Memoirs of a Geisha (22 page)

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 Pontocho 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 1700s. 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

D
uring 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
momoware
, 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.”