Women of the Pleasure Quarters (33 page)

Cut off from the bustling southern plains by the impenetrable mountain ranges of the Japan Alps, the cities of the Japan Sea coast developed a distinctive and robust culture. Kanazawa, the capital of the fabulously rich Maeda lords, became famous for its mansions, gardens, and exquisite handicrafts. It was also known for its refined and elegant geisha, rated as highly as the
geiko
of Kyoto.

From the station I took a bus to Higashi-chaya-machi (Eastern “Teahouse Town” or Pleasure Quarter). I had arranged to stay the night in an old geisha house there. The other two geisha districts were Nishi-chaya-machi (Western Pleasure Quarter) and Kazue-machi (Kazue Town). Leaving my bag in a tatami-matted room very similar to the one I had left in Kyoto, I took a stroll along the little main street.

It was clean, neat, and well preserved, quite disturbingly so. Newly paved with tidy rectangular concrete slabs, it was lined with picturesque old houses of dark wood with shiny tiled roofs. Rows of red lanterns hung along the eaves where the upper floor jutted out above the lower. But behind many of the slatted windows of the ground floors were modern interiors. Most of the people on the street were tourists. It was a geisha theme park, sanitized and lifeless.

Still, at least the area had found a way of surviving. Hanami-koji—Flower-Viewing Alley—in Gion was heading in the same direction. Camera-toting tourists prowled the street and there were even restaurants where they could dine, very expensively, on traditional Japanese cuisine and be entertained by maiko. But the street still retained that ancient forbidding geisha flavor. The dark wooden houses were firmly closed. None but the boldest of
ichigen san
—first-timers—would ever dare slide open a door and put a foot inside; and if he did, he would be briskly seen off.

That was the problem. In order to retain its distinctive character, the geisha world had to remain hermetically sealed. It had to be a special world, cocooned in secrecy and mystery. Once the hoi polloi were able to encroach upon the geisha world it would fade away like dew in the sun. The wonder was not that the geisha were disappearing but rather that they had managed to survive for so long.

A Tokyo friend had given me an introduction to the president of a construction company, the kind of man who in the old days would have been the
danna
of a geisha. Having sat me down in a boardroom and given me a formal greeting, he packed me off in a taxi along with one of the vice presidents of the company to meet the gray men who ran the Kanazawa Chamber of Commerce.

The geisha of Kanazawa were dying out, they told me. After the war there had been about 300 geisha in all in Kanazawa. As recently as 1997, there were still 25 in Higashi, 26 in Nishi, and 13 in Kazue. Now, in a mere two years the numbers had dwindled to 19 in Higashi, 19 in Nishi, and 9 in Kazue. Only one new entrant had joined this year. The
danna
system was disappearing, partly because income tax had risen hugely compared to the prewar years, greatly reducing the amount of disposable income. Added to this, there were very few family-owned businesses anymore. Company presidents, answerable to a board of shareholders, could not throw around corporate money in the way that independent owners had been able to.

“Without the support of
danna-san
the geisha cannot go on,” they said. But geisha, along with the other traditional arts, were an important part of Kanazawa’s heritage. The city officers had decided that they desperately needed to be preserved.

Accordingly, although they could not hope to match the level of sponsorship which a
danna
had been able to offer, they had created a variety of schemes. They had made funds available to support young geisha, to cover the cost of their kimonos and classes and to pay for a dance teacher to visit regularly from Tokyo. They had also created a pension fund for elderly geisha.

The Town Hall had a separate scheme of its own. Through a private donor the city bureaucrats had amassed sufficient funds to provide four or five novice geisha with 300,000 yen ($3,000) for the first year. They would grant a similar sum to the teahouse mother to help support the young geisha and pay for her classes. It was pitifully small. There were, I learned, other cities which subsidized their dwindling geisha communities in the same way—though in Kyoto and Tokyo there was, at the moment at least, no need to do so.

In exchange for subsidies, the Kanazawa geisha consented to a Faustian pact. They agreed to give a certain number of performances of music and dancing for the public for no charge during July and August each year. They even offered to allow the public, thirty at a time, into the hallowed halls of the union building to watch their rehearsals. In fact, they relinquished their mystique.

It explained the theme-park look of the Eastern Pleasure Quarter. The geisha of Kanazawa had become civil servants, part of the tourist heritage, carefully preserved like the pink pickled plums that Japanese women laid out to dry in summer. They would not die out, their dance and music would survive—but at a price. It was profoundly ironic that this was what had become of these women, once queens of a subversive alternative culture. Without an edge of the forbidden, of the erotic, of danger, it was just pretty dancing.

But perhaps it was better that the geisha should survive in some form rather than disappear completely.

chapter 10

saying goodbye

Parting is merely longing,
     never farewell—

The temple bell sounding
     at dawn.

Geisha song
¹

Geisha in a Neon World

Everyone in the geisha world was worried about the future. The problem was not so much the geisha as the growing gap between them and the rest of society. The geisha did not change. They were stuck in a time warp. But Japan had changed hugely and continued to change at dizzying speed. It was the home of Pokémon, Nintendo, and Sony, where women strove for equality in politics and business, where young women chose not to marry because they did not want to spend the rest of their lives mothering men, and where old women, whose husbands had retired, chose to get divorced. The country was consumed in a tidal wave of concrete, skyscrapers, neon, traffic, and cool youngsters with dyed brown hair who took amphetamines, listened to house and garage music and went to raves. The geisha were utterly out of synch.

People often told me that the geisha embodied everything that made Japan Japan. At their most elevated the geisha lived lives dedicated to beauty. They were human works of art, an absurdly anachronistic notion in an aggressively modern society like Japan. If they disappeared, that whole exquisite world—in which every detail, from the placement of the fan in the tea ceremony to the line of a moth wing eyebrow and the intricate weave of an obi, was studied and perfected with loving attention—would die out with them. There was nowhere else where this aesthetic survived.

As a shamisen teacher who lived her life on the fringes of the geisha world said, “Manners are disappearing in Japan. The only place where the old ways of behavior survive is the flower and willow world. The
okiya
system—the system of bringing up maiko in geisha houses under the strict supervision of the mothers—preserves good manners because it’s so strict.” If the geisha died out, it would be the end of what made Japan unique, the end of traditional Japanese culture and manners.

Back in Tokyo, I went to pay a last visit to my geisha friends in Shimbashi. They took me backstage at the Shimbashi Embujo, the only theater built specifically for geisha dance. I had been there earlier in the year to see
Azuma Odori,
literally “Dances of the East” (Tokyo being in the east and Kyoto in the west), the Shimbashi geishas’ annual dance performance. I could not fail to notice that most of the audience were geisha. Many had come up from Kyoto to see how their rivals were doing.

At the theater, we dropped in on one of the officials, a plump, floppy-wristed man with shiny oiled hair fixed immovably to the top of his round head. In the old days, he said gloomily, Azuma Odori used to be performed for a whole month in spring and a month in autumn. These days it had shrunk to a mere four days at the end of May, carefully timed to take place between seasons of kabuki.

“If the flower and willow world disappears, kimonos will disappear too,” he sighed. “Outside the geisha world, people wear kimonos once or twice a year. It’s only geisha who wear them every day. Obi, zori [straw sandals], fans, clogs—all the accouterments of the geisha world—will disappear forever.
Gei
—the arts, Japanese classical culture—will disappear. Music, dancing, that whole gracious teahouse way of life, will be lost.

“In the past,” he went on, “we had a class system. Now we are democratic. Of course, that’s a very good thing; how could anyone say otherwise? But it means that everything is reduced to the same level. What we need is to get young businessmen to come to teahouse parties. But they won’t, no matter how rich they get.

“Young people can’t understand the charm of the flower and willow world. It’s the quietness that makes it interesting. You go into a teahouse and there is a beautiful painting, exquisite flowers, good food, charming geisha. In the old days you would sit quietly and talk to the geisha, how lovely she was, her beautiful kimono, the wonderful tea ceremony, the beautiful piece of craftsmanship you had just bought. But in our modern democratic society, no one knows how to appreciate that kind of thing anymore.

“I hope the flower and willow world survives. Without it life will be lonely and dull. Japan will be just another Hong Kong, nothing but neon.

“The oldest geisha in Shimbashi is ninety. She told me that this is the worst. Worse than after the Great Earthquake, worse than after the war. It’s not just that business is bad. It’s the end.”

Tea and Cakes

Before I left for good I wanted to go back to Kyoto to say farewell to the hairdresser, the printer, the wig maker, everyone at the Haruta geisha house, and all the other geisha house mothers, maiko, and geisha who had come to seem like my enormous extended family. Arriving in the geisha district there from Tokyo was like stepping back in time to a quieter, slower era. For the last time I unpacked my bag in my barely furnished tatami-matted room with the tall narrow mirror and flimsy rack on which to hang my clothes, then went out onto the balcony to watch the maiko clattering along the street and clustering like butterflies in the concrete-lined parking lot in front of the Kaburenjo, giggling and chattering.

Months had passed since I first arrived, all innocence, looking for a way to breach this closed world. I had never realized then how fragile and threatened that world was and is. Now, when I walked the streets of the Kyoto flower towns, I saw the maiko, the geisha, and the “older sisters” with new eyes. To me they were no longer exotic birds but women dedicated to their art who had chosen a life of discipline in order to transmute themselves into creatures of beauty. I had come to respect their silence. That was their iki, their “cool,” that gave them their special flavor. I felt proud and humbled that some of these powerful and alluring women had chosen to befriend and confide in me.

I pondered the best gifts to give everyone. For the sharp-tongued mama-san, who had in her abrasive way provided me with a real experience of geisha training, it had to be cakes from Kanshindo. But for others, less concerned about propriety, maybe the best would be something more personal, with a hint of England about it.

Not far from the Haruta geisha house there was a newly opened tea shop, run by a plump, rather pompous man who spent a good ten minutes brewing up each pot of Darjeeling tea, following, he assured me, the strict rules and rituals of the English tea ceremony. He also sold for an exorbitant price small packets of Indian tea, carefully wrapped in pretty flowery cloth bags, and slices of cake each in its own cellophane package. I decided on tea for the “older sisters” and “mothers” and cake or cookies for the maiko.

In the case of the mama-san, the conventions had to be followed to the letter. I phoned her and made an appointment to visit, then arrived promptly with my Kanshindo cakes neatly wrapped in their shop packaging. She was sitting very upright like a ballet dancer, talking to a guest, while the barman leaned on the counter with a deferential smile.

As usual, she was discussing the terrible decline in traditional values.

“It’s all a matter of rank,” she said regally. “In the old days, when you visited a lord, his wife and all the concubines would be kneeling in order of rank, bowing and greeting the guests. But now rank has disappeared completely. People pay as much attention to what a maid says,” she went on with the tiniest exquisite hint of a disdainful wrinkle of the nose, “as to what a lord says.

“Mine is the last generation,” she concluded. “There will be no geisha after me.”

I remembered that whenever I sat down to pore over books on the history of the Yoshiwara, I was always puzzled as to when exactly the famous pleasure quarter began to decline. Almost as soon as the first brothels were in place back in the early seventeenth century, people started to bemoan the fall in standards. Thereafter generation after generation of writers complained that the courtesans of the old days had been queens, boasting every imaginable accomplishment; those of their own day were lowly creatures in comparison, hardly better than prostitutes. The same thing applied to the geisha. At the beginning of the last century Kafu Nagai made it his personal mission to capture for posterity their last fleeting years. They were, he declared in his novels, already effectively extinct.

I decided I should take into account this eternal tendency to glorify the past and lament the present when listening to the mama-san’s complaints. Things might be bad but they were not that bad. With an appropriate show of humility I thanked her profusely for her help and took my leave.

The next day I dropped in to see my neighbor, the beaming and beautiful white-haired ex-geisha, Hara-san. In exchange for the humble tea I gave her, she deluged me with gifts—dainty wooden sandals with bright blue silk-covered thongs, a couple of pairs of white socks, and a delicate wooden hairpin with a tiny chicken carved on the end. Then, laden down with bags of tea and cakes, I made the rounds. In the evening I met up with Mori-san, my raffish drinking companion who had written a book on guide dogs for the blind, and paid a last visit to the mama-san who had told me about her experiences of
mizuage.
I also said good-bye to the plump mistress and jazz-loving master of the coffee shop. They told me to be sure to come back soon. The best time, they said, would be New Year, when everyone would be relaxed and I could enjoy the New Year festivities.

On my last morning, a maiko called Miegiku, who lived in a geisha house a few doors from my inn, suggested that we have a cup of tea together before I took the bus to the station. At twenty-two she was a little older than average, rather serious and thoughtful, not as giggly and little-girlish as the others. She had an intelligent, open face with a pert nose, a pretty smile, and a candid, direct gaze. Unlike other maiko she had gone to high school. That was one very good reason that not many girls were becoming maiko now; to do so meant that they had to drop out of school at fourteen or fifteen. Then she had had to decide between university and maiko training; so she had started her maiko training late, at seventeen.

“I decided this was something I could only do while I was young,” she told me. “My father was opposed to it. He knows now that we learn traditional arts but he’s still worried. He knows I always say what I think. It’s not good to be too outspoken in this world. We’re supposed to be cute, not clever.”

That day she was wearing a summery pale pink kimono with a pattern of white flowers and a deep mauve obi. Her hair was waxed in the
ofuku
style of the mature maiko. We strolled along together, she shuffling with tiny steps on her wooden clogs, her legs constrained by her tight kimono.

“Let’s go to Hankyu,” she said, naming one of the department stores in the bustling traffic-filled hub of the city. We crossed the River Kamo by a small bridge, cut through a side street to the store, and took the escalator to the coffee shop.

Miegiku had reached that moment of no return when she had to choose whether to go ahead with the turning of the collar and commit herself to being a geisha or leave the flower and willow world for good.

“Have you decided yet?” I asked.

“I really want to be an English teacher,” she confessed. “Sometimes I think I should have gone to university. Customers talk about their children who are students and I wonder if I made a mistake.

“My life has become very narrow. I always have to be so polite; and everyone’s always so nice to me. I feel I’m getting selfish. Whenever I’m invited to a party, I know I will definitely be going by taxi and the customer will pay for the taxi and everything. I’m afraid if I stay here too long I will be completely spoiled. It will be more and more difficult to return to normal life.

“It’s difficult to make a living nowadays as a geisha. In the old days it was easier, people had
danna
. Nowadays fewer people are interested in teahouse parties. Geisha have no families. They live by themselves. Some of those older sisters must be lonely.

“I’m thinking little by little of giving up and doing a normal job. Being a geisha is not a normal job. It looks so pretty from the outside, always wearing a kimono. But inside it’s harsh. If you think of that, it’s not so pretty. It’s a world of show. I want to go back to normal life.”

Sitting on the train as it pulled out of Kyoto, away from the purple hills and crystal streams celebrated by poets for more than a thousand years, I wondered how much longer there would be people around who appreciated that heritage of beauty. There were many reasons why the geisha were fading away—higher taxes, fewer private businesses, more choices for women and, above all, modernization and the changing tastes of the new generation.

Nevertheless Japanese culture—the essential Japaneseness of Japan— had persisted for millennia. Each younger generation was seduced by fashion and modernity; but as they grew older, they always returned to the old ways. In the 1920s young women dressed like flappers. Now many of those same women wore kimonos.

In a few years the baby boomers, who currently considered themselves far too modern and sophisticated to consort with geisha, would have aged into patriarchs. Then Ginza hostess bars and fancy French restaurants might begin to seem a little mundane. Like their fathers and grandfathers before them, perhaps they too would begin to feel that what they now deserved to mark their years and status was the society of those classiest and most exclusive of women—geisha.

The geisha, it seemed to me, might decline but they would not die out. Even if they became very few, they would be all the more valued, like rare precious stones. While there was a demand for them, they would always be there to fill it.

For most people in Japan, there was precious little love or romance to be had anywhere—not in marriage and certainly not in the booming sex industry. But Japanese songs, films, and traditional literature were awash with it, as if in a desperate attempt to inject it into brutally unromantic lives. It was not surprising that such a country should have invented the geisha to embody all the missing romance and love—even if their world too turned out to be only a dream.