Arthur Golden - Memoirs of a Geisha

In the room, I was instructed to sit about an arm’s length to the side of Hatsumomo and just behind her, where I could see her face in the tiny dressing mirror on her makeup stand. She was kneeling on a cushion, wearing a cotton robe that clung to her shoulders, and gathering in her hands a half dozen makeup brushes in various shapes. Some of them were broad like fans, while others looked like a chopstick with a dot of soft hair at the end. Finally she turned and showed them to me.

“These are my brushes,” she said. “And do you remember this?” She took from the drawer of her makeup stand a glass container of stark white makeup and waved it around in the air for me to see. “This is the makeup I told you never to touch.”

“I haven’t touched it,” I said.

She sniffed the closed jar several times and said, “No, I don’t think you have.” Then she put the makeup down and took up three pigment sticks, which she held out for me in the palm of her hand.

“These are for shading. You may look at them.”

I took one of the pigment sticks from her. It was about the size of a baby’s finger, but hard and smooth as stone, so that it left no trace of color on my skin. One end was wrapped in delicate silver foil that was flecking away from the pressure of use.

Hatsumomo took the pigment sticks back and held out what looked to me like a twig of wood burned at one end.

“This is a nice dry piece of paulownia wood,” she said, “for drawing my eyebrows. And this is wax.” She took two half-used bars of wax from their paper wrapping and held them out for me to see.

“Now why do you suppose I’ve shown you these things?”

“So I’ll understand how you put on your makeup,” I said.

“Heavens, no! I’ve shown them to you so you’ll see there isn’t any magic involved. What a pity for you! Because it means that makeup alone won’t be enough to change poor Chiyo into something beautiful.”

Hatsumomo turned back to face the mirror and sang quietly to herself as she opened a jar of pale yellow cream. You may not believe me when I tell you that this cream was made from nightingale droppings, but it’s true. Many geisha used it as a face cream in those days, because it was believed to be very good for the skin; but it was so expensive that Hatsumomo put only a few dots around her eyes and mouth. Then she tore a small piece of wax from one of the bars and, after softening it in her fingertips, rubbed it into the skin of her face, and afterward of her neck and chest. She took some time to wipe her hands clean on a rag, and then moistened one of her flat makeup brushes in a dish of water and rubbed it in the makeup until she had a chalky white paste. She used this to paint her face and neck, but left her eyes bare, as well as the area around her lips and nose. If you’ve ever seen a child cut holes in paper to make a mask, this was how Hatsumomo looked, until she dampened some smaller brushes and used them to fill in the cutouts. After this she looked as if she’d fallen face-first into a bin of rice flour, for her whole face was ghastly white. She looked like the demon she was, but even so, I was sick with jealousy and shame. Because I knew that in an hour or so, men would be gazing with astonishment at that face; and I would still be there in the okiya, looking sweaty and plain.

Now she moistened her pigment sticks and used them to rub a reddish blush onto her cheeks. Already during my first month in the okiya, I’d seen Hatsumomo in her finished makeup many times; I stole looks at her whenever I could without seeming rude. I’d noticed she used a variety of tints for her cheeks, depending on the colors of her kimono. There was nothing unusual in this; but what I didn’t know until years later was that Hatsumomo always chose a shade much redder than others might have used. I can’t say why she did it, unless it was to make people think of blood. But Hatsumomo was no fool; she knew how to bring out the beauty in her features.

When she’d finished applying blush, she still had no eyebrows or lips. But for the moment she left her face like a bizarre white mask and asked Auntie to paint the back of her neck. I must tell you something about necks in Japan, if you don’t know it; namely, that Japanese men, as a rule, feel about a woman’s neck and throat the same way that men in the West might feel about a woman’s legs. This is why geisha wear the collars of their kimono so low in the back that the first few bumps of the spine are visible; I suppose it’s like a woman in Paris wearing a short skirt. Auntie painted onto the back of Hatsumomo’s neck a design called sanbon-ashi -“three legs.” It makes a very dramatic picture, for you feel as if you’re looking at the bare skin of the neck through little tapering points of a white fence. It was years before I understood the erotic effect it has on men; but in a way, it’s like a woman peering out from between her fingers. In fact, a geisha leaves a tiny margin of skin bare all around the hairline, causing her makeup to look even more artificial, something like a mask worn in Noh drama. When a man sits beside her and sees her makeup like a mask, he becomes that much more aware of the bare skin beneath.

While Hatsumomo was rinsing out her brushes, she glanced several times at my reflection in the mirror. Finally she said to me:

“I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking you’ll never be so beautiful. Well, it’s perfectly true.”

“I’ll have you know,” said Auntie, “that some people find Chiyo-chan quite a lovely girl.”

“Some people like the smell of rotting fish,” said Hatsumomo. And with that, she ordered us to leave the room so she could change into her underrobe.

Auntie and I stepped out onto the landing, where Mr. Bekku stood waiting near the full-length mirror, looking just as he had on the day he’d taken Satsu and me from our home. As I’d learned during my first week in the okiya, his real occupation wasn’t dragging girls from their homes at all; he was a dresser, which is to say that he came to the okiya every day to help Hatsumomo put on her elaborate kimono.

The robe Hatsumomo would wear that evening was hanging on a stand near the mirror. Auntie stood smoothing it until Hatsumomo came out wearing an underrobe in a lovely rust color, with a pattern of deep yellow leaves. What happened next made very little sense to me at the time, because the complicated costume of kimono is confusing to people who aren’t accustomed to it. But the way it’s worn makes perfect sense if it’s explained properly.

To begin with, you must understand that a housewife and a geisha wear kimono very differently. When a housewife dresses in kimono, she uses all sorts of padding to keep the robe from bunching unattractively at the waist, with the result that she ends up looking perfectly cylindrical, like a wood column in a temple hall. But a geisha wears kimono so frequently she hardly needs any padding, and bunching never seems to be a problem. Both a housewife and a geisha will begin by taking off their makeup robes and tucking a silk slip around the bare hips; we call this a koshimaki -“hip wrap.” It’s followed by a short-sleeved kimono undershirt, tied shut at the waist, and then the pads, which look like small contoured pillows with strings affixed for tying them into place. In Hatsumomo’s case, with her traditional small-hipped, willowy figure, and her experience of wearing kimono for so many years, she didn’t use padding at all.

So far, everything the woman has put on will be hidden from the eye when she is fully dressed. But the next item, the underrobe, isn’t really an undergarment at all. When a geisha performs a dance, or sometimes even when she walks along the street, she might raise the hem of her kimono in her left hand to keep it out of the way. This has the effect of exposing the underrobe below the knees; so, you see, the pattern and fabric of the underrobe must be coordinated with the kimono. And, in fact, the underrobe’s collar shows as well, just like the collar of a man’s shirt when he wears a business suit. Part of Auntie’s job in the okiya was to sew a silk collar each day onto the underrobe Hatsumomo planned to wear, and then remove it the next morning for cleaning. An apprentice geisha wears a red collar, but of course Hatsumomo wasn’t an apprentice; her collar was white.