Arthur Golden - Memoirs of a Geisha

“My goodness, has it been so long, Tatsumi?” she said to her maid. “I hardly recognize her.”

“I’m glad to hear you say it, ma’am,” Tatsumi replied. “I thought something had gone wrong with my eyes!”

I certainly wondered at the time what they were talking about. But evidently in the six months since I’d last seen them, I’d changed more than I realized. Mameha told me to turn my head this way and that, and kept saying over and over, “My goodness, she’s turned into quite a young woman!” At one point Tatsumi even made me stand and hold my arms out so she could measure my waist and hips with her hands, and then said to me, “Well, there’s no doubt a kimono will fit your body just like a sock fits a foot.” I’m sure she meant this as a compliment, for she had a kindly look on her face when she said it.

Finally Mameha asked Tatsumi to take me into the back room and put me into a proper kimono. I’d arrived in the blue and white cotton robe I’d worn that morning to my lessons at the school, but Tatsumi changed me into a dark blue silk covered with a design of tiny carriage wheels in shades of brilliant yellow and red. It wasn’t the most beautiful kimono you would ever see, but when I looked at myself in the full-length mirror as Tatsumi was tying a bright green obi into place around my waist, I found that except for my plain hairstyle, I might have been taken for a young apprentice geisha on her way to a party. I felt quite proud when I walked out of the room, and thought Mameha would gasp again, or something of the sort. But she only rose to her feet, tucked a handkerchief into her sleeve, and went directly to the door, where she slipped her feet into a green pair of lacquered zori and looked back over her shoulder at me.

“Well?” she said. “Aren’t you coming?”

I had no idea where we were going, but I was thrilled at the thought of being seen on the street with Mameha. The maid had put out a pair of lacquered zori for me, in a soft gray. I put them on and followed Mameha down the dark tunnel of the stairwell. As we stepped out onto the street, an elderly woman slowed to bow to Mameha and then, in almost the same movement, turned to bow to me. I scarcely knew what to think of this, for hardly anyone ever took notice of me on the street. The bright sunlight had blinded my eyes so much, I couldn’t make out whether or not I knew her. But I bowed back, and in a moment she was gone. I thought probably she was one of my teachers, but then an instant later the same thing happened again-this time with a young geisha I’d often admired, but who had never so much as glanced in my direction before.

We made our way up the street with nearly everyone we passed saying something to Mameha, or at the very least bowing to her, and then afterward giving me a little nod or bow as well. Several times I stopped to bow back, with the result that I fell a step or two behind Mameha. She could see the difficulty I was having, and took me to a quiet alleyway to show me the proper way of walking. My trouble, she explained, was that I hadn’t learned to move the upper half of my body independently of the lower half. When I needed to bow to someone, I stopped my feet. “Slowing the feet is a way of showing respect,” she said. “The more you slow up, the greater the respect. You might stop altogether to bow to one of your teachers, but for anyone else, don’t slow more than you need to, for heaven’s sake, or you’ll never get anywhere. Go along at a constant pace when you can, taking little steps to keep the bottom of your kimono fluttering. When a woman walks, she should give the impression of waves rippling over a sandbar.”

I practiced walking up and down the alley as Mameha had described, looking straight toward my feet to see if my kimono fluttered as it should. When Mameha was satisfied, we set out again.

Most of our greetings, I found, fell into one of two simple patterns. Young geisha, as we passed them, usually slowed or even stopped completely and gave Mameha a deep bow, to which Mameha responded with a kind word or two and a little nod; then the young geisha would give me something of a puzzled look and an uncertain bow, which I would return much more deeply-for I was junior to every woman we encountered. When we passed a middle-aged or elderly woman, however, Mameha nearly always bowed first; then the woman returned a respectful bow, but not as deep as Mameha’s, and afterward looked me up and down before giving me a little nod. I always responded to these nods with the deepest bows I could manage while keeping my feet in motion.

I told Mameha that afternoon about Pumpkin’s debut; and for months afterward I hoped she would say the time had come for my apprenticeship to begin as well. Instead, spring passed and summer too, without her saying anything of the sort. In contrast with the exciting life Pumpkin was now leading, I had only my lessons and my chores, as well as the fifteen or twenty minutes Mameha spent with me during the afternoons several times a week. Sometimes I sat in her apartment while she taught me about something I needed to know; but most often she dressed me in one of her kimono and walked me around Gion while running errands or calling on her fortune-teller or wig maker. Even when it rained and she had no errands to run, we walked under lacquered umbrellas, making our way from store to store to check when the new shipment of perfume would arrive from Italy, or whether a certain kimono repair was finished though it wasn’t scheduled to be completed for another week.

At first I thought perhaps Mameha took me with her so that she could teach me things like proper posture-for she was constantly rapping me on the back with her closed folding fan to make me stand straighter-and about how to behave toward people. Mameha seemed to know everyone, and always made a point of smiling or saying something kind, even to the most junior maids, because she understood well that she owed her exalted position to the people who thought highly of her. But then one day as we were walking out of a bookstore, I suddenly realized what she was really doing. She had no particular interest in going to the bookstore, or the wig maker, or the stationer. The errands weren’t especially important; and besides, she could have sent one of her maids instead of going herself. She ran these errands only so that people in Gion would see us strolling the streets together. She was delaying my debut to give everyone time to take notice of me.

One sunny October afternoon we set out from Mameha’s apartment and headed downstream along the banks of the Shirakawa, watching the leaves of the cherry trees flutter down onto the water. A great many other people were out strolling for just the same reason, and as you would expect, all of them greeted Mameha. In nearly every case, at the same time they greeted Mameha, they greeted me.

“You’re getting to be rather well known, don’t you think?” she said to me.

“I think most people would greet even a sheep, if it were walking alongside Mameha-san.”

“Especially a sheep,” she said. “That would be so unusual. But really, I hear a great many people asking about the girl with the lovely gray eyes. They haven’t learned your name, but it makes no difference. You won’t be called Chiyo much longer anyway.”

“Does Mameha-san mean to say-”

“I mean to say that I’ve been speaking with Waza-san”-this was the name of her fortune-teller-“and he has suggested the third day in November as a suitable time for your debut.”

Mameha stopped to watch me as I stood there still as a tree and with my eyes the size of rice crackers. I didn’t cry out or clap my hands, but I was so delighted I couldn’t speak. Finally I bowed to Mameha and thanked her.