Women of the Pleasure Quarters (12 page)

In the old days, the makeup was white lead and had a disastrous effect on the skin. Women quickly aged and their skin became yellow-tinged and prematurely wrinkled from having it applied every day. Sometimes young geisha died from the poisoning. Nowadays maiko and geisha use a gentler makeup, produced by Kanebo, the Japanese cosmetics manufacturer—though modern women, as well as geisha, still swear by nightingale droppings, sold by the bottle in organic cosmetic shops in Japan, to cleanse the skin and give it a pearl-like pallor. To get the luminous white of the face, Masami explained, she mixed a little pink into the white; true white would give a sallow tint on Japanese skin. But for the throat and shoulders, she used pure white to set off the brilliant red of the collar.

Next Masami puffed on a layer of white powder, patting until Kanosome’s face was as smooth as alabaster and as pristine as an artist’s canvas. She filled in the eye sockets and the sides of the nose with pink, then brushed a layer of white around the girl’s neck and shoulders, puffing powder over the top.

Kanosome’s family and a couple of her school friends had traveled from the city outside Tokyo where they lived to witness this rite of passage. They crowded into the room, whispering nervously. Squashed in a row along one wall, they sat formally on their heels. Her parents looked ridiculously young to have such a grown-up child. Her father, in a brown suit, shuffled to his feet, took out a video camera, and started filming. It was like a wedding except that there was no groom. They were seeing their child for the last time. It was a hugely emotional occasion, even more so than it would have been for Western parents. For in Japan girls usually live at home with their parents until they marry, then move straight from their parents’ home to their husband’s.

Taking a narrow brush Masami shaded in the eyebrows in feathery strokes, painting them very straight like moths’ wings, then outlined the eyes in red, extending the line out at the corners. Finally she painted in a line of black around the eyes.

“The trick is to get the face the same every time,” she said. “When they first try and do it themselves, it’s a mess. Our other maiko has a different face every day.”

“She’ll never be able to do this herself!” tut-tutted Kanosome’s small round grandmother.

“Sshh!” whispered Kanosome, motionless as an artist’s canvas.

Then Masami took a silver template and placed it against the girl’s back, adjusting the position at the nape of her neck. With a large flat brush she painted the back in white, up behind the ears and down to the center. She removed the template, revealing a titillating three-pronged tongue of bare skin. Usually a maiko would paint her own face, using two mirrors to paint her back and leaving a two-pronged V of unpainted flesh which supposedly hints at a woman’s private parts.

Two
otokoshi
bustled in, middle-aged women in skirts and white gloves. There have been
otokoshi,
literally “male staff” or “boys,” ever since there were geisha. They were the geishas’ assistants. They helped them dress, carried their shamisen boxes as they went back and forth from geisha house to teahouse, and were often their confidants, privy to the tastiest items of gossip. But these days there were only five of the original male “boys” left, all rather old. Their job had largely been usurped by women.

Chatting and laughing, the
otokoshi
helped Kanosome into her under-kimonos, first a filmy red petticoat, then a white cotton under-blouse with a red collar and long red sleeves, then a floor-length red petticoat, tying them all in place with silk ribbons. Then they laid a brocade collar, embroidered in red, white, and silver, around her neck. Kanosome stood like a tailor’s dummy while the women tugged, readjusted, and tied.

Hanging on the wall was a sumptuous black kimono with a stream in white and pale turquoise swirling across the hem and shoulders. Blossoms and leaves floated along it and there was a stylized bridge across it. There are appropriate kimonos for each season and each event. This was a formal kimono used only for ceremonial occasions. It was made of a light almost transparent silk gauze with a very loose weave called
ro,
worn in summer.

Helping Kanosome into the garment, the women tugged the collar and back of the kimono right down to the middle of her back to expose the familiar breathtaking expanse of white skin and the three-pronged tongue of unpainted flesh at the nape of her neck. Tying it in place with ribbons, they took the obi, a weighty band of sumptuous gold brocade and wrapped it round and round her. Then they inserted a cushion to pad the back and tied it all with silken strings so that the two long ends dangled to the floor. They were heaving and tugging so vigorously they had to stop for breath and wipe the sweat from their brows.

For the final touch, Masami took a small stick of intensely red safflower paste, moistened a thin brush, and carefully painted a tiny petal of red in the center of Kanosome’s lower lip. The upper lip she left white; it is only after a year that the maiko begins to paint her upper lip. Then, after tucking two silver dangling combs into the girl’s coiffure, she handed her a mascara brush and mirror. To everyone’s horror, a black dot appeared on the immaculate white of the face. Masami touched up her handiwork, laughing cheerfully. After all, under all the paint, Kanosome was still a child.

“What a pretty maiko . . .” said Kanosome’s mother in uncertain tones.

The teenager had disappeared. In her place was a beautiful painted doll, all lips and eyes etched on the pure white canvas of her face.

“It’s your own daughter,” smiled the
okasan,
the proprietress of the house, elegant in a dark blue kimono.
Okasan
means “mother”; from now on Kanosome would address her by this title. The two mothers could not have been more different. The
okasan
of the house was slim, elegant, and rather icy, like a nightclub hostess; whereas Kanosome’s real mother was plump, comfortable, and homely. She was giving up one for the other.

Preparations completed, we swept off to the teahouse, owned by the
okasan,
where Kanosome was to celebrate the beginning of her professional career as a maiko. The narrow entrance was decorated wall to wall with enormous colorful paintings of the gods of good luck with “Kanosome” brushed in huge black characters on each. Here the family bade her good-bye, watching rather wistfully as she stepped into her high wooden clogs and out into the night.

“Oki-ni, oki-ni,” she piped, using the Kyoto word for “thank you.” It must have sounded disturbingly affected to her parents’ Tokyo ears. Somehow her demeanor had changed along with her appearance. What on earth had happened to their little girl? She was not even talking the same language as they were anymore.

Bowing, she set off with her new mother, clattering down the road, her obi swinging heavily behind her. The two would parade through the neighborhood so that Kanosome could be formally introduced to all the teahouse owners. Usually it was a grand parade, the maiko’s moment of glory when, like a Hollywood starlet, trailing a pack of photographers and the odd TV cameraman, she showed herself in all her finery to her public. But the rain had kept the photographers away.

“You must be proud of her,” said Kanosome’s grandmother to the young father, filming their retreating backs with his video camera.

“Hmm,” he said slowly. The bland Japanese mask, conveying the illusion that everything is eternally fine, slipped just for an instant. He looked down sadly. “Well,” he said finally. “She really wanted to do it.”

At the far end of the alley two small figures were silhouetted for a moment, sheltering under a huge oiled paper umbrella, before vanishing from sight around the corner.

First Steps in the Geisha World

Harumi was in her second year as a maiko when I met her, even though she was only fifteen. She had wanted to become a maiko so badly that she had left home when she was thirteen to move into Haruta geisha house, and had finished her schooling at the same time as she was beginning her maiko training. I used to see her clip-clopping past my house in her maiko regalia. With her heart-shaped face, large limpid eyes, tiny retroussé nose, and mouth like a bow, she was as perfect as a china doll and the epitome of maiko prettiness.

I bumped into her when I sat in on classes at the Kaburenjo, the “dance and music practice place” which housed a theater, classrooms, and the offices of the district geisha union. (Despite Mr. Kimura’s intransigence, I had finally managed to gain entry.) Fresh-faced without her makeup, in a plain indigo-and-white cotton summer kimono, she had a simple red ribbon in her waxed hair. She shone in the drumming class where she played the
tsuzumi,
a small rather beautiful hour-glass shaped drum of gold-painted lacquered wood with a skin made from the hide of a young horse. Looking straight ahead impassively in the prescribed fashion, she rested it on her right shoulder, held it in place with her left hand and beat out a rhythm with the fingers of her right, breaking into a childish giggle when she made a mistake.

There was something irresistibly attractive about maiko with their combination of little-girl cuteness and teenage vulnerability beneath their archaic coiffures. But they were the most difficult of all to meet; regarded as children, they were fiercely protected by the geisha house mothers. It was also difficult to be invited inside a geisha house. After all, these were private homes, where the geisha and maiko lived. Even when I visited a teahouse, theoretically open for business, I never got further than the home bar, the equivalent of a Victorian parlor, at least for the first few weeks.

I was curious to venture a little deeper inside this world. Who were these little girls I saw flitting about the streets like butterflies? Why had they chosen this anachronistic lifestyle when so many other options were open to them? What were their day-to-day lives like? Did they have regrets about what they had given up? But the doors always seemed to be closed and I dared not knock too insistently. It was not until I had become a familiar face in the geisha world that one day a geisha, who had befriended me at the local coffee shop, suggested casually that I should meet her neighbor. Thus it was that I ended up sliding open the door of the Haruta geisha house where Harumi lived.

The Haruta house was a big rambling chaotic house with a yapping lapdog and a constant stream of visitors. Haruta-san herself, the “mother” of the house, was a large, expansive, open-hearted woman who had had, as she told me, a tough life.

She had been born fifty-two years before in the rural impoverished island of Kyushu, the love-child of a geisha and a wealthy landowner. Her father took her into his household but from the start she was relentlessly bullied by his seven other children. When she was ten she ran away to look for her mother.

But the mother, who had long since married and had other children, was far from pleased to see her. She told the child that she had not even wanted to have her. She had fallen downstairs to try to induce a miscarriage when she was pregnant with her. She beat her, treated her like a housemaid, and refused to let her go to school, then sold her to a hospital where she was forced to wash filthy rags from morning to night. After four years of utter misery, young Haruta found some pills and swallowed three hundred, hoping to kill herself. She was found, revived, and taken back to Kyushu by her mother’s sister. But at fourteen, she was barely educated; she had missed four years of schooling. And there was no work to be found in Kyushu. Her life still seemed hopeless.

There was nothing for it but to go back to Osaka and look for work in the “water trade,” the Japanese term for the sex industry. She found a job in a “cabaret,” a low-grade bar not far removed from a brothel. There she became friendly with a woman who was the girlfriend of a Kyoto textile merchant. She persuaded Haruta-san to try the life of a geisha. With the merchant as her guarantor, Haruta ended up in a geisha house in Kyoto. Once again she was at the bottom of the heap, tormented and bullied. But nothing could be as bad as what she had already gone through. She persevered and in the end inherited the name, the house, and the business.

The geisha world had been her salvation. When I met her she was the comfortable mother hen to a brood of maiko and geisha, including a couple of children of her own, happily established in Kyoto’s world of women.

“I’m very kind to the maiko and geisha,” she confided. “That’s not to say I’m not stern. They have to learn to behave properly. But I would never, never treat anyone the way I was treated.”

Harumi, the youngest maiko in the house, took me upstairs to show me the room she shared with Haruka, her “older sister.” Japanese rooms are usually cramped and tatty but theirs was large, spacious, and airy with fresh tatami matting on the floor, smelling of rice straw. From the open window you could see the tiled roofs of the neighboring houses and the narrow street outside. The room was full of little-girl clutter—piles of stuffed animals, toys, dolls, a bookcase full of books, magazines, and comics and a large mirror which ran the length of one wall, like in a theater dressing room, with drawers underneath it filled with brushes and tubs of unguents and makeup. There were photographs of pop stars, famous geisha, and several pictures of the Hollywood star Leonardo di Caprio pinned along the top. Filling the wall above it was an enormous poster of Masahiro Nakai of the fabulously popular singing group SMAP, heartthrob to millions of Japanese teenage girls.

Despite her little-girl looks, Harumi was unusually grown up and confident for her age. Maiko often are, perhaps because they leave home so young. She sat on her heels, cuddling the house cat, a tawny-eyed tortoiseshell, and chatted cheerfully in her piping voice, using the quaint, rather stilted Kyoto dialect and geisha forms of words. In her spare time she loved music and films, she told me. She had seen the film
Titanic
on video four times and adored the star, Leonardo di Caprio. Or she went shopping with a schoolmate who had become a maiko at the same time as she had.