Women of the Pleasure Quarters (15 page)

As the young man reached the Fukagawa area, he would be beguiled by the strumming of shamisen and the sound of singing from the restaurants and teahouses along the waterfront. The geisha were fine musicians who had spent years studying their art. Even though they might choose to augment their income with prostitution, they had a skill with which they could support themselves for the rest of their lives. In comparison with the chic, independent geisha, the courtesans of the pleasure quarters seemed stuck in a time warp.

The young man who wanted to win himself one of these stylish modern women had to be a very cool character himself. While the ideal woman was
iki,
the equivalent for men was to be a
tsu
—a sophisticate, a connoisseur. The word arose around 1770 and quickly became an enormous fad. Being a
tsu
meant knowing one’s way around the demimonde, knowing the rules of the game so thoroughly that one was completely at ease. Every self-respecting Edo man wanted to be thought a
tsu,
certainly not a
yabo
(“boor,” the opposite) or a
hanka-tsu
(a half-baked
tsu
, a charlatan).

As it happened, the typical
yabo
was likely to be a samurai, an uncouth provincial type who had no idea how to dress stylishly and talked in stiff outmoded language. A
tsu,
in contrast, had no need to be rich or to have high social status. If he looked good and had savoir faire, he was welcome. Thus the countercultural values of the demimonde, which focused obsessively on style, dress, and appearance, seeped through to permeate society at large.

One of the most brilliant figures of the time was a man called Kyoden Santo (1761–1816). A poet and comic novelist, he was also a famous artist who worked under the name Masanobu Kitao and practically lived in the Yoshiwara. Both his wives were second-rank Yoshiwara courtesans. At twenty-four, he published a book called
Romantic Embroilments Born in Edo
(1785). Told cartoon-style in drawings, with the dialogue and narrative festooning every available space, this is the story of Enjiro, the spoiled son of wealthy parents.

Enjiro fancies himself as a great lover
(iro-otoko),
and wants the whole world to know it. But sadly, being ugly, this is rather difficult for him to achieve. The best way to become truly famous is by committing love suicide with a courtesan. So he buys the freedom of a woman called Ukina, paying a lot of money to have a window in her brothel broken. The two scramble down a ladder, feigning elopement, though the brothel staff ruins the effect by cheerfully waving them off. Still, he sets off into the woods with her, having arranged for friends to arrive and stop them before they actually commit the act.

Unfortunately at this stage two robbers turn up, waving swords and wearing the Japanese equivalent of balaclavas, sinister black scarves tied around their faces revealing only their eyes. They set upon the helpless pair and offer to help them die. “We didn’t mean to kill ourselves when we set off to commit suicide,” groans Enjiro.

In the end the robbers make off with their clothes, leaving them naked but for their loincloths and an umbrella. Enjiro has become famous, though not in the way he intended.

Kyoden’s story caused great hilarity and was hugely successful, with the scene of the pair walking along miserably, practically naked, reproduced on innumerable woodblock prints and paper fans. Clearly there were plenty of Enjiros to be found around Edo and in the pleasure quarters.
¹⁰

The licensed and the unlicensed districts, the two worlds within and without the walls, frequently mingled. Whenever there was a clamp-down on illegal prostitution, the unfortunate women were shipped off and dumped in the nearest licensed quarter. Given that the walled cities were never allowed to expand a single yard, there must have been terrible overcrowding and considerable squalor. Moreover, each influx of untrained, unqualified prostitutes dragged standards in the quarters down another notch.

Every now and then there was a devastating fire. In the hundred years following the first appearance of the geisha in 1760, the Yoshiwara burned to the ground ten times and there were several other fires which destroyed sections. When this happened, the brothel-keepers were permitted to relocate temporarily to one of the unlicensed areas until the walled city was rebuilt. The unlicensed quarters were by now so much more lively, popular, and accessible than the licensed that it was a great opportunity to advertise their wares and increase their profits.

One such upheaval took place in 1787, when some brothel-keepers set up temporary houses in a fashionable riverfront zone called Nakasu Island after a fire. The area had been known as Three Forks in the heyday of the Yoshiwara, when a courtesan named Takao was murdered there by her disappointed suitor. After the shogunate instigated a program of landfill, it developed into the most sophisticated and exciting entertainment district in the country, packed with famous and exclusive restaurants and teahouses, with resident geisha to take care of guests.

At its height there were 18 restaurants, some of which catered only to the deputies of the provincial lords, 93 teahouses, 14 boathouses, and at least 27 geisha, not to mention brothels, theaters, and assorted food stalls. The most famous restaurant of all, depicted in many woodblock prints, was the Shikian (Four Seasons Hermitage). Nakasu was an eighteenth-century equivalent of London’s Soho, within easy reach of the city center, with fun for ordinary folk too, where people could go for the day to enjoy sideshows, jugglers, freak shows, mimes, and street theater.

For the women of the Yoshiwara who were transported to this lively environment, there was a far greater degree of freedom than usual. Here no one worried about formalities like the first and second meetings, where clients and courtesans exchanged cups of saké. Instead they could jump straight to consummation, which was supposed to be withheld until the third meeting. Likewise, there were fewer staff around who needed to be tipped, which made it easier on the customers. Conditions were so crowded inside the small temporary brothels that sometimes a girl’s feet touched someone else’s head and everyone could hear the noisy carousing of the drunken customers and the courtesans’ insincere declarations of eternal love to each and every one of them.

Morality was not the only thing which was slipping. For while privileged debauchees sang, danced, and frittered away their time in the company of geisha and courtesans on Nakasu Island, the poor were starving to death. In 1787, after seven years of bad harvests and famine, rioting peasants broke into the shops and storehouses of the wealthy rice merchants, first in Osaka, then in Edo and Kyoto, wrecking, destroying, and making off with sacks of hoarded rice.

Despite the economic woes of the rest of the country, it was still a golden age for pleasure. At the Yoshiwara and the other government-recognized licensed quarters (of which there were about two hundred throughout the country), the partying never stopped. For the man about town there was unlimited choice. He could trawl the unlicensed quarters with their edge of illegality, enjoy himself at the less risky licensed quarters, and take his pick among courtesans, geisha, and straightforward prostitutes.

The Yoshiwara was still unquestionably the most famous pleasure quarter in Japan. Artists depicted its beautiful, languid women in woodblock prints which rolled off the presses to be snapped up by an eager populace. Guidebooks, like the fanzines of modern times, listed their attributes and special skills. Ambitious young men, eager to be recognized as
tsu
sophisticates, studied the manuals describing the latest fashions, desperately checking that they had the right undergarment, silver pipe, and tobacco pouch, could drop the right names, and could spot the most celebrated courtesans and geisha.

They did not realize that their elaborately hedonistic lifestyle would soon be threatened. For cataclysmic events were about to overtake the precious world of Edo, the Yoshiwara, and Tokugawa Japan. And the women who would dominate the brave new world which was to follow would be the geisha, not the courtesans.

chapter 5

inside the pleasure quarters

Becoming a Geisha

I know she is light and faithless,

But she has come back half-repentant

And very pale and very sad.

A butterfly needs somewhere to rest

At evening.

Geisha song
¹

The Professor of Hairstyling

Whenever I had a spare moment I dropped into Professor Ishihara’s hairdressing salon to the north of Shijo Street, in the oldest part of Gion (his Japanese title is Ishihara Sensei, “Teacher Ishihara”). He knew everything one could ever want to know about geisha, maiko, their history, and their hair. His wife, I had heard, was from a family that ran a teahouse, though that was the one thing that he would never talk about.

A laid-back, humorous, dapper man always dressed in an elegant pin-striped suit, he had penned three books on the history of maiko and
tayu
hairstyles and was working on a fourth. He was the only person left in Japan who knew how to create the ornate hairstyles of the
tayu
courtesans.

“In Edo times you could tell everything about a person just by looking at their hair,” he told me one day. “In those days there was a different hairstyle for each class of person. You could tell from someone’s hairstyle what class they were, what kind of work they did, and what part of the country they came from. The geisha world is the only place where that still goes on. There are different hairstyles for each stage of the geisha’s career, different hairstyles for geisha in different parts of Japan, and different sorts of kimono.

“This,” he explained, showing me a picture of an ornate hairstyle, decorated with ribbons, ornaments, and silk flowers, with a bagel-shaped rolled knot of hair worn high on the head, “is
ware-shinobu.
It’s the maiko’s first hairstyle. It means that she is young and cute.

“And this”—turning the page to show me a less heavily decorated hairstyle with the knot lower down—“is the maiko’s second hairstyle,
ofuku.
It means that she is to be congratulated, she is no longer a virgin. Maiko used to start wearing their hair like this when they were thirteen.”

“Thirteen?” I was aghast. It was hard to get to grips with the idea that the old geisha I knew had lost their virginity—in other words, been deflowered whether they liked it or not—at the tender age of thirteen.

“They all had it,” he said carelessly. “They all had
mizuage.
If you listen to the old grannies at the teahouses, they’ll tell you, ‘We were children, we didn’t know anything, what could we do?’ In those days Kyoto was full of rich silk traders and kimono merchants. The
danna
would pay for
mizuage,
buy the girl a house, and pay her an allowance. The wives? They were like employees, they just thought it was normal. Nowadays they’d ask for a divorce! For three hundred years it was perfectly normal for men to pay and for women to give sex. All that’s stopped now, of course. Ever since 1958 it’s been completely different. It’s much more serious now. The maiko all concentrate on their dancing. The
ofuku
hairstyle just means she’s more senior.”

Once you became a senior maiko, he said, there was no further to go. You wore your hair in the
ofuku
style, though there were a couple of other styles worn for special occasions:
yakko-shimada,
a sweeping elegant style worn for the New Year celebrations, decorated with sprigs of dried rice for fertility and good luck; and the
katsuyama,
named after the seventeenth-century bathhouse attendant who became a great courtesan famous for her splendid topknot. The maiko’s last hairstyle, which was very ornate indeed, was the
sakko,
which she wore for her last month before graduating to become a geisha.

The door opened and a young woman came in, piping in a fluting falsetto,
“Ohayo dosu! Sensei, o tanomo shimasu!”
—“Good morning! Professor, could you please . . . ?” In the mornings maiko were always pale and subdued after the previous night’s parties. Without further ado, this one, in an everyday cotton
yukata
and with her long hair loose and shaggy, sat down, picked up a teen magazine, and started leafing through it.

One way to spot an ex-maiko is the perfectly round little bald patch on the crown of her head. Having been tugged and pulled by the hairdresser week after week for five years, the hair never grows back. Watching Professor Ishihara at work, it was easy to see how this could happen. He was like an artist struggling to create beauty out of his chosen material—hair.

With curling irons heated over a portable charcoal brazier, he stretched the hair until it was smooth, shiny, and perfectly straight. Then, combing in globs of white pomade and oiling his comb with
bintsuke
oil (the same oil used to keep sumo wrestlers’ topknots rigid), he parted and sectioned it. Beginning with the hair at the crown of the head, he tugged it firmly into a ponytail, tied in a roll of handmade paper to give bulk, and swept it forward to form the central knot of the entire edifice. He sculpted the hair at the back of the head up and over it, coiling it into a stiff loop, with a thin frame of lacquered wood to hold it in place. The front of the hair meanwhile was rollered. Then he set to work on the two side pieces, stretching them round, with plenty of
bintsuke
oil, and tying them with string to the central knot so that they formed two wings, one on either side of the face. He slipped a thin lacquered wooden band like a hairband through the two wings to hold them firmly in place and tucked a wad of artificial hair inside each.

Then he took a hairpiece, a ponytail of coarse black hair from the Tibetan yak, and tied it onto the central ponytail of the maiko’s own hair. He combed the whole lot together, folded it forward, looped it back, opened it out and—lo and behold!—there was a bagel-shaped knot. Finally he teased the front of the hair into an arch and attached it too to the central knot. He added a hairpin to conceal the center of the bagel, some pieces of stiff black paper to keep the shape of the wings precise, and a couple of crinkly red ribbons. The whole masterful creation took about forty minutes and the end result was a sleek, shiny coiffure with not a single hair out of place, firm enough to survive a week’s working, playing, and sleeping.

“Oki-ni,” said the maiko, transformed from a shaggy-haired young woman into a creature bearing such an immaculate pompadour that a man would be terrified to touch her in case he mussed it. Bowing and smiling, she slipped out of the shop.

Joining the Geisha Family

For Harumi, the first serious decision of her career was whether she should go through with
misedashi,
the three-day debut to become a maiko, or whether she should leave. Until that point the costs the house mother had incurred in training and housing her were not exorbitant. But the debut itself was expensive; and thereafter the costs of classes, kimonos, makeup, and regular trips to the hairdresser, not to mention pocket money and other living expenses, would amount to a huge sum. If she wanted to drop out, this was the moment to do so. Otherwise she would be committed to the maiko life for the next five years. It was a big decision for a child of fourteen to make.

Many of her friends had already discovered that it was not the glamorous life they were expecting and had dropped out. As Haruta, the house mother, put it, “The flower and willow world runs according to strict rules, like Japan in the old days. At home, children are free. Here they are not free. I tell them, try it for a year, but most of them give up within three months. They’re children, they don’t understand properly.”

“It is much tougher than I expected,” said Harumi. “From the outside maiko look so pretty. But when you have entered this world, you discover what a hard life it is. Ten of us started at the same time. Six have left. I feel lonely without them.”

For Harumi there was never any question. If she had been planning to leave, she would have left long before. Besides, she had already been enchanted by her first taste of stepping out, painted and dressed as the epitome of feminine beauty. Despite all the discipline and hard work, it was still every girl’s dream, an eternity of dressing up.

Before her debut, there was an important rite of passage to be undergone. In order to be initiated as a full member of the geisha family, Harumi needed to be adopted by an “older sister,” a senior maiko or a geisha who would be her mentor, teach her the basics of the geisha lifestyle, keep an eye on her progress with dancing and music, and, most important, shoulder the responsibility if she made a mistake. For a maiko it is a weighty deterrent against breaking the rules if she knows that it is her “older sister” rather than herself who will take the blame.

She would also be given a professional name; until then, she had been called by the name she had been born with. Like a surname, which shows one’s link to the family of one’s birth, her professional name would show which geisha family she belonged to and in particular her relationship with her “older sister.” The older sister of Haru-mi—whose name means “Spring Beauty”—is Haru-ka, “Spring Flower,” the senior maiko of the Haru-ta, “Spring Field,” house.

Women who were maiko thirty or forty years ago can remember petitioning a particularly famous maiko or geisha and begging to be taken on as her younger sister. Those who succeeded in being adopted by a ravishingly beautiful geisha or one of the top dancers could be sure that they would be introduced at the best teahouses, where they could bask in her reflected glory. For an ambitious maiko, this is still the way to ensure a brilliant career. Similarly, geisha might watch out for promising maiko, either particularly lovely or particularly talented at dancing, and take them under their wing.

Most maiko, however, are content to leave the choice of older sister to their house mother. Haruta, the mother of Haruta geisha house, told me, “You need someone who has common sense. It’s like bringing up a child. She has to be strict with her, like a parent. Sometimes I choose a maiko, sometimes a geisha; but I always choose from the girls I’ve reared myself at the Haruta house.”

The moment of transition was marked by a ceremony which took place on an auspicious day chosen by a fortune teller au fait with the omens. Called
san-san-kudo,
“three times three, nine times,” it is exactly the same as the most solemn and binding part of the Japanese wedding ceremony, a bit like the exchange of rings in the West. It was almost as if Harumi was marrying into the geisha community, in the same way as a nun marries into the church. Like a nun, henceforth if Harumi wished to marry she would have to give up her geisha vocation.

Dressed in all her finery, her hair tricked out with combs, ribbons, hairpins, ornaments, and silk flowers, her face painted to doll-like perfection, wearing a formal black kimono, she knelt solemnly beside Haruka in a tatami room in the geisha house. First Haruka took a small red-lacquered saucer brimming with saké and drank it in three sips, then passed it to the maid to refill. Next Harumi drank from the same cup. Then the ceremony was repeated with a middle-size saucer, then a large one—three saké cups, three sips from each.

The following day was the beginning of Harumi’s debut. For three days she was the star of the entire district. Every waking second she was on display as she paraded the streets trailed by photographers, meeting everyone, sliding open teahouse doors, bowing again and again, piping, “Tanomo, okasan, oki-ni . . . ,” “Asking your favor, mother, thank you . . .” The house mothers gave her gifts of money in envelopes which the dresser or Haruta—whoever happened to be with her—tucked away in a capacious sleeve. Each contained 10,000 to 20,000 yen, $100 to $200. Multiplied by the number of houses in the district, it came to a sizable amount of money, though it was still only a small contribution toward the exorbitant costs of the
misedashi
. In the evening there was party after party and most of the customers too gave her sizable tips. By the end of all the meeting, greeting, and partying she was completely exhausted.

Living in the same house, Haruka really was like an older sister to Harumi. At eighteen, she had nearly completed her maiko training. She kept an eye on Harumi’s progress, helping her master the minute rules and customs which determine every second of life in the geisha districts. A few days earlier, there had been a small concert at the Kaburenjo where the maiko displayed their musical skills, particularly in drumming. It was an important occasion for Harumi. In the morning, Haruka took her from teahouse to teahouse to greet the teahouse owners and the ancient “older sisters” who would make up the audience and beg their indulgence.

“The timing is so hard,” piped Harumi in her little-girl voice. “If you arrive too early they scold you. If you speak too softly, they scold you. Haruka taught me about that.”

“If I become a geisha and have my own apartment, Harumi will come every two or three days to visit,” Haruka told me in firm, responsible, big sister tones. “It’s not like being friends. It’s a special relationship.”

Graduation:
The Collar-Changing Ceremony

Downstairs in the living room, the nerve center of the house, the witching hour was fast approaching. The lapdog, now confined to a large cage, yapped hysterically, the television blared, and a roomful of ex-geisha sat laughing and chatting. One, in her thirties and married, bounced a large baby on her knee, crooning in English in my honor, “Hap-pee, hap-pee.” Haruta, the large, gregarious house mother, was on the phone, juggling a timetable covered in multicolored scribbles and a book of phone numbers.

“We need a shamisen player for tomorrow night,” she barked. “No, no, she’ll be busy . . . No, not that one either, she’s not good at keeping up a conversation. We need someone who can play the shamisen and knows how to chat too.”

Harumi disappeared into the kitchen to have a quick meal of boiled beef on rice. Geisha and maiko ate twice a day, at twelve, after classes, and at four, before getting ready for the evening’s parties. They might drink with the guests. In fact they were expected to; a geisha who did not drink was almost a contradiction in terms. But they never ate with them. Thus it was important to eat before starting work so as not to suffer too many pangs at the sight of the mouth-watering dishes being served up. If a maiko was really hungry she might snack at midnight when she got back from her last engagement.