Memoirs of a Geisha (45 page)

“The Chairman is a busy man.”

“But surely if the Minister is important to the future of the company—”

“You worry about getting yourself there. I’ll worry about what’s best for the company. I’ll be very disappointed if you’re not back in Gion by the end of the month.”

Nobu rose to leave, for he had to be back in Osaka before nightfall. I walked him to the entryway to help him into his coat and shoes, and put his fedora on his head for him. When I was done, he stood looking at me a long while. I thought he was about to say he found me beautiful—for this was the sort of comment he sometimes made after gazing at me for no reason.

“My goodness, Sayuri, you do look like a peasant!” he said. He had a scowl on his face as he turned away.

  chapter thirty

T
hat very night while the Arashinos slept, I wrote to Mother by the light of the
tadon
burning under the dye vats in the annex. Whether my letter had the proper effect or whether Mother was already prepared to reopen the okiya, I don’t know; but a week later an old woman’s voice called out at the Arashinos’ door, and I rolled it open to find Auntie there. Her cheeks had sunken where she’d lost teeth, and the sickly gray of her skin made me think of a piece of sashimi left on the plate overnight. But I could see that she was still a strong woman; she was carrying a bag of coal in one hand and foodstuffs in the other, to thank the Arashinos for their kindness toward me.

The next day I said a tearful farewell and went back to Gion, where Mother, Auntie, and I set about the task of putting things back in order. When I’d had a look around the okiya, the thought crossed my mind that the house itself was punishing us for our years of neglect. We had to spend four or five days on only the worst of the problems: wiping down the dust that lay as heavily as gauze over the woodwork; fishing the remains of dead rodents from the well; cleaning Mother’s room upstairs, where birds had torn up the tatami mats and used the straw to make nests in the alcove. To my surprise, Mother worked as hard as any of us, partly because we could afford only a cook and one adult maid, though we did also have a young girl named Etsuko. She was the daughter of the man on whose farm Mother and Auntie had been living. As if to remind me of how many years had passed since I first came to Kyoto as a nine-year-old girl, Etsuko herself was nine. She seemed to regard me with the same fear I’d once felt toward Hatsumomo, even though I smiled at her whenever I could. She stood as tall and thin as a broom, with long hair that trailed behind her as she scurried about. And her face was narrow like a grain of rice, so that I couldn’t help thinking that one day she too would be thrown into the pot just as I had been, and would fluff up white and delicious, to be consumed.

When the okiya was livable again, I set out to pay my respects around Gion. I began by calling on Mameha, who was now in a one-room apartment above a pharmacy near the Gion Shrine; since her return a year earlier, she’d had no
danna
to pay for anything more spacious. She was startled when she first saw me—because of the way my cheekbones protruded, she said. The truth was, I felt just as startled to see her. The beautiful oval of her face was unchanged, but her neck looked sinewy and much too old for her. The strangest thing was that she sometimes held her mouth puckered like an old woman’s, because her teeth, though I could see no difference in them, had been quite loose at one time during the war and still caused her pain.

We talked for a long while, and then I asked if she thought
Dances of the Old Capital
would resume the following spring. The performances hadn’t been seen in a number of years.

“Oh, why not?” she said. “The theme can be the ‘Dance in the Stream’!”

If you’ve ever visited a hot springs resort or some such place, and been entertained by women masquerading as geisha who are really prostitutes, you’ll understand Mameha’s little joke. A woman who performs the “Dance in the Stream” is really doing a kind of striptease. She pretends to wade into deeper and deeper water, all the while raising her kimono to keep the hem dry, until the men finally see what they’ve been waiting for, and begin to cheer and toast one another with sake.

“With all the American soldiers in Gion these days,” she went on, “English will get you further than dance. Anyway, the Kaburenjo Theater has been turned into a
kyabarei
.”

I’d never heard this word before, which came from the English “cabaret,” but I learned soon enough what it meant. Even while living with the Arashino family, I’d heard stories about American soldiers and their noisy parties. Still I was shocked when I stepped into the entryway of a teahouse later that afternoon and found—instead of the usual row of men’s shoes at the base of the step—a confusion of army boots, each of which looked as big to me as Mother’s little dog Taku had been. Inside the front entrance hall, the first thing I saw was an American man in his underwear squeezing himself beneath the shelf of an alcove while two geisha, both laughing, tried to pull him out. When I looked at the dark hair on his arms and chest, and even on his back, I had the feeling I’d never seen anything quite so beastly. He’d apparently lost his clothing in a drinking game and was trying to hide, but soon he let the women draw him out by the arms and lead him back down the hall and through a door. I heard whistling and cheering when he entered.

About a week after my return, I was finally ready to make my first appearance as a geisha again. I spent a day rushing from the hairdresser’s to the fortune-teller’s; soaking my hands to remove the last of the stains; and searching all over Gion to find the makeup I needed. Now that I was nearing thirty, I would no longer be expected to wear white makeup except on special occasions. But I did spend a half hour at my makeup stand that day, trying to use different shades of Western-style face powder to hide how thin I’d grown. When Mr. Bekku came to dress me, young Etsuko stood and watched just as I had once watched Hatsumomo; and it was the astonishment in her eyes, more than anything I saw while looking in the mirror, that convinced me I truly looked like a geisha once again.

When at last I set out that evening, all of Gion was blanketed in a beautiful snow so powdery the slightest wind blew the roofs clean. I wore a kimono shawl and carried a lacquered umbrella, so I’m sure I was as unrecognizable as the day I’d visited Gion looking like a peasant. I recognized only about half the geisha I passed. It was easy to tell those who’d lived in Gion before the war, because they gave a little bow of courtesy as they passed, even when they didn’t seem to recognize me. The others didn’t bother with more than a nod.

Seeing soldiers here and there on the streets, I dreaded what I might find when I reached the Ichiriki. But in fact, the entryway was lined with the shiny black shoes worn by officers; and strangely enough, the teahouse seemed quieter than in my days as an apprentice. Nobu hadn’t yet arrived—or at least, I didn’t see any sign of him—but I was shown directly into one of the large rooms on the ground floor and told he would join me there shortly. Ordinarily I would have waited in the maids’ quarters up the hallway, where I could warm my hands and sip a cup of tea; no geisha likes a man to find her idle. But I didn’t mind waiting for Nobu—and besides, I considered it a privilege to spend a few minutes by myself in such a room. I’d been starved for beauty over the past five years, and this was a room that would have astonished you with its loveliness. The walls were covered with a pale yellow silk whose texture gave a kind of presence, and made me feel held by them just as an egg is held by its shell.

I’d expected Nobu to arrive by himself, but when I finally heard him in the hallway, it was clear he’d brought Deputy Minister Sato with him. I didn’t mind if Nobu found me waiting, as I’ve mentioned; but I thought it would be disastrous to give the Minister reason to think I might be unpopular. So I slipped quickly through the adjoining doors into an unused room. As it turned out, this gave me a chance to listen to Nobu struggle to be pleasant.

“Isn’t this quite a room, Minister?” he said. I heard a little grunt in reply. “I requested it especially for you. That painting in the Zen style is really something, don’t you think?” Then after a long silence, Nobu added, “Yes, it’s a beautiful night. Oh, did I already ask if you’ve tasted the Ichiriki Teahouse’s own special brand of sake?”

Things continued in this way, with Nobu probably feeling about as comfortable as an elephant trying to act like a butterfly. When at length I went into the hallway and slid open the door, Nobu seemed very relieved to see me.

I got my first good look at the Minister only after introducing myself and going to kneel at the table. He didn’t look at all familiar, though he’d claimed to have spent hours staring at me. I don’t know how I managed to forget him, because he had a very distinctive appearance; I’ve never seen anyone who had more trouble just lugging his face around. He kept his chin tucked against his breastbone as though he couldn’t quite hold up his head, and he had a peculiar lower jaw that protruded so that his breath seemed to blow right up his nose. After he gave me a little nod and said his name, it was a long while before I heard any sound from him other than grunts, for a grunt seemed to be his way of responding to almost anything.

I did my best to make conversation until the maid rescued us by arriving with a tray of sake. I filled the Minister’s cup and was astonished to watch him pour the sake directly into his lower jaw in the same way he might have poured it into a drain. He shut his mouth for a moment and then opened it again, and the sake was gone, without any of the usual signs people make when they swallow. I wasn’t really sure he’d swallowed at all until he held out his empty cup.

Things went on like this for fifteen minutes or more while I tried to put the Minister at his ease by telling him stories and jokes, and asking him a few questions. But soon I began to think perhaps there was no such thing as “the Minister at his ease.” He never gave me an answer of more than a single word. I suggested we play a drinking game; I even asked if he liked to sing. The longest exchange we had in our first half hour was when the Minister asked if I was a dancer.

“Why, yes, I am. Would the Minister like me to perform a short piece?”

“No,” he said. And that was the end of it.

The Minister may not have liked making eye contact with people, but he certainly liked to study his food, as I discovered after a maid arrived with dinner for the two men. Before putting anything in his mouth, he held it up with his chopsticks and peered at it, turning it this way and that. And if he didn’t recognize it, he asked me what it was. “It’s a piece of yam boiled in soy sauce and sugar,” I told him when he held up something orange. Actually I didn’t have the least idea whether it was yam, or a slice of whale liver, or anything else, but I didn’t think the Minister wanted to hear that. Later, when he held up a piece of marinated beef and asked me about it, I decided to tease him a bit.

“Oh, that’s a strip of marinated leather,” I said. “It’s a specialty of the house here! It’s made from the skin of elephants. So I guess I should have said ‘elephant leather.’ ”

“Elephant leather?”

“Now, Minister, you know I’m teasing you! It’s a piece of beef. Why do you look at your food so closely? Did you think you would come here and eat dog or something?”

“I’ve eaten dog, you know,” he said to me.

“That’s very interesting. But we don’t have any dog here tonight. So don’t look at your chopsticks anymore.”

Very soon we began playing a drinking game. Nobu hated drinking games, but he kept quiet after I made a face at him. We may have let the Minister lose a bit more often than we should have, because later, as we were trying to explain the rules to a drinking game he’d never played, his eyes became as unsteady as corks floating in the surf. All at once he stood up and headed off toward one corner of the room.

“Now, Minister,” Nobu said to him, “exactly where are you planning on going?”

The Minister’s answer was to let out a burp, which I considered a very well-spoken reply because it was apparent he was about to throw up. Nobu and I rushed over to help him, but he’d already clamped his hand over his mouth. If he’d been a volcano, he would have been smoking by this time, so we had no choice but to roll open the glass doors to the garden to let him vomit onto the snow there. You may be appalled at the thought of a man throwing up into one of these exquisite decorative gardens, but the Minister certainly wasn’t the first. We geisha try to help a man down the hallway to the toilet, but sometimes we can’t manage it. If we say to one of the maids that a man has just visited the garden, they all know exactly what we mean and come at once with their cleaning supplies.

Nobu and I did our best to keep the Minister kneeling in the doorway with his head suspended over the snow. But despite our efforts he soon tumbled out headfirst. I did my best to shove him to one side, so he would at least end up in snow that hadn’t yet been vomited upon. But the Minister was as bulky as a thick piece of meat. All I really did was turn him onto his side as he fell.

Nobu and I could do nothing but look at each other in dismay at the sight of the Minister lying perfectly still in the deep snow, like a branch that had fallen from a tree.

“Why, Nobu-san,” I said, “I didn’t know how much fun your guest was going to be.”

“I believe we’ve killed him. And if you ask me, he deserved it. What an irritating man!”

“Is this how you act toward your honored guests? You must take him out onto the street and walk him around a bit to wake him up. The cold will do him good.”

“He’s lying in the snow. Isn’t that cold enough?”

“Nobu-san!” I said. And I suppose this was enough of a reprimand, for Nobu let out a sigh and stepped down into the garden in his stocking feet to begin the task of bringing the Minister back to consciousness. While he was busy with this, I went to find a maid who could help, because I couldn’t see how Nobu would get the Minister back up into the teahouse with only one arm. Afterward I fetched some dry socks for the two men and alerted a maid to tidy the garden after we’d left.