Arthur Golden - Memoirs of a Geisha

The older woman must have taken pity on me; for a long while I lay there sobbing in my misery without anyone touching me. I even heard her shush up a maid who came from inside the house to speak with her. At length she helped me to my feet and dried my face with a handkerchief she took from one sleeve of her simple gray kimono.

“Now, now, little girl. There’s no need to worry so. No one’s going to cook you.” She spoke with the same peculiar accent as Mr. Bekku and Hatsumomo. It sounded so different from the Japanese spoken in my village that I had a hard time understanding her. But in any case, hers were the kindest words anyone had said to me all day, so I made up my mind to do what she advised. She told me to call her Auntie. And then she looked down at me, square in the face, and said in a throaty voice:

“Heavens! What startling eyes! You’re a lovely girl, aren’t you? Mother will be thrilled.”

I thought at once that the mother of this woman, whoever she was, must be very old, because Auntie’s hair, knotted tightly at the back of her head, was mostly gray, with only streaks of black remaining.

Auntie led me through the doorway, where I found myself standing on a dirt corridor passing between two closely spaced structures to a courtyard in the back. One of the structures was a little dwelling like my house in Yoroido-two rooms with floors of dirt; it turned out to be the maids’ quarters. The other was a small, elegant house sitting up on foundation stones in such a way that a cat might have crawled underneath it. The corridor between them opened onto the dark sky above, which gave me the feeling I was standing in something more like a miniature village than a house-especially since I could see several other small wooden buildings down in the courtyard at the end. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was a very typical dwelling for the section of Kyoto in which it stood. The buildings in the courtyard, though they gave the impression of another group of tiny houses, were just a small shed for the toilets and a storehouse of two levels with a ladder on the outside. The entire dwelling fitted into an area smaller than Mr. Tanaka’s home in the countryside and housed only eight people. Or rather nine, now that I had arrived.

After I took in the peculiar arrangement of all the little buildings, I noticed the elegance of the main house. In Yoroido, the wood structures were more gray than brown, and rutted by the salty air. But here the wood floors and beams gleamed with the yellow light of electric lamps. Opening off the front hallway were sliding doors with paper screens, as well as a staircase that seemed to climb straight up. One of these doors stood open, so that I was able to see a wood cabinet with a Buddhist altar. These elegant rooms turned out to be for the use of the family-and also Hatsumomo, even though, as I would come to understand, she wasn’t a family member at all. When family members wanted to go to the courtyard, they didn’t walk down the dirt corridor as the servants did, but had their own ramp of polished wood running along the side of the house. There were even separate toilets-an upper one for family and a lower one for servants.

I had yet to discover most of these things, though I would learn them within a day or two. But I stood there in the corridor a long while, wondering what sort of place this was and feeling very afraid. Auntie had disappeared into the kitchen and was talking in a hoarse voice to somebody. At length the somebody came out. She turned out to be a girl about my age, carrying a wooden bucket so heavy with water that she sloshed half of it onto the dirt floor. Her body was narrow; but her face was plump and almost perfectly round, so that she looked to me like a melon on a stick. She was straining to carry the bucket, and her tongue stuck out of her mouth just the way the stem comes out of the top of a pumpkin. As I soon learned, this was a habit of hers. She stuck her tongue out when she stirred her miso soup, or scooped rice into a bowl, or even tied the knot of her robe. And her face was truly so plump and so soft, with that tongue curling out like a pumpkin stem, that within a few days I’d given her the nickname of “Pumpkin,” which everyone came to call her-even her customers many years later when she was a geisha in Gion.

When she had put down the bucket near me, Pumpkin retracted her tongue, and then brushed a strand of hair behind her ear while she looked me up and down. I thought she might say something, but she just went on looking, as though she were trying to make up her mind whether or not to take a bite of me. Really, she did seem hungry; and then at last she leaned in and whispered:

“Where on earth did you come from?”

I didn’t think it would help to say that I had come from Yoroido; since her accent was as strange to me as everyone else’s, I felt sure she wouldn’t recognize the name of my village. I said instead that I’d just arrived.

“I thought I would never see another girl my age,” she said to me. “But what’s the matter with your eyes?”

Just then Auntie came out from the kitchen, and after shooing Pumpkin away, picked up the bucket and a scrap of cloth, and led me down to the courtyard. It had a beautiful mossy look, with stepping-stones leading to a storehouse in the back; but it smelled horrible because of the toilets in the little shed along one side. Auntie told me to undress. I was afraid she might do to me something like what Mrs. Fidget had done, but instead she only poured water over my shoulders and rubbed me down with the rag. Afterward she gave me a robe, which was nothing more than coarsely woven cotton in the simplest pattern of dark blue, but it was certainly more elegant than anything I’d ever worn before. An old woman who turned out to be the cook came down into the corridor with several elderly maids to peer at me. Auntie told them they would have plenty of time for staring another day and sent them back where they’d come from.

“Now listen, little girl,” Auntie said to me, when we were alone. “I don’t even want to know your name yet. The last girl who came, Mother and Granny didn’t like her, and she was here only a month. I’m too old to keep learning new names, until they’ve decided they’re going to keep you.”

“What will happen if they don’t want to keep me?” I asked.

“It’s better for you if they keep you.”

“May I ask, ma’am… what is this place?”

“It’s an okiya,” she said. “It’s where geisha live. If you work very hard, you’ll grow up to be a geisha yourself. But you won’t make it as far as next week unless you listen to me very closely, because Mother and Granny are coming down the stairs in just a moment to look at you. And they’d better like what they see. Your job is to bow as low as you can, and don’t look them in the eye. The older one, the one we call Granny, has never liked anyone in her life, so don’t worry about what she says. If she asks you a question, don’t even answer it, for heaven’s sake! I’ll answer for you. The one you want to impress is Mother. She’s not a bad sort, but she cares about only one thing.”

I didn’t have a chance to find out what that one thing was, for I heard a creaking noise from the direction of the front entrance hall, and soon the two women came drifting out onto the walkway. I didn’t dare look at them. But what I could see out of the corner of my eye made me think of two lovely bundles of silk floating along a stream. In a moment they were hovering on the walkway in front of me, where they sank down and smoothed their kimono across their knees.

“Umeko-san!” Auntie shouted-for this was the name of the cook. “Bring tea for Granny.”

“I don’t want tea,” I heard an angry voice say.

“Now, Granny,” said a raspier voice, which I took to be Mother’s. “You don’t have to drink it. Auntie only wants to be sure you’re comfortable.”