Arthur Golden - Memoirs of a Geisha

She put the kimono-wrapped in its linen paper-into my arms and walked me down to the storehouse in the courtyard. There she opened the door and flipped a light switch with a loud snap. I could see shelves stacked with sheets and pillows, as well as several locked chests and a few folded futons. Hatsumomo grabbed me by the arm and pointed up a ladder along the outside wall.

“The kimono are up there,” she said.

I made my way up and opened a sliding wooden door at the top. The storage loft didn’t have shelves like the ground-floor level. Instead the walls were lined with red lacquered cases stacked one on top of the next, nearly as high as the ceiling. A narrow corridor passed between these two walls of cases, with slatted windows at the ends, covered over with screens for ventilation. The space was lit harshly just as below, but much more brightly; so that when I had stepped inside, I could read the black characters carved into the fronts of the cases. They said things like Kata-Komon, Ro -“Stenciled Designs, Open-Weave Silk Gauze”; and Kuromontsuki, Awase -“Black-Crested Formal Robes with Inner Lining.” To tell the truth, I couldn’t understand all the characters at the time, but I did manage to find the case with Hatsumomo’s name on it, on a top shelf. I had trouble taking it down, but finally I added the new kimono to the few others, also wrapped in linen paper, and replaced the case where I’d found it. Out of curiosity, I opened another of the cases very quickly and found it stacked to the top with perhaps fifteen kimono, and the others whose lids I lifted were all the same. To see that storehouse crowded with cases, I understood at once why Granny was so terrified of fire. The collection of kimono was probably twice as valuable as the entire villages of Yoroido and Senzuru put together. And as I learned much later, the most expensive ones were in storage somewhere else. They were worn only by apprentice geisha; and since Hatsumomo could no longer wear them, they were kept in a rented vault for safekeeping until they were needed again.

By the time I returned to the courtyard, Hatsumomo had been up to her room to fetch an inkstone and a stick of ink, as well as a brush for calligraphy. I thought perhaps she wanted to write a note and slip it inside the kimono when she refolded it. She had dribbled some water from the well onto her inkstone and was now sitting on the walkway grinding ink. When it was good and black, she dipped a brush in it and smoothed its tip against the stone-so that all the ink was absorbed in the brush and none of it would drip. Then she put it into my hand, and held my hand over the lovely kimono, and said to me:

“Practice your calligraphy, little Chiyo.”

This kimono belonging to the geisha named Mameha-whom I’d never heard of at the time-was a work of art. Weaving its way from the hem up to the waist was a beautiful vine made of heavily lacquered threads bunched together like a tiny cable and sewn into place. It was a part of the fabric, yet it seemed so much like an actual vine growing there, I had the feeling I could take it in my fingers, if I wished, and tear it away like a weed from the soil. The leaves curling from it seemed to be fading and drying in the autumn weather, and even taking on tints of yellow.

“I can’t do it, Hatsumomo-san!” I cried.

“What a shame, little sweetheart,” her friend said to me. “Because if you make Hatsumomo tell you again, you’ll lose the chance to find your sister.”

“Oh, shut up, Korin. Chiyo knows she has to do what I tell her. Write something on the fabric, Miss Stupid. I don’t care what it is.”

When the brush first touched the kimono, Korin was so excited she let out a squeal that woke one of the elderly maids, who leaned out into the corridor with a cloth around her head and her sleeping robe sagging all around her. Hatsumomo stamped her foot and made a sort of lunging motion, like a cat, which was enough to make the maid go back to her futon. Korin wasn’t happy with the few uncertain strokes I’d made on the powdery green silk, so Hatsumomo instructed me where to mark the fabric and what sorts of marks to make. There wasn’t any meaning to them; Hatsumomo was just trying in her own way to be artistic. Afterward she refolded the kimono in its wrapping of linen and tied the strings shut again. She and Korin went back to the front entryway to put their lacquered zori back on their feet. When they rolled open the door to the street, Hatsumomo told me to follow.

“Hatsumomo-san, if I leave the okiya without permission, Mother will be very angry, and-”

“I’m giving you permission,” Hatsumomo interrupted. “We have to return the kimono, don’t we? I hope you’re not planning to keep me waiting.”

So I could do nothing but step into my shoes and follow her up the alleyway to a street running beside the narrow Shirakawa Stream. Back in those days, the streets and alleys in Gion were still paved beautifully with stone. We walked along in the moonlight for a block or so, beside the weeping cherry trees that drooped down over the black water, and finally across a wooden bridge arching over into a section of Gion I’d never seen before. The embankment of the stream was stone, most of it covered with patches of moss. Along its top, the backs of the teahouses and okiya connected to form a wall. Reed screens over the windows sliced the yellow light into tiny strips that made me think of what the cook had done to a pickled radish earlier that day. I could hear the laughter of a group of men and geisha. Something very funny must have been happening in one of the teahouses, because each wave of laughter was louder than the one before, until they finally died away and left only the twanging of a shamisen from another party. For the moment, I could imagine that Gion was probably a cheerful place for some people. I couldn’t help wondering if Satsu might be at one of those parties, even though Awajiumi, at the Gion Registry Office, had told me she wasn’t in Gion at all.

Shortly, Hatsumomo and Korin came to a stop before a wooden door.

“You’re going to take this kimono up the stairs and give it to the maid there,” Hatsumomo said to me. “Or if Miss Perfect herself answers the door, you may give it to her. Don’t say anything; just hand it over. We’ll be down here watching you.”

With this, she put the wrapped kimono into my arms, and Korin rolled open the door. Polished wooden steps led up into the darkness. I was trembling with fear so much, I could go no farther than halfway up them before I came to a stop. Then I heard Korin say into the stairwell in a loud whisper:

“Go on, little girl! No one’s going to eat you unless you come back down with the kimono still in your hands-and then we just might. Right, Hatsumomo-san?”

Hatsumomo let out a sigh at this, but said nothing. Korin was squinting up into the darkness, trying to see me; but Hatsumomo, who stood not much higher than Korin’s shoulder, was chewing on one of her fingernails and paying no attention at all. Even then, amid all my fears, I couldn’t help noticing how extraordinary Hatsumomo’s beauty was. She may have been as cruel as a spider, but she was more lovely chewing on her fingernail than most geisha looked posing for a photograph. And the contrast with her friend Korin was like comparing a rock along the roadside with a jewel. Korin looked uncomfortable in her formal hairstyle with all its lovely ornaments, and her kimono seemed to be always in her way. Whereas Hatsumomo wore her kimono as if it were her skin.

On the landing at the top of the stairs, I knelt in the black darkness and called out:

“Excuse me, please!”

I waited, but nothing happened. “Louder,” said Korin. “They aren’t expecting you.”

So I called again, “Excuse me!”