Women of the Pleasure Quarters (23 page)

The patronage or
danna
system was—and, to some extent, still is—the essence of the flower and willow lifestyle. The first requirement was a man who had a sizable amount of money to spare (extra, that is, after he had paid all his living expenses, his mortgage, provided for the needs of his family and dependent relatives, paid for school fees, holidays abroad, pension plans, and regular investment commitments). Such a man was likely to be at the pinnacle of his career and rather elderly. Most likely he owned his own business and could do as he pleased with his money, rather than being a salaried president, at the beck and call of the shareholders. One businessman reckoned that it would cost 20 to 30 million yen ($200,000–$300,000) a year to keep a geisha.

Following the proper route, he would approach the proprietress of the teahouse where he was a long-standing and trustworthy customer and mention his interest in a particular geisha. The proprietress would discuss the matter with the geisha and her house mother. If all were in agreement, the “mothers” would settle the practical details with the patron and agree on the level of financial assistance he was prepared to give.

Usually the
danna
paid a monthly allowance to cover the geisha’s rent and living expenses and also bought her kimonos and obis. He paid all the tuition fees for her lessons in dancing, shamisen, and singing. When she appeared at a public dance performance, he covered the considerable costs. He would be given the seat of honor and a batch of tickets to distribute to his influential friends and colleagues. If he summoned her to entertain for him at a banquet, he took priority over other guests, though he still had to pay the usual hourly rate for her services. She was also available for sex if required, though, as he was rather elderly, it was not a foregone conclusion that he would exercise his rights.

As to whether geisha or maiko ever slept with customers for money, as prurient Westerners like to imagine: “Geisha don’t do that,” one maiko told me firmly when I dared to ask her. “A
danna
and a customer are quite different. The
danna
is like your husband. You have a proper arrangement with him.”

Maiko, she pointed out, lived in a geisha house watched over by a strict
okasan;
they did not have the opportunity for freelancing of that sort. In any case, they were too busy with their classes and work even to have boyfriends. The maiko confessed that for a short time she had had a boyfriend, not a customer but a young man of her own age. But she had not had the time to see him and eventually the relationship collapsed. Such affairs were strictly against the rules. In the old days, sex had to be arranged through the proper channels and paid for in the proper way; freelance sex was out of the question. The customer had to approach the teahouse mistress who would consult the geisha house mistress before informing the young woman in question. These days, of course, licensed prostitution was illegal.

“Some geisha have
danna
, some don’t,” the maiko added. “It’s much easier if you do. It’s too expensive otherwise.”

Men with the wealth and leisure to become
danna
were often highly cultured, with a keen interest in the traditional arts practiced by the geisha. They would spend a considerable amount of time and money, educating her with tender care so that she became the male ideal of accomplished and talented womanhood. At its most exalted, it was not so much “Lolita” as “Pygmalion,” with the
danna
as a kind of Professor Henry Higgins, choosing his Eliza Doolittle and putting her through finishing school to create the perfect woman, with no ulterior motive other than the pleasure of seeing her grow and develop. Or he might be a sort of connoisseur, a collector of beautiful items with her as his prize possession, demonstrating his wealth, taste, and status.

There is a very simple reason why the geisha world is under threat. The Henry Higgins generation, who saw becoming the
danna
of a geisha as a mark of success and an ideal to strive toward, is dying out. For a start, no one has the money anymore. In modern Japan there are very few family-owned businesses left. Most top executives are employees of large impersonal corporations and cannot help themselves to several million yen of the company’s money in order to spend it on a geisha. Added to which, the baby-boomers are rapidly growing into society’s grand old men. But these are modern Japanese men in their fifties. They have grown up in a world where people go to the ballet and the opera or listen to jazz or techno, rather than the melancholy plink plonk of the shamisen. They spend more time in French restaurants or hostess bars than teahouses. Many have never even seen a geisha. Far from seeing them as objects of desire, they think of them as gorgeous fossils or cultural dinosaurs, if they think of them at all.

Nevertheless, teahouse mothers told me that a good proportion of geisha were still supported by
danna,
maybe one in five. But no one I knew would ever admit to it. It was too sensitive a matter. Geisha knew very well what their image was outside the confines of their small enchanted world. One very popular geisha told me, in tones that brooked no argument, that in the old days maiko had had enormous debts to pay off and that was why they needed a
danna
. Now there were no debts—the 1958 bill had seen to that—so there was no need for patrons any longer.

That was not strictly true. Constructing a world where men can live out their dreams is not a cheap matter. To play her part to the full, a geisha has to be a walking work of art, gorgeously attired, her wig, makeup, and kimono all of the most exquisite quality. Yet to buy the most basic kimono can cost anything from 200,000 yen ($2,000) up to several million ($20,000 upward); the average kimono costs 350,000–500,000 yen ($3,500–$5,000). And it has to be worn with an obi of equal value. Added to which, one kimono is far from enough. Teahouse customers are regulars who come again and again and it would certainly not do to be seen in the same kimono too many times.

All the geisha adored kimonos and collected them with passion. My white-haired neighbor confessed to having two hundred. As a famous Japanese saying goes, a native of Osaka will bankrupt himself for a great meal, but for a Kyoto-ite the fatal weakness is fine silk. None of this is a problem for a maiko who lives at a geisha house where the house mother lays out her kimono each evening. But for a newly hatched geisha setting up on her own, the initial costs might run as high as 20 million yen ($200,000). Geisha need three kimonos a month—one to wear, one to go to the cleaner’s, and one spare, in case a customer spills his drink over your priceless silk. And each month they need different kimonos. All in all, it comes to about 3 million yen ($30,000) a year for kimonos alone.

Then there are classes, which might come to 100,000 yen a month, plus the exorbitant costs incurred for the various ceremonies marking the rites of passage in a geisha’s life—the debut and the changing of the collar, when a maiko graduates to become a fully-fledged geisha. These cost hundreds of thousands of yen for the proper kimono, fans, bags, and other equipment, for tips to the dressers and other helpers, and gifts to members of the community. There are also enormous costs whenever a geisha takes part in one of the grand public dance performances such as the Cherry Dances. Far from being paid like a professional dancer, she has to pay for the honor of appearing and for her costumes and equipment, plus enormous sums in tips for all the helpers and assistants and monetary gifts to her teachers.

In recent years customers have started offering to sponsor part of the cost. One might pay for the kimono and obi, another for the wig for the new geisha, another for the cost of printing the scarves with the geisha’s name which she hands out to everyone. One very popular maiko who decided to give up before the turning of the collar had had promises from sponsors to pay for everything for the ceremony and been showered with expensive bags and gifts. Nevertheless well into the 1990s there are still men who maintain the tradition of the big spender. Those who can afford it pride themselves on being the sole sponsor for a maiko’s debut or turning of the collar. As to whether the maiko chooses to reward her benefactor in the traditional way, that is strictly between her and him.

Geisha Chic:
The Art of the Kimono

One day when I got back to my inn, I found a note, prettily written on handmade paper with a drawing of a
maneki nekko
(a lucky “money-beckoning cat”) on the envelope. It was from Koito. There was a journalist from a women’s magazine coming to interview her, she wrote. Could I, the local foreigner, please be there to add a touch of international color to the photograph?

In her idiosyncratic way Koito was the epitome of the modern geisha. She was a star not of the silver screen or the television but of the Internet. She regularly featured in articles in newspapers and magazines and had a lively fan club. Three years ago she had started a website to put across the geisha lifestyle and philosophy, describe its arts, customs, and history, correct misconceptions, and persuade new customers to come.

Rather than Koito, it was Komaki, her maiko, who was the star of the website. She was the first maiko of the cyber age. She had seen Koito on television, looked up her website, and been captivated by the images and descriptions of life in the flower and willow world. She persuaded her father to send Koito an e-mail asking if she could become her apprentice, was accepted, and moved into Koito’s house. But like many maiko, she discovered that there was a lot more to the life than just looking pretty. Her story—her hopes, her disappointments, her growing frustration—formed the gripping day-to-day substance of the website. Even the house cat featured on it. But now, a year later, having gone through with her debut, she had disappeared.

“It’s not easy raising a maiko,” complained Koito, addressing the plump young journalist who was busy scribbling notes. She too was a fan of Koito’s and regularly checked her website. “She got pimples. Everyone was always watching her and passing comments. It made her self-conscious. No one ever told her she was doing well. So she got depressed. I think she might have run away for good.”

We had been sitting rather stiffly on cushions around the low table in one of the tatami rooms upstairs. Koito led us into a dressing room and began lifting flat cardboard boxes out of the shallow drawers of a tall wooden dresser. She took the lid off one to reveal a package of textured handmade paper. Carefully she undid the ribbons. Inside, within another layer of tissue paper, was a swathe of lustrous silk, quail’s-egg gray. She lifted the folds of fabric to reveal a pattern of white grasses. We fingered the soft silk.

“It’s a geisha’s kimono for autumn,” she said. “Autumn grasses.”

Next she brought out a pale mauve kimono, the color of wisteria, then a dark mauve one with a pattern of maple leaves in dark greens and rusty oranges sprinkled with golden and orange chrysanthemums, and put them both aside. The first, she said, was a summer kimono, the second for autumn. Then she showed us a summer kimono of netlike silk in a delicate leaf green the color of a cicada’s wing, with a river specked with leaves rippling along the hem. Finally she brought out a kimono of a rich midnight blue. Wisteria blossoms tumbled in mauve-and-gold fronds around the skirt and across the sleeves. The cat was rolling on its back, playing with the loose ribbons.

“I’ll wear this one,” she said. We helped her refold the others, carefully wrapping them in layers of tissue paper, replacing them in their envelopes and retying the ribbons.

“How do you choose?” we queried. A maiko living in a geisha house had no need to worry about which kimono was appropriate; her house mother would lay out a different kimono each month for her. But Koito was herself a house mother. For her, life was a succession of day-to-day decisions.

It depended, she explained, on the customers, the teahouse, and the occasion for the party. For a congratulatory party or a celebration of some sort, she might wear something dressy, for a small quiet gathering, something more subdued. It went without saying that she would wear a geisha’s kimono, much more subtly colored than a maiko’s, with sleeves that hung to her hips, not to the ankle, and with the obi tied in a knot without the heavy, swaying ends of the maiko’s.

For a geisha, the art of choosing and wearing a kimono is as important a part of her training as learning traditional dancing or studying the shamisen. The kimono is an art form in its own right, as subtle and complex as tea ceremony, flower arrangement, or brush painting. Woven of the finest, most luxurious silk, kimonos are dyed with designs which are exquisite and often enormously complex; landscapes of palaces, bridges, streams, trees, and birds scroll across a kimono skirt in lavish detail and jewel-like colors.

Traditional arts in Japan are to do not with expressing oneself but learning the form, the
kata,
the proper way of doing things. The aim is perfection, a perfect promulgation of tradition, the right kimono worn in the right way for the place, the season, and the occasion. A geisha is an artist who transforms herself into a perfect work of art according to rules laid down by tradition.

Everything in traditional Japanese life reflects the season, from the flowers arranged in a vase to the brush painting on a wall to the words one uses when writing a poem. If you visit a teahouse, a geisha house, or a private home in spring, there will be a sprig of spring flowers in a wicker vase and an ink painting, perhaps of a sprouting bamboo, on the wall; in winter there might be a sprig of plum blossoms artfully arranged in a section of bamboo. And every haiku includes a word which refers to the seasons—irises, rain, or a frog to evoke June, a cicada in high summer, snow in winter. In the same way, a geisha naturally chooses a kimono proper to the season. For the cool months, from the typhoons of September through the winter snows to the end of April when the cherry blossoms fall, she wears a double-layered
awase
kimono of thick silk lined with crepe. In May and June she wears lighter single-layer kimonos and when the steamy days of July and August come, she switches to
ro,
a silk so fine it is almost transparent.