Arthur Golden - Memoirs of a Geisha

Toward the end of the first month after Granny’s death, one of our new maids came to me one day to say I had a visitor at the door. It was an unseasonably hot October afternoon, and my whole body was damp with perspiration from using our old hand-operated vacuum to clean the tatami mats upstairs in Pumpkin’s new room, which had only recently been Auntie’s; Pumpkin was in the habit of sneaking rice crackers upstairs, so the tatami needed to be cleaned frequently. I mopped myself with a wet towel as quickly as I could and rushed down, to find a young woman in the entryway, dressed in a kimono like a maid’s. I got to my knees and bowed to her. Only when I looked at her a second time did I recognize her as the maid who had accompanied Mameha to our okiya a few weeks earlier. I was very sorry to see her there. I felt certain I was in trouble. But when she gestured for me to step down into the entryway, I slipped my feet into my shoes and followed her out to the street.

“Are you sent on errands from time to time, Chiyo?” she asked me.

So much time had passed since I’d tried to run away that I was no longer confined to the okiya. I had no idea why she was asking; but I told her that I was.

“Good,” she said. “Arrange for yourself to be sent out tomorrow afternoon at three o’clock, and meet me at the little bridge that arches over the Shirakawa Stream.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, “but may I ask why?”

“You’ll find out tomorrow, won’t you?” she answered, with a little crinkle of her nose that made me wonder if she was teasing me.

I certainly wasn’t pleased that Mameha’s maid wanted me to accompany her somewhere-probably to Mameha, I thought, to be scolded for what I’d done. But just the same, the following day I talked Pumpkin into sending me on an errand that didn’t really need to be run. She was worried about getting into trouble, until I promised to find a way of repaying her. So at three o’clock, she called to me from the courtyard:

“Chiyo-san, could you please go out and buy me some new shamisen strings and a few Kabuki magazines?” She had been instructed to read Kabuki magazines for the sake of her education. Then I heard her say in an even louder voice, “Is that all right, Auntie?” But Auntie didn’t answer, for she was upstairs taking a nap.

I left the okiya and walked along the Shirakawa Stream to the arched bridge leading into the Motoyoshi-cho section of Gion. With the weather so warm and lovely, quite a number of men and geisha were strolling along, admiring the weeping cherry trees whose tendrils drooped onto the surface of the water. While I waited near the bridge, I watched a group of foreign tourists who had come to see the famous Gion district. They weren’t the only foreigners I’d ever seen in Kyoto, but they certainly looked peculiar to me, the big-nosed women with their long dresses and their brightly colored hair, the men so tall and confident, with heels that clicked on the pavement. One of the men pointed at me and said something in a foreign language, and they all turned to have a look. I felt so embarrassed I pretended to find something on the ground so I could crouch down and hide myself.

Finally Mameha’s maid came; and just as I’d feared, she led me over the bridge and along the stream to the very same doorway where Hatsumomo and Korin had handed me the kimono and sent me up the stairs. It seemed terribly unfair to me that this same incident was about to cause still more trouble for me-and after so much time had passed. But when the maid rolled open the door for me, I climbed up into the gray light of the stairway. At the top we both stepped out of our shoes and went into the apartment.

“Chiyo is here, ma’am!” she cried.

Then I heard Mameha call from the back room, “All right, thank you, Tatsumi!”

The young woman led me to a table by an open window, where I knelt on one of the cushions and tried not to look nervous. Very shortly another maid came out with a cup of tea for me-because as it turned out, Mameha had not one maid, but two. I certainly wasn’t expecting to be served tea; and in fact, nothing like this had happened to me since dinner at Mr. Tanaka’s house years earlier. I bowed to thank her and took a few sips, so as not to seem rude. Afterward I found myself sitting for a long while with nothing to do but listen to the sound of water passing over the knee-high cascade in the Shirakawa Stream outside.

Mameha’s apartment wasn’t large, but it was extremely elegant, with beautiful tatami mats that were obviously new, for they had a lovely yellow-green sheen and smelled richly of straw. If you’ve ever looked closely enough at a tatami mat, you’d notice that the border around it is edged in fabric, usually just a strip of dark cotton or linen; but these were edged in a strip of silk with a pattern of green and gold. Not far away in an alcove hung a scroll written in a beautiful hand, which turned out to be a gift to Mameha from the famous calligrapher Matsudaira Koichi. Beneath it, on the wooden base of the alcove, an arrangement of blossoming dogwood branches rose up out of a shallow dish that was irregular in shape with a cracked glaze of the deepest black. I found it very peculiar, but actually it had been presented to Mameha by none other than Yoshida Sakuhei, the great master of the setoguro style of ceramics who became a Living National Treasure in the years after World War II.

At last Mameha came out from the back room, dressed exquisitely in a cream kimono with a water design at the hem. I turned and bowed very low on the mats while she drifted over to the table; and when she was there, she arranged herself on her knees opposite me, took a sip of tea the maid served to her, and then said this:

“Now… Chiyo, isn’t it? Why don’t you tell me how you managed to get out of your okiya this afternoon? I’m sure Mrs. Nitta doesn’t like it when her maids attend to personal business in the middle of the day.”

I certainly hadn’t expected this sort of question. In fact, I couldn’t think of anything at all to say, even though I knew it would be rude not to respond. Mameha just sipped at her tea and looked at me with a benign expression on her perfect, oval face. Finally she said:

“You think I’m trying to scold you. But I’m only interested to know if you’ve gotten yourself into trouble by coming here.”

I was very relieved to hear her say this. “No, ma’am,” I said. “I’m supposed to be on an errand fetching Kabuki magazines and shamisen strings.”

“Oh, well, I’ve got plenty of those,” she said, and then called her maid over and told her to fetch some and put them on the table before me. “When you go back to your okiya, take them with you, and no one will wonder where you’ve been. Now, tell me something. When I came to your okiya to pay my respects, I saw another girl your age.”

“That must have been Pumpkin. With a very round face?”

Mameha asked why I called her Pumpkin, and when I explained, she gave a laugh.

“This Pumpkin girl,” Mameha said, “how do she and Hatsumomo get along?”

“Well, ma’am,” I said, “I suppose Hatsumomo pays her no more attention than she would a leaf that has fluttered into the courtyard.”

“How very poetic… a leaf that has fluttered into the courtyard. Is that the way Hatsumomo treats you as well?”

I opened my mouth to speak, but the truth is, I wasn’t sure what to say. I knew very little about Mameha, and it would be improper to speak ill of Hatsumomo to someone outside the okiya. Mameha seemed to sense what I was thinking, for she said to me:

“You needn’t answer. I know perfectly well how Hatsumomo treats you: about like a serpent treats its next meal, I should think.”