Women of the Pleasure Quarters (26 page)

The Writer Who Yearned
for Old Edo

The bamboo was withered and the stalks were eaten at the base by insects. Chokichi thought they would probably disintegrate if he poked them. An emaciated willow tree drooped its branches, barely touched with green, over the shingled roof of a gate. The geisha Yonehachi must have passed through just such a gate when, of a winter’s afternoon, she secretly visited the sick Tanjiro [hero of
The Plum Blossom Calendar,
an early nineteenth-century romance]. And it must have been in a room of such a house that Hanjiro, telling ghost stories one rainy night, dared to take his sweetheart’s hand for the first time. Chokichi experienced a strange fascination and sorrow. He wanted to be possessed by that sweet, gentle, suddenly cold and indifferent fate.

Kafu Nagai, from “The River Sumida,” 1909
¹²

In 1909 a young writer named Kafu Nagai (1879–1959) published an achingly lyrical short story entitled “The River Sumida.” It established him as a master of exquisite prose and defined him as the chronicler par excellence of the demimonde—the last remnant of the misty world of old Edo which was being blasted away by the cold winds of Westernization. Looking for some romanticized past, he found it above all in the shadowy world of the geisha, prostitutes, strippers, bar girls, and chorus girls.

The son of a successful Meiji businessman and bureaucrat, Kafu could afford to slum it. Instead of following in his father’s footsteps, he spent most of his youth in the Yoshiwara and the Yanagibashi geisha quarter, devouring old romances and—most shocking of all—writing fiction, an activity which he did his best to conceal from his family. In Edo times, writers and artists had been considered as disreputable as the geisha, actors, and prostitutes they portrayed, an attitude which persisted among conservative families such as Kafu’s.

Despairing of his son’s feckless lifestyle, his father packed him off to the United States to learn banking, but instead he hung out on the seedier edges of society. The only place where he felt even slightly at home was New York’s Chinatown, in those days a slum teeming with brothels and opium dens. He wrote of the bestiality he saw there, “I thought I had never before heard so poignantly the music of human degradation and collapse.” As for the ragged prostitutes, “I do not hesitate to call them my own dear sisters. I do not ask for light or help. I only await the day when I too shall be able to offer myself to a grain of opium.”
¹³

After a few years in Paris and a short stay in London, he was back in Tokyo, pouring out in a torrent of writing his horror at the brutal new Japan. The only place where he glimpsed anything akin to the beauty and passion he had found abroad was among the denizens of the demimonde who still lived the life of old Edo. His diatribes against the loss of the old ways and his swooningly elegiac tales full of decadence and overblown passion soon won him a huge following.

Urged on by his father, he made a respectable marriage to a merchant’s daughter. But for love he went to geisha. As soon as his father died, he divorced his wife in a matter of weeks (and, as he recorded grumpily, at considerable expense) and married a geisha called Yaeji. They lived in a small ramshackle house with paper screens and doors where they practiced the shamisen together and she helped him prepare paper on which to brush his stories; he wrote contemptuously of “the modern scribbler who does his polemics with a fountain pen on Western-style paper.”

But less than a year later, when he got home one day, she was gone, unable any longer to tolerate his serial infidelity. He never married again. Instead he lived his life in or near the geisha areas and found his pleasures among geisha, bar girls, dancers, and “waitresses” (who were really unlicensed prostitutes) at the new-fangled cafés. In his fifties he bought a pretty young bespectacled geisha out of indenture and set her up in a little house which became a gathering place for journalists and literary people. Later he bought her a house of assignation with, rumor had it, peepholes through which the aging Kafu could watch the customers and geisha at play.
¹⁴

In many ways he was a strange, misanthropic, rather unattractive character. Apart from his girlfriends he professed to hate everyone except for one writer friend who turned down a top position on a newspaper in order to have more time to drink himself to death, an ambition which he duly achieved. Nevertheless Kafu was a magical writer. He captured better than anyone the disappearing romance of Edo.

Rivalry
is the work which most vividly portrays the suffocating claustrophobia and desperate passions of the world of the geisha.
¹⁵

Yoshioka has every intention of doing the decent thing by Komayo—in other words, buying her. He offers to pay off her indenture, buy her her freedom, set her up in a villa, and become her
danna.
But, to his astonishment and rage, Komayo does not leap at this proposal. Is it worth losing her independence again, she wonders, for a man who, like all the others, will only prove to be unreliable and leave her in the end? For Yoshioka is, of course, not offering her marriage. He already has a wife and children.

Komayo, meanwhile, has committed the one mistake which is fatal for a denizen of the floating world: she has fallen in love. Successful geisha make men fall in love with them; but if they lose control of their own feelings, they are doomed. Seduced by Segawa, a handsome young
onnagata
(a kabuki actor who specializes in women’s roles), Komayo finds herself utterly obsessed with him. Recklessly she throws herself into the emotion. At last, she feels (or Kafu imagines that she feels) she knows the essence of what it is to be a geisha, to live on the edge, experiencing the extremes of passion and pain. “Realizing now that bitterness and pleasure alike were part of being a geisha, Komayo felt that she had tasted for the first time the true flavor of geisha life.”

She is convinced, against all the odds, that the actor will marry her. Nevertheless, to keep her options open, she agrees to accept as a part-time
danna
a hideously ugly antiques dealer whom she refers to as “the sea monster.” He provides her with money and in exchange satisfies two of his proclivities: to sleep with a geisha who also from time to time buys the love of a famous kabuki actor and to entertain himself by having sex with a woman who, he knows very well, finds him physically repellent.

Predictably all this ends in tears. As Komayo behaves in a more and more wifely fashion to the kabuki actor, he becomes bored with her and finally throws her over in favor of a statuesque woman made all the more attractive by being the possessor of a large inheritance. Yoshioka, in his turn, has taken his revenge on the hapless Komayo by buying the freedom of a rival geisha from Komayo’s own house and becoming her
danna
.

Thus Komayo has to pay the price for having broken the geisha code by allowing herself to be swept away by her emotions. She is in utter despair. Her life, it seems, is over. She has lost everything. But the way is still open for the story to have a happy ending. The kind old man who runs Komayo’s geisha house wants to retire and decides to pass the business on to her. He gives her the deeds to the house, the use of the name, and the business. Once again she has a future. She can run the geisha house and take care of the geisha that live there. She has finally won financial independence, a far greater prize in the geisha world and certainly much more reliable than winning a man.

Rivalry
is probably the most complete, lovingly observed evocation of the geisha world ever written. Kafu never questions the values of the geisha, though he does point out that the underlying flaw in their lifestyle is their fatal dependence on others. They cannot say no to a customer no matter what he asks. There is a memorable passage which was excised from early versions of the book and only appeared in private editions, describing an encounter which Yoshioka, an insatiable sexual athlete, has with Komayo:

When, at eleven o’clock, she finally escaped from his embrace, she was breathing great gasps, she could scarcely speak, and she had no will to get up. Entirely satisfied with this state of affairs, Yoshioka sped off into the darkness . . . She sighed, and chagrin and resentment came back with doubled intensity at the thought of the men who had imposed themselves on her in the course of the evening. She was battered to the very core. She wanted only to die.
¹⁶

Armageddon

In December 1941 Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. The first retaliatory bombing raids by American B-25s came the following April, damaging and demolishing swathes of buildings around the edges of Tokyo. But still the splendid restaurants, where Tokyo’s 9,000 geisha entertained, stayed open for business despite the punishing new tax which the government, desperate for funds, had imposed on such luxurious activities.

Anyone who could afford it had every intention of carrying on their hedonistic lifestyle. As for the military, they were still partying at teahouses in the spring of 1943 when—for everyone else—rationing was biting hard. Kafu chose to spend his time among the youthful chorus girls of Asakusa in the city’s East End. “In this world apart, there are no ashes of war,” he wrote in his diary.

Finally even the geisha had to go. On March 4, 1944, Kafu recorded regretfully, “From tomorrow restaurants and teahouses are to be banned . . . Geisha have not yet been banned, but they appear to be moving into other trades for want of engagements. Without theaters and geisha, the music of Edo, based upon the shamisen, will perish.”
¹⁷

On their last night the geisha restaurants stayed open almost until dawn. Then the geisha took off their silk kimonos, folded them carefully, and wrapped them in sheets of crisp handmade paper for storage. They put on smocks and
mompe
(baggy cotton indigo-dyed peasant trousers) and went to work in ammunition factories or to labor through the night sewing uniforms and parachutes. The canniest managed to avoid such a fate by finding someone to marry them, becoming concubines, or persuading their patrons to include them on their lists of company employees. And if, of course, your
danna
was a member of the military, he would ensure that you were properly cared for.

Worst of all was 1945, the last year of the war. People sold everything they had and fled to the countryside. In Tokyo, the air-raid sirens whined nearly every night as swarms of B-29s cruised the skies, raining down firebombs in such quantity that the snowflakes turned soot black. The rundown wooden city stood no chance. In a single night, on March 9, some 78,000 people burned to death and 1.5 million were left homeless. The city was reduced to a sea of ashes, rubble, twisted metal, and charred, broken stone walls. The pleasure quarters were utterly destroyed and the theaters (including the beautiful art deco Shimbashi Embujo Theater, built in 1925 for the geisha to perform their annual dances) were reduced to blackened shells. The Yoshiwara, still functioning in defiance of government orders, was burned to a cinder together with hundreds of women who had been locked inside by the brothel-keepers, anxious not to lose their investment.

Kyoto fared better. Thanks to the intervention of American scholars who argued that it was a place of irreplaceable cultural heritage, it was barely touched by bombing.

As the war intensified, the patriotic geisha of Gion decided to do their bit. They bought two planes for the extravagant sum of 65,000 yen each, had the names
Dai-ichi Gion Kogo
(Number 1 Gion plane) and
Dai-ni Gion Kogo
(Number 2 Gion plane) painted with a flourish on the flanks and presented them to the army. The ceremony took place at a nearby military airstrip, where the troop of beautiful young geisha, clad patriotically in peasants’ working clothes and straw sandals and with their famous glossy black locks tied up in bonnets, drew much press attention. Being practical women, the geisha also instigated evacuation training at the teahouses, practiced relaying buckets of water to put out possible fires, and observed a curfew so that the quarters fell into darkness after nightfall.

The last annual dances, entitled
“Ko-koku no miyabi”
(Elegance of the Japanese Empire), took place in spring 1943. Shortly afterward the Gion Kobu Kaburenjo, where dance performances and classes took place, was commandeered and transformed into a munitions factory where geisha and maiko who had not fled to the countryside were conscripted to sew parachutes and uniforms for the army. From late in 1944 they were also ordered to produce incendiary balloons (enormous hydrogen balloons containing bombs and incendiary devices) which would, in theory, drift across the Pacific on the jet stream and set America’s cities ablaze. After 17,000 fire bombs fell on Osaka, the city council, fearful that Kyoto would suffer the same fate, ordered swathes of houses, 10,000 in all, to be evacuated and demolished to make fire breaks. Among them were the beautiful old teahouses of Shimbashi, the northern part of Gion.

The end came on August 15, 1945, after the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been obliterated by atomic bombs. A few days later, people gathered round their radios, expecting to be exhorted to fight the enemy, with bamboo spears if necessary, to the death. Instead, for the first time ever, they heard the reedy voice of their emperor, crackling over the airwaves. His words were convoluted and the language archaic but the meaning was clear. His people, he said, would have to “endure the unendurable and suffer the insufferable.”

After the Deluge

When the American and other Allied occupation forces, under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, arrived in the country a couple of weeks later, many were shaken by the scenes of utter devastation which they saw. They had been expecting violent resistance. Instead they found a nation of shell-shocked, half-starved people, ragged and dirty, who stared at them, blank-eyed, as they drove through the dusty, rubble-strewn streets. Some seemed positively—and astonishingly—pleased to see them.