Women of the Pleasure Quarters (25 page)

The prodigal son and his Madame Butterfly bride who could barely speak a word of English found themselves ostracized not only by the Morgans but by all of New York polite society. There were no invitations to Mrs. Astor’s balls or to soirees with the Vanderbilts or dinner with the Goulds. After a few uncomfortable months, the couple set sail for Paris. By 1906 they were back in Japan, with the intention of settling there. But in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War, antiforeign sentiment was running high. The “slut” who had given herself to a “barbarian” was far from welcome. Finally they took a house on the Champs-Elysées in Paris, a city both relaxed and bohemian enough to welcome a wealthy American and his geisha wife into chic society.

There they lived happily for a decade. Madame Morgan, famous for her porcelain-like Oriental beauty, learned French, studied the piano, and was regularly seen at the salons of the top couturiers. She was never dressed in anything less than the height of Paris fashion. With an ample purse at their disposal they visited Oyuki’s family in Japan several times, though when George had to go to New York to settle financial matters, he went alone. Still, his family, who summered in Europe and there spent time with George and his wife, gradually came round to the marriage.

Then came the First World War. In Japan it was a distant war in far-off countries whose main effect was to provide bottomless markets for Japanese munitions, ship-building companies, and other industries. Foreign businesses having tied up all their resources in the war effort, it was an unprecedented opportunity for Japanese companies to gain the edge—a bonanza, in fact.

George and Oyuki, however, were caught up in the middle of it. When war broke out, George was in New York where he had gone to deal with family affairs. Trying to get back to Paris, he discovered that the direct route was impassable because of German submarine warfare. So he boarded a ship for Gibraltar. After a long and circuitous journey he was traveling overland toward Paris when he died of a sudden massive heart attack. It was 1915 and he was 44.

Utterly shocked by his death—he had never even been ill before—and all alone in a foreign country in the midst of a major war, Oyuki waited as bravely as she could for the body to be sent back for cremation. When the will was read it transpired that George had left enough to support her, in considerable style, on the interest alone for the rest of her life.

The legend of Oyuki Morgan has it that she then returned to New York bearing his ashes where, as his widow, she was more kindly received than when she had been his wife. She settled down there, goes the story, and became a prominent figure in fashionable society, entertaining her guests with her eloquent piano recitals.

A Japanese journalist, however, looked into Oyuki’s life, studied her letters and diaries, and came up with a completely different end to the story. In fact, it seems, she stayed on in Paris where she lived with a French legionnaire who had been sending her love letters from China for some time before George’s death. Oyuki had complained that she was “a widow” even then. So perhaps, ponders the journalist, George, having captured his prey, lost interest and went in search of new lands to conquer. Perhaps he had reasons other than business for going to New York. In any case, Oyuki was only thirty-four when he died, very beautiful still and enormously wealthy, a most eligible prospect.
⁶

In 1938, the ex-legionnaire (by then an elderly academic) having died, Oyuki decided it was time to go home. She was still such a celebrity in Japan that long before she got there, when her ship docked at Shanghai, Japanese journalists were crowding the quay to get a glimpse of her. Back in Kyoto, she settled near the teahouse where George had first gone to woo her, in the oldest section of Gion north of the Shirakawa stream. By then she was practically a foreigner herself. She could barely speak Japanese and wore her outlandish Parisian hats even inside the house. When the Second World War broke out a few years later, people in Gion joked that they would not be bombed “because Oyuki Morgan lives here.” She died in 1963 at the age of eighty-two. Even before that, in 1961, her extraordinary life had been celebrated in a Japanese musical entitled
Morgan Oyuki.

Katoro, the teahouse run by her cousin’s family, is still there on the corner of a quiet cobbled street shaded with willows beside the Shirakawa stream. In the evening a white lantern glows outside and the wooden doors slide open and close again as customers come and go. The plangent notes of the shamisen, plucky but somehow sad, can be heard faintly from inside.

New Geisha for a New Age

In 1922 the handsome young Prince of Wales, later to rule briefly as Edward VIII, toured Japan on a state visit. At the time Britain was Japan’s staunchest ally and he was greeted with boundless enthusiasm. Wherever he went enormous crowds turned out to cheer him. In Tokyo he reviewed the army, took in an opera at the imperial opera house, and viewed the cherry blossoms in the grounds of the imperial palace.

One of the most memorable celebrations took place on the small rural island of Shikoku. Here, in the city of Takamatsu, Count Matsudaira, a scion of one of the country’s most ancient aristocratic families, had spent more than $45,000 (equivalent to $415,000 in modern currency, a veritable fortune) to provide suitable entertainment for such an important guest. After a feast prepared and served by a staff of three hundred, the climax of the evening came when twelve of the city’s most renowned and beautiful geisha glided demurely into the room. Clad in specially woven silk kimonos with a design of Union Jacks intermingled with the Rising Sun, they performed a series of elegant dances.

Much had changed since a couple of decades earlier when the conservative Japanese establishment had been horrified at the success of Sadayakko and her husband Otojiro—a “riverbed prostitute” and a low-grade actor—on the stages of Europe and America. Having started out as countercultural heroines on the fringes of society, geisha had now reached the acme of respectability, being wheeled out as proud representatives of their country to entertain visiting royalty.

Where once the licensed pleasure quarters had dominated the demimonde, it was now the geisha districts that people referred to when they spoke of the “flower and willow world.” There were still highly accomplished geisha in the Yoshiwara; geisha from all over town went to them for lessons in dancing and music. Nevertheless, in the popular mind the licensed quarters had become little more than red-light districts. For high culture in the traditional Japanese mode, for exquisite shamisen playing, graceful and subtly erotic dancing, and witty conversation, men visited the teahouses and high-class restaurants of the geisha districts. For the geisha it was something of a golden age. At the turn of the century there were 25,000 geisha in Japan, by 1929 close to 80,000. It was a thriving profession.
⁷

The 1920s, however, were to be the pinnacle. Already people were asking where exactly geisha fitted into the wild new era of speed, sport, and sex, with its fast cars, American movies, gramophones, ice cream, Marxism,
moga
(“modern gals” with short hair and flapper skirts), and
mobo
(“modern boys” with slicked-back Harold Lloyd haircuts).

Geisha had always been fashion leaders. In the nineteenth century, they set the trends in kimono and obi styles which townswomen enthusiastically followed. Geisha had been the first to try Western hairstyles, carry umbrellas, and learn Western dancing. In 1915 the geisha district of Pontocho in Kyoto established a ballroom dancing school and the geisha houses there had on their books “dance geisha” who could offer the tango and the waltz among their
gei.
⁸

Moreover, for men who wished to enjoy the company of women, or possibly more than just their company, there was now a plethora of choices. The roaring twenties spawned cafés (really bars) across the country and, most famously, up and down the Ginza. There young women, in time-honored fashion, poured men’s drinks for them and chatted flirtatiously. Unlike geisha, they did not need years of training to learn their skills. Nor did a man have to be a
tsu
connoisseur to appreciate them. Particularly in the years following the great earthquake of 1923, which leveled Tokyo and destroyed what few buildings remained of the old city, cafés were all the rage.

The favorite tippling place of Kafu Nagai (1879–1959), a famously decadent novelist who reveled in recording the low life of the time, was the Café Tiger. “The interiors and exteriors of Ginza cafés take me back to the days when I was in Paris,” he recorded nostalgically in a published essay.

In his personal diary he was less diplomatic. “The cafés that are so popular throughout the city are to all appearances like Parisian cafés,” he wrote. “The reality is much different. We try to imitate everything Western and we always make a botch of it. The girls go to work every day and yet they do not receive salaries, and they must depend on gifts from customers for their livelihood. It is quite evident, therefore, that they actually live by prostitution. Fearing rumors and the threats of newspaper reporters, they must appear unwilling to surrender to the blandishments of drunken customers.”
⁹

He had personal experience of “rumors and newspaper reporters,” having had problems with a waitress named Ohisa with whom he must have shared a bed. By then he was a famous author. After newspaper and magazine reports linked their names, Ohisa decided that she was entitled to share his wealth and badgered him relentlessly.

As the ranks of café girls grew, the number of geisha began to fall, until by 1934, there were over 100,000 café girls to 72,000 geisha. It was time for a radical rethink of geisha and their place in society.
¹⁰

What exactly were they? Leaving aside the more dubious country geisha, the grand ladies of Tokyo and Kyoto could in no way be confused with prostitutes, high class or otherwise. They could hardly be countercultural queens, for, with the neat class system of Tokugawa society shaken out of place, there was no longer a counterculture—or, if there was, it was not the sort that would be ruled by geisha.

Perhaps they should follow the same path as their fellow entertainers, the kabuki actors, who were in the process of undergoing a distinctly ironic transformation from disreputable members of the underclass, frequently prostitutes, to doyens of the public stage. Until the departure of the shoguns, kabuki had been a living, changing theatrical form. But, with the coming of the modern age, it became a historical relic. When new plays were written, they were always set in a timeless, nostalgically remembered Edo Never-Never Land.

The music and dance of the geisha too had been a living art form, the popular music and dance of its day. Should they now move with the times or, like kabuki, become repositories of the much-loved past? Were they too doomed to live forever in Edo?

In the mid-1930s, there was much debate on the subject. Geisha, being women, did not contribute. But intellectuals, poets, restaurateurs who employed geisha, politicians, actors, and the director of the Shimbashi Association of Geisha Houses all had their say. Their comments were published as a series of essays in a book called “The Geisha Reader.”

In it the poet Sakutaro Hagiwara expressed in a neat paragraph what was to become the accepted definition of the role of the geisha: “Our wives at home are engrossed in cookery and children, and our conversations with them are quietly serious, mostly concerning household affairs. Outside of this, men need a totally different sort of companion: a woman with whom we can talk about affairs of the world, about the arts, about ideas. We need someone who is entertaining, knowledgeable, educated. This is what a geisha should be.” He went on to say that they should wear Western clothes, give up the shamisen, and learn the piano. The ideal for the modern geisha, it seemed, was to be the Japanese equivalent of the ancient Greek
hetaera,
an accomplished companion for gentlemen.
¹¹

But there were more serious things to worry about than the role of the geisha. Japan had plunged deep into an era which people later spoke of as “the Dark Valley.” The army had grown more and more powerful. Defying the ineffective and corrupt civilian government, troops invaded China and occupied Manchuria. There they set up a puppet state and, as a matter of course, shipped out geisha and prostitutes to entertain the soldiers.

As army and politicians clashed, there were several attempted coups d’etat and a rash of assassinations. In the growing mood of patriotic fervor, the “thought” police were out in force, clamping down on anything that smacked of subversion. The infatuation with all things Western evaporated. Speaking English and playing the piano were frowned on, while the geisha, a potent symbol of the old days when Japan was great, found business booming once more. Politicos and the military gathered in the grand geisha restaurants of Shimbashi and Akasaka to discuss policy and celebrate victories.

While intellectuals like Kafu kept their heads down, and sales declined in the grand department stores of the classier sections of town, in the back streets on the wrong side of the river—which had been the heart of the old city of Edo—life went on much as before. There the great event of 1936 was the apprehension of a woman called Sada Abe, known to history as O-sada, who was found wandering the streets with her lover’s severed penis wrapped in a
furoshiki,
a large kerchief. A low-grade geisha, she had fallen in love with her employer, a restaurant owner, and spent a week with him in a house of assignation. According to one version of events, the grand climax to a week of fevered love-making came when she strangled him. Another has it that he was a philandering pimp and that she strangled him to ensure that he would remain eternally faithful to her.

In any case, hers was judged to be a crime of passion and she was sentenced to a mere five years’ imprisonment. The public, tired of gloomy news, latched joyfully onto her story and she became something of a romantic heroine. Freed in 1941, she opened a bar in the old city and some years later, in traditional fashion, ended up in a nunnery. Her story was made into one of Japan’s most famous films—
Ai no Corrida (In the Realm of the Senses)
by the celebrated director Nagisa Oshima.