Women of the Pleasure Quarters (20 page)

But Yanagibashi was too thoroughly imbued with the decadence of old Edo under the shogunate. The men who had spent their youth rabble-rousing in the teahouses, the industrialists, politicians, bureaucrats, and businessmen who ran the brave new Tokyo, now found Shimbashi, New Bridge, more to their taste. With all things Western coming into vogue, Shimbashi had the advantage of bordering on the Ginza, where the first street of brick buildings with a long colonnaded arcade was built in 1872. And, as it happened, it was also where many of the Gion geishas who had followed their lovers the 250 miles to Tokyo had set up teahouses.

There, men like Hirobumi Ito, the country’s first prime minister, and Taro Katsura, one of his successors, would spend the evening after a day of wrangling over the fledgling constitution in the Diet, the country’s new parliament. And there, in their crass, forthright, country samurai way, they would discuss matters of state between nibbling on delicacies, exchanging banter with the geisha, and showing off their own skills at singing and dancing.

The larger-than-life women whose names were on every tongue, and whose stories gripped the popular imagination of the time, were mainly Shimbashi geisha—women like Okoi, “Honorable Carp,” who was the mistress of, among others, a famous kabuki actor, a sumo grand champion, and prime minister Katsura. Connoisseurs of the old school, nevertheless, continued to favor the Yanagibashi geisha, who were much admired for their elegance and stylish femininity.

The most celebrated geisha of the era was Sadayakko Kawakami, who rose to become the concubine of the country’s first prime minister and later the first woman to tread the boards as an actress. Her story casts light on the women who became geisha, the life they led, and the way in which becoming a geisha opened doors that would otherwise have remained firmly shut. It was the only way in which a woman could hope to take control of her own destiny.

The Story of Sadayakko

Sadayakko or Sada (as she was known at the height of her career) was born in the Nihombashi district of Tokyo just four years into the new era, in 1872. Her father had been a successful businessman but when she was six his business collapsed. Desperate, the family took her along to a geisha house in the Yoshicho geisha district and arranged for her to be adopted by the proprietress, a woman named Kamekichi, who became her geisha “mother.” Undoubtedly money changed hands and the family finances benefited from the transaction. Still, it was an adoption, not a “sale of persons,” considered a perfectly normal way in those days to ensure the future of one’s child.

Mother Kame too did well out of the deal. Not only was the child “of good family,” which would make her more salable as a geisha, she was also strikingly lovely, with translucent white skin, lustrous black tresses, and extraordinary eyes. The left was flat like an Asian eye, the right had a crease like a Western one. And she was very quick; she could “learn one thing and pick up ten,” as the saying went. At the age of ten she demanded to learn to read and write, an outrageous request for a young girl training to be a geisha. The first high schools for women had opened only in 1870 and they were certainly not for the likes of Sada.

Had it been any other child, Mother Kame would have said, “What are you trying to do? Reading and writing is for men!” But she had high ambitions for Sada. She could win, she thought, not just a good
danna
but the very best in the country. To groom her, she arranged classes in riding, swimming, billiards, and martial arts as well as reading and writing.

The word
danna
means “master” in the sense of “patron” or “husband,” though the geisha’s patron will almost always already be married to someone else. Until the enormous changes brought about in Japan by the Second World War and its aftermath, it was a matter of prestige, a mark of a man’s wealth and success in the world, to be known as the patron of a beautiful and famous geisha. Even the dashing rebel samurai leader Kido, devoted as he was to his wife the ex-geisha Matsuko, was the patron of a Gion geisha named Okayo, who had been one of Matsuko’s friends. And, as he wrote in his diary, he also spent much time carousing in geisha quarters.

For the geisha house “mother” and “older sisters” who had the future of a young geisha in their hands, their most important task was to find her a suitable patron. In the course of her career, a geisha would probably have several. The first would have the unique privilege of introducing her to the ways of love through
mizuage
.

At sixteen, Sada, who, as a virgin geisha, had been given the name of Ko-yakko (Little Yakko), was an exquisite girl with feathery eyebrows, delicate features, and those extraordinary mesmerizing eyes. As the proprietress of a top geisha house, Mother Kame had many connections in high society. One day she met up with Eiichi Shibusawa, a great industrialist, real-estate magnate, and banker who lived in a splendidly baroque faux-Moorish mansion. To him, Mother Kame confided her ambition for Sada. He suggested the prime minister himself, Hirobumi Ito, and said he would put in a word on Sada’s behalf.

Like Kido, Ito (1841–1909) had been a swashbuckling gallant from Choshu. Under the stern rule of the dying shogunate he risked execution by smuggling himself aboard a British ship in 1863 when leaving the country was still a capital offense. (According to another version of the story, it was actually the shogunate that sent him and his colleagues on a secret mission to find out how things were in the West.) With four friends he sailed via Shanghai to London, where he lodged in Hampstead and studied at University College for a few months. Reading one day in the
Times
that an international coalition led by the British was planning to attack his home province, he rushed back to Japan to mediate. By 1880 he was the leading figure in the government and in 1885 became the first person to take the title of prime minister. He was instrumental in developing the country’s constitution and served four different terms as prime minister.

A short, stout man who loved to strut around sporting a chest covered in medals, he had a broad forehead, turned-up nose, and straggling goatee beard. He was a notorious libertine. Pompous in public, in private he loved nothing better than the company of a group of charming geisha, whom he would regale with an endless flow of improvised songs, finally driving all but the one who struck his fancy out of the room with a favorite ditty such as “Oh, what a boor and nuisance are you!”
⁸

A great dancer, he once hosted a magnificent masked ball at his Western-style mansion, to which all the foreign diplomats in the city were invited. He went as a Venetian nobleman but the evening degenerated into an orgy of ribaldry and bawdiness, after which his cabinet became known, rather unflatteringly, as “the dancing cabinet.” Of his incessant love affairs, the most scandalous involved a Japanese nobleman’s wife.
⁹

On his raffish nights out in the geisha districts, Ito had already noticed the ravishing, precocious child who shyly filled his saké cup. He was not the sort of man to turn down a proposal to deflower a girl like this. His wife, however, being, he said, something of a dragon, he suggested that the encounter should take place at his villa on an island outside Tokyo. He also handed over a very substantial amount of money to Mother Kame.

As for Sada, she was already in love with a swarthy thickset farm boy turned student but knew well that as a woman, her private feelings were utterly irrelevant. One summer afternoon in 1888 she boarded a boat for Ito’s palatial villa, where she had a bath and carefully applied her makeup. The tubby, bewhiskered Ito, who at forty-seven must have seemed like a grandfather to her, arrived in time for dinner. Knowing her charmingly eccentric interest in reading and writing, he had brought with him, so the story goes, a Chinese book full of extremely explicit instructions on lovemaking. He read to her before putting the instructions into action.

Having now officially become a woman, Sada was entitled to wear the kimono of an adult geisha and took the name Yakko to mark her change in status. Given his wife’s no-nonsense attitudes and the need to avoid scandal, explained Ito, he could not openly keep her. But he bought her the latest fashions, new-fangled Western items like a bathing suit, riding costume, boots, and spurs of 14-karat gold. Whenever he could, he arranged clandestine visits to continue his lessons in sexual techniques. When a policeman questioned her for swimming in the Sumida in her glamorous bathing costume, she tossed her black tresses and said, “I am Yakko, Count Ito’s concubine.”

As Ito’s mistress, Sada was a celebrity, one of the most famous faces in the country. When she went to meet her student lover, she had to go in disguise, hiding her face in her shawl. She in her turn initiated him in the arts of love. But he, like her, could not afford to be ruled by sentiment. Offered the chance to marry into one of the country’s most powerful and wealthy families, he took it and was sent to the United States to study.

Sada knew there was no point pining. Beautiful and famous, she took a succession of lovers, including two kabuki actors, heartthrobs of their day, and a mountainous sumo wrestler. Then one fateful day in 1892 she was summoned to entertain Ito and his guests, among them the real-estate tycoon Shibusawa who had introduced them. He had brought along a young man who was the talk of the town, an actor and satirist named Otojiro Kawakami.

Eight years older than Sada, Otojiro came from a rough rural background and had spent time in prison because of his scurrilous tongue and subversive speeches. Making a living by his wits on the streets, he had become a
rakugo
comedian, the Japanese equivalent of a stand-up comic. He quickly became famous for his savage but very funny stories in which he targeted pretentious city dwellers who made a fad of all things Western, right down to Western government, but somehow always got it wrong.

Shibusawa expected Otojiro to do his piece in front of the prime minister but the young man refused. “If you want to see my performance, you’ll have to come to my theater and pay for a ticket,” he said cheekily. It was the kind of effrontery that Ito, who had been a rebel himself, rather liked.

Entranced by this brusque young man, Sada saw him to the door, introduced herself, and a few days later went to see him perform. The result was a love affair which was to last for the rest of their lives.

It was the end of Sada’s career as a geisha. It was one thing for a geisha to have a professional relationship with a
danna,
quite another for her to have an all-engrossing personal relationship. It gave her a different flavor. Men could no longer enjoy the pleasures of an innocent flirtation with her. Thus if a geisha wished to marry, she had to leave the profession immediately.

As for the
danna,
the only course was to respond with a good grace. Normally he would offer to be the official go-between, a key part of the formalities of marriage in Japan. Given Ito’s position he could not do so; instead he did the next best thing and arranged for a friend of his—a man of rank—to perform the role.

Otojiro became a famous (some would say infamous) actor, director, and impresario and built his own theater while Sada busied herself in time-honored Japanese fashion being his wife. Some years later he started planning a world tour in which, as was usual in Japan,
onnagata
—male actors—would take the female roles. Ever since Izumo no Okuni and her followers had been banned from the theater in the seventeenth century, women had been forbidden to perform as actresses in public. Not that this meant there were no actresses. Geisha and courtesans were, as it were, “parlor actresses,” performing on a small stage to a select audience, and just as famous and celebrated as if they had performed on the public stage.

But, said the promoter, in order to attract an audience in the United States Otojiro would have to have a female star—and who better than his own deservedly celebrated wife, the beautiful Sadayakko!

So Otojiro, Sada, and their troupe of twenty actors set sail for San Francisco. It was 1899, the cusp of the new century and Sada was twenty-seven.

The West which they were on their way to seduce had been enjoying a love affair with “olde world” Japan ever since Commodore Perry opened the doors of this extraordinary feudal society. Japonisme was all the rage. In Britain Victorian artists, notably James McNeill Whistler, were painting in the Japonesque style and collecting Japanese art; Arthur Lasenby Liberty spent much time in Japan studying fabrics and buying goods for his store on London’s Regent Street; and Victorians avidly bought kimonos, fans, and blue-and-white porcelain to decorate their homes. “In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention,” commented Oscar Wilde in his supercilious way. “The Japanese people are simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art.”

In England,
The Mikado
had been a smash hit, with a thousand performances over an eleven-year run. Across the Atlantic on one particular night in 1886 there were 170 separate performances going on simultaneously all over the North American continent. A pin-up that same year of the much-adored star Marie Lloyd showed her dressed as the Westerner’s notion of The Geisha in a red long-sleeved kimono open like a coat, waving a fan, with hairpins in her hair and an enormous bow on her back. The chorus to her song was inscribed beneath the picture:

Every little Jappy chappie’s gone upon the Geisha—

Trickiest little Geisha ever seen in Asia!

I’ve made things hum a bit you know, since I became a Geisha,

Japanesey, free and easy Tea house girl!
¹⁰

In those politically incorrect times, such lyrics seemed utterly inoffensive.

But no one apart from those who had been posted to Japan, and certainly no one in San Francisco, had ever seen a real geisha. When they arrived Sada was astonished to find that her fame had preceded her. There were posters, not of the famous actor but of his humble wife, all over the city.