Women of the Pleasure Quarters (13 page)

“Ever since I was ten I’ve yearned to be a maiko,” she piped, smiling prettily. “I would see them sometimes on television and once when we came to Kyoto on a school visit, walking along the street. They looked so beautiful in their kimonos! I dreamed and dreamed of looking like them. I’ve always loved to wear a kimono.”

Her father, a carpenter, was strongly opposed to the notion of any child of his taking up such a profession. It would also mean that she would have to give up her formal education long before high school. But her mother, a taxi driver, thought it was a good idea.

“She thought it would be good for me to learn good manners, like going to finishing school. It would help me when I got married.”

In the past, children sold into the geisha districts often had to work as maids for years. They lived in the geisha house, being treated like dogsbodies but getting the chance to have the patina of the geisha world rub off on them. For Harumi her period as a
shikomi
(literally “in training”) or
tamago
(“egg”) lasted just six months. Like the child-maids in the old days, she did a little cleaning, ran errands, and helped the maiko and geisha dress. As in any traditional Japanese apprenticeship, the real purpose was for her to absorb the atmosphere of the house, get a feel for how things were done, and get used to the notion of discipline.

But the most difficult thing to get used to was wearing traditional Japanese clothing. Instead of running around in jeans or a skirt, like any modern Japanese child, suddenly she was spending her days in a
yukata,
an ankle-length kimono-like garment that wrapped her knees like a bandage. She also had to hobble around on wooden clogs or dainty slippers so short her heels hung off the back. Her hair, which she tied back in a ponytail, grew wild and shaggy as she coaxed it to become long enough to sculpt into the maiko’s coiffure. And whenever she made the tiniest mistake, someone would be sure to snap at her.

“Everyone corrects you,” she remembered. “Every person I spoke to told me off every single time I made a mistake. It was so hard to bear!”

The first thing she had to learn was to speak Kyoto dialect and use the archaic geisha vocabulary. It was like losing all trace of her former self, even the way she talked, which marked which area of the country she came from and what class she was. She also began to learn the gracious ways of the geisha world. Bowing, greeting, speaking in a high-pitched, girlish voice had to become second nature for her. For a start, she had to memorize the names, ranks, and position in the hierarchy of everyone in her geisha district. As she flitted down the narrow lanes, she was eternally bowing and greeting each person that she met with
“Ohayo san dosu.”
This means “Good morning,” but the words and tone are infinitely softer than the standard Japanese “Ohayo gozaimasu.”

Every maiko told me the same thing: the worst aspect of the new life was not the dance and music classes, not leaving home and living apart from one’s family, but “human relations”—learning to fit into the geisha community. They had to learn, as I myself had, to put up with being at the very bottom of the geisha hierarchy and to accept without ever answering back the harsh words and endless sniping of the vinegar-tongued “older sisters,” some of whom were in their seventies and eighties. As they said in the geisha world, if someone told you that grass was black, ordinarily you would say, “Don’t be so stupid, of course it isn’t, it’s green!” But a would-be maiko had to learn to agree very quietly that it was indeed black, a wonderful shade of black; in fact she couldn’t imagine why she had never noticed before.

Throughout the training period the matriarchs—the “mothers” and the “older sisters”—kept a close eye on Harumi’s progress and on her developing skills in language, manners, and the all-important “human relations.” They also got together with the teachers to discuss her aptitude for the various arts. During the mornings she attended normal school, finishing off her standard education, and in the afternoons went to the classrooms in the Kaburenjo to take her first classes in dancing, singing, and playing the drum, flute, and shamisen.

Then came a dance test to assess her progress as a
shikomi.
It was the first time Harumi had ever performed in public. Worse still, she had to dance before an audience of the most formidable old ladies of the community. “I was so nervous,” she remembered with a giggle, “having to dance all alone before such important people!”

That first hurdle overcome, Harumi was ready for the next—
minarai,
“learning by observation.” Now, for the first time, she would have the thrilling experience she had been dreaming of for so long. She would put on the mask, she would see the alabaster face which henceforth she would present to the world.

But she was still not yet a maiko. To indicate the lower rank, her obi was only half the length of a maiko’s obi, stretching not from neckline to ground but only to the back of her knees. Woven into it was the crest of the Haruta house.

“I was so nervous when I went to
o-zashiki
for the first time,” she said in her little-girl falsetto, stroking the cat and tickling it under the chin. (
O
is an honorific,
zashiki
literally means the tatami room where the party takes place.) “I wondered what I should say to the customers. The older sisters helped me. They told me I must pay attention to the customers’ saké cups and fill them quickly so they were never empty. I was so nervous I just sat still, I dared not say a word. The customers told me I looked like a doll! The hairstyle felt so strange. My head was heavy, I could hardly keep it balanced. The kimono felt so heavy too. It was hard just to walk. And when I had to walk in
okobo,
I thought I would fall! Now I’m used to them. Now I can run in them.”

She showed me the bolster-shaped lacquered wooden pillow, rounded on the bottom and padded on the top, on which she had to rest her neck to prevent her hair getting mussed. It looked like a medieval torture device. In the past house mothers used to spread brown flaky rice husks under the pillow. If a girl’s head slipped even for a second during the night, the brown flakes would stick to her hair, providing incontrovertible evidence. She would be scolded or worse until she had learned.

“I hate the pillow worst,” she said. “I can’t sleep properly. I have to sleep on my side, I can’t sleep on my back. Then I have to wake up to turn over and change sides.”

For Harumi,
minarai
lasted a month, the standard length of time for modern maiko; in the past it might have been a year or more. Every night as she slept her head rolled off the high wooden pillow and ruined her hair. Every day she struggled to paint her face, trying to get the surface alabaster smooth and the features perfectly symmetrical; and every day the face turned out different. Whenever she got something wrong, Haruka, the senior maiko, or Haruta, the house mother, snapped at her.

Finally, dressed in her
minarai
kimono, she would set off for the teahouse, the
minarai-jaya
where her training in proper party behavior took place. All evening she attended at parties, watching and listening, learning how to sit, how to behave, how to chat, how to keep the conversation light and entertaining, and assiduously filling saké cups and changing ashtrays. There was little verbal instruction. In the Japanese way, she was expected to watch carefully and learn by observation, absorbing every detail of this new world.

chapter 4

male geisha and dancing girls
of the eighteenth century

Wine and women

Balm for the soul,

This floating world is

Women and wine.

Geisha song
¹

Shichiko the Male Geisha

The first time I met Shichiko he looked like a very conservative Japanese man. He wore the traditional outfit of baggy trousers and a cotton jacket, all in moss green, immaculately pressed, and carried a fan which he tapped prissily on the table whenever he wanted to make a point. But then I happened to glance at his feet. He was wearing
tabi,
toed linen socks which Japanese men traditionally wear indoors.
Tabi
are always white—except for Shichiko’s. His were an intense shade of royal blue covered with dragonflies. And, despite all his attempts to look serious and solemn, a smile or even a laugh kept breaking out across his horsy jut-jawed face.

Shichiko had come to tell me about
taikomochi,
of which he was one.
Taikomochi,
he explained, were the first geisha—and they were men. They played the same music as the females, they danced and, instead of being up on stage like kabuki actors, they were down there chatting with the customers, in every way just like their female counterparts. But, historically, male geisha had been around long before.

The word
taikomochi
means drum-bearer, in reference to the small hand drum which some of them carried. Back in the seventeenth century, the pleasure quarters supported not only courtesans and prostitutes but an enormous population of brothel-keepers, owners of houses of assignation, cooks, maids, bouncers, cleaners, and assorted hangers-on. The
taikomochi
were the party masters who kept the fun and games going. They were the ones for whom the term
gei-sha
(“artiste,” “entertainer” or, literally, “arts person”) was coined. Like court jesters, they sang, pranced, and told jokes and stories. When a bunch of men went out drinking, they would call a
taikomochi
to entertain them.
Taikomochi
and saké went together.

“Are taikomochi gay?” I inquired rather boldly.

“Nah,” said Shichiko firmly. “You want to have fun that way, you go to Shinjuku [Tokyo’s famous gay district]. You don’t mess about with
taikomochi.
”

This was a little disingenuous. Of course, no one ever talked about that sort of thing anymore. Nevertheless, at least until the end of the war, it was taken for granted that any traditional actor’s job involved the selling of sexual favors.

But
taikomochi
had almost died out. At present, Shichiko told me, there were only five or six left in the whole of Japan. They worked almost exclusively in Asakusa in Tokyo’s East End, which was where I had met him.

Some weeks later I went to watch him perform. It was at one of the regular dance displays which geisha give; though, this being downtown Tokyo, the atmosphere was very different from a Kyoto dance meeting. The room was crowded with elderly shop-owners and bigwigs, squashed together on cushions on the tatami floor. The plump, prosperous women wore matronly kimonos, while the men were in gray suits. The band—five old women on shamisen and five women singers—struck up and the geisha came out in ones, twos, and threes to show off their skills.

Then Shichiko burst on stage in a maroon men’s kimono, announcing, “We’re male geisha—but we don’t wear white paint!” Balancing a folded scarf comically on his head to imitate a geisha’s wig, he undulated along, pigeon-toed, eyes cast coyly down, then knelt in front of an imaginary mirror and mimed applying makeup, boasting in a fluting falsetto, “I’ve got an important
danna
who takes care of me.” I had, I thought, worked out what
taikomochi
were all about. They were stand-up comics, doing mime and impersonations to the accompaniment of shamisen and song.

But then things began to go quite a bit further. In a corner of the stage was a large white folding screen.

“Gay? No, sir, not me,” said Shichiko, back in his own persona now, addressing an imaginary customer—
danna
—behind the screen. “Absolutely not. I don’t do that kind of thing. I’ve called a geisha for you. She’ll be here any minute.”

By now he had advanced until he was half hidden behind the screen. Suddenly there was a hand on his ear, grabbing at him and tugging him while he struggled fiercely to escape. (It was, of course, his own hand, though it looked as if it belonged to the fictitious
danna.
) A hand wrapped around his face, then his sleeve was tugged, then his kimono, until he was dragged out of sight behind the screen. He burst out again.

“
Danna,
wait,” he protested. “Stop, stop! I’m not the geisha.”

Again he was dragged bodily behind the screen by the imaginary
danna,
again he escaped. Finally he groaned, in tones of exaggerated resignation, “Okay,
danna,
okay. But just once, okay? From the back?” With that he pulled up his kimono skirts, revealing a pair of blue baggy trousers. He turned to look behind the screen, pointing derisively, scoffing, “What’s that? Is that all? Is that yours?”

Then he turned so that his rear end was concealed behind the screen and proceeded to mime being penetrated extremely realistically with yelps of pain, rolling his eyes in comic anguish. Finally he made great play of wiping himself clean with tissues, an essential conclusion to the sex act in Japan. He even gave the floor a swab.

I was utterly shocked. Particularly considering the conservative nature of the audience, this struck me as being outrageous in the extreme. But I was the only one. No one else was shocked in the slightest. The shop-owners and their matronly wives laughed heartily and clapped enthusiastically as if it were a familiar everyday skit, skillfully carried out. The geisha returned to the stage for the second part of their performance. I later discovered that the “gay sketch” is indeed a set piece and a standard part of the
taikomochi
repertoire (there are other, considerably more outrageous sketches)—a classic, in fact.

Later, when I met Shichiko again, I asked him about it. “It’s just a joke,” he said, impatient at my tedious Western literal-mindedness. “It’s a symbol of how far we’ll go to please our customers, if you like. We treat the customers like kings. Whatever they ask, we can’t say no.” It was just a game, not real life; and in games anything goes.

Jesters in the Pleasure Quarters

Right from the founding of the pleasure quarters in the seventeenth century, there were jesters prancing about, playing tricks, doing risqué sketches, and singing ribald or melancholy songs to the accompaniment of the shamisen. They kept the mood upbeat and the jokes coming. The canny old brothel-keeper Jinemon Shoji, the founder of the Yoshiwara in the great city of Edo, was particularly fond of one of these talented young men and allowed him to wear his crest. He is said to have been the first to dub them geisha.

There were jesters of all levels of distinction, from serious musicians and accomplished dancers to
nodaiko
(talentless
taikomochi
), useless hangers-on who boosted the numbers in a merchant’s retinue so that he could appear important and who lived off tips and scraps from his table. Talented or talentless, they were an important and popular feature of the quarters and their numbers increased steadily over the years.

The instrument that marked out the geisha, male or female, was the shamisen. A three-stringed banjo-like instrument, introduced from the tropical kingdom of Okinawa in the mid-sixteenth century, the body was of red sandalwood, mulberry, or quince wood. Originally it was made with snake skin stretched taut as a drum over the sound box. Snake skin being hard to find in the colder climate of Japan, it was replaced with dog or cat skin which is used to this day. Traditionally the best shamisens are made from the immaculate soft white pelt of a young female virgin kitten which has yet to be mounted and has therefore not been scratched by a tomcat. Played with a large plectrum of wood or ivory, the instrument makes a melancholy sound, perfect to accompany plaintive love songs. The shamisen became the definitive instrument of the pleasure quarters; it was said that its sound could stir erotic yearnings where none had existed before.

Initially the courtesans too entertained with the shamisen. But after a while it became such a commonplace skill that the higher ranks began to leave it to the lower orders. Instead of entertaining their clients by singing and dancing, the top courtesans would sit regally in their sumptuous robes surrounded by their entourage of child attendants and junior courtesans. Male geisha and younger courtesans took over the job of performing. Around the end of the seventeenth century male geisha began to specialize. Musicians and dancers kept the name “geisha”; clowns and professional fools were
taikomochi
or jesters.

Some of the jesters traveled around with troupes of dancing girls, some worked in teahouses, entertaining customers during the interminable wait for the courtesan to arrive, and some joined the entourages of wealthy merchants. Some, like Shakespeare’s fools, were the best friends of powerful men, dispensing advice and flattery along with songs and buffoonery. Others were distinctly tricky.

Kiseki Ejima (1667–1736) was the most famous chronicler of the demimonde of his day. The son of a wealthy Kyoto shopkeeper, his early years were a rake’s progress through the pleasure quarters. Having squandered the family fortune on high living, he reluctantly took up writing. His acidic and entertaining novels, with titles such as
The Courtesans’ Amorous Shamisen
and
Courtesans Forbidden to Lose their Tempers,
were bestsellers.
²

Male geisha often feature in his tales of life among the demimonde. In one of his stories, the
taikomochi
reflect on the hardships of their life: “We jesters have to drink when we’d rather not,” they sigh. “We have to praise the tiresome little songs of our patrons, hear ourselves called fools by real blockheads, force a smile if we’re offended, and tell a roomful of people what even a woman would keep secret. No, there’s nothing so bitter as to entertain for a living. If you happen to please, you may be hired five times and get only one bu [$100 in today’s money] or two at most. In this wide world, is there no country where it rains hard cash?”
³

The Fashionable
Pleasure Quarter of Gion

From the start, it was a hopeless task to try and keep pleasure restricted to the pleasure quarters. For young gallants, there were plenty of places other than the quarters, with their stilted conversation and overdressed courtesans, where they could go to enjoy an evening of witty repartee culminating, with luck, in sex. The most fashionable of these was Kyoto’s glittering and sophisticated quarter of Gion, soon to become famous for its geisha.

Gion was not walled in; neither was it officially sanctioned. Unlike Shimabara and Yoshiwara, it was not the result of an administrative decision to keep prostitution in one place. Instead it had been created by free enterprise, operating in response to demand, which made it all the more vibrant and lively.

While the
keisei,
“castle-topplers,” of the nightless cities were spinning ever more complex webs of romance to ensnare the wealthy and privileged, there were less arcane and more affordable alternatives springing up outside the gates. Wherever people gathered there was a never-ending supply of unlicensed prostitutes. At coaching inns along the post roads linking city to city, at inns and taverns in the post towns, at the bustling points where the highways entered the cities, at bathhouses and in hot spring resorts—wherever there were men in search of pleasure, there were women to serve their needs.

As in medieval Europe, people tended to gather at places of worship—temples and shrines. They would go to pray and then stay on to have fun and take refreshment. As it was for Chaucer’s pilgrims, visiting a holy place or going on pilgrimage was the closest anyone in those days ever got to going on holiday. There was certainly no requirement to be solemn or earnest about it. Under the peaceful and prosperous rule of the Tokugawa shoguns, entrepreneurs began to build stalls and shops in and around the shrine precincts to serve the needs of pilgrims.

Gion grew up around Yasaka Shrine, on the opposite side of town from Shimabara. Dedicated to a local deity who took particular care of cotton merchants, the temple was one of the most famous and popular in the country. When nouveau-riche travelers arrived from rough and ready Edo to the east to sample the sophisticated delights of Kyoto, they would lighten their purses there first.

Screen paintings of the time show a sprawling complex of large and small shrine buildings with delicate vermilion pillars supporting sweeping cypress shingle roofs, with a squat red pagoda behind. Visitors would arrive on foot or by sedan chair, passing through the enormous
torii,
the red-painted wooden gateway, shaped like one of the monolithic Stonehenge portals, which marked the entrance. The grounds were the scene of much merriment. Paintings show pilgrims dancing exuberantly in circles, flourishing fans, accompanied by drummers and shamisen players and groups of people playing shuttlecock, while women conducted tea ceremonies among the trees and palanquin-bearers snoozed. Flanking the main gate of the shrine were tile-roofed stalls where smiling women in kimonos, their long hair looped into loose coils, brewed tea and steamed round white
dango
(skewered rice flour dumplings).

These were the first teahouses. Gradually they took to serving stronger beverages and more substantial food and the women began to sing and dance for their customers. They also provided other, more personal services, though this was strictly illegal. But the name “teahouse”
(ochaya)
remained.

There was never any lack of candidates among local women to be
cha-tate onna,
tea-brewing women. Apart from women of the town, there were also shrine maidens, who officiated at Shinto ceremonies and petitioned the gods. Such maidens had to be virgins. Once they had lost their virginity, they were ritually impure and quickly found themselves unemployed. The obvious course for an ex–shrine maiden was to betake herself to one of the burgeoning teahouses in search of work.