Arthur Golden - Memoirs of a Geisha

“A man,” I said.

“All right, then. Pour me a cup again.”

I did so, and Mameha practically broke her neck trying to peer up my sleeve as I held my arm out.

“How do you like that?” she asked me. “Because that’s exactly what’s going to happen if you hold your arm so high.”

I tried pouring again with my arm a bit lower. This time, she pretended to yawn and then turned and began a conversation with an imaginary geisha sitting on the other side of her.

“I think you’re trying to tell me that I bored you,” I said. “But how can I bore you just pouring a cup of tea?”

“You may not want me looking up your sleeve, but that doesn’t mean you have to act prissy! A man is interested in only one thing. Believe me, you’ll understand all too soon what I’m talking about. In the meantime, you can keep him happy by letting him think he’s permitted to see parts of your body no one else can see. If an apprentice geisha acts the way you did just then-pouring tea just like a maid would-the poor man will lose all hope. Try it again, but first show me your arm.”

So I drew my sleeve up above my elbow and held my arm out for her to see. She took it and turned it in her hands to look at the top and the bottom.

“You have a lovely arm; and beautiful skin. You should make sure every man who sits near you sees it at least once.”

So I went on, pouring tea again and again, until Mameha felt satisfied that I drew my sleeve out of the way enough to show my arm without being too obvious what I was doing. I looked laughable if I hiked my sleeve up to my elbow; the trick was to act like I was merely pulling it out of the way, while at the same time drawing it a few finger-widths above my wrist to give a view of my forearm. Mameha said the prettiest part of the arm was the underside, so I must always be sure to hold the teapot in such a way that the man saw the bottom of my arm rather than the top.

She asked me to do it again, this time pretending I was pouring tea for the mistress of the Ichiriki. I showed my arm in just the same way, and Mameha made a face at once.

“For heaven’s sake, I’m a woman,” she said. “Why are you showing me your arm that way? Probably you’re just trying to make me angry.”

“Angry?”

“What else am I supposed to think? You’re showing me how youthful and beautiful you are, while I’m already old and decrepit. Unless you were doing it just to be vulgar…”

“How is it vulgar?”

“Why else have you made such a point of letting me see the underside of your arm? You may as well show me the bottom of your foot or the inside of your thigh. If I happen to catch a glimpse of something here or there, well, that’s all right. But to make such a point of showing it to me!”

So I poured a few more times, until I’d learned a more demure and suitable method. Whereupon Mameha announced that we were ready to go out into Gion together.

Already by this time, I’d been wearing the complete ensemble of an apprentice geisha for several hours. Now I had to try walking all around Gion in the shoes we call okobo . They’re quite tall and made of wood, with lovely, lacquered thongs to hold the foot in place. Most people think it very elegant the way they taper down like a wedge, so that the footprint at the bottom is about half the size of the top. But I found it hard to walk delicately in them. I felt as if I had roof tiles strapped to the bottoms of my feet.

Mameha and I made perhaps twenty stops at various okiya and teahouses, though we spent no more than a few minutes at most of them. Usually a maid answered the door, and Mameha asked politely to speak with the mistress; then when the mistress came, Mameha said to her, “I’d like to introduce my new younger sister, Sayuri,” and then I bowed very low and said, “I beg your favor, please, Mistress.” The mistress and Mameha would chat for a moment, and then we left. At a few of the places we were asked in for tea and spent perhaps five minutes. But I was very reluctant to drink tea and only wet my lips instead. Using the toilet while wearing kimono is one of the most difficult things to learn, and I wasn’t at all sure I’d learned it adequately just yet.

In any case, within an hour I was so exhausted, it was all I could do to keep from groaning as I walked along. But we kept up our pace. In those days, I suppose there were probably thirty or forty first-class teahouses in Gion and another hundred or so of a somewhat lower grade. Of course we couldn’t visit them all. We went to the fifteen or sixteen where Mameha was accustomed to entertaining. As for okiya, there must have been hundreds of those, but we went only to the few with which Mameha had some sort of relationship.

Soon after three o’clock we were finished. I would have liked nothing better than to go back to the okiya to fall asleep for a long while. But Mameha had plans for me that very evening. I was to attend my first engagement as a novice geisha.

“Go take a bath,” she said to me. “You’ve been perspiring a good deal, and your makeup hasn’t held up.”

It was a warm fall day, you see, and I’d been working very hard.

Back at the okiya, Auntie helped me undress and then took pity on me by letting me nap for a half hour. I was back in her good graces again, now that my foolish mistakes were behind me and my future seemed even brighter than Pumpkin’s. She woke me after my nap, and I rushed to the bathhouse as quickly as I could. By five, I had finished dressing and applying my makeup. I felt terribly excited, as you can imagine, because for years I’d watched Hatsumomo, and lately Pumpkin, go off in the afternoons and evenings looking beautiful, and now at last my turn had come. The event that evening, the first I would ever attend, was to be a banquet at the Kansai International Hotel. Banquets are stiffly formal affairs, with all the guests arranged shoulder to shoulder in a sort of U-shape around the outside of a big tatami room, and trays of food sitting on little stands in front of them. The geisha, who are there to entertain, move around the center of the room-inside the U-shape made by all the trays, I mean-and spend only a few minutes kneeling before each guest to pour sake and chat. It isn’t what you’d call an exciting affair; and as a novice, my role was less exciting even than Mameha’s. I stayed to one side of her like a shadow. Whenever she introduced herself, I did the same, bowing very low and saying, “My name is Sayuri. I’m a novice and beg your indulgence.” After that I said nothing more, and no one said anything to me.

Toward the end of the banquet, the doors at one side of the room were slid open, and Mameha and another geisha performed a dance together, known as Chi-yo no Tomo -“Friends Everlasting.” It’s a lovely piece about two devoted women meeting again after a long absence. Most of the men sat picking their teeth through it; they were executives of a large company that made rubber valves, or some such thing, and had gathered in Kyoto for their annual banquet. I don’t think a single one of them would have known the difference between dancing and sleepwalking. But for my part, I was entranced. Geisha in Gion always use a folding fan as a prop when dancing, and Mameha in particular was masterful in her movements. At first she closed the fan and, while turning her body in a circle, waved it delicately with her wrist to suggest a stream of water flowing past. Then she opened it, and it became a cup into which her companion poured sake for her to drink. As I say, the dance was lovely, and so was the music, which was played on the shamisen by a terribly thin geisha with small, watery eyes.

A formal banquet generally lasts no more than two hours; so by eight o’clock we were out on the street again. I was just turning to thank Mameha and bid her good night, when she said to me, “Well, I’d thought of sending you back to bed now, but you seem to be so full of energy. I’m heading to the Komoriya Teahouse. Come along with me and have your first taste of an informal party. We may as well start showing you around as quickly as we can.”