Arthur Golden - Memoirs of a Geisha

“Do you think for a moment I would?” she said. “I’m not even going to tell it to my own maid. Just be very sure to keep Nobu-san interested in you. Everything depends on him, and on one other man as well.”

“What other man?”

“A man you haven’t met yet. Now don’t talk about it any further! I’ve probably said more than I should already. It’s a great thing you met Nobu-san today. He may just prove to be your rescuer.”

I must admit I felt a sickness inside when I heard this. If I was to have a rescuer, I wanted it to be the Chairman and no one else.

Now that I knew the identity of the Chairman, I began that very night to read every discarded news magazine I could find in the hopes of learning more about him. Within a week I’d accumulated such a stack of them in my room that Auntie gave me a look as if I’d lost my mind. I did find mention of him in a number of articles, but only in passing, and none told me the sorts of things I really wanted to know. Still, I went on picking up every magazine I found poking out of a trash basket, until one day I came upon a stack of old papers tied in a bundle behind one of the teahouses. Buried in it was a two-year-old issue of a news magazine that happened to feature an article on Iwamura Electric.

It seemed that Iwamura Electric had celebrated its twentieth anniversary in April of 1931. It astonishes me even now to think of it, but this was the same month when I met the Chairman on the banks of the Shirakawa Stream; I would have seen his face in all the magazines, if only I’d looked in them. Now that I knew a date to search for, I managed over the course of time to find many more articles about the anniversary. Most of them came from a collection of junk thrown out after the death of the old granny who lived in an okiya across the alley.

The Chairman had been born in 1890, as I learned, which meant that despite his gray hair he’d been a little over forty when I met him. I’d formed the impression that day he was probably chairman of an unimportant company, but I was quite wrong. Iwamura Electric wasn’t as big as Osaka Electric-its chief rival in western Japan, according to all the articles. But the Chairman and Nobu, because of their celebrated partnership, were much better known than the chiefs of much larger companies. In any case, Iwamura Electric was considered more innovative and had a better reputation.

At seventeen the Chairman had gone to work at a small electric company in Osaka. Soon he was supervising the crew that installed wiring for machinery at factories in the area. The demand for electric lighting in households and offices was growing at this time, and during the evenings the Chairman designed a fixture to allow the use of two lightbulbs in a socket built for only one. The director of the company wouldn’t build it, however, and so at the age of twenty-two, in 1912, shortly after marrying, the Chairman left to establish his own company.

For a few years things were difficult; then in 1914, the Chairman’s new company won the electrical wiring contract for a new building on a military base in Osaka. Nobu was still in the military at this time, since his war wounds made it difficult for him to find a job anywhere else. He was given the task of overseeing the work done by the new Iwamura Electric Company. He and the Chairman quickly became friends, and when the Chairman offered him a job the following year, Nobu took it.

The more I read about their partnership, the more I understood just how well suited they really were to each other. Nearly all the articles showed the same photograph of them, with the Chairman in a stylish three-piece suit of heavy wool, holding in his hand the ceramic two-bulb socket that had been the company’s first product. He looked as if someone had just handed it to him and he hadn’t yet decided what he was going to do with it. His mouth was slightly open, showing his teeth, and he stared at the camera with an almost menacing look, as though he were about to throw the fixture. By contrast, Nobu stood beside him, half a head shorter and at full attention, with his one hand in a fist at his side. He wore a morning coat and pin-striped trousers. His scarred face was completely without expression, and his eyes looked sleepy. The Chairman-perhaps because of his prematurely gray hair and the difference in their sizes-might almost have been Nobu’s father, though he was only two years older. The articles said that while the Chairman was responsible for the company’s growth and direction, Nobu was responsible for managing it. He was the less glamorous man with the less glamorous job, but apparently he did it so well that the Chairman often said publicly that the company would never have survived several crises without Nobu’s talents. It was Nobu who’d brought in a group of investors and saved the company from ruin in the early 1920s. “I owe Nobu a debt I can never repay,” the Chairman was quoted more than once as saying.

Several weeks passed, and then one day I received a note to come to Mameha’s apartment the following afternoon. By this time I’d grown accustomed to the priceless kimono ensembles that Mameha’s maid usually laid out for me; but when I arrived and began changing into an autumn-weight silk of scarlet and yellow, which showed leaves scattered in a field of golden grasses, I was taken aback to find a tear in the back of the gown large enough to put two fingers through. Mameha hadn’t yet returned, but I took the robe in my arms and went to speak with her maid.

“Tatsumi-san,” I said, “the most upsetting thing… this kimono is ruined.”

“It isn’t ruined, miss. It needs to be repaired is all. Mistress borrowed it this morning from an okiya down the street.”

“She must not have known,” I said. “And with my reputation for ruining kimono, she’ll probably think-”

“Oh, she knows it’s torn,” Tatsumi interrupted. “In fact, the underrobe is torn as well, in just the same place.” I’d already put on the cream-colored underrobe, and when I reached back and felt in the area of my thigh, I saw that Tatsumi was right.

“Last year an apprentice geisha caught it by accident on a nail,” Tatsumi told me. “But Mistress was very clear that she wanted you to put it on.”

This made very little sense to me; but I did as Tatsumi said. When at last Mameha rushed in, I went to ask her about it while she touched up her makeup.

“I told you that according to my plan,” she said, “two men will be important to your future. You met Nobu a few weeks ago. The other man has been out of town until now, but with the help of this torn kimono, you’re about to meet him. That sumo wrestler gave me such a wonderful idea! I can hardly wait to see how Hatsumomo reacts when you come back from the dead. Do you know what she said to me the other day? She couldn’t thank me enough for taking you to the exhibition. It was worth all her trouble getting there, she said, just to see you making big eyes at ‘Mr. Lizard.’ I’m sure she’ll leave you alone when you entertain him, unless it’s to drop by and have a look for herself. In fact, the more you talk about Nobu around her, the better-though you’re not to mention a word about the man you’ll meet this afternoon.”

I began to feel sick inside when I heard this, even as I tried to seem pleased at what she’d said; because you see, a man will never have an intimate relationship with a geisha who has been the mistress of a close associate. One afternoon in a bathhouse not many months earlier, I’d listened as a young woman tried to console another geisha who’d just learned that her new danna would be the business partner of the man she’d dreamed about. It had never occurred to me as I watched her that I might one day be in the same position myself.