Arthur Golden - Memoirs of a Geisha

Of course she was talking about Pumpkin.

“Put your name on the board as early every morning as you can,” she told me. “Keep quiet in the classroom. I tolerate no talking at all! And your eyes must stay to the front. If you do these things, I’ll teach you as best I can.”

And with this, she dismissed us.

In the hallways between classes, I kept my eyes open for Satsu, but I didn’t find her. I began to worry that perhaps I would never see her again, and grew so upset that one of the teachers, just before beginning the class, silenced everyone and said to me:

“You, there! What’s troubling you?”

“Oh, nothing, ma’am. Only I bit my lip by accident,” I said. And to make good on this-for the sake of the girls around me, who were staring-I gave a sharp bite on my lip and tasted blood.

It was a relief to me that Pumpkin’s other classes weren’t as painful to watch as the first one had been. In the dance class, for example, the students practiced the moves in unison, with the result that no one stood out. Pumpkin wasn’t by any means the worst dancer, and even had a certain awkward grace in the way she moved. The singing class later in the morning was more difficult for her since she had a poor ear; but there again, the students practiced in unison, so Pumpkin was able to hide her mistakes by moving her mouth a great deal while singing only softly.

At the end of each of her classes, she introduced me to the teacher. One of them said to me, “You live in the same okiya as Pumpkin, do you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, “the Nitta okiya,” for Nitta was the family name of Granny and Mother, as well as Auntie.

“That means you live with Hatsumomo-san.”

“Yes, ma’am. Hatsumomo is the only geisha in our okiya at present.”

“I’ll do my best to teach you about singing,” she said, “so long as you manage to stay alive!”

After this the teacher laughed as though she’d made a great joke, and sent us on our way.

That afternoon Hatsumomo took me to the Gion Registry Office. I was expecting something very grand, but it turned out to be nothing more than several dark tatami rooms on the second floor of the school building, filled with desks and accounting books and smelling terribly of cigarettes. A clerk looked up at us through the haze of smoke and nodded us into the back room. There at a table piled with papers sat the biggest man I’d ever seen in my life. I didn’t know it at the time, but he’d once been a sumo wrestler; and really, if he’d gone outside and slammed his weight into the building itself, all those desks would probably have fallen off the tatami platform onto the floor. He hadn’t been a good enough sumo wrestler to take a retirement name, as some of them do; but he still liked to be called by the name he’d used in his wrestling days, which was Awajiumi. Some of the geisha shortened this playfully to Awaji, as a nickname.

As soon as we walked in, Hatsumomo turned on her charm. It was the first time I’d ever seen her do it. She said to him, “Awaji-san!” But the way she spoke, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had run out of breath in the middle, because it sounded like this:

“Awaaa-jii-saaaannnnnnnn!”

It was as if she were scolding him. He put down his pen when he heard her voice, and his two big cheeks shifted up toward his ears, which was his way of smiling.

“Mmm… Hatsumomo-san,” he said, “if you get any prettier, I don’t know what I’m going to do!”

It sounded like a loud whisper when he spoke, because sumo wrestlers often ruin their voice boxes, smashing into one another’s throats the way they do.

He may have been the size of a hippopotamus, but Awajiumi was a very elegant dresser. He wore a pin-striped kimono and kimono trousers. His job was to make certain that all the money passing through Gion flowed where it was supposed to; and a trickle from that river of cash flowed directly into his pocket. That isn’t to say that he was stealing; it was just the way the system worked. Considering that Awajiumi had such an important job, it was to every geisha’s advantage to keep him happy, which was why he had a reputation for spending as much time out of his elegant clothes as in them.

She and Awajiumi talked for a long time, and finally Hatsumomo told him she’d come to register me for lessons at the school. Awajiumi hadn’t really looked at me yet, but here he turned his giant head. After a moment he got up to slide open one of the paper screens over the window for more light.

“Why, I thought my eyes had fooled me,” he said. “You should have told me sooner what a pretty girl you brought with you. Her eyes… they’re the color of a mirror!”

“A mirror?” Hatsumomo said. “A mirror has no color, Awaji-san.”

“Of course it does. It’s a sparkly gray. When you look at a mirror, all you see is yourself, but I know a pretty color when I find it.”

“Do you? Well, it isn’t so pretty to me. I once saw a dead man fished out of the river, and his tongue was just the same color as her eyes.”

“Maybe you’re just too pretty yourself to be able to see it elsewhere,” Awajiumi said, opening an account book and picking up his pen. “Anyway, let’s register the girl. Now… Chiyo, is it? Tell me your full name, Chiyo, and your place of birth.”

The moment I heard these words, I had an image in my mind of Satsu staring up at Awajiumi, full of confusion and fear. She must have been in this same room at some time or other; if I had to register, surely she’d had to register too.

“Sakamoto is my last name,” I said. “I was born in the town of Yoroido. You may have heard of it, sir, because of my older sister, Satsu?”

I thought Hatsumomo would be furious with me; but to my surprise she seemed almost pleased about the question I’d asked.

“If she’s older than you, she’d have registered already,” Awajiumi said. “But I haven’t come across her. I don’t think she’s in Gion at all.”

Now Hatsumomo’s smile made sense to me; she’d known in advance what Awajiumi would say. If I’d felt any doubts whether she really had spoken to my sister as she claimed, I felt them no longer. There were other geisha districts in Kyoto, though I didn’t know much about them. Satsu was somewhere in one of them, and I was determined to find her.

When I returned to the okiya, Auntie was waiting to take me to the bathhouse down the street. I’d been there before, though only with the elderly maids, who usually handed me a small towel and a scrap of soap and then squatted on the tile floor to wash themselves while I did the same. Auntie was much kinder, and knelt over me to scrub my back. I was surprised that she had no modesty whatever, and slung her tube-shaped breasts around as if they were nothing more than bottles. She even whacked me on the shoulder with one several times by accident.

Afterward she took me back to the okiya and dressed me in the first silk kimono I’d ever worn, a brilliant blue with green grasses all around the hem and bright yellow flowers across the sleeves and chest. Then she led me up the stairs to Hatsumomo’s room. Before going in, she gave me a stern warning not to distract Hatsumomo in any way, or do anything that might make her angry. I didn’t understand it at the time, but now I know perfectly well why she was so concerned. Because, you see, when a geisha wakes up in the morning she is just like any other woman. Her face may be greasy from sleep, and her breath unpleasant. It may be true that she wears a startling hairstyle even as she struggles to open her eyes; but in every other respect she’s a woman like any other, and not a geisha at all. Only when she sits before her mirror to apply her makeup with care does she become a geisha. And I don’t mean that this is when she begins to look like one. This is when she begins to think like one too.