairwell, but I saw no more of her before the maid quickly rolled the door shut.

The next morning after lessons, I came back to the okiya to find that Mother, Granny, and Auntie were closed up together in the formal reception room on the first floor. I felt certain they were talking about the kimono; and sure enough, the moment Hatsumomo came in from the street, one of the maids went to tell Mother, who stepped out into the entrance hall and stopped Hatsumomo on her way up the stairs.

"We had a little visit from Mameha and her maid this morning," she said.

"Oh, Mother, I know just what you're going to say. I feel terrible about the kimono. I tried to stop Chiyo before she put ink on it, but it was too late. She must have thought it was mine! I don't know why she's hated me so from the moment she came here ... To think she would ruin such a lovely kimono just in the hopes of hurting me!"

By now, Auntie had limped out into the hall. She cried, "Matte mashita!" I understood her words perfectly well; they meant "We've waited for you!" But I had no idea what she meant by them. Actually, it was quite a clever thing to say, because this is what the audience sometimes shouts when a great star makes his entrance in a Kabuki play.

"Auntie, are you suggesting that I had something to do with ruining that kimono?" Hatsumomo said. "Why would I do such a thing?"

"Everyone knows how you hate Mameha," Auntie told her. "You hate anyone more successful than you."

"Does that suggest I ought to be extremely fond of you, Auntie, since you're such a failure?"

"There'll be none of that," said Mother. "Now you listen to me, Hatsumomo. You don't really think anyone is empty-headed enough to believe your little story. I won't have this sort of behavior in the okiya, even from you. I have great respect for Mameha. I don't want to hear of anything like this happening again. As for the kimono, someone has to pay for it. I don't know what happened last night, but there's no dispute about who was holding the brush. The maid saw the girl doing it. The girl will pay," said Mother, and put her pipe back into her mouth.

Now Granny came out from the reception room and called a maid to fetch the bamboo pole.

"Chiyo has enough debts," said Auntie. "I don't see why she should pay Hatsumomo's as well."

"We've talked about this enough," Granny said. "The girl should be beaten and made to repay the cost of the kimono, and that's that. Where's the bamboo pole?"

"I'll beat her myself," Auntie said. "I won't have your joints flaring up again, Granny. Come along, Chiyo."

Auntie waited until the maid brought the pole and then led me down to the courtyard. She was so angry her nostrils were bigger than usual, and her eyes were bunched up like fists. I'd been careful since coming to the okiya not to do anything that would lead to a beating. I felt hot suddenly, and the stepping-stones at my feet grew blurry. But instead of beating me, Auntie leaned the pole against the storehouse and then limped over to say quietly to me:

"What have you done to Hatsumomo? She's bent on destroying you. There must be a reason, and I want to know what it is."

"I promise you, Auntie, she's treated me this way since I arrived. I don't know what I ever did to her."

"Granny may call Hatsumomo a fool, but believe me, Hatsumomo is no fool. If she wants to ruin your career badly enough, she'll do it. Whatever you've done to make her angry, you must stop doing it."

"I haven't done anything, Auntie, I promise you."

"You must never trust her, not even if she tries to help you. Already she's burdened you with so much debt you may never work it off."

"I don't understand ..." I said, "about debt'?"

"Hatsumomo's little trick with that kimono is going to cost you more money than you've ever imagined in your life. That's what I mean about debt."

"But. . . how will I pay?"

"When you begin working as a geisha, you'll pay the okiya back for it, along with everything else you'll owe-your meals and lessons; if you get sick, your doctor's fees. You pay all of that yourself. Why do you think Mother spends all her time in her room, writing numbers in those little books? You owe the okiya even for the money it cost to acquire you."

Throughout my months in Gion, I'd certainly imagined that money must have changed hands before Satsu and I were taken from our home. I often thought of the conversation I'd overheard between Mr. Tanaka and my father, and of what Mrs. Fidget had said about Satsu and me being "suitable." I'd wondered with horror whether Mr. Tanaka had made money by helping to sell us, and how much we had cost. But I'd never imagined that I myself would have to repay it.

"You won't pay it back until you've been a geisha a good long time," she went on. "And you'll never pay it back if you end up a failed geisha like me. Is that the way you want to spend your future?"

At the moment I didn't much care how I spent my future.

"If you want to ruin your life in Gion, there are a dozen ways to do it," Auntie said. "You can try to run away. Once you've done that, Mother will see you as a bad investment; she's not going to put more money into someone who might disappear at any time. That would mean the end of your lessons, and you can't be a geisha without training. Or you can make yourself unpopular with your teachers, so they won't give you the help you need. Or you can grow up to be an ugly woman like me. I wasn't such an unattractive girl when Granny bought me from my parents, but I didn't turn out well, and Granny's always hated me for it. One time she beat me so badly for something I did that she broke one of my hips. That's when I stopped being a geisha. And that's the reason I'm going to do the job of beating you myself, rather than letting Granny get her hands on you."

She led me to the walkway and made me lie down on my stomach there. I didn't much care whether she beat me or not; it seemed to me that nothing could make my situation worse. Every time my body jolted under the pole, I wailed as loudly as I dared, and pictured Hatsumomo's lovely face smiling down at me. When the beating was over, Auntie left me crying there. Soon I felt the walkway tremble under someone's footsteps and sat up to find Hatsumomo standing above me.

"Chiyo, I would be ever so grateful if you'd get out of my way."

"You promised to tell me where I could find my sister, Hatsumomo," I said to her.

"So I did!" She leaned down so that her face was near mine. I thought she was going to tell me I hadn't done enough yet, that when she thought of more for me to do, she would tell me. But this wasn't at all what happened.

"Your sister is in ajorou-ya called Tatsuyo," she told me, "in the district of Miyagawa-cho, just south of Gion."

When she was done speaking, she gave me a little shove with her foot, and I stepped down out of her way.

Chapter seven



I'd never heard the word jorou-ya before; so the very next evening, when Auntie dropped a sewing tray onto the floor of the entrance I hall and asked my help in cleaning it up, I said to her:

"Auntie, what is a jorou-ya?"

Auntie didn't answer, but just went on reeling up a spool of thread.

"Auntie?" I said again.

"It's the sort of place Hatsumomo will end up, if she ever gets what she deserves," she said.

She didn't seem inclined to say more, so I had no choice but to leave it at that.

My question certainly wasn't answered; but I did form the impression that Satsu might be suffering even more than I was. So I began thinking about how I might sneak to this place called Tatsuyo the very next time I had an opportunity. Unfortunately, part of my punishment for ruining Mameha's kimono was confinement in the okiya for fifty days. I was permitted to attend the school as long as Pumpkin accompanied me; but I was no longer permitted to run errands. I suppose I could have dashed out the door at any time, if I'd wanted to, but I knew better than to do something so foolish. To begin with, I wasn't sure how to find the Tatsuyo. And what was worse, the moment I was discovered missing, Mr. Bekku or someone would be sent to look for me. A young maid had run away from the okiya next door only a few months earlier, and they brought her back the following morning. They beat her so badly over the next few days that her wailing was horrible. Sometimes I had to put my fingers in my ears to shut it out.

I decided I had no choice but to wait until my fifty-day confinement was over. In the meantime, I put my efforts into finding ways to repay Hatsumomo and Granny for their cruelty. Hatsumomo I repaid by scraping up pigeon droppings whenever I was supposed to clean them from the stepping-stones in the courtyard and mixing them in with her face cream. The cream already contained unguent of nightingale droppings, as I've mentioned; so maybe it did her no harm, but it did give me satisfaction. Granny I repaid by wiping the toilet rag around on the inside of her sleeping robe; and I was very pleased to see her sniffing at it in puzzlement, though she never took it off. Soon I discovered that the cook had taken it upon herself to punish me further over the kimono incident-even though no one had asked her to-by cutting back on my twice-monthly portions of dried fish. I couldn't think of how to repay her for this until one day I saw her chasing a mouse down the corridor with a mallet. She hated mice worse than cats did, as it turned out. So I swept mouse droppings from under the foundation of the main house and scattered them here and there in the kitchen. I even took a chopstick one day and gouged a hole in the bottom of a canvas bag of rice, so she'd have to take everything out of all the cabinets and search for signs of rodents.

One evening as I was waiting up for Hatsumomo, I heard the telephone ring, and Yoko came out a moment later and went up the stairs. When she came back down, she was holding Hatsumomo's shamisen, disassembled in its lacquer carrying case.

"You'll have to take this to the Mizuki Teahouse," she said to me. "Hatsumomo has lost a bet and has to play a song on a shamisen. I don't know what's gotten into her, but she won't use the one the teahouse has offered. I think she's just stalling, since she hasn't touched a shamisen in years."

Yoko apparently didn't know I was confined to the okiya, which was no surprise, really. She was rarely permitted to leave the maid's room in case she should miss an important telephone call, and she wasn't involved in the life of the okiya in any way. I took the shamisen from her while she put on her kimono overcoat to leave for the night.

And after she had explained to me where to find the Mizuki Teahouse, I slipped into my shoes in the entryway, tingling with nervousness that someone might stop me. The maids and Pumpkin-even the three older women-were all asleep, and Yoko would be gone in a matter of minutes. It seemed to me my chance to find my sister had come at last.

I heard thunder rumble overhead, and the air smelled of rain. So I hurried along the streets, past groups of men and geisha. Some of them gave me peculiar looks, because in those days we still had men and women in Gion who made their living as shamisen porters. They were often elderly; certainly none of them were children. It wouldn't surprise me if some of the people I passed thought I'd stolen that shamisen and was running away with it.

When I reached the Mizuki Teahouse, rain was beginning to fall; but the entrance was so elegant I was afraid to set foot in it. The walls beyond the little curtain that hung in the doorway were a soft orange hue, trimmed in dark wood. A path of polished stone led to a huge vase holding an arrangement of twisted branches from a maple tree with their brilliant red leaves of fall. At length I worked up my courage and brushed past the little curtain. Near the vase, a spacious entryway opened to one side, with a floor of coarsely polished granite. I remember being astounded that all the beauty I'd seen wasn't even the entry-way to the teahouse, but only the path leading to the entryway. It was exquisitely lovely-as indeed it should have been; because although I didn't know it, I was seeing for the first time one of the most exclusive teahouses in all of Japan. And a teahouse isn't for tea, you see; it's the place where men go to be entertained by geisha.

The moment I stepped into the entryway, the door before me rolled open. A young maid kneeling on the raised floor inside gazed down at me; she must have heard my wooden shoes on the stone. She was dressed in a beautiful dark blue kimono with a simple pattern in gray. A year earlier I would have taken her to be the young mistress of such an extravagant place, but now after my months in Gion, I recognized at once that her kimono-though more beautiful than anything in Yoroido-was far too simple for a geisha or for the mistress of a teahouse. And of course, her hairstyle was plain as well. Still, she was far more elegant than I was, and looked down at me with contempt.

"Go to the back," she said.

"Hatsumomo has asked that-"

"Go to the back!" she said again, and rolled the door shut without waiting for me to reply.

The rain was falling more heavily now, so I ran, rather than walked, down a narrow alley alongside the teahouse. The door at the back entrance rolled open as I arrived, and the same maid knelt there waiting for me. She didn't say a word but just took the shamisen case from my arms.

"Miss," I said, "may I ask? . . . Can you tell me where the Miyagawa-cho district is?"

"Why do you want to go there?"

"I have to pick up something."

She gave me a strange look, but then told me to walk along the river until I had passed the Minamiza Theater, and I would find myself in Miyagawa-cho.

I decided to stay under the eaves of the teahouse until the rain stopped. As I stood looking around, I discovered a wing of the building visible between the slats of the fence beside me. I put my eye to the fence and found myself looking across a beautiful garden at a window of glass. Inside a lovely tatami room, bathed in orange light, a party of men and geisha sat around a table scattered with sake cups and glasses of beer. Hatsumomo was there too, and a bleary-eyed old man who seemed to be in the middle of a story. Hatsumomo was amused about something, though evidently not by what the old man was saying. She kept glancing at another geisha with her back to me. I found myself remembering the last time I had peered into a teahouse, with Mr. Tanaka's little daughter, Kuniko, and began to feel that same sense of heaviness I'd felt so long ago at the graves of my father's first family- as if the earth were pulling me down toward it. A certain thought was swelling in my head, growing until I couldn't ignore it any longer. I wanted to turn away from it; but I was as powerless to stop that thought from taking over my mind as the wind is to stop itself from blowing. So I stepped back and sank onto the stone step of the entry-way, with the door against my back, and began to cry. I couldn't stop thinking about Mr. Tanaka. He had taken me from my mother and father, sold me into slavery, sold my sister into something even worse. I had taken him for a kind man. I had thought he was so refined, so worldly. What a stupid child I had been! I would never go back to Yoroido, I decided. Or if I did go back, it would only be to tell Mr. Tanaka how much I hated him.

When at last I got to my feet and wiped my eyes on my wet robe, the rain had eased to a mist. The paving stones in the alley sparkled gold from the reflection of the lanterns. I made my way back through the Tominaga-cho section of Gion to the Minamiza Theater, with its enormous tiled roof that had made me think of a palace the day Mr. Bekku brought Satsu and me from the train station. The maid at the Mizuki Teahouse had told me to walk along the river past the Minamiza; but the road running along the river stopped at the theater. So I followed the street behind the Minamiza instead. After a few blocks I found myself in an area without streetlights and nearly empty of people. I didn't know it at the time, but the streets were empty mostly because of the Great Depression; in any other era Miyagawa-cho might have been busier even than Gion. That evening it seemed to me a very sad place-which indeed I think it has always been. The wooden facades looked like Gion, but the place had no trees, no lovely Shirakawa Stream, no beautiful entryways. The only illumination came from lightbulbs in the open doorways, where old women sat on stools, often with two or three women I took to be geisha on the street beside them. They wore kimono and hair ornaments similar to geisha, but their obi were tied in the front rather than the back. I'd never seen this before and didn't understand it, but it's the mark of a prostitute. A woman who must take her sash on and off all night can't be bothered with tying it behind her again and again.

With the help of one of these women, I found the Tatsuyo in a dead-end alley with only three other houses. All were marked with placards near their doors. I can't possibly describe how I felt when I saw the sign lettered "Tatsuyo," but I will say that my body seemed to tingle everywhere, so much that I felt I might explode. In the doorway of the Tatsuyo sat an old woman on a stool, carrying on a conversation with a much younger woman on a stool across the alley-though really it was the old woman who did all the talking. She sat leaning back against the door frame with her gray robe sagging partway open and her feet stuck out in a pair of zori. These were zori woven coarsely from straw, of the sort you might have seen in Yoroido, and not at all like the beautifully lacquered zori Hatsumomo wore with her kimono. What was more, this old woman's feet were bare, rather than fitted with the smooth silk tabi. And yet she thrust them out with their uneven nails just as though she were proud of the way they looked and wanted to be sure you noticed them.

"Just another three weeks, you know, and I'm not coming back," she was saying. "The mistress thinks I am, but I'm not. My son's wife is going to take good care of me, you know. She's not clever, but she works hard. Didn't you meet her?"

If I did I don't remember," the younger woman across the way said. "There's a little girl waiting to talk with you. Don't you see her?"

At this, the old woman looked at me for the first time. She didn't say anything, but she gave a nod of her head to tell me she was listening.

"Please, ma'am," I said, "do you have a girl here named Satsu?"

"We don't have any Satsu," she said.

I was too shocked to know what to say to this; but in any case, the old woman suddenly looked very alert, because a man was just walking past me toward the entrance. She stood partway and gave him several bows with her hands on her knees and told him, "Welcome!" When he'd entered, she put herself back down on the stool and stuck her feet out again.

"Why are you still here?" the old woman said to me. "I told you we don't have any Satsu."

"Yes, you do," said the younger woman across the way. "Your Yukiyo. Her name used to be Satsu, I remember."

"That's as may be," replied the old woman. "But we don't have any Satsu for this girl. I don't get myself into trouble for nothing."

I didn't know what she meant by this, until the younger woman muttered that I didn't look as if I had even a single sen on me. And she was quite right. A sen-which was worth only one hundredth of a yen-was still commonly used in those days, though a single one wouldn't buy even an empty cup from a vendor. I'd never held a coin of any kind in my hand since coming to Kyoto. When running errands, I asked that the goods be charged to the Nitta okiya.

"If it's money you want," I said, "Satsu will pay you." "Why should she pay to speak to the likes of you?" "I'm her little sister."

She beckoned me with her hand; and when I neared her, she took me by the arms and spun me around.

"Look at this girl," she said to the woman across the alley. "Does she look like a little sister to Yukiyo? If our Yukiyo was as pretty as this one, we'd be the busiest house in town! You're a liar, is what you are." And with this, she gave me a little shove back out into the alley.

I'll admit I was frightened. But I was more determined than frightened, and I'd already come this far; I certainly wasn't going to leave just because this woman didn't believe me. So I turned myself around and gave her a bow, and said to her, "I apologize if I seem to be a liar, ma'am. But I'm not. Yukiyo is my sister. If you'd be kind enough to tell her Chiyo is here, she'll pay you what you want:"

This must have been the right thing to say, because at last she turned to the younger woman across the alley. "You go up for me. You're not busy tonight. Besides, my neck is bothering me. I'll stay here and keep an eye on this girl."

The younger woman stood up from her stool and walked across into the Tatsuyo. I heard her climbing the stairs inside. Finally she came back down and said:

"Yukiyo has a customer. When he's done, someone will tell her to come down."

The old woman sent me into the shadows on the far side of the door to squat where I couldn't be seen. I don't know how much time passed, but I grew more and more worried that someone in the okiya might discover me gone. I had an excuse for leaving, though Mother would be angry with me just the same; but I didn't have an excuse for staying away. Finally a man came out, picking at his teeth with a toothpick. The old woman stood to bow and thanked him for coming. And then I heard the most pleasing sound I'd heard since coming to Kyoto. "You wanted me, ma'am?" It was Satsu's voice.

I sprang to my feet and rushed to where she stood in the doorway. Her skin looked pale, almost gray-though perhaps it was only because she wore a kimono of garish yellows and reds. And her mouth was painted with a bright lipstick like the kind Mother wore. She was just tying her sash in the front, like the women I'd seen on my way there. I felt such relief at seeing her, and such excitement, I could hardly keep from rushing into her arms; and Satsu too let out a cry and covered her hand with her mouth.

"The mistress will be angry with me," the old woman said. "I'll come right back," Satsu told her, and disappeared inside the Tatsuyo again. A moment or so later she was back, and dropped several coins into the woman's hand, who told her to take me into the spare room on the first floor.

"And if you hear me cough," she added, "it means the mistress is coming. Now hurry up."

I followed Satsu into the gloomy entrance hall of the Tatsuyo. Its light was brown more than yellow, and the air smelled like sweat. Beneath the staircase was a sliding door that had come off its track. Satsu tugged it open, and with difficulty managed to shut it behind us. We were standing in a tiny tatami room with only one window, covered by a paper screen. The light from outdoors was enough for me to see Satsu's form, but nothing of her features.

"Oh, Chiyo," she said, and then she reached up to scratch her face. Or at least, I thought she was scratching her face, for I couldn't see well. It took me a moment to understand she was crying. After this I could do nothing to hold back my own tears.

"I'm so sorry, Satsu!" I told her. "It's all my fault." Somehow or other we stumbled toward each other in the dark until we were hugging. I found that all I could think about was how bony she'd grown. She stroked my hair in a way that made me think of my mother, which caused my eyes to well up so much I might as well have been underwater.

"Quiet, Chiyo-chan," she whispered to me. With her face so close to mine, her breath had a pungent odor when she spoke. "I'll get a beating if the mistress finds out you were here. Why did it take you so long!"

"Oh, Satsu, I'm so sorry! I know you came to my okiya . . ."

"Months ago."

"The woman you spoke with there is a monster. She wouldn't give me the message for the longest time."

"I have to run away, Chiyo. I can't stay here in this place any longer."

"I'll come with you!"

"I have a train schedule hidden under the tatami mats upstairs. I've been stealing money whenever I can. I have enough to pay off Mrs. Kishino. She gets beaten whenever a girl escapes. She won't let me go unless I pay her first."

"Mrs. Kishino . . . who is she?"

"The old lady at the front door. She's going away. I don't know who will take her place. I can't wait any longer! This is a horrible spot. Never end up anywhere like this, Chiyo! You'd better go now. The mistress may be here at any moment."

"But wait. When do we run away?"

"Wait in the corner there, and don't say a word. I have to go upstairs."

I did as she told me. While she was gone I heard the old woman at the front door greet a man, and then his heavy footsteps ascended the stairs over my head. Soon someone came down again hurriedly, and the door slid open. I felt panicked for a moment, but it was only Satsu, looking very pale.

"Tuesday. We'll run away Tuesday late at night, five days from now. I have to go upstairs, Chiyo. A man has come for me."

"But wait, Satsu. Where will we meet? What time?"

"I don't know . . . one in the morning. But I don't know where."

I suggested we meet near the Minamiza Theater, but Satsu thought it would be too easy for people to find us. We agreed to meet at a spot exactly across the river from it.

"I have to go now," she said.

"But, Satsu . . . what if I can't get away? Or what if we don't meet up?"

"Just be there, Chiyo! I'll only have one chance. I've waited as long as I can. You have to go now before the mistress comes back. If she catches you here, I may never be able to run away."

There were so many things I wanted to say to her, but she took me out into the hallway and wrenched the door shut behind us. I would have watched her go up the stairs, but in a moment the old woman from the doorway had taken me by the arm and pulled me out into the darkness of the street.

I ran back from Miyagawa-cho and was relieved to find the okiya as quiet as I'd left it. I crept inside and knelt in the dim light of the entrance hall, dabbing the sweat from my forehead and neck with the sleeve of my robe and trying to catch my breath. I was just beginning to settle down, now that I'd succeeded in not getting caught. But then I looked at the door to the maids' room and saw that it stood open a bit, just wide enough to reach an arm through, and I felt myself go cold. No one ever left it that way. Except in hot weather it was usually closed all the way. Now as I watched it, I felt certain I heard a rustling sound from within. I hoped it was a rat; because if it wasn't a rat, it was Hatsumomo and her boyfriend again. I began to wish I hadn't gone to Miyagawa-cho. I wished it so hard that if such a thing had been possible, I think time itself would have begun to run backward just from the force of all my wishing. I got to my feet and crept down onto the dirt corridor, feeling dizzy from worry, and with my throat as dry as a patch of dusty ground. When I reached the door of the maids' room, I brought my eye to the crack to peer inside. I couldn't see well. Because of the damp weather, Yoko had lit charcoal earlier that evening in the brazier set into the floor; only a faint glow remained, and in that dim light, something small and pale was squirming. I almost let out a scream when I saw it, because I was sure it was a rat, with its head bobbing around as it chewed at something. To my horror I could even hear the moist, smacking sounds of its mouth. It seemed to be standing up on top of something, I couldn't tell what. Stretching out toward me were two bundles of what I thought were probably rolled-up fabric, which gave me the impression it had chewed its way up between them, spreading them apart as it went. It was eating something Yoko must have left there in the room. I was just about to shut the door, for I was frightened it might run out into the corridor with me, when I heard a woman's moan. Then suddenly from beyond where the rat was chewing, a head raised up and Hatsumomo was looking straight at me. I jumped back from the door. What I'd thought were bundles of rolled-up fabric were her legs. And the rat wasn't a rat at all. It was her boyfriend's pale hand protruding from his sleeve.

"What is it?" I heard her boyfriend's voice say. "Is someone there?"

"It's nothing," Hatsumomo whispered.

"Someone's there."

"No, it's no one at all," she said. "I thought I heard something, but it's no one."

There was no question in my mind Hatsumomo had seen me. But she apparently didn't want her boyfriend to know. I hurried back to kneel in the hallway, feeling as shaken as if I'd almost been run over by a trolley. I heard groans and noises coming from the maids' room for some time, and then they stopped. When Hatsumomo and her boyfriend finally stepped out into the corridor, her boyfriend looked right at me.

"That girl's in the front hall," he said. "She wasn't there when I came in."

"Oh, don't pay her any attention. She was a bad girl tonight and went out of the okiya when she wasn't supposed to. I'll deal with her later."

"So there was someone spying on us. Why did you lie to me?" "Koichi-san," she said, "you're in such a bad mood tonight!" "You aren't the least surprised to see her. You knew she was there
all along."

Hatsumomo's boyfriend came striding up to the front entrance hall and stopped to glower at me before stepping down into the entry-way. I kept my eyes to the floor, but I could feel myself blush a brilliant red. Hatsumomo rushed past me to help him with his shoes. I heard her speak to him as I'd never heard her speak to anyone before, in a pleading, almost whining voice.

"Koichi-san, please," she said, "calm down. I don't know what's gotten into you tonight! Come again tomorrow . . ."

"I don't want to see you tomorrow."

"I hate when you make me wait so long. I'll meet you anywhere you say, on the bottom of the riverbed, even."

"I don't have anywhere to meet you. My wife watches over me too much as it is."

"Then come back here. We have the maids' room-"

"Yes, if you like sneaking around and being spied on! Just let me go, Hatsumomo. I want to get home."

"Please don't be angry with me, Koichi-san. I don't know why you get this way! Tell me you'll come back, even if it isn't tomorrow."

"One day I won't come back," he said. "I've told you that all along."

I heard the outside door roll open, and then it closed again; after a time Hatsumomo came back into the front entrance hall and stood peering down the corridor at nothing. Finally she turned to me and wiped the moisture from her eyes.

"Well, little Chiyo," she said. "You went to visit that ugly sister of yours, didn't you?"

"Please, Hatsumomo-san," I said.

"And then you came back here to spy on me!" Hatsumomo said this so loudly, she woke one of the elderly maids, who propped herself on her elbow to look at us. Hatsumomo shouted at her, "Go back to sleep, you stupid old woman!" and the maid shook her head and lay back down again.

"Hatsumomo-san, I'll do whatever you want me to do," I said. "I don't want to get in trouble with Mother."

"Of course you'll do whatever I want you to do. That isn't even a subject for discussion! And you're already in trouble."

"I had to go out to deliver your shamisen."

"That was more than an hour ago. You went to find your sister, and you made plans to run away with her. Do you think I'm stupid? And then you came back here to spy on me!"

"Please forgive me," I said. "I didn't know it was you there! I thought it was-"

I wanted to tell her I'd thought I'd seen a rat, but I didn't think she'd take it kindly.

She peered at me for a time and then went upstairs to her room. When she came back down, she was holding something in her fist.

"You want to run away with your sister, don't you?" she said. "I think that's a fine idea. The sooner you're out of the okiya, the better for me. Some people think I don't have a heart, but it isn't true. It's touching to imagine you and that fat cow going off to try to make a living someplace, all alone in the world! The sooner you're out of here, the better for me. Stand up."

I stood, though I was afraid of what she was going to do to me. Whatever she was holding in her fist she wanted to tuck beneath the sash of my robe; but when she stepped toward me, I backed away.

"Look," she said, and opened her hand. She was holding a number of folded bills-more money than I'd ever seen, though I don't know how much. "I've brought this from my room for you. You don't need to thank me. Just take it. You'll repay me by getting yourself out of Kyoto so I'll never have to see you again."

Auntie had told me never to trust Hatsumomo, even if she offered to help me. But when I reminded myself how much Hatsumomo hated me, I understood that she wasn't really helping me at all; she was helping herself to be rid of me. I stood still as she reached into my robe and tucked the bills under my sash. I felt her glassy nails brushing against my skin. She spun me around to retie the sash so the money wouldn't slip, and then she did the strangest thing. She turned me around to face her again, and began to stroke the side of my head with her hand, wearing an almost motherly gaze. The very idea of Hatsu-morno behaving kindly toward me was so odd, I felt as if a poisonous snake had come up and begun to rub against me like a cat. Then before I knew what she was doing, she worked her fingers down to my scalp; and all at once she clenched her teeth in fury and took a great handful of my hair, and yanked it to one side so hard I fell to my knees and cried out. I couldn't understand what was happening; but soon Hatsumomo had pulled me to my feet again, and began leading me up the stairs yanking my hair this way and that. She was shouting at me in anger, while I screamed so loudly I wouldn't have been surprised if we'd woken people all up and down the street.

When we reached the top of the stairs, Hatsumomo banged on Mother's door and called out for her. Mother opened it very quickly, tying her sash around her middle and looking angry.

"What is the matter with the two of you!" she said,

"My jewelry!" Hatsumomo said: "This stupid, stupid girl!" And here she began to beat me. I could do nothing but huddle into a ball on the floor and cry out for her to stop until Mother managed to restrain her somehow. By that time Auntie had come to join her on the landing.

"Oh, Mother," Hatsumomo said, "on my way back to the okiya this evening, I thought I saw little Chiyo at the end of the alleyway talking to a man. I didn't think anything of it, because I knew it couldn't be her. She isn't supposed to be out of the okiya at all. But when I went up to my room, I found my jewelry box in disarray, and rushed back down just in time to see Chiyo handing something over to the man. She tried to run away, but I caught her!"

Mother was perfectly silent a long while, looking at me.

"The man got away," Hatsumomo went on, "but I think Chiyo may have sold some of my jewelry to raise money. She's planning to run away from the okiya, Mother, that's what I think . . . after we've been so kind to her!"

"All right, Hatsumomo," Mother said. "That's quite enough. You and Auntie go into your room and find out what's missing."

The moment I was alone with Mother, I looked up at her from where I knelt on the floor and whispered, "Mother, it isn't true . . .

Hatsumomo was in the maids' room with her boyfriend. She's angry about something, and she's taking it out on me. I didn't take anything from her!"

Mother didn't speak. I wasn't even sure she'd heard me. Soon Hatsumomo came out and said she was missing a brooch used for decorating the front of an obi.

"My emerald brooch, Mother!" she kept saying, and crying just like a fine actress. "She's sold my emerald brooch to that horrible man! It was my broochl Who does she think she is to steal such a thing from me!"

"Search the girl," Mother said.

Once when I was a little child of six or so, I watched a spider spinning its web in a corner of the house. Before the spider had even finished its job, a mosquito flew right into the web and was trapped there. The spider didn't pay it any attention at first, but went on with what it was doing; only when it was finished did it creep over on its pointy toes and sting that poor mosquito to death. As I sat there on that wooden floor and watched Hatsumomo come reaching for me with her delicate fingers, I knew I was trapped in a web she had spun for me. I could do nothing to explain the cash I was carrying beneath my sash. When she drew it out, Mother took it from her and counted it.

"You're a fool to sell an emerald brooch for so little," she said to me. "Particularly since it will cost you a good deal more to replace it."

She tucked the money into her own sleeping robe, and then said to Hatsumomo:

"You had a boyfriend here in the okiya tonight."

Hatsumomo was taken aback by this; but she didn't hesitate to reply, "Whatever gave you such an idea, Mother?"

There was a long pause, and then Mother said to Auntie, "Hold her arms."

Auntie took Hatsumomo by the arms and held her from behind, while Mother began to pull open the seams of Hatsumomo's kimono at the thigh. I thought Hatsumomo would resist, but she didn't. She looked at me with cold eyes as Mother gathered up the koshimaki and pushed her knees apart. Then Mother reached up between her legs, and when her hand came out again her fingertips were wet. She rubbed her thumb and fingers together for a time, and then smelled them. After this she drew back her hand and slapped Hatsumomo across the face, leaving a streak of moisture.

Chapter eight



Hnatsumomo wasn't the only one angry at me the following day, because Mother ordered that all the maids be denied servings of dried fish for six weeks as punishment for having tolerated Hatsumomo's boyfriend in the okiya. I don't think the maids could have been more upset with me if I'd actually stolen the food from their bowls with my own hands; and as for Pumpkin, she began to cry when she found out what Mother had ordered. But to tell the truth, I didn't feel as uneasy as you might imagine to have everyone glowering at me, and to have the cost of an obi brooch I'd never seen or even touched added to my debts. Anything that made life more difficult for me only strengthened my determination to run away.

I don't think Mother really believed I'd stolen the obi brooch, though she was certainly content to buy a new one at my expense if it would keep Hatsumomo happy. But she had no doubts at all that I'd left the okiya when I shouldn't have, because Yoko confirmed it. I felt almost as though my life itself were slipping away from me when I learned that Mother had ordered the front door locked to prevent me from going out again. How would I escape from the okiya now? Only Auntie had a key, and she kept it around her neck even while she was sleeping. As an extra measure, the job of sitting by the door in the evenings was taken away from me and given to Pumpkin instead, who had to wake Auntie to have the door unlocked when Hatsumomo came home.

Every night I lay on my futon scheming; but as late as Monday, the very day before Satsu and I had arranged to run away, I'd come up with no plan for my escape. I grew so despondent I had no energy at all for my chores, and the maids chided me for dragging my cloth along the woodwork I was supposed to be polishing, and pulling a broom along the corridor I was supposed to be sweeping. I spent a long while Monday afternoon pretending to weed the courtyard while really only squatting on the stones and brooding. Then one of the maids gave me the job of washing the wood floor in the maids' room, where Yoko was seated near the telephone, and something extraordinary happened. I squeezed a rag full of water onto the floor, but instead of snaking along toward the doorway as I would have expected, it ran toward one of the back corners of the room.

"Yoko, look," I said. "The water's running uphill." Of course it wasn't really uphill. It only looked that way to me. I was so startled by this that I squeezed more water and watched it run into the corner again. And then . . . well, I can't say exactly how it happened; but I pictured myself flowing up the stairs to the second-floor landing, and from there up the ladder, through the trapdoor, and onto the roof beside the gravity-feed tank.

The roof! I was so astonished at the thought, I forgot my surroundings completely; and when the telephone near Yoko rang, I almost cried out in alarm. I wasn't sure what I would do once I reached the roof, but if I could succeed in finding my way down from there, I might meet Satsu after all.

The following evening I made a great show of yawning when I went to bed and threw myself onto my futon as though I were a sack of rice. Anyone watching me would have thought I was asleep within a moment, but actually I could hardly have been more awake. I lay for a long while thinking of my house and wondering what expression would form itself on my father's face when he looked up from the table to see me standing in the doorway. Probably the pockets at his eyes would droop down and he would start to cry, or else his mouth would take on that odd shape that was his way of smiling. I didn't allow myself to picture my mother quite so vividly; just the thought of seeing her again was enough to bring tears to my eyes.

At length the maids settled down onto their futons beside me on the floor, and Pumpkin took up her position waiting for Hatsumomo. I listened to Granny chanting sutras, which she did every night before going to bed. Then I watched her through the partly opened door as she stood beside her futon and changed into her sleeping robe. I was horrified by what I saw when her robe slipped from her shoulders, for I'd never seen her completely naked before. It wasn't just the chicken-like skin of her neck and shoulders; her body made me think of a pile of wrinkled clothing. She looked strangely pitiful to me while she fumbled to unfold the sleeping robe she'd picked up from the table. Everything drooped from her, even her protruding nipples that hung like fingertips. The more I watched her, the more I came to feel that she must be struggling in that cloudy, old lady's mind of hers with thoughts of her own mother and father-who had probably sold her into slavery when she was a little girl-just as I had been struggling with thoughts of my own parents. Perhaps she had lost a sister too. I'd certainly never thought of Granny in this way before. I found myself wondering if she'd started life much as I had. It made no difference that she was a mean old woman and I was just a struggling little girl. Couldn't the wrong sort of living turn anyone mean? I remembered very well that one day back in Yoroido, a boy pushed me into a thorn bush near the pond. By the time I clawed my way out I was mad enough to bite through wood. If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.

If I hadn't already resolved to run away, I'm sure I would have been terrified to think of the suffering that probably lay in wait for me in Gion. Surely it would make me into the sort of old woman Granny had become. But I comforted myself with the thought that by the following day I could begin forgetting even my memories of Gion. I already knew how I would reach the roof; as to how I would climb from there to the street. . . well, I wasn't at all sure. I would have no choice but to take my chances in the dark. Even if I did make it down without hurting myself, reaching the street would be only the beginning of my troubles. However much life in Gion was a struggle, life after running away would surely be more of a struggle. The world was simply too cruel; how could I survive? I lay on my futon in anguish for a while, wondering if I really had the strength to do it... but Satsu would be waiting for me. She would know what to do.

Quite some time passed before Granny settled down in her room. By then the maids were snoring loudly. I pretended to turn over on my futon in order to steal a glance at Pumpkin, kneeling on the floor not far away. I couldn't see her face well, but I had the impression she was growing drowsy. Originally I'd planned to wait until she fell asleep, but I had no idea of the time any longer; and besides, Hatsumomo might come home at any moment. I sat up as quietly as I could, thinking that if anyone noticed me I would simply go to the toilet and come back again. But no one paid me any attention. A robe for me to wear on the following morning lay folded on the floor nearby. I took it in my arms and went straight for the stairwell.

Outside Mother's door, I stood listening for a while. She didn't usually snore, so I couldn't judge anything from the silence, except that she wasn't talking on the telephone or making any other sort of noise. Actually, her room wasn't completely silent because her little dog, Taku, was wheezing in his sleep. The longer I listened, the more his wheezing sounded like someone saying my name: "CHI-yo! CHI-yo!" I wasn't prepared to sneak out of the okiya until I'd satisfied myself Mother was asleep, so I decided to slide the door open and have a look. If she was awake, I would simply say I thought someone had called me. Like Granny, Mother slept with the lamp on her table illuminated; so when I opened the door a crack and peered in, I could see the parched bottoms of her feet sticking out of the sheets. Taku lay between her feet with his chest rising and falling, making that wheezy noise that sounded so much like my name.

I shut her door again and changed my clothes in the upstairs hallway. The only thing I lacked now was shoes-and I never considered running away without them, which ought to give you some idea how much I'd changed since the summer. If Pumpkin hadn't been kneeling in the front entrance hall, I would have taken a pair of the wooden shoes used for walking along the dirt corridor. Instead I took the shoes reserved for use in the upstairs toilet. They were of a very poor quality, with a single leather thong across the top to hold them in place on the foot. To make matters worse, they were much too big for me; but I had no other option.

After closing the trapdoor silently behind me, I stuffed my sleeping robe under the gravity-feed tank and managed to climb up and straddle my legs over the ridge of the roof. I won't pretend I wasn't frightened; the voices of people on the street certainly seemed a long way below me. But I had no time to waste being afraid, for it seemed to me that at any moment one of the maids, or even Auntie or Mother, might pop up through the trapdoor looking for me. I put the shoes onto my hands to keep from dropping them and began scooting my way along the ridge, which proved to be more difficult than I'd imagined. The roof tiles were so thick they made almost a small step where they overlapped, and they clanked against one another when I shifted my weight unless I moved very slowly. Every noise I made echoed off the roofs nearby.

I took several minutes to cross just to the other side of our okiya. The roof of the building next door was a step lower than ours. I climbed down onto it and stopped a moment to look for a path to the street; but despite the moonlight, I could see only a sheet of blackness. The roof was much too high and steep for me to consider sliding down it on a gamble. I wasn't at all sure the next roof would be better; and I began to feel a bit panicky. But I continued along from ridge to ridge until I found myself, near the end of the block, looking down on one side into an open courtyard. If I could make my way to the gutter, I could scoot around it until I came to what I thought was probably a bath shed. From the top of the bath shed, I could climb down into the courtyard easily.

I didn't relish the thought of dropping into the middle of someone else's house. I had no doubt it was an okiya; all the houses along our block were. In all likelihood someone would be waiting at the front door for the geisha to return, and would grab me by the arm as I tried to run out. And what if the front door was locked just as ours was? I wouldn't even have considered this route if I'd had any other choice. But I thought the path down looked safer than anything I'd seen yet.

I sat on the ridge a long while listening for any clues from the courtyard below. All I could hear was laughter and conversation from the street. I had no idea what I would find in the courtyard when I dropped in, but I decided I'd better make my move before someone in my okiya discovered me gone. If I'd had any idea of the damage I was about to do to my future, I would have spun around on that ridge as fast as I could have and scooted right back where I'd come from. But I knew nothing of what was at stake. I was just a child who thought she was embarking on a great adventure.

I swung my leg over, so that in a moment I was dangling along the slope of the roof, just barely clinging to the ridge. I realized with some panic that it was muc'h steeper than I'd thought it would be. I tried to scamper back up, but I couldn't do it. With the toilet shoes on my hands, I couldn't grab onto the ridge of the roof at all, but only hook my wrists over it. I knew I had committed myself, for I would never manage to climb back up again; but it seemed to me that the very moment I let go, I would slide down that roof out of control. My mind was racing with these thoughts, but before I'd made the decision to let go of the ridge, it let go of me. At first I glided down more slowly than I would have expected, which gave me some hope I might stop myself farther down, where the roof curved outward to form the eaves. But then my foot dislodged one of the roof tiles, which slid down with a clattering noise and shattered in the courtyard below. The next thing I knew, I lost my grip on one of the toilet shoes and it slid right past me.

I heard the quiet plop as it landed below, and then a much worse sound-the sound of footsteps coming down a wooden walkway toward the courtyard.

Many times I had seen the way flies stood on a wall or ceiling just as if they were on level ground. Whether they did it by having sticky feet, or by not weighing very much, I had no idea, but when I heard the sound of someone walking below, I decided that whatever I did I would find a way of sticking to that roof just as a fly might do, and I would find it right away. Otherwise I was going to end up sprawled in that courtyard in another few seconds. I tried digging my toes into the roof, and then my elbows and knees. As a final act of desperation I did the most foolish thing of all-I slipped the shoe from my other hand and tried to stop myself by pressing my two palms against the roof tiles. My palms must have been dripping with sweat, because instead of slowing down I began to pick up speed the moment I touched them to the roof. I heard myself skidding with a hissing sound; and then suddenly the roof was no longer there.

For a moment I heard nothing; only a frightening, empty silence. As I fell through the air I had time to form one thought clearly in my mind: I pictured a woman stepping into the courtyard, looking down to see the shattered tile on the ground, and then looking up toward the roof in time to see me fall out of the sky right on top of her; but of course this isn't what happened. I turned as I fell, and landed on my side on the ground. I had the sense to bring an arm up to protect my head; but still I landed so heavily that I knocked myself into a daze. I don't know where the woman was standing, or even if she was in the courtyard at the time I fell out of the sky. But she must have seen me come down off that roof, because as I lay stunned on the ground I heard her say:

"Good heavens! It's raining little girls!"

Well, I would have liked to jump to my feet and run out, but I couldn't do it. One whole side of my body felt dipped in pain. Slowly I became aware of two women kneeling over me. One kept saying something again and again, but I couldn't make it out. They talked between themselves and then picked me up from the moss and sat me on the wooden walkway. I remember only one fragment of their conversation.

"I'm telling you, she came off the roof, ma'am."

"Why on earth was she carrying toilet slippers with her? Did you go up there to use the toilet, little girl? Can you hear me? What a dangerous thing to do! You're lucky you didn't break into pieces when you fell!"

"She can't hear you, ma'am. Look at her eyes."

"Of course she can hear me. Say something, little girl!"

But I couldn't say anything. All I could do was think about how Satsu would be waiting for me opposite the Minamiza Theater, and I would never show up.

The maid was sent up the street to knock on doors until she found where I'd come from, while I lay curled up in a ball in a state of shock. I was crying without tears and holding my arm, which hurt terribly, when suddenly I felt myself pulled to my feet and slapped across the face.

"Foolish, foolish girl!" said a voice. Auntie was standing before me in a rage, and then she pulled me out of that okiya and behind her up the street. When we reached our okiya, she leaned me up against the wooden door and slapped me again across the face.

"Do you know what you've done?" she said to me, but I couldn't answer. "What were you thinking! Well, you've ruined everything for yourself ... of all the stupid things! Foolish, foolish girl!"

I'd never imagined Auntie could be so angry. She dragged me into the courtyard and threw me onto my stomach on the walkway. I began to cry in earnest now, for I knew what was coming. But this time instead of beating me halfheartedly as she had before, Auntie poured a bucket of water over my robe to make-the rod sting all the more, and then struck me so hard I couldn't even draw a breath. When she was done beating me, she threw the rod onto the ground and rolled me over onto my back. "You'll never be a geisha now," she cried. "I warned you not to make a mistake like this! And now there's nothing I or anyone else can do to help you."

I heard nothing more of what she said because of the terrible screams from farther up the walkway. Granny was giving Pumpkin a beating for not having kept a better eye on me.

As it turned out, I'd broken my arm landing as I had in that courtyard. The next morning a doctor came and took me to a clinic nearby. It was late afternoon already by the time I was brought back to the okiya with a plaster cast on my arm. I was still in terrible pain, but Mother called me immediately to her room. For a long while she sat staring at me, patting Taku with one hand and holding her pipe in her mouth with the other.

"Do you know how much I paid for you?" she said to me at last.

"No, ma'am," I answered. "But you're going to tell me you paid more than I'm worth."

I won't say this was a polite way to respond. In fact, I thought Mother might slap me for it, but I was beyond caring. It seemed to me nothing in the world would ever be right again. Mother clenched her teeth together and gave a few coughs in that strange laugh of hers.

"You're right about that!" she said. "Half a yen might have been more than you're worth. Well, I had the impression you were clever. But you're not clever enough to know what's good for you."

She went back to puffing at her pipe for a while, and then she said, "I paid seventy-five yen for you, that's what I paid. Then you went and ruined a kimono, and stole a brooch, and now you've broken your arm, so I'll be adding medical expenses to your debts as well. Plus you have your meals and lessons, and just this morning I heard from the mistress of the Tatsuyo, over in Miyagawa-cho, that your older sister has run away. The mistress there still hasn't paid me what she owes. Now she tells me she's not going to do it! I'll add that to your debt as well, but what difference will it make? You already owe more than you'll ever repay."

So Satsu had escaped. I'd spent the day wondering, and now I had my answer. I wanted to feel happy for her, but I couldn't.

"I suppose you could repay it after ten or fifteen years as a geisha," she went on, "if you happened to be a success. But who would invest another sen in a girl who runs away?"

I wasn't sure how to reply to any of this, so I told Mother I was sorry. She'd been talking to me pleasantly enough until then, but after my apology, she put her pipe on the table and stuck out her jaw so much-from anger, I suppose-that she gave me the impression of an animal about to strike.

"Sorry, are you? I was a fool to invest so much money in you in the first place. You're probably the most expensive maid in all of Gion! If I could sell off your bones to pay back some of your debts, why, I'd rip them right out of your body!"

With this, she ordered me out of the room and put her pipe back into her mouth.

My lip was trembling when I left, but I held my feelings in; for there on the landing stood Hatsumomo. Mr. Bekku was waiting to finish tying her obi while Auntie, with a handkerchief in her hand, stood in front of Hatsumomo, peering into her eyes.

"Well, it's all smeared," Auntie said. "There's nothing more I can do. You'll have to finish your little cry and redo your makeup afterward."

I knew exactly why Hatsumomo was crying. Her boyfriend had stopped seeing her, now that she'd been barred from bringing him to the okiya. I'd learned this the morning before and felt certain Hatsumomo was going to blame her troubles on me. I was eager to get down the stairs before she spotted me, but it was already too late. She snatched the handkerchief from Auntie's hand and made a gesture calling me over. I certainly didn't want to go, but I couldn't refuse.

"You've got no business with Chiyo," Auntie said to her. "Just go into your room and finish your makeup."

Hatsumomo didn't reply, but drew me into her room and shut the door behind us.

"I've spent days trying to decide exactly how I ought to ruin your life," she said to me. "But now you've tried to run away, and done it for me! I don't know whether to feel pleased. I was looking forward to doing it myself."

It was very rude of me, but I bowed to Hatsumomo and slid open the door to let myself out without replying. She might have struck me for it, but she only followed me into the hall and said, "If you wonder what it will be like as a maid all your life, just have a talk with Auntie! Already you're like two ends of the same piece of string. She has her broken hip; you have your broken arm. Perhaps one day you'll even look like a man, just the way Auntie does!"

"There you go, Hatsumomo," Auntie said. "Show us that famous charm of yours."

Back when I was a little girl of five or six, and had never so much as thought about Kyoto once in all my life, I knew a little boy named Noboru in our village. I'm sure he was a nice boy, but he had a very unpleasant smell, and I think that's why he was so unpopular. Whenever he spoke, all the other children paid him no more attention than if a bird had chirped or a frog had croaked, and poor Noboru often sat right down on the ground and cried. In the months after my failed escape, I came to understand just what life must have been like for him; because no one spoke to me at all unless it was to give me an order. Mother had always treated me as though I were only a puff of smoke, for she had more important things on her mind. But now all the maids, and the cook, and Granny did the same.

All that bitter cold winter, I wondered what had become of Satsu, and of my mother and father. Most nights when I lay on my futon I was sick with anxiety, and felt a pit inside myself as big and empty as if the whole world were nothing more than a giant hall empty of people. To comfort myself I closed my eyes and imagined that I was walking along the path beside the sea cliffs in Yoroido. I knew it so well I could picture myself there as vividly as if I really had run away with Satsu and was back at home again. In my mind I rushed toward our tipsy house holding Satsu's hand-though I had never held her hand before- knowing that in another few moments we would be reunited with our mother and father. I never did manage to reach the house in these fantasies; perhaps I was too afraid of what I might find there, and in any case, it was the trip along the path that seemed to comfort me. Then at some point I would hear the cough of one of the maids near me, or the embarrassing sound of Granny passing wind with a groan, and in that instant the smell of the sea air dissolved, the coarse dirt of the path beneath my feet turned into the sheets of my futon once again, and I was left where I'd started with nothing but my own loneliness.

When spring came, the cherry trees blossomed in Maruyama Park, and no one in Kyoto seemed to talk about anything else. Hatsumomo was busier than usual during the daytime because of all the blossom-viewing parties. I envied her the bustling life I saw her prepare for every afternoon. I'd already begun to give up my hopes of awakening one night to find that Satsu had sneaked into our okiya to rescue me, or that in some other way I might hear word of my family in Yoroido. Then one morning as Mother and Auntie were preparing to take Granny on a picnic, I came down the stairs to find a package on the floor of the front entrance hall. It was a box about as long as my arm, wrapped in heavy paper and tied up with frayed twine. I knew it was none of my business; but since no one was around to see me, I went over to read the name and address in heavy characters on the face. It said:

Sakamoto Chiyo

c/o Nitta Kayoko

Gion Tominaga-cho

City of Kyoto, Kyoto Prefecture

I was so astonished that I stood a long while with my hand over my mouth, and I'm sure my eyes were as big around as teacups. The return address, beneath a patch of stamps, was from Mr. Tanaka. I had no idea what could possibly be in the package, but seeing Mr. Tanaka's name there . . . you may find it absurd, but I honestly hoped perhaps he'd recognized his mistake in sending me to this terrible place, and had mailed me something to set me free from the okiya. I can't imagine any package that might free a little girl from slavery; I had trouble imagining it even then. But I truly believed in my heart that somehow when that package was opened, my life would be changed forever.

Before I could figure out what to do next, Auntie came down the stairs and shooed me away from the box, even though it had my name on it. I would have liked to open it myself, but she called for a knife to cut the twine and then took her time unwrapping the coarse paper. Underneath was a layer of canvas sacking stitched up with heavy fishermen's thread. Sewn to the sacking by its corners was an envelope bearing my name. Auntie cut the envelope free and then tore away the sacking to reveal a dark wooden box. I began to get excited about what I might find inside, but when Auntie took off the lid, I felt myself all at once growing heavy. For there, nestled amid folds of white linen, lay the tiny mortuary tablets that had once stood before the altar in our tipsy house. Two of them, which I had never seen before, looked newer than the others and bore unfamiliar Buddhist names, written with characters I couldn't understand. I was afraid even to wonder why Mr. Tanaka had sent them.

For the moment, Auntie left the box there on the floor, with the tablets lined up so neatly inside, and took the letter from the envelope to read it. I stood for what seemed a long while, full of my fears, and not daring even to think. Finally, Auntie sighed heavily and led me by the arm into the reception room. My hands were trembling in my lap as I knelt at the table, probably from the force of trying to keep all my terrible thoughts from rising to the surface of my mind. Perhaps it was really a hopeful sign that Mr. Tanaka had sent me the mortuary tablets. Wasn't it possible that my family would be moving to Kyoto, that we would buy a new altar together and set up the tablets before it? Or perhaps Satsu had asked that they be sent to me because she was on her way back. And then Auntie interrupted my thoughts.

"Chiyo, I'm going to read you something from a man named Tanaka Ichiro," she said in a voice that was strangely heavy and slow. I don't think I breathed at all while she spread the paper out on the table.

Dear Chiyo:

Two seasons have passed since you left Yoroido, and soon the trees will give birth to a new generation of blossoms. Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.

As one who was once an orphaned child himself, this humble person is sorry to have to inform you of the terrible burden you must bear. Six weeks after you left for your new life in Kyoto, the suffering of your honored mother came to its end, and only a few weeks afterward your honored father departed this world as well. This humble person is deeply sorry for your loss and hopes you will rest assured that the remains of both your honored parents are enshrined in the village cemetery. Services were conducted for them at the Hoko-ji Temple in Senzuru, and in addition the women in Yoroido have chanted sutras. This humble person feels confident that both your honored parents have found their places in paradise.

The training of an apprentice geisha is an arduous path. However, this humble person is filled with admiration for those who are able to recast their suffering and become great artists. Some years ago while visiting Gion, it was my honor to view the spring dances and attend a party afterward at a teahouse, and the experience has left the deepest impression. It gives me some measure of satisfaction to know that a safe place in this world has been found for you, Chiyo, and that you will not be forced to suffer through years of uncertainty. This humble person has been alive long enough to see two generations of children grow up, and knows how rare it is for ordinary birds to give birth to a swan. The swan who goes on living in its parents' tree will die; this is why those who are beautiful and talented bear the burden of finding their own way in the world.

Your sister, Satsu, came through Yoroido late this past fall, but ran away again at once with the son of Mr. Sugi. Mr. Sugi fervently hopes to see his beloved son again in this lifetime, and asks therefore that you please notify him immediately if you receive word from your sister.

Most sincerely yours, Tanaka Ichiro

Long before Auntie had finished reading this letter, the tears had begun to flow out of me just like water from a pot that boils over. For it would have been bad enough to learn that my mother had died, or that my father had died. But to learn in a single moment that both my mother and my father had died and left me, and that my sister too was lost to me forever ... at once my mind felt like a broken vase that would not stand. I was lost even within the room around me.

You must think me very naive for having kept alive the hope for so many months that my mother might still be living. But really I had so few things to hope for, I suppose I would have clutched at anything. Auntie was very kind to me while I tried to find my bearings. Again and again she said to me, "Bear up, Chiyo, bear up. There's nothing more any of us can do in this world."

When I was finally able to speak, I asked Auntie if she would set up the tablets someplace where I wouldn't see them, and pray on my behalf-for it would give me too much pain to do it. But she refused, and told me I should be ashamed even to consider turning my back on my own ancestors. She helped me set the tablets up on a shelf near the base of the stairwell, where I could pray before them every morning. "Never forget them, Chiyo-chan," she said. "They're all that's left of your childhood."

Chapter nine



Around the time of my sixty-fifth birthday, a friend sent me an article she'd found somewhere, called "The Twenty Greatest Geisha of Gion's Past." Or maybe it was the thirty greatest geisha, I don't remember. But there I was on the list with a little paragraph telling some things about me, including that I'd been born in Kyoto-which of course I wasn't. I can assure you I wasn't one of Gion's twenty greatest geisha either; some people have difficulty telling the difference between something great and something they've simply heard of. In any case, I would have been lucky to end up as nothing more than a bad geisha and an unhappy one, like so many other poor girls, if Mr. Tanaka had never written to tell me that my parents had died and that I would probably never see my sister again.

I'm sure you'll recall my saying that the afternoon when I first met Mr. Tanaka was the very best afternoon of my life, and also the very worst. Probably I don't need to explain why it was the worst; but you may be wondering how I could possibly imagine that anything good ever came of it. It's true that up until this time in my life Mr. Tanaka had brought me nothing but suffering; but he also changed my horizons forever. We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less
in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course. If I'd never met Mr. Tanaka, my life would have been a simple stream flowing from our tipsy house to the ocean. Mr. Tanaka changed all that when he sent me out into the world. But being sent out into the world isn't necessarily the same as leaving your home behind you. I'd been in Gion more than six months by the time I received Mr. Tanaka's letter; and yet during that time, I'd never for a moment given up the belief that I would one day find a better life elsewhere, with at least part of the family I'd always known. I was living only half in Gion; the other half of me lived in my dreams of going home. This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes consume us completely.

During the rest of the spring and all that summer following the letter, I felt like a child lost on a lake in the fog. The days spilled one after another into a muddle. I remember only snippets of things, aside from a constant feeling of misery and fear. One cold evening after winter had come, I sat a long while in the maids' room watching snow falling silently into the okiya's little courtyard. I imagined my father coughing at the lonely table in his lonely house, and my mother so frail upon her futon that her body scarcely sank into the bedding. I stumbled out into the courtyard to try to flee my misery, but of course we can never flee the misery that is within us.

Then in early spring, a full year after the terrible news about my family, something happened. It was the following April, when the cherry trees were in blossom once again; it may even have been a year to the day since Mr. Tanaka's letter. I was almost twelve by then and was beginning to look a bit womanly, even though Pumpkin still looked very much like a little girl. I'd grown nearly as tall as I would ever grow. My body would remain thin and knobby like a twig for a year or two more, but my face had already given up its childish softness and was now sharp around the chin and cheekbones, and had broadened in such a way as to give a true almond shape to my eyes. In the past, men had taken no more notice of me on the streets than if I had been a pigeon; now they were watching me when I passed them. I found it strange to be the object of attention after being ignored for so long.

In any case, very early one morning that April, I awoke from a most peculiar dream about a bearded man. His beard was so heavy that his features were a blur to me, as if someone had censored them from the film. He was standing before me saying something I can't remember, and then all at once he slid open the paper screen over a window beside him with a loud clack. I awoke thinking I'd heard a noise in the room. The maids were sighing in their sleep. Pumpkin lay quietly with her round face sagging onto the pillow. Everything looked just as it always did, I'm sure; but my feelings were strangely different. I felt as though I were looking at a world that was somehow changed from the one I'd seen the night before-peering out, almost, through the very window that had opened in my dream.

I couldn't possibly have explained what this meant. But I continued thinking about it while I swept the stepping-stones in the courtyard that morning, until I began to feel the sort of buzzing in my head that comes from a thought circling and circling with nowhere to go, just like a bee in a jar. Soon I put down the broom and went to sit in the dirt corridor, where the cool air from beneath the foundation of the main house drifted soothingly over my back. And then something came to mind that I hadn't thought about since my very first week in Kyoto.

Only a day or two after being separated from my sister, I had been sent to wash some rags one afternoon, when a moth came fluttering down from the sky onto my arm. I flicked it off, expecting that it would fly away, but instead it sailed like a pebble across the courtyard and lay there upon the ground. I didn't know if it had fallen from the sky already dead or if I had killed it, but its little insect death touched me. I admired the lovely pattern on its wings, and then wrapped it in one of the rags I was washing and hid it away beneath the foundation of the house.

I hadn't thought about this moth since then; but the moment it came to mind I got on my knees and looked under the house until I found it. So many things in my life had changed, even the way I looked; but when I unwrapped the moth from its funeral shroud, it was the same startlingly lovely creature as on the day I had entombed it. It seemed to be wearing a robe in subdued grays and browns, like Mother wore when she went to her mah-jongg games at night. Everything about it seemed beautiful and perfect, and so utterly unchanged. If only one thing in my life had been the same as during that first week in Kyoto ... As I thought of this my mind began to swirl like a hurricane. It struck me that we-that moth and I-were two opposite extremes. My existence was as unstable as a stream, changing in every way; but the moth was like a piece of stone, changing not at all. While thinking this thought, I reached out a finger to feel the moth's velvety surface; but when I brushed it with my fingertip, it turned all at once into a pile of ash without even a sound, without even a moment in which I could see it crumbling. I was so astonished I let out a cry. The swirling in my mind stopped; I felt as if I had stepped into the eye of a storm. I let the tiny shroud and its pile of ashes flutter to the ground; and now I understood the thing that had puzzled me all morning. The stale air had washed away. The past was gone. My mother and father were dead and I could do nothing to change it. But I suppose that for the past year I'd been dead in a way too. And my sister . . . yes, she was gone; but I wasn't gone. I'm not sure this will make sense to you, but I felt as though I'd turned around to look in a different direction, so that I no longer faced backward toward the past, but forward toward the future. And now the question confronting me was this: What would that future be?

The moment this question formed in my mind, I knew with as much certainty as I'd ever known anything that sometime during that day I would receive a sign. This was why the bearded man had opened the window in my dream. He was saying to me, "Watch for the thing that will show itself to you. Because that thing, when you find it, will be your future."

I had no time for another thought before Auntie called out to me:

"Chiyo, come here!"

Well, I walked up that dirt corridor as though I were in a trance. It wouldn't have surprised me if Auntie had said, "You want to know about your future? All right, listen closely . . ." But instead she just held out two hair ornaments on a square of white silk.

"Take these," she said to me. "Heaven knows what Hatsumomo was up to last night; she came back to the okiya wearing another girl's ornaments. She must have drunk more than her usual amount of sake. Go find her at the school, ask whose they are, and return them."

When I took the ornaments, Auntie gave me a piece of paper with a number of other errands written on it as well and told me to come back to the okiya as soon as I had done them all.

Wearing someone else's hair ornaments home at night may not sound so peculiar, but really it's about the same as coming home in someone else's underwear. Geisha don't wash their hair every day, you see, because of their fancy hairstyles. So a hair ornament is a very intimate article. Auntie didn't even want to touch the things, which is why she was holding them on a square of silk. She wrapped them up to give them to me, so that they looked just like the bundled-up moth I'd been holding only a few minutes earlier. Of course, a sign doesn't mean anything unless you know how to interpret it. I stood there staring at the silk bundle in Auntie's hand until she said, "Take it, for heaven's sake!" Later, on my way to the school, I unfolded it to have another look at the ornaments. One was a black lacquer comb shaped like the setting sun, with a design of flowers in gold around the outside; the other was a stick of blond wood with two pearls at the end holding in place a tiny amber sphere.

I waited outside the school building until I heard the don of the bell signaling the end of classes. Soon girls in their blue and white robes came pouring out. Hatsumomo spotted me even before I spotted her, and came toward me with another geisha. You may wonder why she was at the school at all, since she was already an accomplished dancer and certainly knew everything she needed to know about being a geisha. But even the most renowned geisha continued to take advanced lessons in dance throughout their careers, some of them even into their fifties and sixties.

"Why, look," Hatsumomo said to her friend. "I think it must be a weed. Look how tall it is!" This was her way of ridiculing me for having grown a finger's-width taller than her.

"Auntie has sent me here, ma'am," I said, "to find out whose hair ornaments you stole last night."

Hatsumomo's smile faded. She snatched the little bundle from my hand and opened it.

"Why, these aren't mine . . ." she said. "Where did you get them?"

"Oh, Hatsumomo-san!" said the other geisha. "Don't you remember? You and Kanako took out your hair ornaments while the two of you were playing that foolish game with Judge Uwazumi. Kanako must have gone home with your hair ornaments, and you went home with hers."

"How disgusting," said Hatsumomo. "When do you think Kanako last washed her hair? Anyway, her okiya is right next to yours. Take them for me, would you? Tell her I'll come to fetch mine later, and she'd better not try to keep them."

The other geisha took the hair ornaments and left.

"Oh, don't go, little Chiyo," Hatsumomo said to me. "There's something I want to show you. It's that young girl over there, the one walking through the gate. Her name is Ichikimi."

I looked at Ichikimi, but Hatsumomo didn't seem to have any more to say about her. "I don't know her," I said.

"No, of course not. She's nothing special. A bit stupid, and as awkward as a cripple. But I just thought you'd find it interesting that she's going to be a geisha, and you never will."

I don't think Hatsumomo could have found anything crueler to say to me. For a year and a half now, I'd been condemned to the drudgery of a maid. I felt my life stretching out before me like a long path leading nowhere. I won't say I wanted to become a geisha; but I certainly didn't want to remain a maid. I stood in the garden of the school a long while, watching the young girls my age chat with one another as they streamed past. They may only have been heading back for lunch, but to me they were going from one important thing to another with lives of purpose, while I on the other hand would go back to nothing more glamorous than scrubbing the stones in the courtyard. When the garden emptied out, I stood worrying that perhaps this was the sign I'd waited for-that other young girls in Gion would move ahead in their lives and leave me behind. This thought gave me such a fright I couldn't stay alone in the garden any longer. I walked down to Shijo Avenue and turned toward the Kamo River. Giant banners on the Minamiza Theater announced the performance of a Kabuki play that afternoon entitled Shibaraku, which is one of our most famous plays, though I knew nothing about Kabuki at the time. Crowds streamed up the steps into the theater. Among the men in their dark Western-style suits or kimono, several geisha stood out in brilliant coloring just like autumn leaves on the murky waters of a river. Here again, I saw life in all its noisy excitement passing me by. I hurried away from the avenue, down a side street leading along the Shi-rakawa Stream, but even there, men and geisha were rushing along in their lives so full of purpose. To shut out the pain of this thought I turned toward the Shirakawa, but cruelly, even its waters glided along with purpose-toward the Kamo River and from there to Osaka Bay and the Inland Sea. It seemed the same message waited for me everywhere. I threw myself onto the little stone wall at the edge of the stream and wept. I was an abandoned island in the midst of the ocean, with no past, to be sure, but no future either. Soon I felt myself coming to a point where I thought no human voice could reach me-until I heard a man's voice say this:

"Why it's too pretty a day to be so unhappy."

Ordinarily a man on the streets of Gion wouldn't notice a girl like me, particularly while I was making a fool of myself by crying. If he did notice me, he certainly wouldn't speak to me, unless it was to order me out of his way, or some such thing. Yet not only had this man bothered to speak to me, he'd actually spoken kindly. He'd addressed me in a way that suggested I might be a young woman of standing-the daughter of a good friend, perhaps. For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I'd always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness-a world in which fathers didn't sell their daughters. The noise and hubbub of so many people living their lives of purpose around me seemed to stop; or at least, I ceased to be aware of it. And when I raised myself to look at the man who'd spoken, I had a feeling of leaving my misery behind me there on the stone wall.

I'll be happy to try to describe him for you, but I can think of only one way to do it-by telling you about a certain tree that stood at the edge of the sea cliffs in Yoroido. This tree was as smooth as driftwood because of the wind, and when I was a little girl of four or five I found a man's face on it one day. That is to say, I found a smooth patch as broad as a plate, with two sharp bumps at the outside edge for cheekbones. They cast shadows suggesting eye sockets, and beneath the shadows rose a gentle bump of a nose. The whole face tipped a bit to one side, gazing at me quizzically; it looked to me like a man with as much certainty about his place in this world as a tree has. Something about it was so meditative, I imagined I'd found the face of a Buddha.

The man who'd addressed me there on the street had this same kind of broad, calm face. And what was more, his features were so smooth and serene, I had the feeling he'd go on standing there calmly until I wasn't unhappy any longer. He was probably about forty-five years old, with gray hair combed straight back from his forehead. But I couldn't look at him for long. He seemed so elegant to me that I blushed and looked away.

Two younger men stood to one side of him; a geisha stood to the other. I heard the geisha say to him quietly:

"Why, she's only a maid! Probably she stubbed her toe while running an errand. I'm sure someone will come along to help her soon."

"I wish I had your faith in people, Izuko-san," said the man.

"The show will be starting in only a moment. Really, Chairman, I don't think you should waste any more time . . ."

While running errands in Gion, I'd often heard men addressed by titles like "Department Head" or occasionally "Vice President." But only rarely had I heard the title "Chairman." Usually the men addressed as Chairman had bald heads and frowns, and swaggered down the street with groups of junior executives scurrying behind. This man before me was so different from the usual chairman that even though I was only a little girl with limited experience of the world, I knew his company couldn't be a terribly important one. A man with an important company wouldn't have stopped to talk to me.

"You're trying to tell me it's a waste of time to stay here and help her," said the Chairman.

"Oh, no," the geisha said. "It's more a matter of having no time to waste. We may be late for the first scene already."

"Now, Izuko-san, surely at some time you yourself have been in the same state this little girl is in. You can't pretend the life of a geisha is always simple. I should think you of all people-"

"I've been in the state she's in? Chairman, do you mean . . . making a public spectacle of myself?"

At this, the Chairman turned to the two younger men and asked that they take Izuko ahead to the theater. They bowed and went on their way while the Chairman remained behind. He looked at me a long while, though I didn't dare to look back at him. At length I said:

"Please, sir, what she says is true. I'm only a foolish girl . . . please don't make yourself late on my account."

"Stand up a moment," he told me.

I didn't dare disobey him, though I had no idea what he wanted. As it turned out, all he did was take a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe away the grit that had stuck to my face from the top of the stone wall. Standing so close before him, I could smell the odor of talc on his smooth skin, which made me recall the day when the Emperor Taisho's nephew had come to our little fishing village. He'd done nothing more than step out of his car and walk to the inlet and back, nodding to the crowds that knelt before him, wearing a Western-style business suit, the first I'd ever seen-for I peeked at him, even though I wasn't supposed to. I remember too-that his mustache was carefully groomed, unlike the hair on the faces of the men in our village, which grew untended like weeds along a path. No one of any importance had ever been in our village before that day. I think we all felt touched by nobility and greatness.

Occasionally in life we come upon things we can't understand because we have never seen anything similar. The Emperor's nephew certainly struck me that way; and so did the Chairman. When he had wiped away the grit and tears from my face, he tipped my head up.

"Here you are ... a beautiful girl with nothing on earth to be ashamed of," he said. "And yet you're afraid to look at me. Someone has been cruel to you ... or perhaps life has been cruel."

"I don't know, sir," I said, though of course I knew perfectly well.

"We none of us find as much kindness in this world as we should," he told me, and he narrowed his eyes a moment as if to say I should think seriously about what he'd just said.

I wanted more than anything to see the smooth skin of his face once more, with its broad brow, and the eyelids like sheaths of marble over his gentle eyes; but there was such a gulf in social standing between us. I did finally let my eyes flick upward, though I blushed and looked away so quickly that he may never have known I met his gaze.

But how can I describe what I saw in that instant? He was looking at me as a musician might look at his instrument just before he begins to play, with understanding and mastery. I felt that he could see into me as though I were a part of him. How I would have loved to be the instrument he played!

In a moment he reached into his pocket and brought something out.

"Do you like sweet plum or cherry?" he said.

"Sir? Do you mean ... to eat?"

"I passed a vendor a moment ago, selling shaved ice with syrup on it. I never tasted one until I was an adult, but I'd have liked them as a child. Take this coin and buy one. Take my handkerchief too, so you can wipe your face afterward," he said. And with this, he pressed the coin into the center of the handkerchief, wrapped it into a bundle, and held it out to me.

From the moment the Chairman had first spoken to me, I'd forgotten that I was watching for a sign about my future. But when I saw the bundle he held in his hand, it looked so much like the shrouded moth, I knew I'd come upon the sign at last. I took the bundle and bowed low to thank him, and tried to tell him how grateful I was- though I'm sure my words carried none of the fullness of my feelings. I wasn't thanking him for the coin, or even for the trouble he'd taken in stopping to help me. I was thanking him for . . . well, for something I'm not sure I can explain even now. For showing me that something besides cruelty could be found in the world, I suppose.

I watched him walk away with sickness in my heart-though it was a pleasing kind of sickness, if such a thing exists. I mean to say that if you have experienced an evening more exciting than any in your life, you're sad to see it end; and yet you still feel grateful that it happened. In that brief encounter with the Chairman, I had changed from a lost girl facing a lifetime of emptiness to a girl with purpose in her life. Perhaps it seems odd that a casual meeting on the street could have brought about such change. But sometimes life is like that, isn't it? And I really do think if you'd been there to see what I saw, and feel what I felt, the same might have happened to you.

When the Chairman had disappeared from sight, I rushed up the street to search for the shaved ice vendor. The day wasn't especially hot, and I didn't care for shaved ice; but eating it would make my encounter with the Chairman linger. So I bought a paper cone of shaved ice with cherry syrup on it, and went to sit again on the same stone wall. The taste of the syrup seemed startling and complex, I think only because my senses were so heightened. If I were a geisha like the one named Izuko, I thought, a man like the Chairman might spend time with me. I'd never imagined myself envying a geisha. I'd been brought to Kyoto for the purpose of becoming one, of course; but up until now I'd have run away in an instant if I could have. Now I understood the thing I'd overlooked; the point wasn't to become a geisha, but to be one. To become a geisha . . . well, that was hardly a purpose in life. But to be a geisha ... I could see it now as a stepping-stone to something else. If I was right about the Chairman's age, he was probably no more than forty-five. Plenty of geisha had achieved tremendous success by the age of twenty. The geisha Izuko was probably no more than twenty-five herself. I was still a child, nearly twelve . . . but in another twelve years I'd be in my twenties. And what of the Chairman? He would be no older by that time than Mr. Tanaka was already.

The coin the Chairman had given me was far more than I'd needed for a simple cone of shaved ice. I held in my hand the change from the vendor-three coins of different sizes. At first I'd thought of keeping them forever; but now I realized they could serve a far more important purpose.

I rushed to Shijo Avenue and ran all the way to its end at the eastern edge of Gion, where the Gion Shrine stood. I climbed the steps, but I felt too intimidated to walk beneath the great two-story entrance gate with its gabled roof, and walked around it instead. Across the gravel courtyard and up another flight of steps, I passed through the torii gate to the shrine itself. There I threw the coins into the offertory box-coins that might have been enough to take me away from Gion- and announced my presence to the gods by clapping three times and bowing. With my eyes squeezed tightly shut and my hands together, I prayed that they permit me to become a geisha somehow. I would suffer through any training, bear up under any hardship, for a chance to attract the notice of a man like the Chairman again.

When I opened my eyes, I could still hear the traffic on Higashi-Oji Avenue. The trees hissed in a gust of wind just as they had a moment earlier. Nothing had changed. As to whether the gods had heard me, I had no way of knowing. I could do nothing but tuck the Chairman's handkerchief inside my robe and carry it with me back to the okiya.

Chapter ten



One morning quite some months later, while we were putting away the ro underrobes-the ones made of lightweight silk gauze for hot weather-and bringing out the hitoe underrobes instead-the ones with no lining, used in September-I came upon a smell in the entry-way so horrible that I dropped the armload of robes I was carrying. The smell was coming from Granny's room. I ran upstairs to fetch Auntie, because I knew at once that something must be terribly wrong. Auntie hobbled down the stairs as quickly as she could and went in to find Granny dead on the floor; and she had died in a most peculiar manner. Granny had the only electric space heater in our okiya. She used it every single night except during the summer. Now that the month of September had begun and we were putting away the summer-weight underrobes, Granny had begun to use her heater again. That doesn't mean the weather was necessarily cool; we change the weight of our clothing by the calendar, not by the actual temperature outdoors, and Granny used her heater just the same way. She was unreasonably attached to it, probably because she'd spent so many nights of her life suffering miserably from the cold.

Granny's usual routine in the morning was to wrap the cord around the heater before pushing it back against the wall. Over time the hot metal burned all the way through the cord, so that the wire finally came into contact with it, and the whole thing became electrified. The police said that when Granny touched it that morning she must have been immobilized at once, maybe even killed instantly. When she slid down onto the floor, she ended up with her face pressed against the hot metal surface. This was what caused the horrible smell. Happily I didn't see her after she'd died, except for her legs, which were visible from the doorway and looked like slender tree limbs wrapped in wrinkled silk.

For a week or two after Granny died, we were as busy as you can imagine, not only with cleaning the house thoroughly-because in Shinto, death is the most impure of all the things that can happen-but with preparing the house by setting out candles, trays with meal offerings, lanterns at the entrance, tea stands, trays for money that visitors brought, and so on. We were so busy that one evening the cook became ill and a doctor was summoned; it turned out her only problem was that she'd slept no more than two hours the night before, hadn't sat down all day, and had eaten only a single bowl of clear soup. I was surprised too to see Mother spending money almost unrestrainedly, making plans for sutras to be chanted "on Granny's behalf at the Chion-in Temple, purchasing lotus-bud arrangements from the undertaker- all of it right in the midst of the Great Depression. I wondered at first if her behavior was a testament to how deeply she felt about Granny; but later I realized what it really meant: practically all of Gion would come tramping through our okiya to pay respects to Granny, and would attend the funeral at the temple later in the week; Mother had to put on the proper kind of show.

For a few days all of Gion did indeed come through our okiya, or so it seemed; and we had to feed tea and sweets to all of them. Mother and Auntie received the mistresses of the various teahouses and okiya, as well as a number of maids who were acquainted with Granny; also shopkeepers, wig makers, and hairdressers, most of whom were men; and of course, dozens and dozens of geisha. The older geisha knew Granny from her working days, but the younger ones had never even heard of her; they came out of respect for Mother-or in some cases because they had a relationship of one kind or another with Hatsumomo.

My job during this busy period was to show visitors into the reception room, where Mother and Auntie were waiting for them. It was a distance of only a few steps; but the visitors couldn't very well show themselves in; and besides, I had to keep track of which faces belonged to which shoes, for it was my job to take the shoes to the maids' room to keep the entryway from being too cluttered, and then bring them back again at the proper moment. I had trouble with this at first. I couldn't peer right into the eyes of our visitors without seeming rude, but a simple glimpse of their faces wasn't enough for me to remember them. Very soon I learned to look closely at the kimono they wore.

On about the second or third afternoon the door rolled open, and in came a kimono that at once struck me as the loveliest I'd seen any of our visitors wear. It was somber because of the occasion-a simple black robe bearing a crest-but its pattern of green and gold grasses sweeping around the hem was so rich-looking, I found myself imagining how astounded the wives and daughters of the fishermen back in Yoroido would be to see such a thing. The visitor had a maid with her as well, which made me think perhaps she was the mistress of a teahouse or okiya-because very few geisha could afford such an expense. While she looked at the tiny Shinto shrine in our entryway, I took the opportunity to steal a peek at her face. It was such a perfect oval that I thought at once of a certain scroll in Auntie's room, showing an ink painting of a courtesan from the Heian period a thousand years earlier. She wasn't as striking a woman as Hatsumomo, but her features were so perfectly formed that at once I began to feel even more insignificant than usual. And then suddenly I realized who she was.

Mameha, the geisha whose kimono Hatsumomo had made me ruin.

What had happened to her kimono wasn't really my fault; but still, I would have given up the robe I was wearing not to run into her. I lowered my head to keep my face hidden while I showed her and her maid into the reception room. I didn't think she would recognize me, since I felt certain she hadn't seen my face when I'd returned the kimono; and even if she had, two years had passed since then. The maid who accompanied her now wasn't the same young woman who'd taken the kimono from me that night and whose eyes had filled with tears. Still, I was relieved when the time came for me to bow and leave them in the reception room.

Twenty minutes later, when Mameha and her maid were ready to leave, I fetched their shoes and arranged them on the step in the entryway, still keeping my head down and feeling every bit as nervous as I had earlier. When her maid rolled open the door, I felt that my ordeal was over. But instead of walking out, Mameha just went on standing there. I began to worry; and I'm afraid my eyes and my mind weren't communicating well, because even though I knew I shouldn't do it, I
let my eyes flick up. I was horrified to see that Mameha was peering down at me.

"What is your name, little girl?" she said, in what I took to be a very stern tone.

I told her that my name was Chiyo.

"Stand up a moment, Chiyo. I'd like to have a look at you."

I rose to my feet as she had asked; but if it had been possible to make my face shrivel up and disappear, just like slurping down a noodle, I'm sure I would have done it.

"Come now, I want to have a look at you!" she said. "Here you are acting like you're counting the toes on your feet."

I raised my head, though not my eyes, and then Mameha let out a long sigh and ordered me to look up at her.

"What unusual eyes!" she said. "I thought I might have imagined it. What color would you call them, Tatsumi?"

Her maid came back into the entryway and took a look at me. "Blue-gray, ma'am," she replied.

"That's just what I would have said. Now, how many girls in Gion do you think have eyes like that?"

I didn't know if Mameha was speaking to me or Tatsumi, but neither of us answered. She was looking at me with a peculiar expression-concentrating on something, it seemed to me. And then to my great relief, she excused herself and left.

Granny's funeral was held about a week later, on a morning chosen by a fortune-teller. Afterward we began putting the okiya back in order, but with several changes. Auntie moved downstairs into the room that had been Granny's, while Pumpkin-who was to begin her apprenticeship as a geisha before long-took the second-floor room where Auntie had lived. In addition, two new maids arrived the following week, both of them middle-aged and very energetic. It may seem odd that Mother added maids although the family was now fewer in number; but in fact the okiya had always been understaffed because Granny couldn't tolerate crowding.

The final change was that Pumpkin's chores were taken away from her. She was told instead to spend her time practicing the various arts she would depend upon as a geisha. Usually girls weren't given so much opportunity for practice, but poor Pumpkin was a slow learner and needed the extra time if anyone ever did. I had difficulty watching her as she knelt on the wooden walkway every day and practiced her shamisen for hours, with her tongue poking out the side of her mouth
like she was trying to lick her cheek clean. She gave me little smiles whenever our eyes met; and really, her disposition was as sweet and kind as could be. But already I was finding it difficult to bear the burden of patience in my life, waiting for some tiny opening that might never come and that would certainly be the only chance I'd ever get. Now I had to watch as the door of opportunity was held wide open for someone else. Some nights when I went to bed, I took the handkerchief the Chairman had given me and lay on my futon smelling its rich talc scent. I cleared my mind of everything but the image of him and the feeling of warm sun on my face and the hard stone wall where I'd sat that day when I met him. He was my bodhisattva with a thousand arms who would help me. I couldn't imagine how his help would come to me, but I prayed that it would.

Toward the end of the first month after Granny's death, one of our new maids came to me one day to say I had a visitor at the door. It was an unseasonably hot October afternoon, and my whole body was damp with perspiration from using our old hand-operated vacuum to clean the tatami mats upstairs in Pumpkin's new room, which had only recently been Auntie's; Pumpkin was in the habit of sneaking rice crackers upstairs, so the tatami needed to be cleaned frequently. I mopped myself with a wet towel as quickly as I could and rushed down, to find a young woman in the entryway, dressed in a kimono like a maid's. I got to my knees and bowed to her. Only when I looked at her a second time did I recognize her as the maid who had accompanied Mameha to our okiya a few weeks earlier. I was very sorry to see her there. I felt certain I was in trouble. But when she gestured for me to step down into the entryway, I slipped my feet into my shoes and followed her out to the street.

"Are you sent on errands from time to time, Chiyo?" she asked me.

So much time had passed since I'd tried to run away that I was no longer confined to the okiya. I had no idea why she was asking; but I told her that I was.

"Good," she said. "Arrange for yourself to be sent out tomorrow afternoon at three o'clock, and meet me at the little bridge that arches over the Shirakawa Stream."

"Yes, ma'am," I said, "but may I ask why?"

"You'll find out tomorrow, won't you?" she answered, with a little crinkle of her nose that made me wonder if she was teasing me.

I certainly wasn't pleased that Mameha's maid wanted me to accompany her somewhere-probably to Mameha, I thought, to be scolded for what I'd done. But just the same, the following day I talked Pumpkin into sending me on an errand that didn't really need to be run. She was worried about getting into trouble, until I promised to find a way of repaying her. So at three o'clock, she called to me from the courtyard:

"Chiyo-san, could you please go out and buy me some new shamisen strings and a few Kabuki magazines?" She had been instructed to read Kabuki magazines for the sake of her education. Then I heard her say in an even louder voice, "Is that all right, Auntie?" But Auntie didn't answer, for she was upstairs taking a nap.

I left the okiya and walked along the Shirakawa Stream to the arched bridge leading into the Motoyoshi-cho section of Gion. With the weather so warm and lovely, quite a number of men and geisha were strolling along, admiring the weeping cherry trees whose tendrils drooped onto the surface of the water. While I waited near the bridge, I watched a group of foreign tourists who had come to see the famous Gion district. They weren't the only foreigners I'd ever seen in Kyoto, but they certainly looked peculiar to me, the big-nosed women with their long dresses and their brightly colored hair, the men so tall and confident, with heels that clicked on the pavement. One of the men pointed at me and said something in a foreign language, and they all turned to have a look. I felt so embarrassed I pretended to find something on the ground so I could crouch down and hide myself.

Finally Mameha's maid came; and just as I'd feared, she led me over the bridge and along the stream to the very same doorway where Hatsumomo and Korin had handed me the kimono and sent me up the stairs. It seemed terribly unfair to me that this same incident was about to cause still more trouble for me-and after so much time had passed. But when the maid rolled open the door for me, I climbed up into the gray light of the stairway. At the top we both stepped out of our shoes and went into the apartment.

"Chiyo is here, ma'am!" she cried.

Then I heard Mameha call from the back room, "All right, thank you, Tatsumi!"

The young woman led me to a table by an open window, where I knelt on one of the cushions and tried not to look nervous. Very shortly another maid came out with a cup of tea for me-because as it turned out, Mameha had not one maid, but two. I certainly wasn't expecting to be served tea; and in fact, nothing like this had happened to me since dinner at Mr. Tanaka's house years earlier. I bowed to thank her and took a few sips, so as not to seem rude. Afterward I found myself sitting for a long while with nothing to do but listen to the sound of water passing over the knee-high cascade in the Shirakawa Stream outside.

Mameha's apartment wasn't large, but it was extremely elegant, with beautiful tatami mats that were obviously new, for they had a lovely yellow-green sheen and smelled richly of straw. If you've ever looked closely enough at a tatami mat, you'd notice that the border around it is edged in fabric, usually just a strip of dark cotton or linen; but these were edged in a strip of silk with a pattern of green and gold. Not far away in an alcove hung a scroll written in a beautiful hand, which turned out to be a gift to Mameha from the famous calligrapher Matsudaira Koichi. Beneath it, on the wooden base of the alcove, an arrangement of blossoming dogwood branches rose up out of a shallow dish that was irregular in shape with a cracked glaze of the deepest black. I found it very peculiar, but actually it had been presented to Mameha by none other than Yoshida Sakuhei, the great master of the setoguro style of ceramics who became a Living National Treasure in the years after World War II.

At last Mameha came out from the back room, dressed exquisitely in a cream kimono with a water design at the hem. I turned and bowed very low on the mats while she drifted over to the table; and when she was there, she arranged herself on her knees opposite me, took a sip of tea the maid served to her, and then said this:

"Now . . . Chiyo, isn't it? Why don't you tell me how you managed to get out of your okiya this afternoon? I'm sure Mrs. Nitta doesn't like it when her maids attend to personal business in the middle of the day."

I certainly hadn't expected this sort of question. In fact, I couldn't think of anything at all to say, even though I knew it would be rude not to respond. Mameha just sipped at her tea and looked at me with a benign expression on her perfect, oval face. Finally she said:

"You think I'm trying to scold you. But I'm only interested to know if you've gotten yourself into trouble by coming here."

I was very relieved to hear her say this. "No, ma'am," I said. "I'm supposed to be on an errand fetching Kabuki magazines and shamisen strings."

"Oh, well, I've got plenty of those," she said, and then called her maid over and told her to fetch some and put them on the table before me. "When you go back to your okiya, take them with you, and no one will wonder where you've been. Now, tell me something. When I came to your okiya to pay my respects, I saw another girl your age."

"That must have been Pumpkin. With a very round face?"

Mameha asked why I called her Pumpkin, and when I explained, she gave a laugh.

"This Pumpkin girl," Mameha said, "how do she and Hatsumomo get along?"

"Well, ma'am," I said, "I suppose Hatsumomo pays her no more attention than she would a leaf that has fluttered into the courtyard."

"How very poetic ... a leaf that has fluttered into the courtyard. Is that the way Hatsumomo treats you as well?"

I opened my mouth to speak, but the truth is, I wasn't sure what to say. I knew very little about Mameha, and it would be improper to speak ill of Hatsumomo to someone outside the okiya. Mameha seemed to sense what I was thinking, for she said to me:

"You needn't answer. I know perfectly well how Hatsumomo treats you: about like a serpent treats its next meal, I should think."

"If I may ask, ma'am, who has told you?"

"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 were 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 bear 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.

As for the idea of another geisha taking on the task of training me . . . well, it would mean crossing paths with Hatsumomo. Few geisha in Gion were brave enough to do such a thing.

Late one morning a few weeks after my encounter with Mameha, I was serving tea to Mother and a guest in the reception room when Auntie slid open the door.

"I'm sorry to interrupt," Auntie said, "but I wonder if you would mind excusing yourself for just a moment, Kayoko-san." Kayoko was Mother's real name, you see, but we rarely heard it used in our okiya. "We have a visitor at the door."

Mother gave one of her coughing laughs when she heard this. "You must be having a dull day, Auntie," she said, "to come announce a visitor yourself. The maids don't work hard enough as it is, and now you're doing their jobs for them."

"I thought you'd rather hear from me," Auntie said, "that our visitor is Mameha."

I had begun to worry that nothing would come of my meeting with Mameha. But to hear that she had suddenly appeared at our okiya . . . well, the blood rushed to my face so intensely that I felt like a lightbulb just switched on. The room was perfectly quiet for a long moment, and then Mother's guest said, "Mameha-san . . . well! I'll run along, but only if you promise to tell me tomorrow just what this is all about."

I took my opportunity to slip out of the room as Mother's guest was leaving. Then in the formal entrance hall, I heard Mother say something to Auntie I'd never imagined her saying. She was tapping her pipe into an ashtray she'd brought from the reception room, and when she handed the ashtray to me, she said, "Auntie, come here and fix my hair, please." I'd never before known her to worry in the least about her appearance. It's true she wore elegant clothing. But just as her room was filled with lovely objects and yet was hopelessly gloomy, she herself may have been draped in exquisite fabrics, but her eyes were as oily as a piece of old, smelly fish . . . and really, she seemed to regard her hair the way a train regards its smokestack: it was just the thing that happened to be on top.

While Mother was answering the door, I stood in the maids' room cleaning out the ashtray. And I worked so hard to overhear Mameha and Mother that it wouldn't have surprised me if I had strained all the muscles in my ears.

First Mother said, "I'm sorry to have kept you waiting, Mameha-san. What an honor to have a visit from you!"

Then Mameha said, "I hope you'll forgive me for calling so unexpectedly, Mrs. Nitta." Or something equally dull. And it went on this way for a while. All my hard work in overhearing it was about as rewarding to me as a man who lugs a chest up the hill only to learn that it's full of rocks.

At last they made their way through the formal entrance hall to the reception room. I was so desperate to overhear their conversation that I grabbed a rag from the maids' room and began polishing the floor of the entrance hall with it. Normally Auntie wouldn't have permitted me to work there while a guest was in the reception room, but she was as preoccupied with eavesdropping as I was. When the maid came out after serving tea, Auntie stood to one side where she wouldn't be seen and made sure the door was left open a crack so she could hear. I listened so closely to their small talk that I must have lost track of everything around me, for suddenly I looked up to see Pumpkin's round face staring right into mine. She was on her knees polishing the floor, even though I was already doing it and she wasn't expected to do chores anymore.

"Who is Mameha?" she whispered to me.

Obviously she had overheard the maids talking among themselves; I could see them huddled together on the dirt corridor just at the edge of the walkway.

"She and Hatsumomo are rivals," I whispered back. "She's the one whose kimono Hatsumomo made me put ink on."

Pumpkin looked like she was about to ask something else, but then we heard Mameha say, "Mrs. Nitta, I do hope you'll forgive me for disturbing you on such a busy day, but I'd like to talk with you briefly about your maid Chiyo."

"Oh, no," Pumpkin said, and looked into my eyes to show how sorry she felt for the trouble I was about to be in.

"Our Chiyo can be a bit of a nuisance," Mother said. "I do hope she hasn't been troubling you."

"No, nothing like that," Mameha said. "But I noticed she hasn't been attending the school these past few weeks. I'm so accustomed to running into her from time to time in the hallway . . . Just yesterday I realized she must be terribly ill! I've recently met an extremely capable doctor. I wonder, shall I ask him to stop by?"

"It's very kind of you," said Mother, "but you must be thinking of a different girl. You couldn't have run into our Chiyo in the hallway at the school. She hasn't attended lessons there for two years."

"Are we thinking of the same girl? Quite pretty, with startling blue-gray eyes?"

"She does have unusual eyes. But there must be two such girls in Gion . . . Who would have thought it!"

"I wonder if it's possible that two years have passed since I saw her there," Mameha said. "Perhaps she made such a strong impression it still seems very recent. If I may ask, Mrs. Nitta ... is she quite well?"

"Oh, yes. As healthy as a young sapling, and every bit as unruly, if I do say so."

"Yet she isn't taking lessons any longer? How puzzling."

"For a young geisha as popular as you, I'm sure Gion must seem an easy place to make a living. But you know, times are very difficult. I can't afford to invest money in just anyone. As soon as I realized how poorly suited Chiyo was-"

"I'm quite sure we're thinking of two different girls," Mameha said. "I can't imagine that a businesswoman as astute as you are, Mrs. Nitta, would call Chiyo 'poorly suited'. . ."

"Are you certain her name is Chiyo?" Mother asked.

None of us realized it, but as she spoke these words, Mother was rising from the table and crossing the little room. A moment later she slid open the door and found herself staring directly into Auntie's ear. Auntie stepped out of the way just as though nothing had happened; and I suppose Mother was content to pretend the same, for she did nothing more than look toward me and say, "Chiyo-chan, come in here a moment."

By the time I slid the door shut behind me and knelt on the tatami mats to bow, Mother had already settled herself at the table again.

"This is our Chiyo," Mother said.

"The very girl I was thinking of!" said Mameha. "How do you do, Chiyo-chan? I'm happy that you look so healthy! I was just saying to Mrs. Nitta that I'd begun to worry about you. But you seem quite well."

"Oh, yes, ma'am, very well," I answered.

"Thank you, Chiyo," Mother told me. I bowed to excuse myself, but before I could rise to my feet, Mameha said:

"She's really quite a lovely girl, Mrs. Nitta. I must say, at times I've thought of coming to ask your permission to make her my younger sister. But now that she's no longer in training ..."

Mother must have been shocked to hear this, because although she'd been on the point of taking a sip of tea, her hand stopped on its way to her mouth and remained motionless there during the time it took me to leave the room. I was nearly back to my place on the floor of the entrance hall when she finally responded.

"A geisha as popular as you, Mameha-san . . . you could have any apprentice in Gion as your younger sister."

"It's true I'm often asked. But I haven't taken on a new younger sister in more than a year. You'd think that with this terrible Depression, customers would have slowed to a trickle, but really, I've never been so busy. I suppose the rich just go right on being rich, even in a time like this."

"They need their fun more than ever now," Mother said. "But you were saying ..."

"Yes, what was I saying? Well, it makes no difference. I mustn't take any more of your time. I'm pleased that Chiyo is quite healthy after all."

"Very healthy, yes. But, Mameha-san, wait a moment before you leave, if you don't mind. You were saying you'd almost considered taking on Chiyo as your younger sister?"

"Well, by now she's been out of training so long . . ." Mameha said. "Anyway, I'm sure you have an excellent reason for the decision you've made, Mrs. Nitta. I wouldn't dare second-guess you."

"It's heartbreaking, the choices people are forced to make in these times. I just couldn't afford her training any longer! However, if you feel she has potential, Mameha-san, I'm sure any investment you might choose to make in her future would be amply repaid."

Mother was trying to take advantage of Mameha. No geisha ever paid lesson fees for a younger sister.

"I wish such a thing were possible," Mameha said, "but with this terrible Depression . . ."

"Perhaps there's some way I could manage it," Mother said. "Though Chiyo is a bit headstrong, and her debts are considerable. I've often thought how shocking it would be if she ever managed to repay them."

"Such an attractive girl? I'd find it shocking if she couldn't."

"Anyway, there's more to life than money, isn't there?" Mother said. "One wants to do one's best for a girl like Chiyo. Perhaps I could see my way to investing a bit more in her . . . just for her lessons, you understand. But where would it all lead?"

"I'm sure Chiyo's debts are very considerable," Mameha said. "But even so, I should think she'll repay them by the time she's twenty." "Twenty!" said Mother. "I don't think any girl in Gion has ever done such a thing. And in the midst of this Depression . . ."

"Yes, there is the Depression, it's true."

"It certainly seems to me our Pumpkin is a safer investment," Mother said. "After all, in Chiyo's case, with you as her older sister, her debts will only grow worse before they get better."

Mother wasn't just talking about my lesson fees; she was talking about fees she would have to pay to Mameha. A geisha of Mameha's standing commonly takes a larger portion of her younger sister's earnings than an ordinary geisha would.

"Mameha-san, if you have a moment longer," Mother went on, "I wonder if you would entertain a proposal. If the great Mameha says Chiyo will repay her debts by the age of twenty, how can I doubt it's true? Of course, a girl like Chiyo won't succeed without an older sister such as yourself, and yet our little okiya is stretched to its limits just now. I can't possibly offer you the terms you're accustomed to. The best I could offer from Chiyo's future earnings might be only half what you'd ordinarily expect."

"Just now I'm entertaining several very generous offers," Mameha said. "If I'm going to take on a younger sister, I couldn't possibly afford to do it at a reduced fee."

"I'm not quite finished, Mameha-san," Mother replied. "Here's my proposal. It's true I can afford only half what you might usually expect. But if Chiyo does indeed manage to repay her debts by the age of twenty, as you anticipate, I would turn over to you the remainder of what you ought to have made, plus an additional thirty percent. You would make more money in the long run."

"And if Chiyo turns twenty without having repaid her debts?" Mameha asked.

"I'm sorry to say that in such a case, the investment would have been a poor one for both of us. The okiya would be unable to pay the fees owed to you."

There was a silence, and then Mameha sighed.

"I'm very poor with numbers, Mrs. Nitta. But if I understand correctly, you'd like me to take on a task you think may be impossible, for fees that are less than usual. Plenty of promising young girls in Gion would make fine younger sisters to me at no risk whatever. I'm afraid I must decline your proposal."

"You're quite right," said Mother. "Thirty percent is a bit low. I'll offer you double, instead, if you succeed."

"But nothing if I fail."

"Please don't think of it as nothing. A portion of Chiyo's fees would have gone to you all along. It's simply that the okiya would be unable to pay you the additional amount you would be owed."

I felt certain Mameha was going to say no. Instead she said, "I'd like to find out first how substantial Chiyo's debt really is."

"I'll fetch the account books for you," Mother told her.

I heard nothing more of their conversation, for at this point Auntie ran out of patience for my eavesdropping, and sent me out of the okiya with a list of errands. All that afternoon, I felt as agitated as a pile of rocks in an earthquake; because, of course, I had no idea how things would turn out. If Mother and Mameha couldn't come to an agreement, I would remain a maid all my life just as surely as a turtle remains a turtle, When I returned to the okiya, Pumpkin was kneeling on the walkway near the courtyard, making terrible twanging noises with her shamisen. She looked very pleased when she caught sight of me, and called me over.

"Find some excuse to go into Mother's room," she said. "She's been in there all afternoon with her abacus. I'm sure she'll say something to you. Then you have to run back down here and tell me!"

I thought this was a fine idea. One of my errands had been to buy some cream for the cook's scabies, but the pharmacy had been out of it. So I decided to go upstairs and apologize to Mother for having come back to the okiya without it. She wouldn't care, of course; probably she didn't even know I'd been sent to fetch it. But at least it would get me into her room.

As it turned out, Mother was listening to a comedy show on the radio. Normally if I disturbed her at a time like this, she would wave me in and go right on listening to the radio-looking over her account books and puffing at her pipe. But today, to my surprise, she turned off the radio and slapped the account book shut the moment she saw me. I bowed to her and went to kneel at the table.

"While Mameha was here," she said, "I noticed you in the formal entrance hall polishing the floor. Were you trying to overhear our conversation?"

"No, ma'am. There was a scratch on the floorboards. Pumpkin and I were doing what we could to buff it out."

"I only hope you turn out to be a better geisha than you are a liar," she said, and began to laugh, but without taking her pipe out of her mouth, so that she accidentally blew air into the stem and caused ashes to shoot up out of the little metal bowl. Some of the flecks of tobacco were still burning when they came down onto her kimono. She put the pipe down onto the table and whacked herself with her palm until she was satisfied they'd all been snuffed out.

"Now, Chiyo, you've been here in the okiya more than a year," she said.

"More than two years, ma'am."

"In that time I've hardly taken any notice of you. And then today, along comes a geisha like Mameha, to say she wants to be your older sister! How on earth am I to understand this?"

As I saw it, Mameha was actually more interested in harming Hatsumomo than in helping me. But I certainly couldn't say such a thing to Mother. I was about to tell her I had no idea why Mameha had taken an interest in me; but before I could speak, the door to Mother's room slid open, and I heard Hatsumomo's voice say:

"I'm sorry, Mother, I didn't know you were busy scolding the maid!"

"She won't be a maid much longer," Mother told her. "We've had a visit today that may interest you."

"Yes, I gather Mameha has come and plucked our little minnow out of the aquarium," Hatsumomo said. She drifted over and knelt at the table, so close that I had to scoot away to make room for both of us.

"For some reason," Mother said, "Mameha seems to think Chiyo will repay her debts by the age of twenty."

Hatsumomo's face was turned toward mine. To see her smile, you might have thought she was a mother looking adoringly at a baby. But this is what she said:

"Perhaps, Mother, if you sold her to a whorehouse . . ."

"Stop it, Hatsumomo. I didn't invite you in here to listen to this sort of thing. I want to know what you've done to Mameha lately to provoke her."

"I may have ruined Miss Prissy's day by strolling past her on the street, perhaps, but other than that I haven't done a thing."

"She has something in mind. I'd like to know what it is."

"There's no mystery at all, Mother. She thinks she can get at me by going through Little Miss Stupid."

Mother didn't respond; she seemed to be considering what Hatsumomo had told her. "Perhaps," she said at last, "she really does think Chiyo will be a more successful geisha than our Pumpkin and would like to make a bit of money off her. Who can blame her for that?"

"Really, Mother . . . Mameha doesn't need Chiyo in order to make money. Do you think it's an accident she's chosen to waste her time on a girl who happens to live in the same okiya I do? Mameha would probably establish a relationship with your little dog if she thought it would help drive me out of Gion."

"Come now, Hatsumomo. Why would she want to drive you out of Gion?"

"Because I'm more beautiful. Does she need a better reason? She wants to humiliate me by telling everyone, 'Oh, please meet my new younger sister. She lives in the same okiya as Hatsumomo, but she's such a jewel they've entrusted her to me for training instead.'"

"I can't imagine Mameha behaving that way," Mother said, almost under her breath.

"If she thinks she can make Chiyo into a more successful geisha than Pumpkin," Hatsumomo went on, "she's going to be very surprised. But f'm delighted that Chiyo will be dressed up in a kimono and paraded around. It's a perfect opportunity for Pumpkin. Haven't you ever seen a kitten attacking a ball of string? Pumpkin will be a much better geisha after she's sharpened her teeth on this one."

Mother seemed to like this, for she raised the edges of her mouth in a sort of smile.

"I had no idea what a fine day this would be," she said. "This morning when I woke up, two useless girls were living in the okiya. Now they'll be fighting it out . . . and with a couple of the most prominent geisha in Gion ushering them along!"

Chapter twelve



The very next afternoon Mameha summoned me to her apartment. This time she was seated at the table waiting for me when the maid slid open the door. I was careful to bow properly before coming into the room and then to cross to the table and bow again.

"Mameha-san, I don't know what has led you to this decision . . ." I began, "but I can't express how grateful I am-"

"Don't be grateful just yet," she interrupted. "Nothing has happened. You'd better tell me what Mrs. Nitta said to you after my visit yesterday."

"Well," I said, "I think Mother was a little confused about why you've taken notice of me . . . and to tell the truth, so am I." I hoped Mameha would say something, but she didn't. "As for Hatsumomo-"

"Don't even waste your time thinking about what she says. You already know she'd be thrilled to see you fail, just as Mrs. Nitta would."

"I don't understand why Mother should want me to fail," I said, 'considering she'll make more money if I succeed."

"Except that if you pay back your debts by the age of twenty, she'll owe me a good deal of money. I made a sort of bet with her yesterday," Mameha said, while a maid served us tea. "I wouldn't have made the bet unless I felt certain you would succeed. But if I'm going to be your older sister, you may as well know that I have very strict terms."

I expected her to tell them to me, but she only glowered and said:

"Really, Chiyo, you must stop blowing on your tea that way. You look like a peasant! Leave it on the table until it's cool enough to drink."

"I'm sorry," I said. "I wasn't aware I was doing it."

"It's time you were; a geisha must be very careful about the image she presents to the world. Now, as I say, I have very strict terms. To begin with, I expect you to do what I ask without questioning me or doubting me in any way. I know you've disobeyed Hatsumomo and Mrs. Nitta from time to time. You may think that's understandable; but if you ask me, you should have been more obedient in the first place and perhaps none of these unfortunate things would ever have happened to you."

Mameha was quite right. The world has changed a good deal since; but when I was a child, a girl who disobeyed her elders was soon put in her place.

"Several years ago I took on two new younger sisters," Mameha continued. "One worked very hard, but the other slacked off. I brought her here to my apartment one day and explained that I wouldn't tolerate her making a fool of me any longer, but it had no effect. The following month I told her to go and find herself a new older sister."

"Mameha-san, I promise you, such a thing will never happen with me," I said. "Thanks to you, I feel like a ship encountering its first taste of the ocean. I would never forgive myself for disappointing you."

"Yes, well, that's all fine, but I'm not just talking about how hard you work. You'll have to be careful not to let Hatsumomo trick you. And for heaven's sake, don't do anything to make your debts worse than they are. Don't break even a teacup!"

I promised her I wouldn't; but I must confess that when I thought of Hatsumomo tricking me again . . . well, I wasn't sure how I could defend myself if she tried.

"There's one more thing," Mameha said. "Whatever you and I discuss must be kept private. You are never to tell any of it to Hatsumomo. Even if we've only talked about the weather, do you understand? If Hatsumomo asks what I said, you must tell her, 'Oh, Hatsumomo-san, Mameha-san never says anything of interest! As soon as I've heard it, it slips right out of my mind. She's the dullest person alive!'"

I told Mameha I understood.

"Hatsumomo is quite clever," she went on. "If you give her the slightest hint, you'll be surprised how much she'll figure out on her own."

Suddenly, Mameha leaned toward me and said in an angry voice, "What were you two talking about yesterday when I saw you on the street together?"

"Nothing, ma'am!" I said. And though she went on glaring at me, I was so shocked I couldn't say anything further.

"What do you mean, nothing? You'd better answer me, you stupid little girl, or I'll pour ink in your ear tonight while you're sleeping!"

It took me a moment to understand that Mameha was trying to do an imitation of Hatsumomo. I'm afraid it wasn't a very good imitation, but now that I understood what she was doing, I said, "Honestly, Hatsumomo-san, Mameha-san is always saying the dullest things! I can never remember a single one of them. They just melt away like snowflakes. Are you quite sure you saw us talking yesterday? Because if we talked at all, I can hardly remember it. . . ."

Mameha went on for a time, doing her poor imitation of Hatsumomo, and at the end said I had done an adequate job. I wasn't as confident as she was. Being questioned by Mameha, even when she was trying to act like Hatsumomo, wasn't the same thing as keeping up a facade in front of Hatsumomo herself.

In the two years since Mother had put an end to my lessons, I'd forgotten much of what I'd learned. And I hadn't learned much to begin with, since my mind had been occupied with other things. This is why, when I went back to the school after Mameha agreed to be my older sister, I honestly felt I was beginning my lessons for the very first time.

I was twelve years old by then, and nearly as tall as Mameha. Having grown older may seem like an advantage, but I can assure you it wasn't. Most of the girls at the school had begun their studies much younger, in some cases at the traditional age of three years and three days. Those few who'd started as young as this were mostly the daughters of geisha themselves, and had been raised in such a way that dance and tea ceremony formed as much a part of their daily life as swimming in the pond had for me.

I know I've described something of what it was like to study shamisen with Teacher Mouse. But a geisha must study a great many arts besides shamisen. And in fact, the "gei" of "geisha" means "arts," so the word "geisha" really means "artisan" or "artist." My first lesson in the morning was in a kind of small drum we call tsutsumi. You may wonder why a geisha should bother learning drums, but the answer is very simple. In a banquet or any sort of informal gathering in Gion, geisha usually dance to nothing more than the accompaniment of a shamisen and perhaps a singer. But for stage performances, such as Dances of the Old Capital every spring, six or more shamisen players join together as an ensemble, backed by various types of drums and also a Japanese flute we call fue. So you see, a geisha must try her hand at all of these instruments, even though eventually she'll be encouraged to specialize in one or two.

As I say, my early-morning lesson was in the little drum we call tsutsumi, which is played in a kneeling position like all the other musical instruments we studied. Tsutsumi is different from the other drums because it's held on the shoulder and played with the hand, unlike the larger okaiva, which rests on the thigh, or the largest drum of all, called taiho, which sits edgewise on a stand and is struck with fat drumsticks. I studied them all at one time or other. A drum may seem like an instrument even a child can play, but actually there are various ways of striking each of them, such as-for the big taiko-bringing the arm across the body and then swinging the drumstick backhand, you might say, which we call uchikomi; or striking with one arm while bringing the other up at the same moment, which we call sarashi. There are other methods as well, and each produces a different sound, but only after a great deal of practice. On top of this, the orchestra is always in view of the public, so all these movements must be graceful and attractive, as well as being in unison-with the other players. Half the work is in making the right sound; the other half is in doing it the proper way.

Following drums, my next lesson of the morning was in Japanese flute, and after that in shamisen. The method in studying any of these instruments was more or less the same. The teacher began by playing something, and then the students tried to play it back. On occasion we sounded like a band of animals at the zoo, but not often, because the teachers were careful to begin simply. For example, in my first lesson on the flute, the teacher played a single note and we tried one at a time to play it back. Even after only one note, the teacher still found plenty to say.

"So-and-so, you must keep your little finger down, not up in the air. And you, Such-and-such, does your flute smell bad? Well then, why do you wrinkle your nose that way!"

She was very strict, like most of the teachers, and naturally we were afraid of making mistakes. It wasn't uncommon for her to take the flute from some poor girl in order to hit her on the shoulder with it.

After drums, flute, and shamisen, my next lesson was usually in singing. We often sing at parties in Japan; and of course, parties are mostly what men come to Gion for. But even if a girl can't hold a tune and will never be asked to perform in front of others, she must still study singing to help her understand dance. This is because the dances are set to particular pieces of music, often performed by a singer accompanying herself on the shamisen.

There are many different types of songs-oh, far more than I could possibly count-but in our lessons we studied five different kinds. Some were popular ballads; some were long pieces from Kabuki theater telling a story; others were something like a short musical poem. It would be senseless for me to try describing these songs. But let me say that while I find most of them enchanting, foreigners often seem to think they sound more like cats wailing in a temple yard than music. It is true that traditional Japanese singing involves a good deal of warbling and is often sung so far back in the throat that the sound comes out from the nose rather than the mouth. But it's only a matter of what you're accustomed to hearing.

In all of these classes, music and dance were only part of what we learned. Because a girl who has mastered the various arts will still come off badly at a party if she hasn't learned proper comportment and behavior. This is one reason the teachers always insist upon good manners and bearing in their students, even when a girl is only scurrying down the hall toward the toilet. When you're taking a lesson in shamisen, for example, you'll be corrected for speaking in anything but the most proper language, or for speaking in a regional accent rather than in Kyoto speech, or for slouching, or walking in lumbering steps. In fact, the most severe scolding a girl is likely to receive probably won't be for playing her instrument badly or failing to learn the words to a song, but rather for having dirty fingernails, or being disrespectful, or something of that sort.

Sometimes when I've talked with foreigners about my training, they've asked, "Well, when did you study flower arranging?" The answer is that I never did. Anyone who sits down in front of a man and begins to arrange flowers by way of entertaining him is likely to look up and find that he has laid his head down on the table to go to sleep. You must remember that a geisha, above all, is an entertainer and a performer. We may pour sake or tea for a man, but we never go and fetch another serving of pickles. And in fact, we geisha are so well pampered by our maids that we scarcely know how to look after ourselves or keep our own rooms orderly, much less adorn a room in a teahouse with flowers.

My last lesson of the morning was in tea ceremony. This is a subject many books are written about, so I won't try to go into much detail. But basically, a tea ceremony is conducted by one or two people who sit before their guests and prepare tea in a very traditional manner, using beautiful cups, and whisks made from bamboo, and so forth. Even the guests are a part of the ceremony because they must hold the cup in a certain manner and drink from it just so. If you think of it as sitting down to have a nice cup of tea . . . well, it's more like a sort of dance, or even a meditation, conducted while kneeling. The tea itself is made from tea leaves ground into a powder and then whisked with boiled water into a frothy green mix we call matcha, which is very unpopular with foreigners. I'll admit it does look like green soapy water and has a bitter taste that takes a certain getting used to.

Tea ceremony is a very important part of a geisha's training. It isn't unusual for a party at a private residence to begin with a brief tea ceremony. And the guests who come to see the seasonal dances in Gion are first served tea made by geisha.

My tea ceremony teacher was a young woman of perhaps twenty-five who wasn't a very good geisha, as I later learned; but she was so obsessed with tea ceremony that she taught it as if every movement was absolutely holy. Because of her enthusiasm I quickly learned to respect her teaching, and I must say it was the perfect lesson to have at the end of a long morning. The atmosphere was so serene. Even now, I find tea ceremony as enjoyable as a good night's sleep.

What makes a geisha's training- so difficult isn't simply the arts she must learn, but how hectic her life becomes. After spending all morning in lessons, she is still expected to work during the afternoon and evening very much as she always has. And still, she sleeps no more than three to five hours every night. During these years of training, if I'd been two people my life would probably still have been too busy. I would have been grateful if Mother had freed me from my chores as she had Pumpkin; but considering her bet with Mameha, I don't think she ever considered offering me more time for practice. Some of my chores were given to the maids, but most days I was responsible for more than I could manage, while still being expected to practice shamisen for an hour or more during the afternoon. In winter, both Pumpkin and I were made to toughen up our hands by holding them in ice water until we cried from pain, and then practice outside in the frigid air of the courtyard. I know it sounds terribly cruel, but it's the way things were done back then. And in fact, toughening the hands in this way really did help me play better. You see, stage fright drains the feeling from your hands; and when you've already grown accustomed to playing with hands that are numbed and miserable, stage fright presents much less of a problem.

In the beginning Pumpkin and I practiced shamisen together every afternoon, right after our hour-long lesson in reading and writing with Auntie. We'd studied Japanese with her ever since my arrival, and Auntie always insisted on good behavior. But while practicing shamisen during the afternoon, Pumpkin and I had great fun together. If we laughed out loud Auntie or one of the maids would come scold us; but as long as we made very little noise and plunked away at our shamisens while we talked, we could get away with spending the hour enjoying each other's company. It was the time of day I looked forward to most.

Then one afternoon while Pumpkin was helping me with a technique for slurring notes together, Hatsumomo appeared in the corridor before us. We hadn't even heard her come into the okiya.

"Why, look, it's Mameha's little-sister-to-be!" she said to me. She added the "to-be" because Mameha and I wouldn't officially be sisters until the time of my debut as an apprentice geisha.

"I might have called you 'Little Miss Stupid,' " she went on, "but after what I've just observed, I think I ought to save that for Pumpkin instead."

Poor Pumpkin lowered her shamisen into her lap just like a dog putting its tail between its legs. "Have I done something wrong?" she asked.

I didn't have to look directly at Hatsumomo to see the anger blooming on her face. I was terribly afraid of what would happen next.

"Nothing at all!" Hatsumomo said. "I just didn't realize what a thoughtful person you are."

"I'm sorry, Hatsumomo," Pumpkin said. "I was trying to help Chiyo by-"

"But Chiyo doesn't want your help. When she wants help with her shamisen, she'll go to her teacher. Is that head of yours just a big, hollow gourd?"

And here Hatsumomo pinched Pumpkin by the lip so hard that the shamisen slid off her lap onto the wooden walkway where she was seated, and fell from there onto the dirt corridor below.

"You and I need to have a little talk," Hatsumomo said to her. You'll put your shamisen away, and I'll stand here to make sure you don't do anything else stupid."

When Hatsumomo let go, poor Pumpkin stepped down to pick up her shamisen and begin disassembling it. She gave me a pitiful glanqe, and I thought she might calm down. But in fact her lip began to quiver; then her whole face trembled like the ground before an earthquake; and suddenly she dropped the pieces of her shamisen onto the walkway and put her hand to her lip-which had already begun to swell-while tears rolled down her cheeks. Hatsumomo's face softened as if the angry sky had broken, and she turned to me with a satisfied smile.

"You'll have to find yourself another little friend," she said to me. "After Pumpkin and I have had our talk, she'll know better than to speak a word to you in the future. Won't you, Pumpkin?"

Pumpkin nodded, for she had no choice; but I could see how sorry she felt. We never practiced shamisen together again.

I reported this encounter to Mameha the next time I visited her apartment.

"I hope you took to heart what Hatsumomo said to you," she told me. "If Pumpkin isn't to speak a word to you, then you mustn't speak a word to her either. You'll only get her into trouble; and besides, she'll have to tell Hatsumomo what you say. You may have trusted the poor girl in the past, but you mustn't any longer."

I felt so sad at hearing this, I could hardly speak for a long while. "Trying to survive in an okiya with Hatsumomo," I said at last, "is like a pig trying to survive in a slaughterhouse."

I was thinking of Pumpkin when I said this, but Mameha must have thought I meant myself. "You're quite right," she said. "Your only defense is to become more successful than Hatsumomo and drive her out."

"But everyone says she's one of the most popular geisha. I can't imagine how I'll ever become more popular than she is."

"I didn't say popular," Mameha replied. "I said successful. Going to a lot of parties isn't everything. I live in a spacious apartment with two maids of my own, while Hatsumomo-who probably goes to as many parties as I do-continues to live in the Nitta okiya. When I say successful, I mean a geisha who has earned her independence. Until a geisha has assembled her own collection of kimono-or until she's been adopted as the daughter of an okiya, which is just about the same thing-she'll be in someone else's power all her life. You've seen some of my kimono, haven't you? How do you suppose I came by them?"

"I've been thinking that perhaps you were adopted as the daughter of an okiya before you came to live in this apartment."

"I did live in an okiya until about five years ago. But the mistress there has a natural daughter. She would never adopt another."

"So if I might ask . . . did you buy your entire collection of kimono yourself?"

"How much do you think a geisha earns, Chiyo! A complete collection of kimono doesn't mean two or three robes for each of the seasons. Some men's lives revolve around Gion. They'll grow bored if they see you in the same thing night after night."

I must have looked every bit as puzzled as I felt, for Mameha gave a laugh at the expression on my face.

"Cheer up, Chiyo-chan, there's an answer to this riddle. My danna is a generous man and bought me most of these robes. That's why I'm more successful than Hatsumomo. I have a wealthy danna. She hasn't had one in years."

I'd already been in Gion long enough to know something of what Mameha meant by a danna. It's the term a wife uses for her husband- or rather, it was in my day. But a geisha who refers to her danna isn't talking about a husband. Geisha never marry. Or at least those who do no longer continue as geisha.

You see, sometimes after a party with geisha, certain men don't feel satisfied with all the flirting and begin to long for something a bit more. Some of these men are content to make their way to places like Miyagawa-cho, where they'll add the odor of their own sweat to the unpleasant houses I saw on the night I found my sister. Other men work up their courage to lean in bleary-eyed and whisper to the geisha beside them a question about what her "fees" might be. A lower-class geisha may be perfectly agreeable to such an arrangement; probably she's happy to take whatever income is offered her. A woman like this may call herself a geisha and be listed at the registry office; but I think you should take a look at how she dances, and how well she plays shamisen, and what she knows about tea ceremony before you decide whether or not she really is a proper geisha. A true geisha will never soil her reputation by making herself available to men on a nightly basis.

I won't pretend a geisha never gives in casually to a man she finds attractive. But whether she does or not is her private affair. Geisha have passions like everyone else, and they make the same mistakes. A geisha who takes such a risk can only hope she isn't found out. Her reputation is certainly at stake; but more important, so is her standing with her danna, if she has one. What's more, she invites the wrath of the woman who runs her okiya. A geisha determined to follow her passions might take this risk; but she certainly won't do it for spending money she might just as easily earn in some legitimate way.

So you see, a geisha of the first or second tier in Gion can't be bought for a single night, not by anyone. But if the right sort of man is interested in something else-not a night together, but a much longer time-and if he's willing to offer suitable terms, well, in that case geisha will be happy to accept such an arrangement. Parties and so on are all very nice; but the real money in Gion comes from having a danna, and a geisha without one-such as Hatsumomo-is like a stray cat on the street without a master to feed it.

You might expect that in the case of a beautiful woman like Hatsumomo, any number of men would have been eager to propose themselves as her danna; and I'm sure there were many who did. She had ir fact had a danna at one time. But somehow or other she'd so angered the mistress of the Mizuki, which was her principal teahouse, that men who made inquiries forever afterward were told she wasn't available-which they probably took to mean she already had a danna, even thougf it wasn't true. In damaging her relationship with the mistress, Hatsumomo had hurt no one so much as herself. As a very popular geisha she made enough money to keep Mother happy; but as a geisha without a danna, she didn't make enough to gain her independence and move out of the okiya once and for all. Nor could she simply change her registration to another teahouse whose mistress might be more accommodating in helping her find a danna; none of the other mistresses would want to damage their relationships with the Mizuki.

Of course, the average geisha isn't trapped in this way. Instead she spends her time charming men in the hopes that one of them will eventually make an inquiry with the mistress of the teahouse about her. Many of these inquiries lead nowhere; the man, when he's investigated, may be found to have too little money; or he may balk when someone suggests he give a gift of an expensive kimono as a gesture of goodwill! But if the weeks of negotiations come to a successful conclusion, the geisha and her new danna conduct a ceremony just like when two geisha become sisters. In most cases this bond will probably last six months or so, perhaps longer-because of course, men tire so quickly of the same thing. The terms of the arrangement will probably oblige the danna to pay off a portion of the geisha's debts and cover many of her living expenses every month-such as the cost of her makeup and perhaps a portion of her lesson fees, and maybe her medical expenses as well. Things of that sort. Despite all these extravagant expenses, he'll still continue to pay her usual hourly fee whenever he spends time with her, just as her other customers do. But he's also entitled to certain "privileges."

These would be the arrangements for an average geisha. But a very top geisha, of which there were probably thirty or forty in Gion, would expect much more. To begin with, she wouldn't even consider tarnishing her reputation with a string of danna, but might instead have only one or two in her entire life. Not only will her danna cover all of her living expenses, such as her registration fee, her lesson fees, and her meals; what's more, he'll provide her with spending money, sponsor dance recitals for her, and buy her gifts of kimono and jewelry. And when he spends time with her, he won't pay her usual hourly fee; he'll probably pay more, as a gesture of goodwill.

Mameha was certainly one of these top geisha; in fact, as I came to learn, she was probably one of the two or three best-known geisha in all of Japan. You may have heard something about the famous geisha Mametsuki, who had an affair with the prime minister of Japan shortly before World War I and caused something of a scandal. She was Mameha's older sister-which is why they both had "Mame" in their names. It's common for a young geisha to derive her name from the name of her older sister.

Having an older sister like Mametsuki was already enough to ensure Mameha a successful career. But in the early 1925, the Japan Travel Bureau began its first international advertising campaign. The posters showed a lovely photograph of the pagoda from the Toji Temple in southeastern Kyoto, with a cherry tree to one side and a lovely young apprentice geisha on the other side looking very shy and graceful, and exquisitely delicate. That apprentice geisha was Mameha.

It would be an understatement to say that Mameha became famous. The poster was displayed in big cities all over the world, with the words "Come and Visit the Land of the Rising Sun" in all sorts of foreign languages-not only English, but German, French, Russian, and . . . oh, other languages I've never even heard of. Mameha was only sixteen at the time, but suddenly she found herself being summoned to meet every head of state who came to Japan, and every aristocrat from England or Germany, and every millionaire from the United States. She poured sake for the great German writer Thomas Mann, who afterward told her a long, dull story through an interpreter that went on and on for nearly an hour; as well as Charlie Chaplin, and Sun Yat-sen, and later Ernest Hemingway, who got very drunk and said the beautiful red lips on her white face made him think of blood in the snow. In the years since then, Mameha had grown only more famous by putting on a number of widely publicized dance recitals at the Kabukiza Theater in Tokyo, usually attended by the prime minister and a great many other luminaries.

When Mameha had announced her intention of taking me on as her younger sister, I hadn't known any of these things about her, and it's just as well. Probably I would have felt so intimidated, I couldn't have done much more than tremble in her presence.

Mameha was kind enough to sit me down and explain much of this on that day in her apartment. When she was satisfied that I understood her, she said:

"Following your debut, you'll be an apprentice geisha until the age of eighteen. After that you'll need a danna if you're to pay back your debts. A very substantial danna. My job will be to make sure you're well known in Gion by then, but it's up to you to work hard at becoming an accomplished dancer. If you can't make it at least to the fifth rank by the age of sixteen, nothing I can do will help you, and Mrs. Nitta will be delighted to win her bet with me."

"But, Mameha-san," I said, "I don't understand what dance has to do with it."

"Dance has everything to do with it," she told me. "If you look around at the most successful geisha in Gion, every one of them is a dancer."

Dance is the most revered of the geisha's arts. Only the most promising and beautiful geisha are encouraged to specialize in it, and nothing except perhaps tea ceremony can compare to the richness of its tradition. The Inoue School of dance, practiced by the geisha of Gion, derives from Noh theater. Because Noh is a very ancient art that has always been patronized by the Imperial court, dancers in Gion consider their art superior to the school of dance practiced in the Ponto-cho district across the river, which derives from Kabuki. Now, I'm a great admirer of Kabuki, and in fact I've been lucky enough to have as my friends a number of the most famous Kabuki actors of this century. But Kabuki is a relatively young art form; it didn't exist before the 1705. And it has always been enjoyed by ordinary people rather than patronized by the Imperial court. There is simply no comparing the dance in Pontocho to the Inoue School of Gion.

All apprentice geisha must study dance, but, as I say, only the promising and attractive ones will be encouraged to specialize and go on to become true dancers, rather than shamisen players or singers. Unfortunately, the reason Pumpkin, with her soft, round face, spent so much of her time practicing shamisen was because she hadn't been selected as a dancer. As for me, I wasn't so exquisitely beautiful that I was given no choice but to dance, like Hatsumomo. It seemed to me I would become a dancer only by demonstrating to my teachers that I was willing to work as hard as necessary.

Thanks to Hatsumomo, however, my lessons got off to a very bad start. My instructor was a woman of about fifty, known to us as Teacher Rump, because her skin gathered at her throat in such a way as to make a little rear end there beneath her chin. Teacher Rump hated Hatsumomo as much as anyone in Gion did. Hatsumomo knew this quite well; and so what do you think she did? She went to her-I know this because Teacher Rump told it to me some years later-and said:

"Teacher, may I be permitted to ask you a favor? I have my eye on one of the students in your class, who seems to me a very talented girl. I'd be extremely grateful if you could tell me what you think of her. Her name is Chiyo, and I'm very, very fond of her. I'd be greatly in your debt for any special help you might give her."

Hatsumomo never needed to say another word after this, because Teacher Rump gave me all the "special help" Hatsumomo hoped she would. My dancing wasn't bad, really, but Teacher Rump began at once to use me as an example of how things should not be done. For example, I remember one morning when she demonstrated a move to us by drawing her arm across her body just so and then stamping one foot on the mats. We were all expected to copy this move in unison; but because we were beginners, when we finished and stamped our feet, it sounded as if a platter stacked with beanbags had been spilled onto the floor, for not a single foot hit the mats at the same moment as any other. I can assure you I'd done no worse at this than anyone else, but Teacher Rump came and stood before me with that little rear end under her chin quivering, and tapped her folding fan against her thigh a few times before drawing it back and striking me on the side of the head with it.

"We don't stamp at just any old moment," she said. "And we don't twitch our chins."

In dances of the Inoue School, the face must be kept perfectly expressionless in imitation of the masks worn in Noh theater. But for her to complain about my chin twitching at the very moment when her own was trembling in anger . . . well, I was on the edge of tears because she'd struck me, but the other students burst out laughing. Teacher Rump blamed me for the outburst, and sent me out of the classroom in punishment.

I can't say what might have become of me under her care, if Mameha hadn't finally gone to have a talk with her and helped her to figure out what had really happened. However much Teacher Rump might have hated Hatsumomo beforehand, I'm sure she hated her all the more after learning how Hatsumomo had duped her. I'm happy to say she felt so terrible about the way she had treated me that I soon became one of her favorite students.

I won't say I had any natural talent of any kind at all, in dance or in anything else; but I was certainly as determined as anyone to work single-mindedly until I reached my goal. Since meeting the Chairman on the street that day back in the spring, I had longed for nothing so much as the chance to become a geisha and find a place for myself in the world. Now that Mameha had given me that chance, I was intent on making good. But with all my lessons and chores, and with my high expectations, I felt completely overwhelmed in my first six months of training. Then after that, I began to discover little tricks that made everything go more smoothly. For example, I found a way of practicing the shamisen while running errands. I did this by practicing a song in my mind while picturing clearly how my left hand should shift on the neck and how the plectrum should strike the string. In this way, when I put the real instrument into my lap, I could sometimes play a song quite well even though I had tried playing it only once before. Some people thought I'd learned it without practicing, but in fact, I'd practiced it all up and down the alleyways of Gion.

I used a different trick to learn the ballads and other songs we studied at the school. Since childhood I've always been able to hear a piece of music once and remember it fairly well the next day. I don't know why, just something peculiar about my mind, I suppose. So I took to writing the words on a piece of paper before going to sleep. Then when I awoke, while my mind was still soft and impressionable, I read the page before even stirring from my futon. Usually this was enough, but with music that was more difficult, I used a trick of finding images to remind me of the tune. For example, a branch falling from a tree might make me think of the sound of a drum, or a stream flowing over a rock might remind me of bending a string on the shamisen to make the note rise in pitch; and I would picture the song as a kind of stroll through a landscape.

But of course, the greatest challenge of all, and the most important one for me, was dance. For months I tried to make use of the various tricks I'd discovered, but they were of little help to me. Then one day Auntie grew furious when I spilled tea onto a magazine she was reading. The strange thing was that I'd been thinking kind thoughts toward her at the very moment she turned on me. I felt terribly sad afterward and found myself thinking of my sister, who was somewhere in
Japan without me; and of my mother, who I hoped was at peace in paradise now; and of my father, who'd been so willing to sell us and live out the end of his life alone. As these thoughts ran through my head, my body began to grow heavy. So I climbed the stairs and went into the room where Pumpkin and I slept-for Mother had moved me there after Mameha's visit to our okiya. Instead of laying myself down on the tatami mats and crying, I moved my arm in a sort of sweeping movement across my chest. I don't know why I did it; it was a move from a dance we'd studied that morning, which seemed to me very sad. At the same time I thought about the Chairman and how my life would be so much better if I could rely on a man like him. As I watched my arm sweep through the air, the smoothness of its movement seemed to express these feelings of sadness and desire. My arm passed through the air with great dignity of movement-not like a leaf fluttering from a tree, but like an ocean liner gliding through the water. I suppose that by "dignity" I mean a kind of self-confidence, or certainty, such that a little puff of wind or the lap of a wave isn't going to make any difference.

What I discovered that afternoon was that when my body felt heavy, I could move with great dignity. And if I imagined the Chairman observing me, my movements took on such a deep sense of feeling that sometimes each movement of a dance stood for some little interaction with him. Turning around with my head tipped at an angle might represent the question, "Where shall we spend our day together, Chairman?" Extending my arm and opening my folding fan told how grateful I felt that he'd honored me with his company. And when I snapped my fan shut again later in the dance, this was when I told him that nothing in life mattered more to me than pleasing him.

Chapter thirteen



During the spring of 1934, after I'd been in training for more than two years, Hatsumomo and Mother decided that the time had come for Pumpkin to make her debut as an apprentice geisha. Of course, no one told me anything about it, since Pumpkin was on orders not to speak with me, and Hatsumomo and Mother wouldn't waste their time even considering such a thing. I found out about it only when Pumpkin left the okiya early one afternoon and came back at the end of the day wearing the hairstyle of a young geisha-the so-called momaware, meaning "split peach." When I took my first look at her as she stepped up into the entrance hall, I felt sick with disappointment and jealousy. Her eyes never met mine for more than a flicker of an instant; probably she couldn't help thinking of the effect her debut was having on me. With her hair swept back in an orb so beautifully from her temples, rather than tied at the neck as it had always been, she looked very much like a young woman, though still with her same babyish face. For years she and I had envied the older girls who wore their hair so elegantly. Now Pumpkin would be setting out as a geisha while I remained behind, unable even to ask about her new life.

Then came the day Pumpkin dressed as an apprentice geisha for the first time and went with Hatsumomo to the Mizuki Teahouse, for the ceremony to bind them together as sisters. Mother and Auntie went, though I wasn't included. But I did stand among them in the formal entrance hall until Pumpkin came down the stairs assisted by the maids. She wore a magnificent black kimono with the crest of the Nitta okiya and a plum and gold obi; her face was painted white for the very first time. You might expect that with the ornaments in her hair and the brilliant red of her lips, she should have looked proud and lovely; but I thought she looked more worried than anything else. She had great difficulty walking; the regalia of an apprentice geisha is so cumbersome. Mother put a camera into Auntie's hands and told her to go outside and photograph Pumpkin having a flint sparked on her back for good luck the very first time. The rest of us remained crowded inside the entrance hall, out of view. The maids held Pumpkin's arms while she slipped her feet into the tall wooden shoes we call okobo, which an apprentice geisha always wears. Then Mother went to stand behind Pumpkin and struck a pose as though she were about to spark a flint, even though, in reality, it was always Auntie or one of the maids who did the job. When at last the photograph was taken, Pumpkin stumbled a few steps from the door and turned to look back. The others were on their way out to join her, but I was the one she looked at, with an expression that seemed to say she was very sorry for the way things had turned out.

By the end of that day, Pumpkin was officially known by her new geisha name of Hatsumiyo. The "Hatsu" came from Hatsumomo, and even though it ought to have helped Pumpkin to have a name derived from a geisha as well known as Hatsumomo, in the end it didn't work that way. Very few people ever knew her geisha name, you see; they just called her Pumpkin as we always had.

I was very eager to tell Mameha about Pumpkin's debut. But she'd been much busier than usual lately, traveling frequently to Tokyo at the request of her danna, with the result that we hadn't set eyes on each other in nearly six months. Another few weeks passed before she finally had time to summon me to her apartment. When I stepped inside, the maid let out a gasp; and then a moment later Mameha came walking out of the back room and let out a gasp as well. I couldn't think what was the matter. And then when I got on my knees to bow to Mameha and tell her how honored I was to see her again, she paid me no attention at all.

"My goodness, has it been so long, Tatsumi?" she said to her maid. "I hardly recognize her."

"I'm glad to hear you say it, ma'am," Tatsumi replied. "I thought something had gone wrong with my eyes!"

I certainly wondered at the time what they were talking about. But evidently in the six months since I'd last seen them, I'd changed more than I realized. Mameha told me to turn my head this way and that, and kept saying over and over, "My goodness, she's turned into quite a young woman!" At one point Tatsumi even made me stand and hold my arms out so she could measure my waist and hips with her hands, and then said to me, "Well, there's no doubt a kimono will fit your body just like a sock fits a foot." I'm sure she meant this as a compliment, for she had a kindly look on her face when she said it.

Finally Mameha asked Tatsumi to take me into the back room and put me into a proper kimono. I'd arrived in the blue and white cotton robe I'd worn that morning to my lessons at the school, but Tatsumi changed me into a dark blue silk covered with a design of tiny carriage wheels in shades of brilliant yellow and red. It wasn't the most beautiful kimono you would ever see, but when I looked at myself in the full-length mirror as Tatsumi was tying a bright green obi into place around my waist, I found that except for my plain hairstyle, I might have been taken for a young apprentice geisha on her way to a party. I felt quite proud when I walked out of the room, and thought Mameha would gasp again, or something of-the sort. But she only rose to her feet, tucked a handkerchief into her sleeve, and went directly to the door, where she slipped her feet into a green pair of lacquered zori and looked back over her shoulder at me.

"Well?" she said. "Aren't you coming?"

I had no idea where we were going, but I was thrilled at the thought of being seen on the street with Mameha. The maid had put out a pair of lacquered zori for me, in a soft gray. I put them on and followed Mameha down the dark tunnel of the stairwell. As we stepped out onto the street, an elderly woman slowed to bow to Mameha and then, in almost the same movement, turned to bow to me. I scarcely knew what to think of this, for hardly anyone ever took notice of me on the street. The bright sunlight had blinded my eyes so much, I couldn't make out whether or not I knew her. But I bowed back, and in a moment she was gone. I thought probably she was one of my teachers, but then an instant later the same thing happened again-this time with a young geisha I'd often admired, but who had never so much as glanced in my direction before.

We made our way up the street with nearly everyone we passed saying something to Mameha, or at the very least bowing to her, and then afterward giving me a little nod or bow as well. Several times I stopped to bow back, with the result that I fell a step or two behind Mameha. She could see the difficulty I was having, and took me to a quiet alleyway to show me the proper way of walking. My trouble, she explained, was that I hadn't learned to move the upper half of my body independently of the lower half. When I needed to bow to someone, I stopped my feet. "Slowing the feet is a way of showing respect," she said. "The more you slow up, the greater the respect. You might stop altogether to bow to one of your teachers, but for anyone else, don't slow more than you need to, for heaven's sake, or you'll never get anywhere. Go along at a constant pace when you can, taking little steps to keep the bottom of your kimono fluttering. When a woman walks, she should give the impression of waves rippling over a sandbar."

I practiced walking up and down the alley as Mameha had described, looking straight toward my feet to see if my kimono fluttered as it should. When Mameha was satisfied, we set out again.

Most of our greetings, I found, fell into one of two simple patterns. Young geisha, as we passed them, usually slowed or even stopped completely and gave Mameha a deep bow, to which Mameha responded with a kind word or two and a little nod; then the young geisha would give me something of a puzzled look and an uncertain bow, which I would return much more deeply-for I was junior to every woman we encountered. When we passed a middle-aged or elderly woman, however, Mameha nearly always bowed first; then the woman returned a respectful bow, but not as deep as Mameha's, and afterward looked me up and down before giving me a little nod. I always responded to these nods with the deepest bows I could manage while keeping my feet in motion.

I told Mameha that afternoon about Pumpkin's debut; and for months afterward I hoped she would say the time had come for my apprenticeship to begin as well. Instead, spring passed and summer too, without her saying anything of the sort. In contrast with the exciting life Pumpkin was now leading, I had only my lessons and my chores, as well as the fifteen or twenty minutes Mameha spent with me during the afternoons several times a week. Sometimes I sat in her apartment while she taught me about something I needed to know; but most often she dressed me in one of her kimono and walked me around Gion while running errands or calling on her fortune-teller or wig maker. Even when it rained and she had no errands to run, we walked under lacquered umbrellas, making our way from store to store to check ,when the new shipment of perfume would arrive from Italy, or whether a certain kimono repair was finished though it wasn't scheduled to be completed for another week.

At first I thought perhaps Mameha took me with her so that she could teach me things like proper posture-for she was constantly rapping me on the back with her closed folding fan to make me stand straighter-and about how to behave toward people. Mameha seemed to know everyone, and always made a point of smiling or saying something kind, even to the most junior maids, because she understood well that she owed her exalted position to the people who thought highly of her. But then one day as we were walking out of a bookstore, I suddenly realized what she was really doing. She had no particular interest in going to the bookstore, or the wig maker, or the stationer. The errands weren't especially important; and besides, she could have sent one of her maids instead of going herself. She ran these errands only so that people in Gion would see us strolling the streets together. She was delaying my debut to give everyone time to take notice of me.

One sunny October afternoon we set out from Mameha's apartment and headed downstream along the banks of the Shirakawa, watching the leaves of the cherry trees flutter down onto the water. A great many other people were out strolling for just the same reason, and as you would expect, all of them greeted Mameha. In nearly every case, at the same time they greeted Mameha, they greeted me.

"You're getting to be rather well known, don't you think?" she said to me.

"I think most people would greet even a sheep, if it were walking alongside Mameha-san."

"Especially a sheep," she said. "That would be so unusual. But really, I hear a great many people asking about the girl with the lovely gray eyes. They haven't learned your name, but it makes no difference. You won't be called Chiyo much longer anyway."

"Does Mameha-san mean to say-"

"I mean to say that I've been speaking with Waza-san"-this was the name of her fortune-teller-"and he has suggested the third day in November as a suitable time for your debut."

Mameha stopped to watch me as I stood there still as a tree and with my eyes the size of rice crackers. I didn't cry out or clap my hands, but I was so delighted I couldn't speak. Finally I bowed to Mameha and thanked her.

"You're going to make a fine geisha," she said, "but you'll make an even better one if you put some thought into the sorts of statements you make with your eyes."

"I've never been aware of making any statement with them at all," I said.

"They're the most expressive part of a woman's body, especially in your case. Stand here a moment, and I'll show you."

Mameha walked around the corner, leaving me alone in the quiet alleyway. A moment later she strolled out and walked right past me with her eyes to one side. I had the impression she felt afraid of what might happen if she looked in my direction.

"Now, if you were a man," she said, "what would you think?"

"I'd think you were concentrating so hard on avoiding me that you couldn't think about anything else."

"Isn't it possible I was just looking at the rainspouts along the base of the houses?"

"Even if you were, I thought you were avoiding looking at me."

"That's just what I'm saying. A girl with a stunning profile will never accidentally give a man the wrong message with it. But men are going to notice your eyes and imagine you're giving messages with them even when you aren't. Now watch me once more."

Mameha went around the corner again, and this time came back with her eyes to the ground, walking in a particularly dreamy manner. Then as she neared me her eyes rose to meet mine for just an instant, and very quickly looked away. I must say, I felt an electric jolt; if I'd been a man, I would have thought she'd given herself over very briefly to strong feelings she was struggling to hide.

"If I can say things like this with ordinary eyes like mine," she told me, "think how much more you can say with yours. It wouldn't surprise me if you were able to make a man faint right here on the street."

"Mameha-san!" I said. "If I had the power to make a man faint, I'm sure I'd be aware of it by now."

"I'm quite surprised you aren't. Let's agree, then, that you'll be ready to make your debut as soon as you've stopped a man in his tracks just by flicking your eyes at him."

I was so eager to make my debut that even if Mameha had challenged me to make a tree fall by looking at it, I'm sure I would have tried. I asked her if she would be kind enough to walk with me while I experimented on a few men, and she was happy to do it. My first encounter was with a man so old that, really, he looked like a kimono full of bones. He was making his way slowly up the street with the help of a cane, and his glasses were smeared so badly with grime that it wouldn't have surprised me if he had walked right into the corner of a building. He didn't notice me at all; so we continued toward Shijo Avenue. Soon I saw two businessmen in Western suits, but I had no better luck with them. I think they recognized Mameha, or perhaps they simply thought she was prettier than I was, for in any case, they never took their eyes off her.

I was about to give up when I saw a delivery boy of perhaps twenty, carrying a tray stacked with lunch boxes. In those days, a number of the restaurants around Gion made deliveries and sent a boy around during the afternoon to pick up the empty boxes. Usually they were stacked in a crate that was either carried by hand or strapped to a bicycle; I don't know why this young man was using a tray. In any case, he was half a block away, walking toward me. I could see that Mameha was looking right at him, and then she said:

"Make him drop the tray."

Before I could make up my mind whether she was joking, she turned up a side street and was gone.

I don't think it's possible for a girl of fourteen-or for a woman of any age-to make a young man drop something just by looking at him in a certain way; I suppose such things may happen in movies and books. I would have given up without even trying, if I hadn't noticed two things. First, the young man was already eyeing me as a hungry cat might eye a mouse; and second, most of the streets in Gion didn't have curbs, but this one did, and the delivery boy was walking in the street not far from it. If I could crowd him-so that he had to step up onto the sidewalk and stumble over the curb, he might drop the tray. I began by keeping my gaze to the ground in front of me, and then tried to do the very thing Mameha had done to me a few minutes earlier. I let my eyes rise until they met the young man's for an instant, and then I quickly looked away. After a few more steps I did the same thing again. By this time he was watching me so intently that probably he'd forgotten about the tray on his arm, much less the curb at his feet. When we were very close, I changed my-course ever so slightly to begin crowding him, so that he wouldn't be able to pass me without stepping over the curb onto the sidewalk, and then I looked him right in the eye. He was trying to move out of my way; and just as I had hoped, his feet tangled themselves on the curb, and he fell to one side scattering the lunch boxes on the sidewalk. Well, I couldn't help laughing! And I'm happy to say that the young man began to laugh too. I helped him pick up his boxes, gave him a little smile before he bowed to me more deeply than any man had ever bowed to me before, and then went on his way.

I met up with Mameha a moment later, who had seen it all.

"I think perhaps you're as ready now as you'll ever need to be," she said. And with that, she led me across the main avenue to the apartment of Waza-san, her fortune-teller, and set him to work finding auspicious dates for all the various events that would lead up to my debut-such as going to the shrine to announce my intentions to the gods, and having my hair done for the first time, and performing the ceremony that would make sisters of Mameha and me.

I didn't sleep at all that night. What I had wanted for so long had finally come to pass, and oh, how my stomach churned! The idea of dressing in the exquisite clothing I admired and presenting myself to a roomful of men was enough to make my palms glisten with sweat. Every time I thought of it, I felt a most delicious nervousness that tingled all the way from my knees into my chest. I imagined myself inside a teahouse, sliding open the door of a tatami room. The men turned their heads to look at me; and of course, I saw the Chairman there among them. Sometimes I imagined him alone in the room, wearing not a Western-style business suit, but the Japanese dress so many men wore in the evenings to relax. In his fingers, as smooth as driftwood, he held a sake cup; more than anything else in the world, I wanted to pour it full for him and feel his eyes upon me as I did.

I may have been no more than fourteen, but it seemed to me I'd lived two lives already. My new life was still beginning, though my old life had come to an end some time ago. Several years had passed since I'd learned the sad news about my family, and it was amazing to me how completely the landscape of my mind had changed. We all know that a winter scene, though it may be covered over one day, with even the trees dressed in shawls of snow, will be unrecognizable the following spring. Yet I had never imagined such a thing could occur within our very selves. When I first learned the news of my family, it was as though I'd been covered over by a blanket of snow. But in time the terrible coldness had melted away to reveal a landscape I'd never seen before or even imagined. I don't know if this will make sense to you, but my mind on the eve of my debut was like a garden in which the flowers have only begun to poke their faces up through the soil, so that it is still impossible to tell how things will look. I was brimming with excitement; and in this garden of my mind stood a statue, precisely in the center. It was an image of the geisha I wanted to become.

Chapter fourteen


I've heard it said that the week in which a young girl prepares for her debut as an apprentice geisha is like when a caterpillar turns into a butterfly. It's a charming idea; but for the life of me I can't imagine why anyone ever thought up such a thing. A caterpillar has only to spin its cocoon and doze off for a while; whereas in my case, I'm sure I never had a more exhausting week. The first step was to have my hair done in the manner of an apprentice geisha, in the "split peach" style, which I've mentioned. Gion had quite a number of hairdressers in those days; Mameha's worked in a terribly crowded room above an eel restaurant. I had to spend nearly two hours waiting my turn with six or eight geisha kneeling here and there, even out on the landing of the stairwell. And I'm sorry to say that the smell of dirty hair was overpowering. The elaborate hairstyles geisha wore in those days required so much effort and expense that no one went to the hairdresser more than once a week or so; by the end of that time, even the perfumes they put in their hair weren't of much help.

When at last my turn came, the first thing the hairdresser did was put me over a large sink in a position that made me wonder if he was going to chop off my head. Then he poured a bucket of warm water over my hair and began to scrub it with soap. Actually "scrub" isn't a strong enough word, because what he did to my scalp using his fingers is more like what a workman does to a field using a hoe. Looking back on it, I understand why. Dandruff is a great problem among geisha, and very few things are more unattractive and make the hair look more unclean. The hairdresser may have had the best motives, but after a while my scalp felt so raw, I was almost in tears from the pain. Finally he said to me, "Go ahead and cry if you have to. Why do you think I put you over a sink!"

I suppose this was his idea of a clever joke, because after he'd said it he laughed out loud.

When he'd had enough of scraping his fingernails across my scalp, he sat me on the mats to one side and tore a wooden comb through my hair until the muscles of my neck were sore from pulling against him. At length he satisfied himself that the knots were gone, and then combed camellia oil into my hair, which gave it a lovely sheen. I was starting to think the worst was over; but then he took out a bar of wax. And I must tell you that even with camellia oil as a lubricant and a hot iron to keep the wax soft, hair and wax were never meant to go together. It says a great deal about how civilized we human beings are, that a young girl can willingly sit and allow a grown man to comb wax through her hair without doing anything more than whimpering quietly to herself. If you tried such a thing with a dog, it would bite you so much you'd be able to see through your hands.

When my hair was evenly waxed, the hairdresser swept the forelock back and brought the rest up into a large knot like a pincushion on the top of the head. When viewed from the back, this pincushion has a split in it, as if it's cut in two, which gives the hairstyle its name of "split peach."

Even though I wore this split-peach hairstyle for a number of years, there's something about it that never occurred to me until quite some time later when a man explained it. The knot-what I've called the "pincushion"-is formed by wrapping the hair around a piece of fabric. In back where the knot is split, the fabric is left visible; it might be any design or color, but in the case of an apprentice geisha-after a certain point in her life, at least-it's always red silk. One night a man said to me:

"Most of these innocent little girls have no idea how provocative the 'split peach' hairstyle really is! Imagine that you're walking along behind a young geisha, thinking all sorts of naughty thoughts about what you might like to do to her, and then you see on her head this split-peach shape, with a big splash of red inside the cleft . . . And what do you think of?"

Well, I didn't think of anything at all, and I told him so.

"You aren't using your imagination!" he said.

After a moment I understood and turned so red he laughed to see it.

On my way back to the okiya, it didn't matter to me that my poor scalp felt the way clay must feel after the potter has scored it with a sharp stick. Every time I caught a glimpse of myself in the glass of a shop, I felt I was someone to be taken seriously; not a girl anymore, but a young woman. When I reached the okiya, Auntie made me model my hair for her and said all sorts of kind things. Even Pumpkin couldn't resist walking once around me admiringly-though Hatsumomo would have been angry if she'd known. And what do you suppose Mother's reaction was? She stood on her tiptoes to see better-which did her little good, because already I was taller than she was-and then complained that I probably ought to have gone to Hatsumomo's hairdresser rather than Mameha's.

Every young geisha may be proud of her hairstyle at first, but she comes to hate it within three or four days. Because you see, if a girl comes home exhausted from the hairdresser and lays her head down on a pillow for a nap just as she did the night before, her hair will be flattened out of shape. The moment she awakens, she'll have to go right back to the hairdresser again. For this reason, a young apprentice geisha must learn a new way of sleeping after her hair is styled for the first time. She doesn't use an ordinary pillow any longer, but a taka-makura-which I've mentioned before. It's not so much a pillow as a cradle for the base of the neck. Most are padded with a bag of wheat chaff, but still they're not much better than putting your neck on a stone. You lie there on-your futon with your hair suspended in the air, thinking everything is fine until you fall asleep; but when you wake up, you've shifted somehow so that your head has settled back on the mats, and your hairstyle is as flat as if you hadn't bothered to use a tall pillow in the first place. In my case, Auntie helped me to avoid this by putting a tray of rice flour on the mats beneath my hair. Whenever my head drooped back while I slept, my hair sank into the rice flour, which stuck to the wax and ruined my hairstyle. I'd already watched Pumpkin go through this ordeal. Now it was my turn. For a time I woke up every morning with my hair ruined and had to wait in line at the hairdresser for my chance to be tortured.

Every afternoon during the week leading up to my debut, Auntie dressed me in the complete regalia of an apprentice geisha and made me walk up and down the dirt corridor of the okiya to build up my strength. In the beginning I could scarcely walk at all, and worried that I might tip over backward. Young girls dress much more ornately than older women, you see, which means brighter colors and showier fabrics, but also a longer obi. A mature woman will wear the obi tied in back in a manner we call the "drum knot," because it makes a tidy little box shape; this doesn't require very much fabric. But a girl younger than around twenty or so wears her obi in a showier fashion. In the case of an apprentice geisha, this means the most dramatic fashion of all, a darari-obi-"dangling obi"-knotted almost as high as the shoulder blades, and with the ends hanging nearly to the ground. No matter how brightly colored a kimono might be, the obi is nearly always brighter. When an apprentice geisha walks down the street in front of you, you notice not her kimono but rather her brilliantly colored, dangling obi-with just a margin of kimono showing at the shoulders and on the sides. To achieve this effect the obi must be so long that it stretches all the way from one end of a room to the other. But it isn't the length of the obi that makes it hard to wear; it's the weight, for it's nearly always made of heavy silk brocade. Just to carry it up the stairs is exhausting, so you can imagine how it feels to wear it-the thick band of it squeezing your middle like one of those awful snakes, and the heavy fabric hanging behind, making you feel as if someone has strapped a traveling trunk to your back.

To make matters worse, the kimono itself is also heavy, with long, swinging sleeves. I don't mean sleeves that drape over the hand onto the ground. You may have noticed that when a woman is wearing kimono and stretches out her arms, the fabric below the sleeve hangs down to form something like a pocket. This baggy pocket, which we call thewn, is the part that's so long on the kimono of an apprentice geisha. It can easily drag along the ground if a girl isn't careful; and when she dances, she will certainly trip over her sleeves if she doesn't wrap them many times around the forearm to keep them out of the way.

Years later a famous scientist from Kyoto University, when he was very drunk one night, said something about the costume of an apprentice geisha that I've never forgotten. "The mandrill of central Africa is often considered the showiest of primates," he said. "But I believe the apprentice geisha of Gion is perhaps the most brilliantly colored primate of all!"

Finally the day came when Mameha and I were to perform the ceremony binding us as sisters. I bathed early and spent the rest of the morning dressing. Auntie helped me with the finishing touches on my makeup and hair. Because of the wax and makeup covering my skin, I had the strange sensation of having lost all feeling in my face; every time I touched my cheek, I could feel only a vague sense of pressure from my finger. I did it so many times Auntie had to redo my makeup. Afterward as I studied myself in the mirror, a most peculiar thing happened. I knew that the person kneeling before the makeup stand was me, but so was the unfamiliar girl gazing back. I actually reached out to touch her. She wore the magnificent makeup of a geisha. Her lips were flowering red on a stark white face, with her cheeks tinted a soft pink. Her hair was ornamented with silk flowers and sprigs of un-husked rice. She wore a formal kimono of black, with the crest of the Nitta okiya. When at last I could bring myself to stand, I went into the hall and looked in astonishment at myself in the full-length mirror. Beginning at the hem of my gown, an embroidered dragon circled up the bottom of the robe to the middle of my thigh. His mane was woven in threads lacquered with a beautiful reddish tint. His claws and teeth were silver, his eyes gold-real gold. I- couldn't stop tears from welling up in my eyes, and had to look straight up at the ceiling to keep them from rolling onto my cheeks. Before leaving the okiya, I took the handkerchief the Chairman had given me and tucked it into my obi for good luck.

Auntie accompanied me to Mameha's apartment, where I expressed my gratitude to Mameha and pledged to honor and respect her. Then the three of us walked to the Gion Shrine, where Mameha and I clapped our hands and announced to the gods that we would soon be bound as sisters. I prayed for their favor in the years ahead, and then closed my eyes and thanked them for having granted me the wish I'd pleaded for three and a half years earlier, that I should become a geisha.

The ceremony was to take place at the Ichiriki Teahouse, which is certainly the best-known teahouse in all of Japan. It has quite a history, partly because of a famous samurai who hid himself there in the early 17005. If you've ever heard the story of the Forty-seven Ronin- who avenged their master's death and afterward killed themselves by seppuku-well, it was their leader who hid himself in the Ichiriki Teahouse while plotting revenge. Most of the first-class teahouses in Gion are invisible from the street, except for their simple entrances, but the Ichiriki is as obvious as an apple on a tree. It sits at a prominent corner of Shijo Avenue, surrounded by a smooth, apricot-colored wall with its own tiled roof. It seemed like a palace to me.

We were joined there by two of Mameha's younger sisters, as well as by Mother. When we had all assembled in the exterior garden, a maid led us through the entrance hall and down a beautiful meandering corridor to a small tatami room in the back. I'd never been in such elegant surroundings before. Every piece of wood trim gleamed; every plaster wall was perfect in its smoothness. I smelled the sweet, dusty fragrance of kuroyaki-"char-black"-a sort of perfume made by charring wood and grinding it into a soft gray dust. It's very old-fashioned, and even Mameha, who was as traditional a geisha as you would find, preferred something more Western. But all the kuroyaki worn by generations of geisha still haunted the Ichiriki. I have some even now, which I keep in a wooden vial; and when I smell it, I see myself back there once again.

The ceremony, which was attended by the mistress of the Ichiriki, lasted only about ten minutes. A maid brought a tray with several sake cups, and Mameha and I drank together. I took three sips from a cup, and then passed it to her and she took three sips. We did this with three different cups, and then it was over. From that moment on, I was no longer known as Chiyo. I was the novice geisha Sayuri. During the first month of apprenticeship, a young geisha is known as a "novice" and cannot perform dances or entertain on her own without her older sister, and in fact does little besides watching and learning. As for my name of Sayuri, Mameha had worked with her fortune-teller a long while to choose it. The sound of a name isn't all that matters, you see; the meaning of the characters is very important as well, and so is the number of strokes used to write them-for there are lucky and unlucky stroke counts. My new name came from "sa," meaning "together," "yu," from the zodiac sign for the Hen-in order to balance other elements in my personality-and "ri," meaning "understanding." All the combinations involving an element from Mameha's name, unfortunately, had been pronounced inauspicious by the fortune-teller.

I thought Sayuri was a lovely name, but it felt strange not to be known as Chiyo any longer. After the ceremony we went into another room for a lunch of "red rice," made of rice mixed with red beans. I picked at it, feeling strangely unsettled and not at all like celebrating. The mistress of the teahouse asked me a question, and when I heard her call me "Sayuri," I realized what was bothering me. It was as if the little girl named Chiyo, running barefoot from the pond to her tipsy house, no longer existed. I felt that this new girl, Sayuri, with her gleaming white face and her red lips, had destroyed her.

Mameha planned to spend the early afternoon taking me around Gion to introduce me to the mistresses of the various teahouses and okiya with which she had relationships. But we didn't head out the moment lunch was done. Instead she took me into a room at the Ichiriki and asked me to sit. Of course, a geisha never really "sits" while wearing kimono; what we call sitting is probably what other people would call kneeling. In any case, after I'd done it, she made a face at me and told me to do it again. The robes were so awkward it took me several tries to manage it properly. Mameha gave me a little ornament in the shape of a gourd and showed me how to wear it dangling on my obi. The gourd, being hollow and light, is thought to offset the heaviness of the body, you see, and many a clumsy young apprentice has relied upon one to help keep her from falling down.

Mameha talked with me a while, and then just when we were ready to leave, asked me to pour her a cup of tea. The pot was empty, but she told me to pretend to pour it anyway. She wanted to see how I held my sleeve out of the way when I did it. I thought I knew exactly what she was looking for and tried my best, but Mameha was unhappy with me.

"First of all," she said, "whose cup are you filling?"

"Yours!" I said.

"Well, for heaven's sake, you don't need to impress me. Pretend I'm someone else. Am I a man or a woman?"

"A man," I said.

"All right, then. Pour me a cup again."

I did so, and Mameha practically broke her neck trying to peer up my sleeve as I held my arm out.

"How do you like that?" she asked me. "Because that's exactly what's going to happen if you hold your arm so high."

I tried pouring again with my arm a bit lower. This time, she pretended to yawn and then turned and began a conversation with an imaginary geisha sitting on the other side of her.

"I think you're trying to tell me that I bored you," I said. "But how can I bore you just pouring a cup of tea?"

"You may not want me looking up your sleeve, but that doesn't mean you have to act prissy! A man is interested in only one thing. Believe me, you'll understand all too soon what I'm talking about. In the meantime, you can keep him happy by letting him think he's permitted to see parts of your body no one else can see. If an apprentice geisha acts the way you did just then-pouring tea just like a maid would-the poor man will lose all hope. Try it again, but first show me your arm."

So I drew my sleeve up above my elbow and held my arm out for her to see. She took it and turned it in her hands to look at the top and the bottom.

"You have a lovely arm; and beautiful skin. You should make sure every man who sits near you sees it at least once."

So I went on, pouring tea again and again, until Mameha felt satisfied that I drew my sleeve out of the way enough to show my arm without being too obvious what I was doing. I looked laughable if I hiked my sleeve up to my elbow; the trick was to act like I was merely pulling it out of the way, while at the same time drawing it a few finger-widths above my wrist to give a view of my forearm. Mameha said the prettiest part of the arm was the underside, so I must always be sure to hold the teapot in such a way that the man saw the bottom of my arm rather than the top.

She asked me to do it again, this time pretending I was pouring tea for the mistress of the Ichiriki. I showed my arm in just the same way, and Mameha made a face at once.

"For heaven's sake, I'm a woman," she said. "Why are you showing me your arm that way? Probably you're just trying to make me angry."

"Angry?"

"What else am I supposed to think? You're showing me how youthful and beautiful you are, while I'm already old and decrepit. Unless you were doing it just to be vulgar . . ."

"How is it vulgar?"

"Why else have you made such a point of letting me see the underside of your arm? You may as well show me the bottom of your foot or the inside of your thigh. If I happen to catch a glimpse of something here or there, well, that's all right. But to make such a point of showing it to me!"

So I poured a few more times, until I'd learned a more demure and suitable method. Whereupon Mameha announced that we were ready to go out into Gion together.

Already by this time, I'd been wearing the complete ensemble of an apprentice geisha for several hours. Now I had to try walking all around Gion in the shoes we call okobo. They're quite tall and made of wood, with lovely, lacquered thongs to hold the foot in place. Most people think it very elegant the way they taper down like a wedge, so that the footprint at the bottom is about half the size of the top. But I found it hard to walk delicately in them. I felt as if I had roof tiles strapped to the bottoms of my feet.

Mameha and I made perhaps twenty stops at various okiya and teahouses, though we spent no more than a few minutes at most of them. Usually a maid answered the door, and Mameha asked politely to speak with the mistress; then when the mistress came, Mameha said to her, "I'd like to introduce my new younger sister, Sayuri," and then I bowed very low and said, "I beg your favor, please, Mistress." The mistress and Mameha would chat for a moment, and then we left. At a few of the places we were asked in for tea and spent perhaps five minutes. But I was very reluctant to drink tea and only wet my lips instead. Using the toilet while wearing kimono is one of the most difficult things to learn, and I wasn't at all sure I'd learned it adequately just yet.

In any case, within an hour I was so exhausted, it was all I could do to keep from groaning as I walked along. But we kept up our pace. In those days, I suppose there were probably thirty or forty first-class teahouses in Gion and another hundred or so of a somewhat lower grade. Of course we couldn't visit them all. We went to the fifteen or sixteen where Mameha was accustomed to entertaining. As for okiya, there must have been hundreds of those, but we went only to the few with which Mameha had some sort of relationship.

Soon after three o'clock we were finished. I would have liked nothing better than to go back to the okiya to fall asleep for a long while. But Mameha had plans for me that very evening. I was to attend my first engagement as a novice geisha.

"Go take a bath," she said to me. "You've been perspiring a good deal, and your makeup hasn't held up."

It was a warm fall day, you see, and I'd been working very hard.

Back at the okiya, Auntie helped me undress and then took pity on me by letting me nap for a half hour. I was back in her good graces again, now that my foolish mistakes were behind me and my future seemed even brighter than Pumpkin's. She woke me after my nap, and I rushed to the bathhouse as quickly as I could. By five, I had finished dressing and applying my makeup. I felt terribly excited, as you can imagine, because for years I'd watched Hatsumomo, and lately Pumpkin, go off in the afternoons and evenings looking beautiful, and now at last my turn had come. The event that evening, the first I would ever attend, was to be a banquet at the Kansai International Hotel. Banquets are stiffly formal affairs, with all the guests arranged shoulder to shoulder in a sort of U-shape around the outside of a big tatami room, and trays of food sitting on little stands in front of them. The geisha, who are there to entertain, move around the center of the room-inside the U-shape made by all the trays, I mean-and spend only a few minutes kneeling before each guest to pour sake and chat. It isn't what you'd call an exciting affair; and as a novice, my role was less exciting even than Mameha's. I stayed to one side of her like a shadow. Whenever she introduced herself, I did the same, bowing very low and saying, "My name is Sayuri. I'm a novice and beg your indulgence." After that I said nothing more, and no one said anything to me.

Toward the end of the banquet, the doors at one side of the room were slid open, and Mameha and another geisha performed a dance together, known as Chi-yo no Tomo-"Friends Everlasting." It's a lovely piece about two devoted women meeting again after a long absence. Most of the men sat picking their teeth through it; they were executives of a large company that made rubber valves, or some such thing, and had gathered in Kyoto for their annual banquet. I don't think a single one of them would have known the difference between dancing and sleepwalking. But for my part, I was entranced. Geisha in Gion always use a folding fan as a prop when dancing, and Mameha in particular was masterful in her movements. At first she closed the fan and, while turning her body in a circle, waved it delicately with her wrist to suggest a stream of water flowing past. Then she opened it, and it became a cup into which her companion poured sake for her to drink. As I say, the dance was lovely, and so was the music, which was played on the shamisen by a terribly thin geisha with small, watery eyes.

A formal banquet generally lasts no more than two hours; so by eight o'clock we were out on the street again. I was just turning to thank Mameha and bid her good night, when she said to me, "Well, I'd thought of sending you back to bed now, but you seem to be so full of energy. I'm heading to the Komoriya Teahouse. Come along with me and have your first taste of an informal party. We may as well start showing you around as quickly as we can."

I couldn't very well tell her I felt too tired to go; so I swallowed my real feelings and followed her up the street.

The party, as she explained to me along the way, was to be given by the man who ran the National Theater in Tokyo. He knew all the important geisha in nearly every geisha district in Japan; and although he would probably be very cordial when Mameha introduced me, I shouldn't expect him to say much. My only responsibility was to be sure I always looked pretty and alert. "Just be sure you don't let anything happen to make you look bad," she warned.

We entered the teahouse and were shown by a maid to a room on the second floor. I hardly dared to look inside when Mameha knelt and slid open the door, but I could see seven or eight men seated on cushions around a table, with perhaps four geisha. We bowed and went inside, and afterward knelt on the mats to close the door behind us-for this is the way a geisha enters a room. We greeted the other geisha first, as Mameha had told me to do, then the host, at one comer of the table, and afterward the other guests.

"Mameha-san!" said one of the geisha. "You've come just in time to tell us the story about Konda-san the wig maker."

"Oh, heavens, I can't remember it at all," Mameha said, and everyone laughed; I had no idea what the joke was. Mameha led me around the table and knelt beside the host. I followed and positioned myself to one side.

"Mr. Director, please permit me to introduce my new younger sister," she said to him.

This was my cue to bow and say my name, and beg the director's indulgence, and so on. He was a very nervous man, with bulging eyes and a kind of chicken-bone frailty. He didn't even look at me, but only flicked his cigarette in the nearly full ashtray before him and said:

"What is all the talk about Konda-san the wig maker? All evening the girls keep referring to it, and not a one of them will tell the story."

"Honestly, I wouldn't know!" Mameha said.

"Which means," said another geisha, "that she's too embarrassed to tell it. If she won't, I suppose I'll have to."

The men seemed to like this idea, but Mameha only sighed.

"In the meantime, I'll give Mameha a cup of sake to calm her nerves," the director said, and washed out his own sake cup in a bowl of water on the center of the table-which was there for that very reason-before offering it to her.

"Well," the other geisha began, "this fellow Konda-san is the best wig maker in Gion, or at least everyone says so. And for years Mameha-san went to him. She always has the best of everything, you know. Just look at her and you can tell."

Mameha made a mock-angry face.

"She certainly has the best sneer," said one of the men.

"During a performance," the geisha went on, "a wig maker is always backstage to help with changes of costume. Often while a geisha is taking off a certain robe and putting on another one, something will slip here or there, and then suddenly ... a naked breast! Or ... a little bit of hair! You know, these things happen. And anyway-"

"All these years I've been working in a bank," said one of the men. "I want to be a wig maker!"

"There's more to it than just gawking at naked women. Anyway, Mameha-san always acts very prim and goes behind a screen to change-"

"Let me tell the story," Mameha interrupted. "You're going to give me a bad name. I wasn't being prim. Konda-san was always staring at me like he couldn't wait for the next costume change, so I had a screen brought in. It's a wonder Konda-san didn't burn a hole in it with his eyes, trying to see through it the way he did."

"Why couldn't you just give him a little glimpse now and then," the director interrupted. "How can it hurt you to be nice?"

"I've never thought of it that way," Mameha said. "You're quite right, Mr. Director. What harm can a little glimpse do? Perhaps you want to give us one right now?"

Everyone in the room burst out laughing at this. Just when things were starting to calm down, the director started it all over by rising to his feet and beginning to untie the sash of his robe.

"I'm only going to do this," he said to Mameha, "if you'll give me a glimpse in return . . ."

"I never made such an offer," Mameha said.

"That isn't very generous of you."

"Generous people don't become geisha," Mameha said. "They become the patrons of geisha."

"Never mind, then," the director said, and sat back down. I have to say, I was very relieved he'd given up; because although all the others seemed to be enjoying themselves enormously, I felt embarrassed.

"Where was I?" Mameha said. "Well, I had the screen brought in one day, and I thought this was enough to keep me safe from Konda-san. But when I hurried back from the toilet at one point, I couldn't find him anywhere. I began to panic, because I needed a wig for my next entrance; but soon we found him sitting on a chest against the wall, looking very weak and sweating. I wondered if there was something wrong with his heart! He had my wig beside him, and when he saw me, he apologized and helped put it on me. Then later that afternoon, he handed me a note he'd written . . ."

Here Mameha's voice trailed off. At last one of the men said, "Well? What did it say?"

Mameha covered her eyes with her hand. She was too embarrassed to continue, and everyone in the room broke into laughter.

"All right, I'll tell you what he wrote," said the geisha who'd begun the story. "It was something like this: 'Dearest Mameha. You are the very loveliest geisha in all of Gion,' and so forth. After you have worn a wig, I always cherish it, and keep it in my workshop to put my face into it and smell the scent of your hair many times a day. But today when you rushed to the toilet, you gave me the greatest moment of my life.

While you were inside, I hid myself at the door, and the beautiful tinkling sound, more lovely than a waterfall-' "

The men laughed so hard that the geisha had to wait before going on.

"'-and the beautiful tinkling sound, more lovely than a waterfall, made me hard and stiff where I myself tinkle-' "

"He didn't say it that way," Mameha said. "He wrote, 'the beautiful tinkling sound, more lovely than a waterfall, caused me to swell and bulge at the knowledge that your body was bare . . .'"

"Then he told her," the other geisha said, "that he was unable to stand afterward because of the excitement. And he hoped that one day he would experience such a moment again."

Of course, everyone laughed, and I pretended to laugh too. But the truth is, I was finding it difficult to believe that these men-who had paid so considerably to be there, among women wrapped in beautiful, expensive robes-really wanted to hear the same sorts of stories children back in the pond in Yoroido might have told. I'd imagined feeling out of my depth in a conversation about literature, or Kabuki, or something of that sort. And of course, there were such parties in Gion; it just happened that my first was of the more childish kind.

All through Mameha's story, the man beside me had sat rubbing his splotchy face with his hands and paying little attention. Now he looked at me a long while and then asked, "What's the matter with your eyes? Or have I just drunk too much?"

He certainly had drunk too much-though I didn't think it would be proper to tell him. But before I could answer, his eyebrows began to twitch, and a moment later he reached up and scratched his head so much that a little cloud of snow spilled onto his shoulders. As it turned out, he was known in Gion as "Mr. Snowshowers" because of his terrible dandruff. He seemed to have forgotten the question he'd asked me-or maybe he never expected me to answer it-because now he asked my age. I told him I was fourteen.

"You're the oldest fourteen-year-old I've ever seen. Here, take this," he said, and handed me his empty sake cup.

"Oh, no, thank you, sir," I replied, "for I'm only a novice . . ." This was what Mameha had taught me to say, but Mr. Snowshowers didn't listen. He just held the cup in the air until I took it, and then lifted up a vial of sake to pour for me.

I wasn't supposed to drink sake, because an apprentice geisha- particularly one still in her novitiate-should appear childlike. But I couldn't very well disobey him. I held the sake cup out; but he scratched his head again before he poured, and I was horrified to see a few flecks settle into the cup. Mr. Snowshowers filled it with sake and said to me, "Now drink up. Go on. First of many."

I gave him a smile and had just begun to raise the cup slowly to my lips-not knowing what else I could do-when, thank heavens, Mameha rescued me.

"It's your first day in Gion, Sayuri. It won't do for you to get drunk," she said, though she was speaking for the benefit of Mr. Snow-showers. "Just wet your lips and be done with it."

So I obeyed her and wet my lips with the sake. And when I say that I wet my lips, I mean I pinched them shut so tightly I nearly sprained my mouth, and then tipped the sake cup until I felt the liquid against my skin. Then I put the cup down on the table hurriedly and said, "Mmm! Delicious!" while reaching for the handkerchief in my obi. I felt very relieved when I patted my lips with it, and I'm happy to say that Mr. Snowshowers didn't even notice, for he was busy eyeing the cup as it sat there full on the table before him. After a moment he picked it up in two fingers and poured it right down his throat, before standing and excusing himself to use the toilet.

An apprentice geisha is expected to walk a man to the toilet and back, but no one expects a novice to do it. When there isn't an apprentice in the room, a man will usually walk himself to the toilet, or sometimes one of the geisha will accompany him. But Mr. Snowshowers stood there gazing down at me until I realized he was waiting for me to stand.

I didn't know my way around the Komoriya Teahouse, but Mr. Snowshowers certainly did. I followed him down the hall and around a corner. He stepped aside while I rolled open the door to the toilet for him. After I had closed it behind him and was waiting there in the hallway, I heard the sound of someone coming up the stairs, but I thought nothing of it. Soon Mr. Snowshowers was done and we made our way back. When I entered the room, I saw that another geisha had joined the party, along with an apprentice. They had their backs to the door, so that I didn't see their faces until I'd followed Mr. Snowshowers around the table and taken up my place once again. You can imagine how shocked I felt when I saw them; for there, on the other side of the table, was the one woman I would have given anything to avoid. It was Hatsumomo, smiling at me, and beside her sat Pumpkin.

Chapter fifteen



Hnatsumomo smiled when she was happy, like everybody else; and she was never happier than when she was about to make someone suffer. This is why she wore such a beautiful smile on her face when she said:

"Oh, my goodness! What a peculiar coincidence. Why, it's a novice! I really shouldn't tell the rest of this story, because I might embarrass the poor thing."

I hoped Mameha would excuse herself and take me with her. But she only gave me an anxious glance. She must have felt that leaving Hatsumomo alone with these men would be like running away from a house on fire; we'd be better off to stay and control the damage.

"Really, I don't think there's anything more difficult than being a novice," Hatsumomo was saying. "Don't you think so, Pumpkin?"

Pumpkin was a full-fledged apprentice now; she'd been a novice six months earlier. I glanced at her for sympathy, but she just stared at the table with her hands in her lap. Knowing her as I did, I understood that the little wrinkle at the top of her nose meant she felt upset.

"Yes, ma'am," she said.

"Such a difficult time of life," Hatsumomo went on. "I can still remember how hard I found it... What is your name, little novice?"

Happily, I didn't have to respond, because Mameha spoke up.

"You're certainly right about it being a difficult time of life for you, Hatsumomo-san. Though of course, you were more awkward than most."

"I want to hear the rest of the story," said one of the men.

"And embarrass the poor novice who's just joined us?" Hatsumomo said. "I'll tell it only if you promise that you won't think about this poor girl as you listen. Be sure to picture some other girl in your mind."

Hatsumomo could be ingenious in her devilishness. The men might not have pictured the story happening to me earlier, but they certainly would now.

"Let's see, where was I?" Hatsumomo began. "Oh, yes. Well, this novice I mentioned ... I can't remember her name, but I ought to give her one to keep you from confusing her with this poor girl. Tell me, little novice . . . what is your name?"

"Sayuri, ma'am," I said. And my face felt so hot from nervousness that I wouldn't have been surprised if my makeup had simply melted and begun to drip onto my lap.

"Sayuri. How lovely! Somehow it doesn't suit you. Well, let's call this novice in the story 'Mayuri.' Now then, one day I was walking along Shijo Avenue with Mayuri, on our way to her older sister's okiya. There was a terrible wind, the sort that rattles the windows, and poor Mayuri had so little experience with kimono. She was no heavier than a leaf, and those big sleeves can be just like sails, you know. As we were about to cross the street, she disappeared, and I heard a little sound from behind me, like 'Ah . . . ah,' but very faint. . ."

Here Hatsumomo turned to look at me.

"My voice isn't high enough," she said. "Let me hear you say it. 'Ah . . . ah . . .'"

Well, what could I do? I tried my best to make the noise.

"No, no, much higher . . . oh, never mind!" Hatsumomo turned to the man beside her and said under her breath, "She isn't very bright, is she?" She shook her head for a moment and then went on. "Anyway, when I turned around, poor Mayuri was being blown backward up the street a full block behind me, with her arms and legs flailing so much she looked like a bug on its back. I nearly tore my obi laughing, but then all of a sudden she stumbled right off the curb into a busy intersection just as a car came zooming along. Thank heavens she was blowr^ onto the hood! Her legs flew up ... and then if you can picture this, the wind blew right up her kimono, and . . . well, I don't need to tell you what happened."

"You certainly do!" one of the men said.

"Don't you have any imagination?" she replied. "The wind blew her kimono right up over her hips. She didn't want everyone to see her naked; so to preserve her modesty, she flipped herself around and ended up with her legs pointing in two different directions, and her private parts pressed against the windshield, right in the driver's face . . ."

Of course, the men were in hysterics by now, including the director, who tapped his sake cup on the tabletop like a machine gun, and said, "Why doesn't anything like this ever happen to me?"

"Really, Mr. Director," Hatsumomo said. "The girl was only a novice! It's not as if the driver got to see anything. I mean, can you imagine looking at the private parts of this girl across the table?" She was talking about me, of course. "Probably she's no different from a baby!"

"Girls sometimes start getting hair when they're only eleven," said one of the men.

"How old are you, little Sayuri-san?" Hatsumomo asked me.

"I'm fourteen, ma'am," I told her, just as politely as I could. "But I'm an old fourteen."

Already the men liked this, and Hatsumomo's smile hardened a bit.

"Fourteen?" she said. "How perfect! And of course, you don't have any hair ..."

"Oh, but I do. A good deal of it!" And I reached up and patted one hand against the hair on my head.

I guess this must have been a clever thing to do, although it didn't seem particularly clever to me. The men laughed harder than they'd laughed even at Hatsumomo's story. Hatsumomo laughed too, I suppose because she didn't want to seem as if the joke had been on her.

As the laughter died down, Mameha and I left. We hadn't even closed the door behind us before we heard Hatsumomo excusing herself as well. She and Pumpkin followed us down the stairway.

"Why, Mameha-san," Hatsumomo said, "this has simply been too much fun! I don't know why we haven't entertained together more often!"

"Yes, it has been fun," said Mameha. "I just relish the thought of what the future holds!"

After this, Mameha gave me a very satisfied look. She was relishing the thought of seeing Hatsumomo destroyed.

That night after bathing and removing my makeup, I was standing in the formal entrance hall answering Auntie's questions about my day, when Hatsumomo came in from the street and stood before me. Normally she wasn't back so early, but I knew the moment I saw her face that she'd come back only for the purpose of confronting me. She wasn't even wearing her cruel smile, but had her lips pressed together in a way that looked almost unattractive. She stood before me only a moment, and then drew back her hand and slapped me across the face. The last thing I saw before her hand struck me was a glimpse of her clenched teeth like two strings of pearls.

I was so stunned, I can't recall what happened immediately afterward. But Auntie and Hatsumomo must have begun to argue, because the next thing I heard was Hatsumomo saying, "If this girl embarrasses me in public again, I'll be happy to slap the other side of her face!"

"How did I embarrass you?" I asked her.

"You knew perfectly well what I meant when I wondered if you had hair, but you made me look like a fool. I owe you a favor, little Chiyo. I'll return it soon, I promise."

Hatsumomo's anger seemed to close itself up, and she walked back out of the okiya, where Pumpkin was waiting on the street to bow to her.

I reported this to Mameha the following afternoon, but she hardly paid any attention.

"What's the problem?" she said. "Hatsumomo didn't leave a mark on your face, thank heavens. You didn't expect she'd be pleased at your comment, did you?"

"I'm only concerned about what might happen the next time we run into her," I said.

"I'll tell you what will happen. We'll turn around and leave. The host may be surprised to see us walk out of a party we've just walked into, but it's better than giving Hatsumomo another chance to humiliate you. Anyway, if we run into her, it will be a blessing."

"Really, Mameha-san, I can't see how it could be a blessing."

"If Hatsumomo forces us to leave a few teahouses, we'll drop in on more parties, that's all. You'll be known around Gion much faster that way."

I felt reassured by Mameha's confidence. In fact, when we set out into Gion later, I expected that at the end of the night I would take off my,makeup and find my skin glowing with the satisfaction of a long evening. Our first stop was a party for a young film actor, who looked no older than eighteen but had not a single hair on his head, not even eyelashes or eyebrows. He went on to become very famous a few years later, but only because of the manner of his death. He killed himself with a sword after murdering a young waitress in Tokyo. In any case, I thought him very strange until I noticed that he kept glancing at me; I'd lived so much of my life in the isolation of the okiya that I must admit I relished the attention. We stayed more than an hour, and Ha-tsumomo never showed up. It seemed to me that my fantasies of success might indeed come to pass.

Next we stopped at a party given by the chancellor of Kyoto University. Mameha at once began talking with a man she hadn't seen in some time, and left me on my own. The only space I could find at the table was beside an old man in a stained white shirt, who must have been very thirsty because he was drinking continually from a glass of beer, except when he moved it away from his mouth to burp. I knelt beside him and was about to introduce myself when I heard the door slide open. I expected to see a maid delivering another round of sake, but there in the hallway knelt Hatsumomo and Pumpkin.

"Oh, good heavens!" I heard Mameha say to the man she was entertaining. "Is your wristwatch accurate?"

"Very accurate," he said. "I set it every afternoon by the clock at the train station."

"I'm afraid Sayuri and I have no choice but to be rude and excuse ourselves. We were expected elsewhere a half hour ago!"

And with that, we stood and slipped out of the party the very moment after Hatsumomo and Pumpkin entered it.

As we were leaving the teahouse, Mameha pulled me into an empty tatami room. In the hazy darkness I couldn't make out her features, but only the beautiful oval shape of her face with its elaborate crown of hair. If I couldn't see her, then she couldn't see me; I let my jaw sag with frustration and despair, for it seemed I would never escape Hatsumomo.

"What did you say to that horrid woman earlier today?" Mameha said to me.

"Nothing at all, ma'am!"

"Then how did she find us here?"

"I didn't know we would be here myself," I said. "I couldn't possibly have told her."

"My maid knows about my engagements, but I can't imagine . . . Well, we'll go to a party hardly anyone knows about. Naga Teruomi was just appointed the new conductor of the Tokyo Philharmonic last week. He's come into town this afternoon to give everyone a chance to idolize him. I don't much want to go, but ... at least Hatsumomo won't be there."

We crossed Shijo Avenue and turned down a narrow alley that smelled of sake and roasted yams. A sprinkle of laughter fell down onto us from the second-story windows brightly lit overhead. Inside the teahouse, a young maid showed us to a room on the second floor, where we found the conductor sitting with his thin hair oiled back and his fingers stroking a sake cup in anger. The other men in the room were in the midst of a drinking game with two geisha, but the conductor refused to join. He talked with Mameha for a while, and soon asked her to put on a dance. I don't think he cared about the dance, really; it was just a way to end the drinking games and encourage his guests to begin paying attention to him again. Just as the maid brought a shamisen to hand to one of the geisha-even before Mameha had taken up her pose-the door slid open and . . . I'm sure you know what I'm going to say. They were like dogs that wouldn't stop following us. It was Hatsumomo and Pumpkin once again.

You should have seen the way Mameha and Hatsumomo smiled at each other. You'd almost have thought they were sharing a private joke-whereas in fact, I'm sure Hatsumomo was relishing her victory in finding us, and as for Mameha . . . well, I think her smile was just a way of hiding her anger. During her dance, I could see her jaw jutting out and her nostrils flared. She didn't even come back to the table afterward, but just said to the conductor:

"Thank you so much for permitting us to drop in! I'm afraid it's so late . . . Sayuri and I must excuse ourselves now . . ."

I can't tell you how pleased Hatsumomo looked as we closed the door behind us.

I followed Mameha down the stairs. On the bottom step she came to a halt and waited. At last a young maid rushed into the formal entrance hall to see us out-the very same maid who'd shown us up the stairs earlier.

"What a difficult life you must have as a maid!" Mameha said to her. "Probably you want so many things and have so little money to spend. But tell me, what will you do with the funds you've just earned?"

"I haven't earned any funds, ma'am," she said. But to see her swallowing so nervously, I could tell she was lying.

"How much money did Hatsumomo promise you?"

The maid's gaze fell at once to the floor. It wasn't until this moment that I understood what Mameha was thinking. As we learned some time afterward, Hatsumomo had indeed bribed at least one of the maids in every first-class teahouse in Gion. They were asked to call Yoko-the girl who answered the telephone in our okiya-whenever Mameha and I arrived at a party. Of course, we didn't know about Yoko's involvement at the time; but Mameha was quite right in assuming that the maid in this teahouse had passed a message to Hatsumomo somehow or other.

The maid couldn't bring herself to look at Mameha. Even when Mameha lifted her chin, the girl still pointed her eyes downward just as if they weighed as much as two lead balls. When we left the teahouse, we could hear Hatsumomo's voice coming from the window above-for it was such a narrow alleyway that everything echoed.

"Yes, what was her name?" Hatsumomo was saying.

"Sayuko," said one of the men.

"Not Sayuko. Sayuri," said another.

"I think that's the one," Hatsumomo said. "But really, it's too embarrassing for her ... I mustn't tell you! She seems like a nice girl . . ."

"I didn't get much of an impression," one man said. "But she's very pretty."

"Such unusual eyes!" said one of the geisha.

"You know what I heard a man say about her eyes the other day?" Hatsumomo said. "He told me they were the color of smashed worms."

"Smashed worms . . . I've certainly never heard a color described that way before."

"Well, I'll tell you what I was going to say about her," Hatsumomo went on, "but you must promise not to repeat it. She has some sort of disease, and her bosoms look just like an old lady's-all droopy and wrinkled-really, it's dreadful! I saw her in a bathhouse once . . ."

Mameha and I had stopped to listen, but when we heard this, she gave me a little push and we walked out of the alley together. Mameha stood for a while looking up and down the street and then said:

"I'm trying to think where we can go, but... I can't think of a single place. If that woman has found us here, I suppose she can find us anywhere in Gion. You may as well go back to your okiya, Sayuri, until we come up with a new plan."

One afternoon during World War II, some years after these events I'm telling you about now, an officer took his pistol out of its holster during a party beneath the boughs of a maple tree and laid it on the straw mat to impress me. I remember being struck by its beauty. The metal had a dull gray sheen; its curves were perfect and smooth. The oiled wood handle was richly grained. But when I thought of its real purpose as I listened to his stories, it ceased to be beautiful at all and became something monstrous instead.

This is exactly what happened to Hatsumomo in my eyes after she brought my debut to a standstill. That isn't to say I'd never considered her monstrous before. But I'd always envied her loveliness, and now I no longer did. While I ought to have been attending banquets every night, and ten or fifteen parties besides, I was forced instead to sit in the okiya practicing dance and shamisen just as though nothing in my life had changed from the year before. When Hatsumomo walked past me down the corridor in her full regalia, with her white makeup glowing above her dark robe just like the moon in a hazy night sky, I'm sure that even a blind man would have found her beautiful. And yet I felt nothing but hatred, and heard my pulse hissing in my ears.

I was summoned to Mameha's apartment several times in the next few days. Each time I hoped she was going to say she'd found a way around Hatsumomo; but she only wanted me to run errands she couldn't entrust to her maid. One afternoon I asked if she had any idea what would become of me.

"I'm afraid you're an exile, Sayuri-san, for the moment," she replied. "I hope you feel more determined than ever to destroy that wicked woman! But until I've thought of a plan, it will do you no good to follow me around Gion."

Of course I was disappointed to hear it, but Mameha was quite right. Hatsumomo's ridicule would do me such harm in the eyes of men, and even in the eyes of women in Gion, that I would be better off staying home.

Happily, Mameha was very resourceful and did manage to find engagements from time to time that were safe for me to attend. Hatsumomo may have closed off Gion from me, but she couldn't close off the entire world beyond it. When Mameha left Gion for an engagement, she often invited me along. I went on a day trip by train to Kobe, where Mameha cut the ribbon for a new factory. On another occasion I joined her to accompany the former president of Nippon Telephone & Telegraph on a tour of Kyoto by limousine. This tour made quite an impression on me, for it was my first time seeing the vast city of Kyoto that lay beyond the bounds of our little Gion, not to mention my first time riding in a car. I'd never really understood how desperately some people lived during these years, until we drove along the river south of the city and saw dirty women nursing their babies under the trees along the railroad tracks, and men squatting in tattered straw sandals among the weeds. I won't pretend poor people never came to Gion, but we rarely saw anyone like these starving peasants too poor even to bathe. I could never have imagined that I-a slave terrorized by Hatsumomo's wickedness-had lived a relatively fortunate life through the Great Depression. But that day I realized it was true.

Late one morning I returned from the school to find a note telling me to bring my makeup and rush to Mameha's apartment. When I arrived, Mr. Itchoda, who was a dresser just like Mr. Bekku, was in the back room tying Mameha's obi before a full-length mirror.

"Hurry up and put on your makeup," Mameha said to me. "I've laid a kimono out for you in the other room."

Mameha's apartment was enormous by the standards of Gion. In addition to her main room, which measured six tatami mats in area, she had two other smaller rooms-a dressing area that doubled as a maids' room, and a room in which she slept. There in her bedroom was a freshly made-up futon, with a complete kimono ensemble on top of it that her maid had laid out for me. I was puzzled by the futon. The sheets certainly weren't the ones Mameha had slept in the night before, for they were as smooth as fresh snow. I wondered about it while changing into the cotton dressing robe I'd brought. When I went to begin applying my makeup, Mameha told me why she had summoned me.

"The Baron is back in town," she said. "He'll be coming here for lunch. I want him to meet you."

I haven't had occasion to mention the Baron, but Mameha was referring to Baron Matsunaga Tsuneyoshi-her danna. We don't have barons and counts in Japan any longer, but we did before World War II, and Baron Matsunaga was certainly among the wealthiest. His family controlled one of Japan's large banks and was very influential in finance. Originally his older brother had inherited the title of baron, but he had been assassinated while serving as finance minister in the cabinet of Prime Minister Inukai. Mameha's danna, already in his thirties at that time, had not only inherited the title of baron but all of his brother's holdings, including a grand estate in Kyoto not too far from Gion. His business interests kept him in Tokyo much of the time; and something else kept him there as well-for I learned many years later that he had another mistress, in the geisha district of Akasaka in Tokyo. Few men are wealthy enough to afford one geisha mistress, but Baron Matsunaga Tsuneyoshi had two.

Now that I knew Mameha would be spending the afternoon with her danna, I had a much better idea why the futon in her bedroom had been made up with fresh sheets.

I changed quickly into the clothing Mameha had set out for me-an underrobe of light green, and a kimono in russet and yellow with a design of pine trees at the hem. By this time one of Mameha's maids was just returning from a nearby restaurant with a big lacquer box holding the Baron's lunch. The foods inside it, on plates and bowls, were ready to be served just as in a restaurant. The largest was a flat lacquer dish with two grilled, salted ayu poised on their bellies as though they were swimming down the river together. To one side stood two tiny steamed crabs of the sort that are eaten whole. A trail of streaked salt curved along the black lacquer to suggest the sand they had crossed.

A few minutes later the Baron arrived. I peeked out through a crack at the edge of the sliding door and saw him standing just outside on the landing while Mameha untied his shoes. My first impression was of an almond or some other kind of nut, because he was small and very round, with a certain kind of heaviness, particularly around his eyes. Beards were very fashionable at that time, and the Baron wore a number of long, soft hairs on his face that I'm sure were supposed to resemble a beard, but looked to me more like some sort of garnish, or like the thin strips of seaweed that are sometimes sprinkled onto a bowl of rice.

"Oh, Mameha . . . I'm exhausted," I heard him say. "How I hate these long train rides!"

Finally he stepped out of his shoes and crossed the room with brisk little steps. Earlier in the morning, Mameha's dresser had brought an overstuffed chair and a Persian rug from a storage closet across the hall and arranged them near the window. The Baron seated himself there; but as for what happened afterward, I can't say, because Mameha's maid came over to me and bowed in apology before giving the door a gentle push to slide it the rest of the way closed.

I stayed in Mameha's little dressing room for an hour or more while the maid went in and out serving the Baron's lunch. I heard the murmur of Mameha's voice occasionally, but mainly the Baron did the talking. At one point I thought he was angry with Mameha, but finally I overheard enough to understand that he was only complaining about a man he'd met the day before, who'd asked him personal questions that made him angry. At last when the meal was over, the maid carried out cups of tea, and Mameha asked for me. I went out to kneel before the Baron, feeling very nervous-for I'd never met an aristocrat before. I bowed and begged his favor, and thought perhaps he would say something to me. But he seemed to be looking around the apartment, hardly taking notice of me at all.

"Mameha," he said, "what happened to that scroll you used to have in the alcove? It was an ink painting of something or other- much better than the thing you have there now."

"The scroll there now, Baron, is a poem in Matsudaira Koichi's own hand. It has hung in that alcove nearly four years."

"Four years? Wasn't the ink painting there when I came last month?"

"It wasn't . . . but in any case, the Baron hasn't honored me with a visit in nearly three months."

"No wonder I'm feeling so exhausted. I'm always saying I ought to spend more time in Kyoto, but . . . well, one thing leads to another. Let's have a look at that scroll I'm talking about. I can't believe it's been four years since I've seen it."

Mameha summoned her maid and asked her to bring the scroll from the closet. I was given the job of unrolling it. My hands were trembling so much that it slipped from my grasp when I held it up for the Baron to have a look.

"Careful, girl!" he said.

I was so embarrassed that even after I'd bowed and apologized, I couldn't help glancing at the Baron again and again to see if he seemed angry with me. While I held the scroll up, he seemed to look at me more than at it. But it wasn't a reproachful stare. After a while I realized it was curiosity, which only made me feel more self-conscious.

"This scroll is much more attractive than the one you have in the alcove now, Mameha," he said. But he still seemed to be looking at me, and made no effort to look away when I glanced at him. "Calligraphy is so old-fashioned anyway," he went on. "You ought to take that thing in the alcove down, and put up this landscape painting again."

Mameha had no choice but to do as the Baron suggested; she even managed to look as if she thought it was a fine idea. When the maid and I had finished hanging the painting and rolling up the other scroll, Mameha called me over to pour tea for the Baron. To look at us from above, we formed a little triangle-Mameha, the Baron, and me. But of course, Mameha and the Baron did all the talking; as for me, I did nothing more useful than to kneel there, feeling as much out of my element as a pigeon in a nest of falcons. To think I'd ever imagined myself worthy of entertaining the sorts of men Mameha entertained-not only grand aristocrats like the Baron, but the Chairman as well. Even the theater director from several nights earlier . . . he'd hardly so much as glanced at me. I won't say I'd felt worthy of the Baron's company earlier; but now I couldn't help realizing once again that I was nothing more than an ignorant girl from a fishing village. Hatsumomo, if she had her way, would keep me down so low, every man who visited Gion would remain forever out of my reach. For all I knew I might never see Baron Matsunaga again, and never come upon the Chairman. Wasn't it possible Mameha would realize the hopelessness of my cause and leave me to languish in the okiya like a little-worn kimono that had seemed so lovely in the shop? The Baron-who I was beginning to realize was something of a nervous man-leaned over to scratch at a mark on the surface of Mameha's table, and made me think of my father on the last day I'd seen him, digging grime out of ruts in the wood with his fingernails. I wondered what he would think if he could see me kneeling here in Mameha's apartment, wearing a robe more expensive than anything he'd ever laid eyes on, with a baron across from me and one of the most famous geisha in all of Japan at my side. I was hardly worthy of these surroundings. And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped about my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.