Arthur Golden - Memoirs of a Geisha

This seemed to have the effect Mameha wanted. Dr. Crab sat in silence a moment. Finally he said, “I hardly know the proper thing to do. This is the first time I’ve found myself in such a peculiar position.”

“Please accept the ekubo , Doctor, and let’s put Hatsumomo’s foolishness behind us.”

“I’ve often heard of dishonest girls who arrange mizuage for the time of month when a man will be easily deceived. I’m a doctor, you know. I won’t be fooled so readily.”

“But no one is trying to fool you!”

He sat just a moment longer and then stood with his shoulders hunched to march, elbow-first, from the room. I was too busy bowing good-bye to see whether he took the ekubo with him; but happily, after he and Mameha had left, I looked at the table and saw they were no longer there.

When Mameha mentioned my role on the stage, I thought she was making up a story on the spot to explain why Hatsumomo might lie about me. So you can imagine my surprise the next day when I learned she’d been telling the truth. Or if it wasn’t exactly the truth, Mameha felt confident that it would be true before the end of the week.

At that time, in the mid-1930s, probably as many as seven or eight hundred geisha worked in Gion; but because no more than sixty were needed each spring for the production of Dances of the Old Capital , the competition for roles destroyed more than a few friendships over the years. Mameha hadn’t been truthful when she said that she’d taken a role from Hatsumomo; she was one of the very few geisha in Gion guaranteed a solo role every year. But it was quite true that Hatsumomo had been desperate to see Pumpkin on the stage. I don’t know where she got the idea such a thing was possible; Pumpkin may have earned the apprentice’s award and received other honors besides, but she never excelled at dance. However, a few days before I presented ekubo to the Doctor, a seventeen-year-old apprentice with a solo role had fallen down a flight of stairs and hurt her leg. The poor girl was devastated, but every other apprentice in Gion was happy to take advantage of her misfortune by offering to fill the role. It was this role that in the end went to me. I was only fifteen at the time, and had never danced on the stage before-which isn’t to say I wasn’t ready to. I’d spent so many evenings in the okiya, rather than going from party to party like most apprentices, and Auntie often played the shamisen so that I could practice dance. This was why I’d already been promoted to the eleventh level by the age of fifteen, even though I probably possessed no more talent as a dancer than anyone else. If Mameha hadn’t been so determined to keep me hidden from the public eye because of Hatsumomo, I might even have had a role in the seasonal dances the previous year.

This role was given to me in mid-March, so I had only a month or so to rehearse it. Fortunately my dance teacher was very helpful and often worked with me privately during the afternoons. Mother didn’t find out what had happened-Hatsumomo certainly wasn’t going to tell her-until several days afterward, when she heard the rumor during a game of mah-jongg. She came back to the okiya and asked if it was true I’d been given the role. After I told her it was, she walked away with the sort of puzzled look she might have worn if her dog Taku had added up the columns in her account books for her.

Of course, Hatsumomo was furious, but Mameha wasn’t concerned about it. The time had come, as she put it, for us to toss Hatsumomo from the ring.

Late one afternoon a week or so later, Mameha came up to me during a break in rehearsals, very excited about something. It seemed that on the previous day, the Baron had mentioned to her quite casually that he would be giving a party during the coming weekend for a certain kimono maker named Arashino. The Baron owned one of the best-known collections of kimono in all of Japan. Most of his pieces were antiques, but every so often he bought a very fine work by a living artist. His decision to purchase a piece by Arashino had prompted him to have a party.

“I thought I recognized the name Arashino,” Mameha said to me, “but when the Baron first mentioned it, I couldn’t place it. He’s one of Nobu’s very closest friends! Don’t you see the possibilities? I didn’t think of it until today, but I’m going to persuade the Baron to invite both Nobu and the Doctor to his little party. The two of them are certain to dislike each other. When the bidding begins for your mizuage , you can be sure that neither will sit still, knowing the prize could be taken by the other.”

I was feeling very tired, but for Mameha’s sake I clapped my hands in excitement and said how grateful I was to her for coming up with such a clever plan. And I’m sure it was a clever plan; but the real evidence of her cleverness was that she felt certain she’d have no difficulty persuading the Baron to invite these two men to his party. Clearly they would both be willing to come-in Nobu’s case because the Baron was an investor in Iwamura Electric, though I didn’t know it at the time; and in Dr. Crab’s case because… well, because the Doctor considered himself something of an aristocrat, even though he probably had only one obscure ancestor with any aristocratic blood, and would regard it as his duty to attend any function the Baron invited him to. But as to why the Baron would agree to invite either of them, I don’t know. He didn’t approve of Nobu; very few men did. As for Dr. Crab, the Baron had never met him before and might as well have invited someone off the street.

But Mameha had extraordinary powers of persuasion, as I knew. The party was arranged, and she convinced my dance instructor to release me from rehearsals the following Saturday so I could attend it. The event was to begin in the afternoon and run through dinner-though Mameha and I were to arrive after the party was under way. So it was about three o’clock when we finally climbed into a rickshaw and headed out to the Baron’s estate, located at the base of the hills in the northeast of the city. It was my first visit to anyplace so luxurious, and I was quite overwhelmed by what I saw; because if you think of the attention to detail brought to bear in making a kimono, well, that same sort of attention had been brought to the design and care of the entire estate where the Baron lived. The main house dated back to the time of his grandfather, but the gardens, which struck me as a giant brocade of textures, had been designed and built by his father. Apparently the house and gardens never quite fit together until the Baron’s older brother-the year before his assassination-had moved the location of the pond, and also created a moss garden with stepping-stones leading from the moon-viewing pavilion on one side of the house. Black swans glided across the pond with a bearing so proud they made me feel ashamed to be such an ungainly creature as a human being.

We were to begin by preparing a tea ceremony the men would join when they were ready; so I was very puzzled when we passed through the main gate and made our way not to an ordinary tea pavilion, but straight toward the edge of the pond to board a small boat. The boat was about the size of a narrow room. Most of it was occupied with wooden seats along the edges, but at one end stood a miniature pavilion with its own roof sheltering a tatami platform. It had actual walls with paper screens slid open for air, and in the very center was a square wooden cavity filled with sand, which served as the brazier where Mameha lit cakes of charcoal to heat the water in a graceful iron teakettle. While she was doing this, I tried to make myself useful by arranging the implements for the ceremony. Already I was feeling quite nervous, and then Mameha turned to me after she had put the kettle on the fire and said: