Memoirs of a Geisha (40 page)

Hatsumomo went to my room, with Mother following. The hallway floor was a terrible mess. Not only had Hatsumomo broken a bottle and then stepped on it, she’d tracked ointment and blood all around the upstairs hall—and much worse, onto the tatami mats in her own room, Mother’s room, and now mine as well. She was kneeling at my dressing table when I looked in, closing the drawers very slowly and looking a bit defeated.

“What journal is Hatsumomo talking about?” Mother asked me.

“If there’s a journal, I’m certain Hatsumomo will find it,” I said.

At this, Hatsumomo put her hands into her lap and gave a little laugh as though the whole thing had been some sort of game, and she’d been cleverly outwitted.

“Hatsumomo,” Mother said to her, “you’ll repay Sayuri for the brooch you accused her of stealing. What’s more, I won’t have the tatami in this okiya defiled with blood. They’ll be replaced, and at your expense. This has been a very costly day for you, and it’s hardly past noon. Shall I hold off calculating the total, just in case you’re not quite finished?”

I don’t know if Hatsumomo heard what Mother said. She was too busy glaring at me, and with a look on her face I wasn’t accustomed to seeing.

*  *  *

If you’d asked me, while I was still a young woman, to tell you the turning point in my relationship with Hatsumomo, I would have said it was my
mizuage
. But even though it’s quite true that my
mizuage
lifted me onto a high shelf where Hatsumomo could no longer reach me, she and I might well have gone on living side by side until we were old women, if nothing else had happened between us. This is why the real turning point, as I’ve since come to see it, occurred the day when Hatsumomo read my journal, and I discovered the obi brooch she’d accused me of stealing.

By way of explaining why this is so, let me tell you something Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku once said during an evening at the Ichiriki Teahouse. I can’t pretend I was well acquainted with Admiral Yamamoto—who’s usually described as the father of the Japanese Imperial Navy—but I was privileged to attend parties with him on a number of occasions. He was a small man; but keep in mind that a stick of dynamite is small too. Parties always grew noisier after the Admiral arrived. That night, he and another man were in the final round of a drinking game, and had agreed that the loser would go buy a condom at the nearest pharmacy—just for the embarrassment of it, you understand; not for any other purpose. Of course, the Admiral ended up winning, and the whole crowd broke into cheers and applause.

“It’s a good thing you didn’t lose, Admiral,” said one of his aides. “Think of the poor pharmacist looking up to find Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku on the other side of the counter!”

Everyone thought this was very funny, but the Admiral replied that he’d never had any doubt about winning.

“Oh, come now!” said one of the geisha. “Everyone loses from time to time! Even you, Admiral!”

“I suppose it’s true that everyone loses at some time,” he said. “But never me.”

Some in the room may have considered this an arrogant thing to say, but I wasn’t one of them. The Admiral seemed to me the sort of man who really was accustomed to winning. Finally someone asked him the secret of his success.

“I never seek to defeat the man I am fighting,” he explained. “I seek to defeat his confidence. A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course to victory. Two men are equals—
true equals
—only when they both have equal confidence.”

I don’t think I realized it at the time, but after Hatsumomo and I quarreled over my journal, her mind—as the Admiral would have put it—began to be troubled by doubt. She knew that under no circumstances would Mother take her side against me any longer; and because of that, she was like a fabric taken from its warm closet and hung out of doors where the harsh weather will gradually consume it.

If Mameha were to hear me explaining things in this way, she would certainly speak up and say how much she disagreed. Her view of Hatsumomo was quite different from mine. She believed Hatsumomo was a woman bent on self-destruction, and that all we needed to do was to coax her along a path she was certain to follow in any case. Perhaps Mameha was right; I don’t know. It’s true that in the years since my
mizuage
, Hatsumomo had gradually been afflicted by some sort of disease of the character—if such a thing exists. She’d lost all control over her drinking, for example, and of her bouts of cruelty too. Until her life began to fray, she’d always used her cruelty for a purpose, just as a samurai draws his sword—not for slashing at random, but for slashing at enemies. But by this time in her life, Hatsumomo seemed to have lost sight of who her enemies were, and sometimes struck out even at Pumpkin. From time to time during parties, she even made insulting comments to the men she was entertaining. And another thing: she was no longer as beautiful as she’d once been. Her skin was waxy-looking, and her features puffy. Or perhaps I was only seeing her that way. A tree may look as beautiful as ever; but when you notice the insects infesting it, and the tips of the branches that are brown from disease, even the trunk seems to lose some of its magnificence.

*  *  *

Everyone knows that a wounded tiger is a dangerous beast; and for this reason, Mameha insisted that we follow Hatsumomo around Gion during the evenings over the next few weeks. Partly, Mameha wanted to keep an eye on her, because neither of us would have been surprised if she’d sought out Nobu to tell him about the contents of my journal, and about all my secret feelings for “Mr. Haa,” whom Nobu might have recognized as the Chairman. But more important, Mameha wanted to make Hatsumomo’s life difficult for her to bear.

“When you want to break a board,” Mameha said, “cracking it in the middle is only the first step. Success comes when you bounce up and down with all your weight until the board snaps in half.”

So every evening, except when she had an engagement she couldn’t miss, Mameha came to our okiya around dusk and waited to walk out the door behind Hatsumomo. Mameha and I weren’t always able to stay together, but usually at least one of us managed to follow her from engagement to engagement for a portion of the evening. On the first night we did this, Hatsumomo pretended to find it amusing. But by the end of the fourth night she was looking at us through squinted, angry eyes, and had difficulty acting cheerful around the men she tried to entertain. Then early the following week, she suddenly wheeled around in an alleyway and came toward us.

“Let me see now,” she said. “Dogs follow their owners. And the two of you are following me around, sniffing and sniffing. So I guess you want to be treated like dogs! Shall I show you what I do with dogs I don’t like?”

And with this, she drew back her hand to strike Mameha on the side of the head. I screamed, which must have made Hatsumomo stop to think about what she was doing. She stared at me a moment with eyes burning before the fire went out of them and she walked away. Everyone in the alley had noticed what was happening, and a few came over to see if Mameha was all right. She assured them she was fine and then said sadly:

“Poor Hatsumomo! It must be just as the doctor said. She really does seem to be losing her mind.”

There was no doctor, of course, but Mameha’s words had the effect she’d hoped for. Soon a rumor had spread all over Gion that a doctor had declared Hatsumomo mentally unstable.

*  *  *

For years Hatsumomo had been very close to the famous Kabuki actor Bando Shojiro VI. Shojiro was what we call an
onna-gata
, which means that he always played women’s roles. Once, in a magazine interview, he said that Hatsumomo was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, and that on the stage he often imitated her gestures to make himself seem more alluring. So you can well imagine that whenever Shojiro was in town, Hatsumomo visited him.

One afternoon I learned that Shojiro would attend a party later that evening at a teahouse in the geisha district of Pontocho, on the other side of the river from Gion. I heard this bit of news while preparing a tea ceremony for a group of naval officers on leave. Afterward I rushed back to the okiya, but Hatsumomo had already dressed and snuck out. She was doing what I’d once done, leaving early so that no one would follow her. I was very eager to explain to Mameha what I’d learned, so I went straight to her apartment. Unfortunately, her maid told me she’d left a half hour earlier “to worship.” I knew exactly what this meant: Mameha had gone to a little temple just at the eastern edge of Gion to pray before the three tiny
jizo
statues she’d paid to have erected there. A
jizo
, you see, honors the soul of a departed child; in Mameha’s case, they were for the three children she’d aborted at the Baron’s request. Under other circumstances I might have gone searching for her, but I couldn’t possibly disturb her in such a private moment; and besides, she might not have wanted me to know even that she’d gone there. Instead I sat in her apartment and permitted Tatsumi to serve me tea while I waited. At last, with something of a weary look about her, Mameha came home. I didn’t want to raise the subject at first, and so for a time we chatted about the upcoming Festival of the Ages, in which Mameha was scheduled to portray Lady Murasaki Shikibu, author of
The Tale of Genji
. Finally Mameha looked up with a smile from her cup of brown tea—Tatsumi had been roasting the leaves when I arrived—and I told her what I’d discovered during the course of the afternoon.

“How perfect!” she said. “Hatsumomo’s going to relax and think she’s free of us. With all the attention Shojiro is certain to give her at the party, she may feel renewed. Then you and I will come drifting in like some sort of horrid smell from the alleyway, and ruin her evening completely.”

Considering how cruelly Hatsumomo had treated me over the years, and how very much I hated her, I’m sure I ought to have been elated at this plan. But somehow conspiring to make Hatsumomo suffer wasn’t the pleasure I might have imagined. I couldn’t help remembering one morning as a child, when I was swimming in the pond near our tipsy house and suddenly felt a terrible burning in my shoulder. A wasp had stung me and was struggling to free itself from my skin. I was too busy screaming to think of what to do, but one of the boys pulled the wasp off and held it by the wings upon a rock, where we all gathered to decide exactly how to murder it. I was in great pain because of the wasp, and certainly felt no kindness toward it. But it gave me a terrible sensation of weakness in my chest to know that this tiny struggling creature could do nothing to save itself from the death that was only moments away. I felt the same sort of pity toward Hatsumomo. During evenings when we trailed her around Gion until she returned to the okiya just to get away from us, I felt almost as though we were torturing her.

In any case, around nine o’clock that night, we crossed the river to the Pontocho district. Unlike Gion, which sprawls over many blocks, Pontocho is just a single long alleyway stretched out along one bank of the river. People call it an “eel’s bed” because of its shape. The autumn air was a bit chilly that night, but Shojiro’s party was outdoors anyway, on a wooden verandah standing on stilts above the water. No one paid us much attention when we stepped out through the glass doors. The verandah was beautifully lit with paper lanterns, and the river shimmered gold from the lights of a restaurant on the opposite bank. Everyone was listening to Shojiro, who was in the middle of telling a story in his singsong voice; but you should have seen the way Hatsumomo’s expression soured when she caught sight of us. I couldn’t help remembering a damaged pear I’d held in my hand the day before, because amid the cheerful faces, Hatsumomo’s expression was like a terrible bruise.

Mameha went to kneel on a mat right beside Hatsumomo, which I considered very bold of her. I knelt toward the other end of the verandah, beside a gentle-looking old man who turned out to be the koto player Tachibana Zensaku, whose scratchy old records I still own. Tachibana was blind, I discovered that night. Regardless of my purpose in coming, I would have been content to spend the evening just chatting with him, for he was such a fascinating, endearing man. But we’d hardly begun to talk when suddenly everyone burst out laughing.

Shojiro was quite a remarkable mimic. He was slender like the branch of a willow, with elegant, slow-moving fingers, and a very long face he could move about in extraordinary ways; he could have fooled a group of monkeys into thinking he was one of them. At that moment he was imitating the geisha beside him, a woman in her fifties. With his effeminate gestures—his pursed lips, his rolls of the eyes—he managed to look so much like her that I didn’t know whether to laugh or just sit with my hand over my mouth in astonishment. I’d seen Shojiro on the stage, but this was something much better.

Tachibana leaned in toward me and whispered, “What’s he doing?”

“He’s imitating an older geisha beside him.”

“Ah,” said Tachibana. “That would be Ichiwari.” And then he tapped me with the back of his hand to make sure he had my attention. “The director of the Minamiza Theater,” he said, and held out his little finger below the table where no one else could see it. In Japan, you see, holding up the little finger means “boyfriend” or “girlfriend.” Tachibana was telling me that the older geisha, the one named Ichiwari, was the theater director’s mistress. And in fact the director was there too, laughing louder than anyone.

A moment later, still in the midst of his mimicry, Shojiro stuck one of his fingers up his nose. At this, everyone let out a laugh so loud you could feel the verandah trembling. I didn’t know it at the time, but picking her nose was one of Ichiwari’s well-known habits. She turned bright red when she saw this, and held a sleeve of her kimono over her face, and Shojiro, who had drunk a good bit of sake, imitated her even then. People laughed politely, but only Hatsumomo seemed to find it really funny; for at this point Shojiro was beginning to cross the line into cruelty. Finally the theater director said, “Now, now, Shojiro-san, save some energy for your show tomorrow! Anyway, don’t you know you’re sitting near one of Gion’s greatest dancers? I propose that we ask for a performance.”