Arthur Golden - Memoirs of a Geisha

“You’re going to make a fine geisha,” she said, “but you’ll make an even better one if you put some thought into the sorts of statements you make with your eyes.”

“I’ve never been aware of making any statement with them at all,” I said.

“They’re the most expressive part of a woman’s body, especially in your case. Stand here a moment, and I’ll show you.”

Mameha walked around the corner, leaving me alone in the quiet alleyway. A moment later she strolled out and walked right past me with her eyes to one side. I had the impression she felt afraid of what might happen if she looked in my direction.

“Now, if you were a man,” she said, “what would you think?”

“I’d think you were concentrating so hard on avoiding me that you couldn’t think about anything else.”

“Isn’t it possible I was just looking at the rainspouts along the base of the houses?”

“Even if you were, I thought you were avoiding looking at me.”

“That’s just what I’m saying. A girl with a stunning profile will never accidentally give a man the wrong message with it. But men are going to notice your eyes and imagine you’re giving messages with them even when you aren’t. Now watch me once more.”

Mameha went around the corner again, and this time came back with her eyes to the ground, walking in a particularly dreamy manner. Then as she neared me her eyes rose to meet mine for just an instant, and very quickly looked away. I must say, I felt an electric jolt; if I’d been a man, I would have thought she’d given herself over very briefly to strong feelings she was struggling to hide.

“If I can say things like this with ordinary eyes like mine,” she told me, “think how much more you can say with yours. It wouldn’t surprise me if you were able to make a man faint right here on the street.”

“Mameha-san!” I said. “If I had the power to make a man faint, I’m sure I’d be aware of it by now.”

“I’m quite surprised you aren’t. Let’s agree, then, that you’ll be ready to make your debut as soon as you’ve stopped a man in his tracks just by flicking your eyes at him.”

I was so eager to make my debut that even if Mameha had challenged me to make a tree fall by looking at it, I’m sure I would have tried. I asked her if she would be kind enough to walk with me while I experimented on a few men, and she was happy to do it. My first encounter was with a man so old that, really, he looked like a kimono full of bones. He was making his way slowly up the street with the help of a cane, and his glasses were smeared so badly with grime that it wouldn’t have surprised me if he had walked right into the corner of a building. He didn’t notice me at all; so we continued toward Shijo Avenue. Soon I saw two businessmen in Western suits, but I had no better luck with them. I think they recognized Mameha, or perhaps they simply thought she was prettier than I was, for in any case, they never took their eyes off her.

I was about to give up when I saw a delivery boy of perhaps twenty, carrying a tray stacked with lunch boxes. In those days, a number of the restaurants around Gion made deliveries and sent a boy around during the afternoon to pick up the empty boxes. Usually they were stacked in a crate that was either carried by hand or strapped to a bicycle; I don’t know why this young man was using a tray. In any case, he was half a block away, walking toward me. I could see that Mameha was looking right at him, and then she said:

“Make him drop the tray.”

Before I could make up my mind whether she was joking, she turned up a side street and was gone.

I don’t think it’s possible for a girl of fourteen-or for a woman of any age-to make a young man drop something just by looking at him in a certain way; I suppose such things may happen in movies and books. I would have given up without even trying, if I hadn’t noticed two things. First, the young man was already eyeing me as a hungry cat might eye a mouse; and second, most of the streets in Gion didn’t have curbs, but this one did, and the delivery boy was walking in the street not far from it. If I could crowd him so that he had to step up onto the sidewalk and stumble over the curb, he might drop the tray. I began by keeping my gaze to the ground in front of me, and then tried to do the very thing Mameha had done to me a few minutes earlier. I let my eyes rise until they met the young man’s for an instant, and then I quickly looked away. After a few more steps I did the same thing again. By this time he was watching me so intently that probably he’d forgotten about the tray on his arm, much less the curb at his feet. When we were very close, I changed my course ever so slightly to begin crowding him, so that he wouldn’t be able to pass me without stepping over the curb onto the sidewalk, and then I looked him right in the eye. He was trying to move out of my way; and just as I had hoped, his feet tangled themselves on the curb, and he fell to one side scattering the lunch boxes on the sidewalk. Well, I couldn’t help laughing! And I’m happy to say that the young man began to laugh too. I helped him pick up his boxes, gave him a little smile before he bowed to me more deeply than any man had ever bowed to me before, and then went on his way.

I met up with Mameha a moment later, who had seen it all.

“I think perhaps you’re as ready now as you’ll ever need to be,” she said. And with that, she led me across the main avenue to the apartment of Waza-san, her fortune-teller, and set him to work finding auspicious dates for all the various events that would lead up to my debut-such as going to the shrine to announce my intentions to the gods, and having my hair done for the first time, and performing the ceremony that would make sisters of Mameha and me.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. What I had wanted for so long had finally come to pass, and oh, how my stomach churned! The idea of dressing in the exquisite clothing I admired and presenting myself to a roomful of men was enough to make my palms glisten with sweat. Every time I thought of it, I felt a most delicious nervousness that tingled all the way from my knees into my chest. I imagined myself inside a teahouse, sliding open the door of a tatami room. The men turned their heads to look at me; and of course, I saw the Chairman there among them. Sometimes I imagined him alone in the room, wearing not a Western-style business suit, but the Japanese dress so many men wore in the evenings to relax. In his fingers, as smooth as driftwood, he held a sake cup; more than anything else in the world, I wanted to pour it full for him and feel his eyes upon me as I did.

I may have been no more than fourteen, but it seemed to me I’d lived two lives already. My new life was still beginning, though my old life had come to an end some time ago. Several years had passed since I’d learned the sad news about my family, and it was amazing to me how completely the landscape of my mind had changed. We all know that a winter scene, though it may be covered over one day, with even the trees dressed in shawls of snow, will be unrecognizable the following spring. Yet I had never imagined such a thing could occur within our very selves. When I first learned the news of my family, it was as though I’d been covered over by a blanket of snow. But in time the terrible coldness had melted away to reveal a landscape I’d never seen before or even imagined. I don’t know if this will make sense to you, but my mind on the eve of my debut was like a garden in which the flowers have only begun to poke their faces up through the soil, so that it is still impossible to tell how things will look. I was brimming with excitement; and in this garden of my mind stood a statue, precisely in the center. It was an image of the geisha I wanted to become.