Memoirs of a Geisha (6 page)

Now she took a close look at me for the first time, puffing on her pipe while the old woman beside her sighed. I didn’t feel I could look at Mother directly, but I had the impression of smoke seeping out of her face like steam from a crack in the earth. I was so curious about her that my eyes took on a life of their own and began to dart about. The more I saw of her, the more fascinated I became. Her kimono was yellow, with willowy branches bearing lovely green and orange leaves; it was made of silk gauze as delicate as a spider’s web. Her obi was every bit as astonishing to me. It was a lovely gauzy texture too, but heavier-looking, in russet and brown with gold threads woven through. The more I looked at her clothing, the less I was aware of standing there on that dirt corridor, or of wondering what had become of my sister—and my mother and father—and what would become of me. Every detail of this woman’s kimono was enough to make me forget myself. And then I came upon a rude shock: for there above the collar of her elegant kimono was a face so mismatched to the clothing that it was as though I’d been patting a cat’s body only to discover that it had a bulldog’s head. She was a hideous-looking woman, though much younger than Auntie, which I hadn’t expected. It turned out that Mother was actually Auntie’s younger sister—though they called each other “Mother” and “Auntie,” just as everyone else in the okiya did. Actually they weren’t really sisters in the way Satsu and I were. They hadn’t been born into the same family; but Granny had adopted them both.

I was so dazed as I stood there, with so many thoughts running through my mind, that I ended up doing the very thing Auntie had told me not to do. I looked straight into Mother’s eyes. When I did she took the pipe from her mouth, which caused her jaw to fall open like a trapdoor. And even though I knew I should at all costs look down again, her peculiar eyes were so shocking to me in their ugliness that I could do nothing but stand there staring at them. Instead of being white and clear, the whites of her eyes had a hideous yellow cast, and made me think at once of a toilet into which someone had just urinated. They were rimmed with the raw lip of her lids, in which a cloudy moisture was pooled; and all around them the skin was sagging.

I drew my eyes downward as far as her mouth, which still hung open. The colors of her face were all mixed up: the rims of her eyelids were red like meat, and her gums and tongue were gray. And to make things more horrible, each of her lower teeth seemed to be anchored in a little pool of blood at the gums. This was due to some sort of deficiency in Mother’s diet over the past years, as I later learned; but I couldn’t help feeling, the more I looked at her, that she was like a tree that has begun to lose its leaves. I was so shocked by the whole effect that I think I must have taken a step back, or let out a gasp, or in some way given her some hint of my feelings, for all at once she said to me, in that raspy voice of hers:

“What are you looking at!”

“I’m very sorry, ma’am. I was looking at your kimono,” I told her. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it.”

This must have been the right answer—if there was a right answer—because she let out something of a laugh, though it sounded like a cough.

“So you like it, do you?” she said, continuing to cough, or laugh, I couldn’t tell which. “Do you have any idea what it cost?”

“No, ma’am.”

“More than you did, that’s for certain.”

Here the maid appeared with tea. While it was served I took the opportunity to steal a glance at Granny. Whereas Mother was a bit on the plump side, with stubby fingers and a fat neck, Granny was old and shriveled. She was at least as old as my father, but she looked as if she’d spent her years stewing herself into a state of concentrated meanness. Her gray hair made me think of a tangle of silk threads, for I could see right through them to her scalp. And even her scalp looked mean, because of patches where the skin was colored red or brown from old age. She wasn’t frowning exactly, but her mouth made the shape of a frown in its natural state anyway.

She took in a great big breath in preparation to speak; and then as she let it out again she mumbled, “Didn’t I say I don’t want any tea?” After this, she sighed and shook her head, and then said to me, “How old are you, little girl?”

“She’s the year of the monkey,” Auntie answered for me.

“That fool cook is a monkey,” Granny said.

“Nine years old,” said Mother. “What do you think of her, Auntie?”

Auntie stepped around in front of me and tipped my head back to look at my face. “She has a good deal of water.”

“Lovely eyes,” said Mother. “Did you see them, Granny?”

“She looks like a fool to me,” Granny said. “We don’t need another monkey anyway.”

“Oh, I’m sure you’re right,” Auntie said. “Probably she’s just as you say. But she looks to me like a very clever girl, and adaptable; you can see that from the shape of her ears.”

“With so much water in her personality,” Mother said, “probably she’ll be able to smell a fire before it has even begun. Won’t that be nice, Granny? You won’t have to worry any longer about our storehouse burning with all our kimono in it.”

Granny, as I went on to learn, was more terrified of fire than beer is of a thirsty old man.

“Anyway, she’s rather pretty, don’t you think?” Mother added.

“There are too many pretty girls in Gion,” said Granny. “What we need is a smart girl, not a pretty girl. That Hatsumomo is as pretty as they come, and look at what a fool she is!”

After this Granny stood, with Auntie’s help, and made her way back up the walkway. Though I must say that to watch Auntie’s clumsy gait—because of her one hip jutting out farther than the other—it wasn’t at all obvious which of the two women had the easier time walking. Soon I heard the sound of a door in the front entrance hall sliding open and then shut again, and Auntie came back.

“Do you have lice, little girl?” Mother asked me.

“No,” I said.

“You’re going to have to learn to speak more politely than that. Auntie, be kind enough to trim her hair, just to be sure.”

Auntie called a servant over and asked for shears.

“Well, little girl,” Mother told me, “you’re in Kyoto now. You’ll learn to behave or get a beating. And it’s Granny gives the beatings around here, so you’ll be sorry. My advice to you is: work very hard, and never leave the okiya without permission. Do as you’re told; don’t be too much trouble; and you might begin learning the arts of a geisha two or three months from now. I didn’t bring you here to be a maid. I’ll throw you out, if it comes to that.”

Mother puffed on her pipe and kept her eyes fixed on me. I didn’t dare move until she told me to. I found myself wondering if my sister was standing before some other cruel woman, in another house somewhere in this horrible city. And I had a sudden image in my mind of my poor, sick mother propping herself on one elbow upon her futon and looking around to see where we had gone. I didn’t want Mother to see me crying, but the tears pooled in my eyes before I could think of how to stop them. With my vision glazed, Mother’s yellow kimono turned softer and softer, until it seemed to sparkle. Then she blew out a puff of her smoke, and it disappeared completely.

  chapter four

D
uring those first few days in that strange place, I don’t think I could have felt worse if I’d lost my arms and legs, rather than my family and my home. I had no doubt life would never again be the same. All I could think of was my confusion and misery; and I wondered day after day when I might see Satsu again. I was without my father, without my mother—without even the clothing I’d always worn. Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived. I remember one moment drying rice bowls in the kitchen, when all at once I felt so disoriented I had to stop what I was doing to stare for a long while at my hands; for I could scarcely understand that this person drying the bowls was actually me.

Mother had told me I could begin my training within a few months if I worked hard and behaved myself. As I learned from Pumpkin, beginning my training meant going to a school in another section of Gion to take lessons in things like music, dance, and tea ceremony. All the girls studying to be geisha took classes at this same school. I felt sure I’d find Satsu there when I was finally permitted to go; so by the end of my first week, I’d made up my mind to be as obedient as a cow following along on a rope, in the hopes that Mother would send me to the school right away.

Most of my chores were straightforward. I stowed away the futons in the morning, cleaned the rooms, swept the dirt corridor, and so forth. Sometimes I was sent to the pharmacist to fetch ointment for the cook’s scabies, or to a shop on Shijo Avenue to fetch the rice crackers Auntie was so fond of. Happily the worst jobs, such as cleaning the toilets, were the responsibility of one of the elderly maids. But even though I worked as hard as I knew how, I never seemed to make the good impression I hoped to, because my chores every day were more than I could possibly finish; and the problem was made a good deal worse by Granny.

Looking after Granny wasn’t really one of my duties—not as Auntie described them to me. But when Granny summoned me I couldn’t very well ignore her, for she had more seniority in the okiya than anyone else. One day, for example, I was about to carry tea upstairs to Mother when I heard Granny call out:

“Where’s that girl! Send her in here!”

I had to put down Mother’s tray and hurry into the room where Granny was eating her lunch.

“Can’t you see this room is too hot?” she said to me, after I’d bowed to her on my knees. “You ought to have come in here and opened the window.”

“I’m sorry, Granny. I didn’t know you were hot.”

“Don’t I look hot?”

She was eating some rice, and several grains of it were stuck to her lower lip. I thought she looked more mean than hot, but I went directly to the window and opened it. As soon as I did, a fly came in and began buzzing around Granny’s food.

“What’s the matter with you?” she said, waving at the fly with her chopsticks. “The other maids don’t let in flies when they open the window!”

I apologized and told her I would fetch a swatter.

“And knock the fly into my food? Oh, no, you won’t! You’ll stand right here while I eat and keep it away from me.”

So I had to stand there while Granny ate her food, and listen to her tell me about the great Kabuki actor Ichimura Uzaemon XIV, who had taken her hand during a moon-viewing party when she was only fourteen. By the time I was finally free to leave, Mother’s tea had grown so cold I couldn’t even deliver it. Both the cook and Mother were angry with me.

The truth was, Granny didn’t like to be alone. Even when she needed to use the toilet, she made Auntie stand just outside the door and hold her hands to help her balance in a squatting position. The odor was so overpowering, poor Auntie nearly broke her neck trying to get her head as far away from it as possible. I didn’t have any jobs as bad as this one, but Granny did often call me to massage her while she cleaned her ears with a tiny silver scoop; and the task of massaging her was a good deal worse than you might think. I almost felt sick the first time she unfastened her robe and pulled it down from her shoulders, because the skin there and on her neck was bumpy and yellow like an uncooked chicken’s. The problem, as I later learned, was that in her geisha days she’d used a kind of white makeup we call “China Clay,” made with a base of lead. China Clay turned out to be poisonous, to begin with, which probably accounted in part for Granny’s foul disposition. But also as a younger woman Granny had often gone to the hot springs north of Kyoto. This would have been fine except that the lead-based makeup was very hard to remove; traces of it combined with some sort of chemical in the water to make a dye that ruined her skin. Granny wasn’t the only one afflicted by this problem. Even during the early years of World War II, you could still see old women on the streets in Gion with sagging yellow necks.

*  *  *

One day after I’d been in the okiya about three weeks, I went upstairs much later than usual to straighten Hatsumomo’s room. I was terrified of Hatsumomo, even though I hardly saw her because of the busy life she led. I worried about what might happen if she found me alone, so I always tried to clean her room the moment she left the okiya for her dance lessons. Unfortunately, that morning Granny had kept me busy until almost noon.

Hatsumomo’s room was the largest in the okiya, larger in floor space than my entire house in Yoroido. I couldn’t think why it should be so much bigger than everyone else’s until one of the elderly maids told me that even though Hatsumomo was the only geisha in the okiya now, in the past there’d been as many as three or four, and they’d all slept together in that one room. Hatsumomo may have lived alone, but she certainly made enough mess for four people. When I went up to her room that day, in addition to the usual magazines strewn about, and brushes left on the mats near her tiny makeup stand, I found an apple core and an empty whiskey bottle under the table. The window was open, and the wind must have knocked down the wood frame on which she’d hung her kimono from the night before—or perhaps she’d tipped it over before going to bed drunk and hadn’t yet bothered to pick it up. Usually Auntie would have fetched the kimono by now, because it was her responsibility to care for the clothing in the okiya, but for some reason she hadn’t. Just as I was standing the frame erect again, the door slid open all at once, and I turned to see Hatsumomo standing there.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said. “I thought I heard a little mousie or something. I see you’ve been straightening my room! Are you the one who keeps rearranging all my makeup jars? Why do you insist on doing that?”

“I’m very sorry, ma’am,” I said. “I only move them to dust underneath.”

“But if you touch them,” she said, “they’ll start to smell like you. And then the men will say to me, ‘Hatsumomo-san, why do you stink like an ignorant girl from a fishing village?’ I’m sure you understand that, don’t you? But let’s have you repeat it back to me just to be sure. Why don’t I want you to touch my makeup?”

I could hardly bring myself to say it. But at last I answered her. “Because it will start to smell like me.”

“That’s very good! And what will the men say?”

“They’ll say, ‘Oh, Hatsumomo-san, you smell just like a girl from a fishing village.’ ”

“Hmm . . . there’s something about the way you said it that I don’t like. But I suppose it will do. I can’t see why you girls from fishing villages smell so bad. That ugly sister of yours was here looking for you the other day, and her stench was nearly as bad as yours.”

I’d kept my eyes to the floor until then; but when I heard these words, I looked Hatsumomo right in the face to see whether or not she was telling me the truth.

“You look so surprised!” she said to me. “Didn’t I mention that she came here? She wanted me to give you a message about where she’s living. Probably she wants you to go find her, so the two of you can run away together.”

“Hatsumomo-san—”

“You want me to tell you where she is? Well, you’re going to have to earn the information. When I think how, I’ll tell you. Now get out.”

I didn’t dare disobey her, but just before leaving the room I stopped, thinking perhaps I could persuade her.

“Hatsumomo-san, I know you don’t like me,” I said. “If you would be kind enough to tell me what I want to know, I’ll promise never to bother you again.”

Hatsumomo looked very pleased when she heard this and came walking toward me with a luminous happiness on her face. Honestly, I’ve never seen a more astonishing-looking woman. Men in the street sometimes stopped and took their cigarettes from their mouths to stare at her. I thought she was going to come whisper in my ear; but after she’d stood over me smiling for a moment, she drew back her hand and slapped me.

“I told you to get out of my room, didn’t I?” she said.

I was too stunned to know how to react. But I must have stumbled out of the room, because the next thing I knew, I was slumped on the wood floor of the hallway, holding my hand to my face. In a moment Mother’s door slid open.

“Hatsumomo!” Mother said, and came to help me to my feet. “What have you done to Chiyo?”

“She was talking about running away, Mother. I decided it would be best if I slapped her for you. I thought you were probably too busy to do it yourself.”

Mother summoned a maid and asked for several slices of fresh ginger, then took me into her room and seated me at the table while she finished a telephone call. The okiya’s only telephone for calling outside Gion was mounted on the wall of her room, and no one else was permitted to use it. She’d left the earpiece lying on its side on the shelf, and when she took it up again, she seemed to squeeze it so hard with her stubby fingers that I thought fluid might drip onto the mats.

“Sorry,” she said into the mouthpiece in her raspy voice. “Hatsumomo is slapping the maids around again.”

During my first few weeks in the okiya I felt an unreasonable affection for Mother—something like what a fish might feel for the fisherman who pulls the hook from its lip. Probably this was because I saw her no more than a few minutes each day while cleaning her room. She was always to be found there, sitting at the table, usually with an account book from the bookcase open before her and the fingers of one hand flicking the ivory beads of her abacus. She may have been organized about keeping her account books, but in every other respect she was messier even than Hatsumomo. Whenever she put her pipe down onto the table with a click, flecks of ash and tobacco flew out of it, and she left them wherever they lay. She didn’t like anyone to touch her futon, even to change the sheets, so the whole room smelled like dirty linen. And the paper screens over the windows were stained terribly on account of her smoking, which gave the room a gloomy cast.

While Mother went on talking on the telephone, one of the elderly maids came in with several strips of freshly cut ginger for me to hold against my face where Hatsumomo had slapped me. The commotion of the door opening and closing woke Mother’s little dog, Taku, who was an ill-tempered creature with a smashed face. He seemed to have only three pastimes in life—to bark, to snore, and to bite people who tried to pet him. After the maid had left again, Taku came and laid himself behind me. This was one of his little tricks; he liked to put himself where I would step on him by accident, and then bite me as soon as I did it. I was beginning to feel like a mouse caught in a sliding door, positioned there between Mother and Taku, when at last Mother hung up the telephone and came to sit at the table. She stared at me with her yellow eyes and finally said:

“Now you listen to me, little girl. Perhaps you’ve heard Hatsumomo lying. Just because she can get away with it doesn’t mean you can. I want to know . . . why did she slap you?”

“She wanted me to leave her room, Mother,” I said. “I’m terribly sorry.”

Mother made me say it all again in a proper Kyoto accent, which I found difficult to do. When I’d finally said it well enough to satisfy her, she went on:

“I don’t think you understand your job here in the okiya. We all of us think of only one thing—how we can help Hatsumomo be successful as a geisha. Even Granny. She may seem like a difficult old woman to you, but really she spends her whole day thinking of ways to be helpful to Hatsumomo.”

I didn’t have the least idea what Mother was talking about. To tell the truth, I don’t think she could have fooled a dirty rag into believing Granny was in any way helpful to anyone.

“If someone as senior as Granny works hard all day to make Hatsumomo’s job easier, think how much harder you have to work.”

“Yes, Mother, I’ll continue working very hard.”

“I don’t want to hear that you’ve upset Hatsumomo again. The other little girl manages to stay out of her way; you can do it too.”

“Yes, Mother . . . but before I go, may I ask? I’ve been wondering if anyone might know where my sister is. You see, I’d hoped to send a note to her.”

Mother had a peculiar mouth, which was much too big for her face and hung open much of the time; but now she did something with it I’d never seen her do before, which was to pinch her teeth together as though she wanted me to have a good look at them. This was her way of smiling—though I didn’t realize it until she began to make that coughing noise that was her laugh.