Women of the Pleasure Quarters (24 page)

More muted colors are suitable for winter, fresher ones for the hot months. There are also traditional color combinations for each month: pale green layered on deep purple for January, rose backed with slate blue for October. The designs on the kimono, whether dyed (as in the dressier garments) or woven in, always reflect the season. A geisha naturally selects a kimono with the appropriate flowers, plants, insects, or birds: sprigs of pine in January, plum blossom in February, cherry blossom in the spring, small trout in summer, maple leaves in autumn, and snowflakes in the winter. It is all part of the process of living one’s life as art.
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Koito had changed into a white cotton under-kimono patterned with red chrysanthemums. Scooping her hair into a net, she knelt in front of the tall narrow mirror of her dressing table and opened the tiny drawers overflowing with brushes and tubs of unguents. She took a breath and settled down to begin her makeup. Absorbed, we watched the transformation, all the more dramatic because this was not a beautiful young maiko but an aging, rather plain woman.

Having covered her face in a layer of eggshell white, she turned her back to the mirror and, using a hand mirror to help her, skillfully painted her back in white, leaving the provocative V of unpainted flesh at the nape of the neck. She penciled in two feathery eyebrows, adding a surreal touch of lipstick to define them, edged her eyes in red and added a line of black, then painted her mouth the color of a ripe cherry.

Then she lifted an enormous box like a hatbox from a cupboard and brought out a gleaming coiffed wig on a stand. She combed it, tidied it, and fitted it over her head, adjusting it until it was perfectly centered and balanced, combed it again, added a few hairpins and turned to look at us. The wig had performed its magic. The “Mount Fuji” widow’s peak and the strange unnatural wings of the wig had transformed the shape of her face, accentuating the delicate pointed chin. The frumpy thirty-year-old had disappeared and a startlingly alluring creature emerged, like a butterfly from a chrysalis, not beautiful, but indubitably sexy and fascinating. Coquettishly, she picked up the mewing cat and held it up to her face, gazing into its sharp black eyes. It put its paws on her shoulders and tried to lick the immaculate alabaster of her face.

Standing up, she put on a red-and-white under-kimono, followed by another of pale pink scattered with small red chrysanthemums, and the thick white brocade collar marking the adult geisha, tying them all in place with ribbons.

“I used to have a dresser,” she said. “But now I do it myself. If you get someone in, you have to fit in with their timing.”

Then she took the lustrous midnight-blue kimono with its mauve-and-pale gold design of wisteria and slipped it over her shoulders, pulling it down to reveal not an ample expanse of bare back like a maiko’s but a titillating flash of white-painted shoulders. The fabric swirled about her feet like water.

In old Japan, sex appeal was all to do with mystery. Far from revealing swathes of naked bosom, midriff, or leg like a Hollywood star on Oscar night, the epitome of desirability was the
tayu,
the courtesan, swathed in layer upon layer of sumptuous fabric like a Christmas present, with just her tiny bare feet to remind you of the frail flesh of the woman inside. To the Japanese eye, there was an enormous difference in the way geisha and wives—the two poles of Japanese womanhood—wore their kimonos. The geisha was ineffably sexy; but it was a subtle sexiness, a matter of hint and suggestion.

In time I began to be able to see the difference between the kimono a geisha wore when she was dressed to kill with white face and wig and an ordinary one such as a wife would wear. The geisha’s was more ornate, bolder, and more decorative with a strong pattern on the skirt and hem where it would be most visible. It was the same shape and size as a standard one; the kimono is a one-size-fits-all garment which you adjust by folding and tying. But there were a myriad subtle ways in which a geisha tied hers to make it very different from a wife’s, and infinitely sexier.

For a start it was worn looser than a wife would ever dream of, leaving a suggestive flash of pale under-kimono, spangled with red, clearly visible at the sleeve and hem. It sat lower on the shoulders with the collar pulled well down to reveal the painted back and the erotic tongue of bare flesh at the nape of the neck. It was also worn much longer so that it draped to form a train on the ground, eddying gracefully about the feet. A wife, conversely, would wear a kimono with a discreet pattern on the chest or thigh. She would fold and tie it so that it stopped just at the ankle to make a prim asexual cylinder with barely a bulge for bottom or breasts. When walking the geisha held the skirt of her kimono gracefully with the left hand; if a wife needed to lift her kimono skirt, she would hold it with the right hand.

Koito had wrapped herself in a long green obi, winding it round and round her waist and tucking in pads of stiffening and a cushion at the back to give extra bulk, until she was cocooned as thoroughly as an Egyptian mummy. The last touch was a narrow white silk cord. She turned with a coquettish downcast glance. “It’s a long time since I’ve dressed like this,” she confided. Normally she wore the understated kimono and subtle makeup of the day-to-day working geisha. The white makeup, wig, and sumptuous kimono were party wear, for special occasions only.

It was not only her appearance that had changed. Her bearing and the timbre of her voice had changed too, though she was still as chirpy as a Cockney sparrow. As she opened the front door, the cat darted out and disappeared under a nearby parked car. She slipped on a pair of wooden clogs, lower and lighter than a maiko’s hooflike ones, and minced after it, lifting her trailing kimono skirts with her left hand and trilling, “Kitty, Kitty”—
“Nekko-chan, Nekko-chan”
—in a girlish falsetto. Together we set off down the street to pose for photographs, Koito tripping along, bowing and calling out greetings to everyone we met.

chapter 8

from the flapper years
to the age of neon

No matter what happens

I am in love with Gion.

Even in my sleep

Beneath my pillow

the waters ripple.

Isamu Yoshii (1886–1960)
¹

Cherry Dances in
Turn-of-the-Century Kyoto

Throughout the centuries of the shoguns’ rule, there had always been two hearts in Japan. Although Edo was the center of power where the shogun had his castle, Kyoto-ites could console themselves with the thought that theirs was the emperor’s city, home to the imperial court. They were the upholders of taste, class, and the aristocratic old ways.

For a few years as valiant young samurai crowded the teahouses of Gion, plotting and roistering, Kyoto had seethed with passion and politics. Then suddenly a deathly hush fell. Dust began to gather on the white-walled imperial palace with its red pillars and silent expanses of raked sand. The emperor, the courtiers, the princes, the lords, even the flunkies had gone. The swashbuckling samurai and their geisha mistresses, merchants, writers, and artists packed their possessions, hired palanquin bearers and headed for the glittering streets of the new capital, Edo, now renamed Tokyo.

What was to become of Kyoto? What role did the ancient capital have to play in this brave new world? For a while a pall of gloom hung over the beautiful valley with its purple hills and crystalline rivers. Then the city fathers put their heads together.

They came up with the idea of an international exposition to show off the city’s traditional arts and crafts, already much admired abroad, and build up business. The Kyoto Exposition, the first in Japan, took place in 1871 but had only limited success. Something extra was needed to brighten up the city and bring it back to life.

The answer was to bring the geisha out of the closet. They were, after all, one of the city’s chief glories and, having played such a heroic part in the recent struggle, might finally be considered almost respectable. Some had married the country’s new rulers; they need no longer suffer the stigma of being branded “riverbed prostitutes” by polite society.

So the vice-governor consulted the two most powerful people in Gion: the ninth Sugiura, the owner and direct descendant of the founder of Ichiriki-tei, the venerable teahouse where the ronin Oishi as well as the heroes of the recent revolution had reveled; and Haruko Katayama, the legendary dancer and teacher who, under her professional name, Yachiyo Inoue III, was responsible for establishing the Inoue style as the exclusive dance form practiced in Gion. (The Inoue School might be considered the Bolshoi of the geisha world in Japan; the present principal is Yachiyo Inoue IV, now ninety-six.)

Once a year, they decided, the public should have a chance to see the geisha perform their famous dances. The first public performance of Miyako Odori, “Dances of the Capital” (known as the Cherry Dances in the English-language brochures published for Victorian tourists), took place in March 1872 as part of the second and much larger Kyoto Exposition. They lasted seven weeks and have been repeated in some form annually (increasing to semiannually in 1952) ever since. Two other geisha districts also performed public dances. Gion’s archrival, Pontocho (still rather subdued, having been the quarter favored by the losing side), called theirs the Kamo River Dances, while Kamishichiken, in the north of the city, performed the Kitano Dances.

Until then the geishas’ charms had been reserved for those who could afford to pay for them. Many, along with courtesans, were famous and adored among the populace. Everyone knew their names and might even own a woodblock print pin-up of a favorite; but few ever had the chance to see them close up. Now, once a year, the dancing, which had previously been only for the eyes of a select and wealthy few in intimate tatami-matted rooms, was on display for the general public. It was, of course, rather different. It was large-scale, not small-scale, involving many geisha. In the 1872 performance, there were seven groups each of 32 dancers, 11 singers, 4 hand drum players, 2 flautists, 3 players of smaller drums and gongs, and one player of the large drum, who performed for a week each, 371 performers in all.
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It was the beginning of a new role for the geisha. They were still regarded with ambivalence. They were still on the outskirts of society, being either the children of geisha, part of a demimonde beyond the pale of the respectable world, or having been sold by impoverished country parents into a sort of servitude. But they were also stars; they had a recognized place in society and an aura of glamour. And every year crowds flocked to buy tickets for their brilliant and colorful dance spectaculars.

Thus both Kyoto and the geisha continued to flourish. When, that same year, the Cattle Release Act was passed, geisha stood in line at Kyoto City Hall to buy their two licenses, one for entertainment, the other for sex. The enthusiastic reformers of the young government, out to emulate Western ways, instigated various experiments. For a few years there were compulsory workshops for geisha so that they could learn a skill and, in theory, at least, be equipped to pursue a decent living. There they sat in glum rows spinning and weaving or learning reading, accountancy, dancing, or music. The only escape was when they were summoned to a teahouse to entertain. Eventually attendance was made optional and classes immediately stopped apart from dancing and singing. So began the vocational schools which each geisha district in Kyoto still runs.

The American Millionaire
and the Icy-Hearted Geisha

One spring day in 1902 a world-weary American named George Dennison Morgan, whiling away a few weeks in Kyoto, went to see a performance of the Cherry Dances. A nephew of the millionaire financier J. Pierpont Morgan, he was wealthy enough that he would never have to work. Disillusioned with New York society after a soured romance, he moved to Japan and settled in Yokohama where he started collecting antiques.

No doubt he thought of taking a Japanese concubine. For a Western man it was the simplest of financial arrangements and one Japanese girl was much like another, or so the average Western chauvinist might have thought. But then at the Cherry Dances he saw a geisha so beautiful, so feminine, and so graceful that he had eyes for no one else. Another, only slightly less romantic version of the story is that he met her at a Gion geisha party. In any case, he fell utterly and incurably in love.

It was a story which was to set tongues wagging and newspaper presses whirring furiously on both sides of the Pacific. To this day, if you ask a Kyoto geisha to name the most famous geisha of all time, she will say, “Oyuki Morgan.”

O-yuki (Honorable Snow) was at the height of her career, an exquisite young woman of twenty-one. In photographs she looks like a porcelain doll, with a long strikingly aristocratic face, fine nose, delicate mouth, tapering almond eyes, and a disdainful lift to her eyebrows. She is the eternal feminine, woman personified, remote, aloof, and mysterious. As far as Morgan could see, she was completely perfect.

In fact she was not at all aristocratic but the daughter of a Kyoto swordsmith. There being less and less call for swords in the bright new Japan, the family business had gone disastrously into decline when she was in her teens. For a good-looking young Kyoto girl, it was the most natural thing in the world to go and work in Gion to help her family out. Missing out the trainee maiko stage (she was too old for that), she went to live at a geisha house run by one of her relatives.

George was thirty-one, not handsome but impeccably groomed and rather stolid in appearance, with a faintly lugubrious spaniel air. He wore his hair with a neatly combed center parting, in the fashion of the time, and had a bristly mustache which covered the sides of his pursed, rather stubborn mouth. His deepset eyes were a little sad, his nose slightly bulbous.

To Western eyes he looked unremarkable enough. But in the Kyoto backwoods, where Westerners were a rarity, the round-eyed long-nosed foreigner seemed like a visitor from another planet. When Oyuki was summoned to the teahouse to entertain him, she was shocked and repelled by his pallid skin, coarse compared to silky Asian skin, and colorless hair. Maybe he wooed her through an interpreter, maybe he had picked up a few words of barbarically accented Japanese. In any case, at the end of the evening he asked the maid of the teahouse to arrange for him to spend the night with her. Oyuki was aghast.

“Sleep with a foreigner? I’d rather die,” she exclaimed in the privacy of one of the teahouse’s back rooms.

But George had no intention of giving up. Even though she rejected him, he gave her an outrageously extravagant tip—20 yen, at a time when a one yen tip was unheard of and a ticket for the Cherry Dances cost 10 sen (one tenth of a yen). So Oyuki, having a family to support, accepted him as a regular customer.

She had other financial pressures too. As it happened, she was in love with a student named Shunsuke Kawakami. One of the customs among geisha until well into the modern era was to invite university students to have fun at the teahouses after hours without charging them
hana-dai,
“flower money,” the geishas’ fee; they only paid for their drinks and sometimes not even for those. After midnight when the formal geisha parties were over and the customers had been packed off home to their wives, the dashing students of Kyoto’s Imperial University would pile into the teahouses to chat, drink, and carouse.

The geisha loved the company of these handsome young gallants. They also knew that one day they would undoubtedly be among the country’s elite. The first universities had only recently been founded and the gilded young men (it was only men) who succeeded in entering were guaranteed positions among the country’s movers and shakers, whether in the financial, bureaucratic, or political spheres. When they were rich and powerful, they would automatically continue to patronize the teahouses where they had been so kindly treated as students. Japanese society worked (and still works) on the basis of loyalty. Once a man had set up a relationship with a teahouse, he would maintain it throughout his life; indeed, he would probably pass it on to his son.

Thus Oyuki had met her student. She also, very secretly indeed, broke all the rules by sleeping with him when she got the chance. Shunsuke had promised to take her out of the geisha world and marry her when he finished his studies. But in the meantime he was struggling to find the money to pay his fees. George, knowing nothing of all this, persisted in his suit. By now, he wanted more than just a night of sex. He wanted to possess this exquisite creature; he wanted to marry her. Night after night he went to the teahouse and asked for Oyuki to entertain him then plied her with gifts and tips. Oyuki smiled her cool mysterious smile, icily played her shamisen and the antique bowed
kokyu,
danced with grave but unmistakable eroticism and accepted his money, most of which ended up in Shunsuke’s pocket. Beyond that, she kept poor George at arm’s length.

By now the story of the fabulously rich foreigner and the icy-hearted geisha had become big news. The
Osaka Daily News
published a series of sixteen articles under the title “The Lovelorn Foreigner,” reporting breathlessly on events as they unfolded and padding the story with colorful details, some true, some distinctly dubious.
³

George became more and more desperate. He also, say Japanese sources, whiled away the time by visiting other teahouses and even became the
danna
of a Shimabara courtesan named Hinamado whom he set up in a house with her mother. He was, after all, only a man. But although he found sensual satisfaction with others, his heart was Oyuki’s.

Then Shunsuke graduated and took himself off to Osaka where he immediately got a fast-track job in a bank. Suddenly his love for Oyuki evaporated. The last thing an ambitious young man wanted was a scandalous relationship with a geisha, let alone a geisha as notorious as Oyuki had become thanks to George’s much-publicized attentions. As for marrying her—that did not even bear thinking about. When she went to see him in Osaka, he offered to pay back the money he owed her.

For Oyuki it was a terrible shock. Suffering the pangs of rejection, she was also overwhelmed with remorse at the way she had exploited the lovelorn foreigner on behalf of this perfidious lover. It seemed like karmic retribution for her cruelty to him. Even while she had been using him, she herself was being used. George had been so constant in his devotion no matter how cruelly she treated him; surely the proper thing to do was to give him what he wanted and marry him.

So she did. The 40,000 yen story pops up at this point too. George, it was said, handed over this outrageous sum—enough to start a bank—to Oyuki’s family for the privilege of marrying their daughter. George himself denied any such rumors, as did Oyuki’s family. But even American papers reported that he had paid $25,000 (equivalent to $440,000 in modern currency) “according to Japanese tradition.”
⁴

In 1904, the year that the Russo-Japanese war began, the couple had a very quiet wedding in Yokohama. Shortly afterward they boarded a steamer for New York. During the voyage, he taught her a few words of English and explained how she would be expected to comport herself as a member of one of America’s most powerful and snobbish dynasties.

George’s immediate family was on the quay to meet them, together with the American press, buzzing with curiosity about this outlandish match. The family, his stepmother was reported to have said, was far from happy with George’s choice. The woman was, after all, Japanese and not even a Christian. In those days Westerners were unabashedly chauvinist when it came to other races. No matter how clever their fans and pretty their kimonos, the Japanese were still nonwhites and therefore inferior; it was only after the Japanese armed forces had shot a few Russians in the ongoing Russo-Japanese War that, as one Japanese diplomat commented with heavy irony, the West began to concede that they might be remotely civilized.
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