Women of the Pleasure Quarters (8 page)

By the end of the century it was far larger than the country’s other famous pleasure quarters. Shimabara women were said to be the most beautiful; Shinmachi, where the playboy merchants of Osaka went to enjoy themselves, had the most sumptuous buildings and luxurious facilities; the women of Maruyama in Nagasaki wore the most gorgeous kimonos; but the Yoshiwara girls outdid them all with their
hari
(attitude or style). At its height there were more than three thousand courtesans in the Yoshiwara, though only a few held the rank of
tayu
.

For the people of Edo, the Yoshiwara offered nonstop drama. The vast majority, who could never even dream of being able to afford an evening with a courtesan, could still follow their exploits in print. For the pleasure quarters together with the kabuki theater were the heart of a cultural renaissance, both democratic and subversive, produced by, for, and about the townsfolk and treated with great suspicion by the shogunate who made periodic attempts to clamp down on it. The courtesans and their clientele were the prime subject matter of woodblock prints, kabuki plays, and the courtesan critiques and
tayu
biographies which poured off the newly developed printing presses. Like the lives of the rich and famous today, they offered endless fascination and vicarious excitement.

The stories of the time are full of grand guignol—passion, love, debauchery, men ruined for love, suicides, deaths—and also of ribald humor. Like the great
tayu
of Kyoto, the courtesans of the Yoshiwara stood the usual customer/merchandise relationship on its head. They were at liberty to turn down any client, no matter how wealthy or aristocratic. Many of the sizzling stories of the day, much appreciated by the townsfolk, concern courtesans who rejected lovesick nobles and fell in love with handsome but low-born and impoverished clerks.

Much as the lower orders loved such bodice-ripping melodramas, the real lives of the courtesans tended to be a lot more down to earth. Besides the elegant, high-class courtesans of the official pleasure quarter, there were also many unlicensed and distinctly lower-class prostitutes operating illegally. Around the mid-1600s, many of these were to be found in bathhouses. These were a little like the Turkish baths of today, with large reception areas where customers could lounge, drink tea, and be entertained after bathing. As far as the Yoshiwara brothel-keepers were concerned, this was unwarranted competition. They frequently petitioned the shogunate to have it stamped out.

Katsuyama was a real-life prostitute who appeared at a bathhouse called Tanzen in 1646. She was a beauty with a warm, open face and a cheeky, larger-than-life personality. But what the customers loved most was when she dressed up as a man. There had been nothing like it since Izumo no Okuni took to the stage dressed as a man back in 1603 and stunned the populace with her wild
kabuku
dancing. Wearing a wicker hat, man’s kimono, and two swords like a samurai, Katsuyama would bring the house down with the Tanzen-bushi dance, named after the bathhouse, strutting and swaggering in jaunty macho fashion. As with all such dances, there was an erotic coda.

Katsuyama became so popular that she outshone all the
tayu
of the Yoshiwara. In 1653, after a brawl between a bunch of townsfolk and some rival samurai, the authorities closed down the bathhouse. Katsuyama was head-hunted by one of the top Yoshiwara bordellos, which gave her instant promotion to
tayu.
When she made her first grand procession down the main boulevard of the quarter to an assignation with a client, the great courtesans were so curious about this upstart that they all turned out to watch. They were so impressed with the cocky way in which she kicked out her feet in the “figure of eight” walk and with her distinctive topknot that the “Katsuyama gait” and the “Katsuyama knot” continued to be in vogue for a century afterward.

The whole thing was a game. Like any game, you had to play it to the best of your ability and you had to stick to the rules; but in the long run it was not to be taken too seriously. And whatever went on in the licentious night-time dreamworld of the Yoshiwara was always forgotten the next day. It never infected the world outside those enchanted walls. That tradition carried over into the world of the geisha. Mystery was of the essence.

It was all showbiz. But in the floating world, nothing could continue unchanged for long. By the eighteenth century, the pleasure quarter culture had been thriving for over a hundred years. The courtesans, with their stilted conversation and layer upon layer of starchy clothing, were beginning to seem a little passé. It was time for something new.

Gradually the number of women worthy to be designated
tayu
began to decline. The term itself, which had been used exclusively in Shimabara, disappeared as the focus of culture and life shifted to Edo. The last recorded
tayu
was in 1761. (The
tayu
of Wachigaiya, sadly, are not a continuation of the line but actresses, playing out a charade, a re-creation of a lost era.)

It was then that a new breed of woman first began to step out not just in the pleasure quarters but in the town: a woman who was not a caged bird, who dressed with understated sophistication, not showy glitter, and who sold not her body but her arts.

chapter 2

the world of the geisha

Love, Passion, and Jealousy

In the floating world where all things change

Love never changes by promising never to change.

Geisha song
¹

Love and Death

Love was the currency of the fantasy world in which the geisha operated, yet for a geisha to fall in love was a disaster. In the past, at least, the geisha’s profession was fueled by desire; just as today, where rock and roll stars roll their hips suggestively, groupies line up to service them, and actresses wear more and more revealing dresses to the Oscars, the entertainment industry was predicated on it. But it was a perilous game: to flirt with men, to snuggle up to them, to stir their desire so that they would call for you again but—no matter how intimate you appeared to be—never to lose your head, let alone your heart. The edge of danger was one of the things that gave the game its excitement.

To play at love was one thing, really to fall in love quite another—and in the supercharged world of the geisha it was always a danger. Usually the courtesan or geisha would fall in love with someone young, handsome, and poor who was not even a customer. If they fell in love with a customer, that would be equally disastrous, for customers were inevitably married. Once the pair were overcome by desire and could no longer endure the limitations imposed by society on their meetings, they were doomed. Unlike such love affairs in the West, marriage was almost never the answer.

Often the only solution was death. In fact to die together came to seem so hugely romantic that many couples yearned to express their love for each other in this way, like Romeo and Juliet. The great dramatist Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1724), often described as the Shakespeare of Japan, created a whole genre of kabuki plays about double suicide, of which the most famous was
Love Suicides at Sonezaki,
inspired by a real-life incident in 1703.

The stage version of the story goes as follows: the beautiful nineteenyear-old courtesan Ohatsu is in love with Tokubei, a handsome twenty-five-year-old clerk who is far too poor to be able to buy her out of bondage. His uncle has arranged a marriage for him with a wealthy relative but Tokubei informs him that he cannot go through with it. He therefore needs to return the dowry which has already been paid to him. But he has already lent the money to the wicked Kuheiji, an oil merchant whom he imagines to be a friend of his. When Tokubei demands the money back, Kuheiji denies all knowledge of the loan. Kuheiji then swaggers off to the brothel to make his suit to Ohatsu; he too wants to buy her. Hiding beneath the verandah, Tokubei overhears his suit. The lovers are ruined. The only recourse is to commit suicide.

Ohatsu puts on a white kimono, signifying death (corpses in Japan are dressed in white), with a black cloak above it so that they will not be seen. Taking with them a rosary, the pair flee the brothel and set off for the woods of Sonezaki Shrine. As the bell tolls the coming of dawn, they pray, embrace each other for the last time, then bind themselves tightly to a tree so as to look beautiful even in death. Weeping, Tokubei takes out his dagger and cuts her throat, then, with a razor, slashes his own. By their deaths, these two humble people have become ennobled. “They have become models of true love,” declares the narrator in the final words of the play.
²

Chikamatsu’s plays were so successful that they inspired a boom in copycat love suicides. By 1722 there was such an epidemic that the government banned plays about double suicide and took stern measures against such suicides themselves, displaying the perpetrators, dead or alive, for three days and condemning survivors to work for the untouchables, the most ignominious punishment imaginable.

But to this day love suicide is still a recognized phenomenon in Japan. Each year some young couples, prevented from marrying by parental pressure, choose this way to be together. In Japanese eyes, far from being macabre, it is profoundly romantic. On a recent visit to Japan, some friends asked me how many love suicides there were a year in Britain. They were completely incredulous when I told them there were none.

The most celebrated love suicide of modern times was the novelist Osamu Dazai (1909–1948), a fin-de-siècle character who lived not at the end of a century but at the end of an era, as Japan was slipping inexorably toward apocalyptic war. A writer of intensely passionate, sometimes sardonic novels chronicling the dying gasps of the crumbling Japanese aristocracy, he was an attractive, hard drinking, devil-may-care kind of man, obsessed with dying a beautiful death.

While still a student, he met a geisha named Hatsuyo Oyama, moved her in with him, and took her down to Tokyo where he was to study French literature at the Imperial University. But his grandmother, the stern old matriarch of their wealthy and very conservative northern family, was fiercely opposed to any alliance with a geisha. She disinherited him.

Almost out of pique Dazai made a suicide pact with another woman whom he had picked up on a drinking spree. It was 1930 and he was twenty-one. They went down to the coast at Kamakura, just outside Tokyo, and flung themselves into the sea. As luck would have it the girl drowned but Dazai survived. His brother had to rush down to Tokyo to hush things up.

Later he tried to commit suicide with Hatsuyo, his geisha lover, after she had had an affair with one of his friends while he was in hospital trying to conquer his addiction to painkillers. He himself had incessant affairs; but the notion of his lover/wife having an affair was more than he could tolerate. The two went off to a hot spring resort in the mountains and took an overdose of barbiturates together. This time both lived, and Dazai went on to write a succession of brilliant novels.

After the war he was acclaimed as Japan’s greatest postwar novelist and awarded several literary prizes. His debauched lifestyle continued. He had a wife and child and a mistress and child and was working on a novel called
Goodbye,
a comic tale of how a man rids himself of a succession of unwanted women. He had also begun a new relationship with a woman named Tomie Yamazaki. On June 13, 1948, the pair drowned themselves together in the Tamagawa Reservoir. It was a fitting end, the death he had been looking for so long. He was just a few days short of his fortieth birthday.
³

Of Love and Kissing

There are many different words for love in Japanese, none of which means quite the same as the English word—though it is important to remember that what we, modern English speakers, mean by “love” is probably not at all the same as what the ancient Greeks, the Romans, or the medieval troubadours of courtly love meant by it or, for that matter, the modern-day French, Italians, or anyone else. Love is an invention, culturally conditioned; notions of love vary place by place, era by era, and culture by culture.

Unlike the chivalrous knights of the European Middle Ages who devoted themselves to unattainable ladies, suffered torments of undeclared passion, and yearned after women whom they saw as goddesses, put on pedestals, and worshipped, Japanese men fell in love with real women, not bloodless ideals. They did not go to war with a scented glove tucked into their armor. It was possible to have sex without love—in fact, that was by far the safest course. But no one ever considered the possibility of love without sex. In fact the closest they ever came to the European notion of courtly love was probably the samurai’s idealized love of beautiful boys. According to the
Hagakure,
an eighteenth-century treatise on samurai ethics, this was a form of love which was purest when it remained undeclared.

Love never resulted in marriage—which meant that there was no culture of wooing, courting, dating, and finally falling to one’s knees one moonlit night and slipping the ring shyly onto the finger. Thus a 1915 visitor could write, “The fact is, of course, that Cupid has a very bad time in this country; it is an unknown land to him. Soft eyes and coy glances, fair spring days and moonlight nights in autumn, wanderings in country lanes and by the sea, hand-squeezing, sighing, sweet confidences, and all the other ‘ministers of love’ have no place here.”
⁴

In fact by then Japanese intellectuals knew all about the Western concept of love. They called it
rabu,
the Japanese phoneticization of the English word, to differentiate the noble emotion of platonic love from base physical passion. It had an extra luster because it was an exotic foreign emotion conveyed in a foreign word, rather like talking about
amour
or
amore
instead of just plain love. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century there were many angst-ridden Japanese novels written celebrating
rabu
.

The novelist Kafu Nagai, who spent his whole life among geisha, prostitutes, and bar girls and went to the grave with a geisha’s name tattooed on his body, wrote that the most transcendent moment of his life was when he exchanged a few words with a young American woman on Staten Island. They talked of opera, the irrelevance of marriage, and the poetry of the night sky, then parted with a gentle handshake.

“I felt strangely forlorn,” wrote Kafu the great sensualist, “at the thought that never again as long as I lived would such a beautiful thing happen to me.”
⁵
It was an experience of
rabu,
pure and unadulterated by the gross physical passion which permeated all his other relationships.

It is still awkward to say in Japanese “I love you,” partly because, like the equally reticent British, Japanese do not usually express such emotions in words. The most common phrase is
suki desu
which literally means only “I like you”—though, as always in Japan, the meaning is communicated more through intonation and gut feeling than through the words themselves. The phrase “to fall in love” is rendered by a rather clumsy direct translation of the English words. Under “love,” an EnglishJapanese conversation dictionary published as recently as 1969 comments, ”Marriage in Japan is generally arranged by the parents and is seldom the result of mutual love. The Japanese language therefore is poor in expressions of affection and those which exist are apt to be taken in a bad sense.”
⁶

Likewise the most commonly used word for kiss is the adopted
kissu,
not surprising for a society where kissing was until very recently considered a shockingly private and erotic activity. Even in the woodblock prints depicting the floating world of the courtesans and geisha, kissing is almost never shown. After all, it was probably not very appealing to press one’s mouth up against a face covered in white lead-based paint, added to which a courtesan or a geisha would be reluctant to smudge her makeup. In fact the erotic touching of lips was one of the most esoteric of the geishas’ arsenal of sexual techniques.

Long before the word
kissu
was coined, in 1878, Junichiro Oda, one of the first translators of English literature into Japanese, came across the outlandish phrase “I should sleep well if I could get one kiss from those coral lips” in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s
Ernest Maltravers
; to Japanese of the time it was virtually incomprehensible and distinctly pornographic. Showing great ingenuity, he rendered it “. . . if I could get one lick of your red lips.” His readers probably thought the concept as well as the words quite hilarious.
⁷

Kissing, in fact, was not part of normal human interaction. It was considered so indecent that when there was a proposal for August Rodin’s statue
The Kiss
to be exhibited in Tokyo in the 1930s, there was public outrage. The police banned it. There was a suggestion that the sculpture should be shown with the heads wrapped in a cloth so that no one would see the offensive kissing; the naked bodies were not a problem. In the end the Rodin was not shown until after the Second World War, which was also when the first screen kiss occurred in a Japanese film.

Falling in Love with a Geisha

I bathed my snow skin

In pure Tamagawa River.

Our quarrel is loosened slowly,

And he loosens my hair.

I am all uncombed.

I will not remember him,

I will not altogether forget him,

I will wait for Spring.

Geisha song
⁸

To fall in love with a geisha was to play with fire—as Hideo, a youthful curator at a Tokyo modern art museum, discovered. He was in a hole-in-the-wall drinking house a couple of years ago in Shibuya, a bustling, fashionable, youthful Tokyo neighborhood, when he met a bewitching young woman. She was twenty-three, he not yet thirty. She was wearing rather gaudy clothes, too bright, too tight, and too revealing; at first he took her for a prostitute or a bar girl. But her face enthralled him. For the quiet studious young man she was a vision from another world. It was only after they had become lovers that she revealed she was indeed from another world: she was a geisha.

He showed me photographs of a laughing girl with a mane of tumbling black hair and a dazzlingly lovely face. She might have been a model; she had one of those perfectly proportioned faces with porcelain skin, a delicate nose, and eyes and mouth a little larger than life. He also had pictures of her as a geisha, kneeling demurely in a kimono, her face a bland white mask.

“I preferred her real face,” he said. “I never saw her geisha life or met her geisha friends. I once went to see her when she gave a public dance performance, but that was it. She kept me well away from that side of her life.”

She had grown up in the poorest, slummiest part of Osaka, a wildflower springing up on a dung heap. When she was fourteen her father walked out, leaving her behind with her overworked hairdresser mother. At seventeen she took the train to Tokyo and found a job as a hostess in a sleazy bar.

Then she met a professional gambler. He rented a luxury apartment in an expensive area of Tokyo for her, gave her an allowance and bought her all the clothes she wanted, then moved in himself.