Women of the Pleasure Quarters (17 page)

One evening around midnight we ended up at a small bar on a quiet backstreet behind Yasaka Shrine, right in the lee of the Eastern Hills. From the outside it might have been a private house.

“This is a very special geisha,” Mori-san assured me as he slid the door open, slipped out of his shoes, and stepped into the hallway. The mama-san came out to greet us and ushered us into the bar.

A dignified, rather stiff woman, she might have been sixty or seventy. She had a plump round face with even, delicate features which must once have been beautiful. Her hair was swept into the unnaturally black bouffant hairstyle which all the geisha wore and her kimono, crossed high at the neck in matronly style, was a sober dark blue. I felt a little uncomfortable. Her smile was icy. She was perfectly pleasant, yet she seemed to be just going through the motions; she needed our business but in fact would much rather that we had not come. It was as if she was reining in her true feelings with almost noticeable effort.

Mori-san, a buoyant character utterly impervious to subtleties of atmosphere or feeling, was chatting cheerfully about business in the geisha world. Then his face lit up as two young women appeared. These were not maiko but bar girls, leggy students in tiny skirts whose job was to entertain the customers. While he teased and joked with them, the mama-san was left to entertain me.

“Gion must have changed quite a lot since you were first here,” I ventured, carefully avoiding impertinent personal questions. I was amazed at the vehemence of her reply.

“It’s completely different,” she exploded. “Everything has changed. Those days were dark. It was a dark life.”

“Could I ask . . .” I murmured politely, “would you mind telling me . . . I’ve heard music and dance classes were much harsher in those days.”

Suddenly the floodgates opened. I didn’t need to be polite, I hardly needed to speak. With Mori-san distracted by his two companions and no one but a foreigner, utterly outside the geisha community, to hear her, the mama-san poured out her story. Harsh? The classes had been terrible. The older sisters had been tough on her and the house mothers too; and her “older sister” had died suddenly at twenty-five, so there was no one to stand up for her.

“I thought I’d commit suicide many times,” she burst out. “My house mother was famous for her cruelty. Everyone knew it. She was always in a rage. I was like the maid. I did all the cleaning in the house by myself. She’d give me a list of jobs, then go out. If I hadn’t done them all when she got back, she beat me.”

Her father, she said, disappeared when she was four. Her mother was alone and poor. She hadn’t intended to send her child to the geisha district. But her aunt knew of a good position in a geisha house and when she was ten she was packed off to Gion.

“I didn’t know anything about it,” she said fiercely. “I didn’t know anything when I was brought here. I lived in Gion, I went to school, and I never saw my mother again.”

In those days there were no big decisions about whether to stay on or leave. A child who had been purchased from her parents was effectively an indentured slave. She labored under an enormous debt—the money used to pay for her purchase plus the exorbitant costs of the hairstyling and gorgeous kimonos and obis which were an essential part of the job. Until it was repaid, which might be never, she was the property of the geisha house. When the time came for her to go through with her debut and become a maiko, she did so. She had no choice in the matter. And later when the time came to change her collar and start wearing the
ofuku
hairstyle, she had no choice in that either. Added to which, changing the collar was not simply a colorful ritual as it is for modern maiko. It meant growing up and becoming an adult in a very literal sense.

“It was against the law to force you to have sex with a patron if you didn’t want to, even in those days,” blurted out the mama-san. I hadn’t even dared mention
mizuage
. “But no one paid any attention. Of course I had it, we all did. It was horrible, he was a horrible man. He was a specialist, a professional deflowerer.”

Amazed at her outburst, I was burning to ask her what a professional deflowerer was. But she obviously thought she had said enough. Then Mori-san and the two students joined in, chatting blithely, and a few minutes later he decided it was time to leave. As we strolled through the dark streets to our next port of call, a late-night noodle shop, I commented with due politeness on how nice she had been.

“ ‘Nice’?” chuckled the irrepressible Mori-san. “I wouldn’t call her ‘nice.’ She’s hard—
kibishi
—tough as an old boot.” There were reasons for that, I thought. I was beginning to understand why so many of the older women of the geisha community were harsh and sharp-tongued.

A Necessary Rite of Passage

The mama-san was the first but far from the only “older sister” to talk to me about
mizuage
. For women who were maiko before prostitution was made illegal in 1958—in other words, anyone aged over about fifty-five, which included many of the older members of the community—compulsory deflowering at an early age was simply a part of life. It made no difference whether they were the spoiled children of generations of geisha and had grown up in a wealthy geisha house with maids and servants, or whether they were the children of starving peasants, brought in weeping from the countryside. Children in those days did not have choices. The option of leaving before one’s debut or before the change of collar was simply not available.

Which is not to say that they were unhappy. Japanese practice
gaman
—“endurance,” “getting on with things,” “putting up with things.” When it is cold, you are cold, you don’t waste energy heating your house. When it is hot, you are hot. Widespread central heating and air-conditioning are recent developments in Japan and older people still do not bother much with them. And if you were told that you had to have
mizuage,
you just put up with it.

When I asked the older women of the geisha community if they had had
mizuage,
they looked at me with astonishment as if they could not imagine how anyone could ask such a stupid question.

“Of course,” they would tut impatiently. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be a geisha.”

Before the 1958 watershed,
mizuage
was not simply something that everyone took for granted but the most crucial step in the maiko’s career. Like a young man’s circumcision, painful but unavoidable, it was an initiation ritual. It marked the transition from maiko to geisha, from girl to woman, and was a prerequisite for changing one’s collar, synonymous with growing up. Until you had had it, you were not a woman. A virgin geisha would have been as much a contradiction in terms as a virgin wife.

From the customer’s point of view, of course, the chance to deflower a maiko was an irresistible opportunity. As everywhere, virgins were highly desirable. And a maiko was the apogee of virgins, the crème de la crème, selected for her beauty, highly accomplished, and trained to be compliant with whatever a man desired. Men were prepared to pay a small fortune for the privilege of deflowering one. It cost several million yen in today’s money, one elderly geisha told me, enough to buy a house.

As for the geisha house, they had invested a lot of money, what with the initial purchase and the costs of raising the girl—classes, training, kimonos, housing, and the rest. The first step toward recouping it was
mizuage,
one of the most lucrative transactions in the girl’s entire career.

Mizuage
began with the courtesans. For the geisha as for them, the cost of the debut was prohibitively expensive. It was simply not possible unless a wealthy sponsor could be found to pay for it. As a bonus, whoever was prepared to lay out the money would have the privilege of being the fledgling courtesan’s first patron. The payment was not for deflowering her but to cover the cost of the debut; though for the young woman the distinction must have seemed academic.

Sometimes by the time a courtesan or geisha came to have her debut, she was not really a virgin. Saikaku, the great seventeenth-century chronicler of the pleasure quarters, wrote rollicking stories about girls who were sold for “deflowering” time and again. The deception could be perpetrated if the girl moved to a new district where no one knew her and she could celebrate her “debut” for the second, third, or fourth time. The customer would not find out the truth until it was too late and would never dream of losing face by broadcasting his humiliation. To this day a sponsor or sponsors have to be found to pay for a maiko’s debut; though, post–1958, the position no longer carries the same bonus.

In her charmingly self-deprecating autobiography,
A Drunken Story of Gion,
one of the grand old ladies of the geisha district, Haruyu, who recently passed away in her late eighties, described the terrible embarrassment of being unable to find a
danna
. She was, she wrote candidly, not hugely attractive. In fact, as the photographs in the book reveal, she was downright plain. But she was the daughter of a teahouse owner and, attractive or not, automatically became a maiko. She came from a family of four sisters and two brothers, though her brothers were sent away practically as soon as they were born to be brought up by their father. Otherwise they would have become shamisen players or dressers; those were the only jobs for men in the geisha district.

At eleven she became a maiko. But when she reached fourteen, the magic age when all her contemporaries were losing their virginity and changing from the
ware-shinobu
to the
ofuku
hairstyle, month after month passed and her hair remained resolutely the same. She was so plain that there were no applicants to deflower her. Walking the streets of the geisha districts wearing the little-girl hairstyle that told everyone she was still a virgin, she felt more and more embarrassed and ashamed.

Eventually her “older sister” went to one of the professional deflowerers to beg him to perform the
mizuage.
Haruyu reported the conversation: “ ‘I don’t want people thinking there’s something wrong with her, like a disability or some sort of physical problem. So would you mind . . .’ asked Older Sister. ‘Do you think you could . . . ? Just so people will know she’s normal.’ ”

Finally the owner of a big department store agreed to do it. By now Haruyu was fifteen, old for
mizuage
. Afterward she had the even greater embarrassment of having to walk around with her hair in the
ofuku
—“just deflowered”—style. The house mothers kept stopping her on the street to congratulate her. She was so embarrassed that she ran home.

At the time, she wrote, there were two “professional deflowerers” who took care of Gion. She gave them pseudonyms: “Mr. Kawada” and “Mr. Kimura.” Once a maiko was getting past her sell-by date, if she still hadn’t been deflowered, the mother of her geisha house would go to one of them and suggest he do the honors.

Once, she wrote, all the maiko of the district were performing at the annual Cherry Dances. There were two pathways like catwalks—
hanamichi,
“flower roads”—stretching through the middle of the audience from the back of the theater to the stage. For one piece there was a line of maiko dancing on each. “This catwalk is Kawada-san’s,” yelled a wag in the audience. “That one’s Kimura-san’s!”
³

One woman, frail but still lovely, had been the child of a famous geisha and remembered the twenties, when there were 2,500 geisha and 106 maiko in Gion alone. When I met her she was ninety, a little hard of hearing and slow on her feet but imperious still and beautiful, with silky skin as fine as parchment and delicate features. She was perfectly turned out in a kimono of watered silk with a pale-gray swirled ink pattern. She spoke not just Kyoto dialect but archaic Kyoto dialect. It was rather like meeting someone who speaks in Dickensian English.

She had grown up in one of the most prosperous teahouses in the district, with maids to serve her. “Thanks to the money of our patrons,” she said in her thin but piercing voice, “we ate very well, better than people outside the geisha districts.”

The daughters of geisha and of teahouse owners were in a highly privileged position, very different from girls who had been recruited from outside the geisha areas. They had no debts, they were not in bondage, they had the family house to live in. So she had no need of a patron to support her. In fact, she had no need to become a geisha at all if she didn’t want to. She could have simply taken over as the mama-san of the teahouse, the family business. But in those days it would have been unthinkable for a beautiful young girl not to have become a geisha, particularly if she came from a geisha background.

But even though she came from a privileged background, she had
mizuage,
which suggests that it was seen not as a terrible ordeal from which a mother would wish to protect her daughter, but a necessary rite of passage.

“
Mizuage
is when you become a woman for the first time,” she said. “In those days everyone had
mizuage
around fourteen. I was late, I was fifteen. I was embarrassed. I changed my hairstyle, so everyone knew I had had it. It was like getting married. Everyone congratulated me and I gave celebratory presents to everyone. I gave gifts of food to my teachers and seniors.”

As for the perpetrator, “in those days it was just a man who makes a woman for the first time. He only did it once. Some customers were
mizuage
specialists. Mostly they were honorable senior citizens, rich and old. I don’t know about nowadays. Young maiko do as they please!
Mizuage
is really awful; but afterward you celebrated. The
danna
paid a lot of money but the family spent it all on celebrating. It certainly wasn’t embarrassing. It was normal; it would have been embarrassing to have been late in having it. It would have looked as if you couldn’t find a
danna
.”

To a modern woman, the concept of being deflowered on a one-night stand by a rich old man who paid a lot of money for the privilege and liked to spend his time going around deflowering virgins is unspeakably abhorrent. But, barbaric though it may seem, it needs to be seen in context. One way or another, most Japanese women who grew up before 1958 wound up having to have sex with someone they barely knew and didn’t care about. If they were of the social class that had arranged marriages, often they had met their prospective husband only once or twice before the wedding and most probably had been so shy they had not dared raise their gaze higher than his shoes.