Women of the Pleasure Quarters Read Free Page B

grandmother before her had been geisha. Then there were those—here there was the faintest, barely perceptible curl of the lip—who had come in from elsewhere. They, she implied, were a different class altogether. Of the five
hanamachi,
Gion, Pontocho, and Kamishichiken had long histories. They had always been geisha istricts. But I must bear in mind that East Gion and, worse still, Miyagawa-cho were different, unspeakably low, in fact quite beyond the pale; in the past, prostitutes—she breathed the word with distaste—had lived there.
    “I would not like to see Miyagawa-cho written about in the same breath as the others,” she said emphatically.
    Even Gion, Pontocho, and Kamishichiken were all completely dissimilar, with entirely different histories and
shikitari.
She had met many Westerners, she concluded, writers and journalists, who had come to Kyoto on the same quest as mine. They had all failed. They had all given up and so should I.
    “No matter how long you are here you will never
understand the intricacies of our system.”
    Gloomily I took another sip of whiskey. I had never met a Japanese woman so formidable and steely. In the alcoves the men were shouting and laughing. Ties were loosened, faces flushed.
    “Mama!” shouted one. With the indulgent smile of a mother for a naughty child, the mama-san—my hostess—slipped away to join them, topping up their drinks and admonishing them teasingly. One, rather the worse for wear, came over to try his English skills on me.
    At that moment the door opened. With a rustle of silk and brocade, a creature like a painted doll appeared.
    “Okasan, oki-ni!”
she cooed in breathy, high-pitched tones using the Kyoto word for thank you: “Mother, thank you.” Tottering unsteadily into the room on clogs a good four inches high, she stood nodding, smiling, and giggling, covering her mouth with her hand.
    “She has just become a maiko,” explained the mama. “This is her third day.”
    I was dumbstruck, as many people are, on coming face to face with a maiko. (Maiko literally means “dancing girl” but is usually translated “trainee geisha” or “apprentice geisha.”) Later, as the days and months passed, I was able to see the childish faces underneath the thick white paint. But that time, I could not stop myself staring in amazement and curiosity at this extraordinary confection. I was not the only one. For a moment there was silence before the chatter started up again.
    She was wearing a sumptuous black kimono with an intertwined design of bamboo leaves and stems in browns, whites, and greens around the hem. The kimono sat flatteringly low on her shoulders, revealing a layer of brilliant red brocade at the throat which I took to be an under-kimono; in fact it was a separate under-collar. Around her waist, wrapping her like a corset from armpit to hip, was a thick cummerbund—the obi—of pale gold embroidered with flowers.
    She was not so much a woman as a walking work of art, a compilation of symbols and markers of eroticism, as far removed from a human being as a bonsai is from a natural tree. Geisha have been described as icons of femininity. If that is the case, it is a very stylized image of femininity, following conventions utterly different from Western notions of beauty and sexiness. There was certainly not the slightest pretense that this was a real woman. She was an actress, painted up to play a role; it would be as absurd to confuse the girl with the role as to assume that the star of a soap opera actually was the character she was playing.
    Rather unsteadily, with much rustling of fabric, she perched on the edge of one of the sofas; the enormous obi prevented her from sitting any further back. I glanced at the mama, hoping that I might slip over and join the group; but with a barely perceptible pursing of the lips she indicated that I should keep quiet and stay where I was. So I watched and listened, curious to see what this painted creature