Women of the Pleasure Quarters (16 page)

There were no parties that night for Harumi’s “older sister,” Haruka. Relaxing in a T-shirt and shorts with her long hair tied back in a ponytail, she was noticeably more mature and confident than the childlike Harumi. She lacked the younger girl’s porcelain prettiness but she had an engaging candor of manner. Squashed around a corner of the table that filled the living room, we tried to ignore the noise and bustle as we chatted.

Haruka had her own decision to make. She had already been a maiko for five years and now this stage of her life in the geisha world was nearly at an end. She had reached the most important turning point of her career. If she stayed on, the next step was
erikae,
“changing the collar,” when the maiko’s thick red embroidered undercollar—
eri
—was replaced with the
geiko
’s—Kyoto geisha’s—white one and her long maiko locks were cut in preparation for putting on the wig of the geiko. If she wanted to leave, now was the moment to do so. Otherwise she would be committed for at least two years. It was akin to deciding whether to go on to postgraduate study at university.

Lots of young women became maiko for five years. It was like going to finishing school, acquiring gloss and grooming and also meeting a pool of wealthy and influential men, one of whom might turn out to be a prospective husband. Geisha were much less flamboyant, part of the dark fabric of the place. Instead of the brilliant peacock colors of the maiko, geisha wore simple, elegant kimonos. Instead of the maiko’s waxed coiffure, they wore their hair in a bouffant bun except on special occasions, when they would don a wig. They were also in much less demand. Customers would ask for a particular geisha whom they knew; but they would just ask for a maiko, any maiko. If she was not particularly charming or entertaining or a particularly good dancer, a geisha might find herself out of work; and no parties meant no income.

Being a geisha was a vocation. You only went through the changing of the collar if you really wanted to, perhaps because you loved traditional dance and music and wanted to take it up as a full-time profession or because you enjoyed the life and didn’t want to leave. But if you did choose to carry on, you would end up spending your most eligible years studying dance and music and entertaining old men at parties. If, after all that, you decided that you wanted to marry, you might well find yourself on the shelf.

“I’m wondering whether to give up,” confided Haruka. “I like the geisha look; but if you become a geisha, the classes get much more difficult. When you’re a maiko, everyone treats you like a child. If you make mistakes, the customers think you’re cute. But after
erikae
you’re an adult, you can’t make mistakes anymore. In any case, I really want to get married. You only have one life. I don’t want to go on being a geisha forever.

“I’d like to marry someone who’s not fussy about household stuff, someone manly. An ordinary guy would be fine, I don’t need a company chairman’s son. The only trouble is, you get spoiled as a maiko. You get used to having presents and being taken to good restaurants. I couldn’t marry a poor man. I might not make a good wife.”

Haruka was the daughter of a truck driver from just outside Kyoto. Becoming a maiko had opened doors for her into worlds she could never have imagined.

“My father didn’t want me to become a maiko,” she said. “He was worried about me. He didn’t know what I would have to do. But my mother said it was okay. I still go home quite often, but this is my family now; we eat rice from the same pot. I love it. I love classes and I love ‘work’ [the evening parties]. Last night we danced at the International Hotel opposite Nijo Castle. The night before that we were at a restaurant on the river in Takao for an outdoor party. There were jetties out above the water. Three of us were there. We went from table to table, chatting to all the customers. That’s how it is most nights in summer, outdoor parties. I love the traveling too, I love seeing new places. I’ve been everywhere. I’ve been to Tokyo, I’ve been to Nagasaki.”

Maiko are in huge demand. Kyoto is the only place in the country that still has them and they are often invited to brighten up a party for particularly important guests at a classy traditional restaurant in another city. They travel first class on the bullet train and stay in five-star hotels. They are also often hired to look decorative and be charming at conferences or exhibitions of, for example, kimono fabrics. Added to which, everyone who visits Kyoto and has connections or a bottomless purse wants to meet maiko. They are the symbol of the city. As one self-styled connoisseur put it, “maiko are the flavor of Kyoto.”

“I meet famous people all the time,” beamed Haruka. “I’ve met kabuki actors, TV actors, sportsmen . . .

“You know Masahiro Nakai?” she added, mentioning the boyish heartthrob whose photograph dominated the wall in the room she shared with Harumi. “I met him! He was starring in a TV drama and came to film in Kyoto. They ended up at a teahouse run by a friend of our house mother. The master of the teahouse knew I was Nakai-kun’s fan.
*
He didn’t say anything, he just called and asked me to entertain. So I got to meet Nakai-kun. He was really fun, even better-looking than I thought.”

Six o’clock was approaching, the magic moment when the first parties always began. Harumi reappeared, poised and ready for the evening’s work. The mask was in place. She was no longer a wide-eyed innocent child but a porcelain doll, wrapped like a Christmas gift in layer upon layer of kimonos and obis. Her eyes and eyebrows were drawn in black, the corners of her eyes defined in red, and her lips a perfect bow, startlingly red on the alabaster white of her face. Her kimono of light, loosely woven silk was a vivid shade of royal blue with a design of irises. Her thick brocade obi was of pale orange and gold with a red-and-silver under-obi beneath it. Her hair, in the
ofuku
style of the mature maiko, was decked out with a dangling silver comb and a frieze of stylized silk hydrangeas in pale pink and blue, appropriate for the month of June.

She stood rather uncertainly in the entrance like an actress in the wings, composing herself to step out into the spotlight. Outside a taxi had pulled up, almost filling the narrow street with its dark wooden houses. Tucking her wicker-bottomed silk handbag under her arm, she stepped into her high
okobo
clogs and, bells tinkling, slipped gracefully into the taxi, piping
“Oki-ni, oki-ni”
as she left. For a moment the geisha soap opera on television was interrupted by the face of Leonardo di Caprio, advertising Orico, a credit card company.

The Wigmaker

One day, during a break in the weather, I took a bus across town to the other side of the city, near the Nishijin weavers’ district and the Kamishichiken geisha district, to visit one of the three wigmakers who among them serviced all the Kyoto geisha. Mr. Imanishi had turned a wing of his rambling house behind Myoshinji Zen temple into a busy workshop where he sat on his heels alongside his two sons, his apprentices in the trade. Here and there about the room were what looked at first glance like human heads stuck on poles. They turned out to be wigs, some with long bedraggled locks, others neatly coiffed, set on egg-shaped wooden molds.

“Wigs used to be all Japanese hair, you know,” said Mr. Imanishi breezily with a grin. He was a roguish man in his sixties with a face like a walnut, a cheeky upturned nose, and a mop of curly gray hair. The hair of the wig on the stand in front of him hung in unappetizing rat’s tails which he was sectioning and combing energetically, slapping on globs of white
bintsuke
wax.

“But these days Japanese girls are rich,” he went on. “They don’t need to sell their hair. So we use imported Chinese hair, plus yak’s hair for volume. But Japanese hair is the best. That’s what we say, us wigmakers.”

He looped, folded, and pinned the tresses in a process very similar to dressing a maiko’s hair until he had created the glossy coiffure of the geisha, with a swatch of hair at the back, held in place with a stiff silver ribbon. Then he handed me the finished wig. The glossy hair was sticky with wax but the wig itself was astonishingly light and hard. Inside was a framework of duralumin, a sort of aluminum, lined with netting, like the inside of a crash helmet. Western wigs, conversely, have a rubber base.

“Once they decide to change the collar, that’s when we measure them up for their first wig,” explained Mr. Imanishi, wiping his hands on his uncannily clean white linen apron. “I meet the maiko and decide what shape will flatter her face. A round face, I make it look thinner; a thin face, I make it plumper. Those geisha all look pretty, right? That’s the wigmaker’s art, to make a wig that flatters the face. That’s what keeps them coming back.”

Unlike a Western wig, a Japanese wig had a widow’s peak at the front like Mount Fuji. It took, he said, two weeks to make a wig and required several fittings. For the first five days after the changing of the collar, one of his sons went to the geisha house every day to teach the fledgling geisha how to put it on. Once the first parties were over and she had time for more fittings, she ordered a second wig so that she always had one to wear while the other was being reset.

No geisha would dream of being seen in a wig that had a single hair out of place let alone one that was a bit flat or misshapen. In order to ensure that they always had that fresh-from-the-hairdresser look, geisha stored their wigs carefully in wig boxes and had them combed out and reset once a month, a job which took half a day (one and a half hours plus fetching and returning the wig) and cost 23,000 yen ($230) a time. Added to that, a wig had a lifespan of about three years, after which a geisha would need a new one. Each new wig cost 500,000 yen, in the region of $5,000. All in all, it was a sizable expense for the geisha and provided a thriving business for Mr. Imanishi and his fellow wigmakers.

Wigs came into vogue well after the end of the war, around the watershed year of 1958. Before then they had been used mainly in the kabuki theater. Geisha used to go to the hairdresser as maiko do still. For maiko, who were in the process of being trained, it was essential to live the flower and willow life twenty-four hours a day. But geisha were modern women, adults who had chosen to continue the life while it suited them. In their time off, they preferred to have the option of wearing Western clothes and having their hair in a less conspicuous style. Wearing a wig enabled them to switch between the geisha world and everyday life with ease. They could treat being a geisha as a job and the geisha’s outfit as a uniform, to be put on when they started work and taken off afterward. It was a liberation. Thus as the profession itself changed, wigs soared in popularity.

But how on earth, I asked, could one tamp down the enormous amount of hair which most geisha had, and fit a wig on top? Perhaps, said Mr. Imanishi, I should try it myself. Without more ado he swept my hair back and twisted a stretchy net over it, then wound a bandage-like tape around the edges. In seconds my head was as smooth as the egg-shaped molds on which the wigs rested. Then he lifted a wig out of its box. After he had tied a few ribbons and made a few adjustments it fitted perfectly. It felt tight, secure, and heavy, like wearing a crown. He added an ivory comb and some tortoiseshell hairpins and gave me a mirror in which to admire his handiwork.

The effect of a black, glossy, and absurdly stylized geisha wig perched above my European features was, it has to be said, far from flattering, like wearing an enormous piled-up Louis Quatorze wig without the gown, flounces, powder, or perfectly placed round black beauty spot. I hastily dabbed on the reddest lipstick I could find. A good thick layer of white makeup, I could see, would make all the difference. As is normal in Japan to mark the occasion, I lined up with Mr. Imanishi and his family, his baby grandson on my knee, for a group photograph.

I had a final question. He had been boasting of how many geisha he knew and how well he knew them.

“What would you say if your daughter wanted to become a geisha?” I asked.

He looked taken aback.

“Hmm,” he said finally, with an uncertain chuckle. “That’s a difficult question.” It was, it seemed, as outrageous a suggestion as if I had asked a stern Victorian patriarch if he would allow his daughter to become an actress. I could almost hear the music hall refrain: “Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington!” In turn-of-the-millennium Japan, geisha still had the rakish, not-quite-respectable image that actors and actresses used to have a century ago in Britain. To drop their names and boast of how many one knew was one thing. To have one’s own child join the ranks of these glamorous but nonetheless somehow disreputable creatures was quite another.

Mizuage: Becoming a Woman

A hole in the paper wall,

Who has been so guilty?

Through it I hear the breaking of a shamisen string,

Meaning bad luck.

Yet the prediction-seller says

That mine is excellent.

Geisha song
²

Every now and then a friend of a friend named Mr. Mori would phone me and invite me out on a bar crawl. He was a flamboyant character who had taken me under his wing because I was foreign and therefore a guest of his country and, like him, a writer. He loved the company of geisha; but he also knew how to spend time with them without bankrupting himself.

The secret was the “home bar” (
homu baa
in Japanese). A full-blown geisha party was so exorbitantly expensive that unless one had unlimited means, it was only feasible to throw one when there were very important business guests to be entertained and the whole thing could be paid for on company expenses. In modern Japan, to take over a tatami room in a teahouse in order to down a few flagons of saké with a geisha was insanely expensive. Thus, in order not to price themselves out of the market, most teahouses had developed “home bars,” a small bar with sofas, tables, and a karaoké machine where men could go without booking (provided that they were not first-timers) and have a very expensive but still affordable drink. When Mr. Mori took me out on bar crawls, that was where we went.