Arthur Golden - Memoirs of a Geisha

I felt myself panicking as she stepped into her room. I thought of trying to wrestle the book from her hands… but then I remembered Mameha’s realization at the sumo tournament. To rush after Hatsumomo was the obvious thing. I’d be better off to wait until she began to relax, thinking she’d won, and then take the journal from her when she wasn’t expecting it. This seemed to me a fine idea… until a moment later when I had an image of her hiding it in a place I might never find.

By now she’d closed the door. I went to stand outside it and called out quietly, “Hatsumomo-san, I’m sorry if I seemed angry. May I come in?”

“No, you may not,” she said.

I slid the door open anyway. The room was in terrible disarray, because Hatsumomo had put things everywhere in her efforts at moving. The journal was sitting on the table while Hatsumomo held a towel against her foot. I had no idea how I would distract her, but I certainly didn’t intend to leave the room without the journal.

She may have had the personality of a water rat, but Hatsumomo was no fool. If she’d been sober, I wouldn’t even have tried to outsmart her right then. But considering her state at the moment… I looked around the floor at the piles of underclothing, bottles of perfume, and all the other things she’d scattered in disarray. The closet door was open, and the tiny safe where she kept her jewelry stood ajar; pieces were spilling out onto the mats as though she’d sat there earlier in the morning drinking and trying them on. And then one object caught my eye as clearly as a single star burning in a black sky.

It was an emerald obi brooch, the very one Hatsumomo had accused me of stealing years earlier, on the night I’d found her and her boyfriend in the maids’ room. I’d never expected to see it again. I walked directly to the closet and reached down to pluck it from among the jewelry lying there.

“What a wonderful idea!” Hatsumomo said. “Go ahead and steal a piece of my jewelry. Truthfully, I’d rather have the cash you’ll have to pay me.”

“I’m so pleased you don’t mind!” I told her. “But how much cash will I have to pay for this?”

As I said these words, I walked over and held the brooch up before her. The radiant smile she’d worn now faded, just as the darkness fades from a valley when the sun rises on it. In that moment, while Hatsumomo sat stunned, I simply reached down to the table with my other hand and took the journal away.

I had no notion how Hatsumomo would react, but I walked out the door and closed it behind me. I thought of going straight to Mother to show her what I’d found, but of course, I couldn’t very well go there with the journal in my hand. As quickly as I could, I slid open the door to the closet where in-season kimono were kept and stashed the journal on a shelf between two robes wrapped in tissue paper. It took no more than a few seconds; but all the while my back tingled from the sensation that at any moment Hatsumomo might open her door and spot me. After I’d shut the closet door again, I rushed into my room and began opening and closing the drawers to my makeup stand to give Hatsumomo the impression I’d hid the journal there.

When I came out into the hallway, she was watching me from the doorway of her room, wearing a little smile as though she found the whole situation amusing. I tried to look worried-which wasn’t too difficult-and carried the brooch with me into Mother’s room to lay it on the table before her. She put aside the magazine she was reading and held it up to admire it.

“This is a lovely piece,” she said, “but it won’t go far on the black market these days. No one pays much for jewels like this one.”

“I’m sure Hatsumomo will pay very dearly for it, Mother,” I said. “Do you remember the brooch I’m supposed to have stolen from her years ago, the one that was added to my debts? This is it. I’ve just found it on the floor near her jewelry box.”

“Do you know,” said Hatsumomo, who had come into the room and now stood behind me. “I believe Sayuri is right. That is the brooch I lost! Or at least, it looks like it. I never thought I’d see it again!”

“Yes, it’s very difficult to find things when you’re drunk all the time,” I said. “If only you’d looked in your jewelry box more closely.”

Mother put the brooch down on the table and went on glowering at Hatsumomo.

“I found it in her room,” Hatsumomo said. “She’d hidden it in her makeup stand.”

“Why were you looking through her makeup stand?” Mother said.

“I didn’t want to have to tell you this, Mother, but Sayuri left something on her table and I was trying to hide it for her. I know I should have brought it to you at once, but… she’s been keeping a journal, you see. She showed it to me last year. She’s written some very incriminating things about certain men, and… truthfully, there are some passages about you too, Mother.”

I thought of insisting it wasn’t true; but none of it mattered in any case. Hatsumomo was in trouble, and nothing she was going to say would change the situation. Ten years earlier when she had been the okiya’s principal earner, she probably could have accused me of anything she’d wanted. She could have claimed I’d eaten the tatami mats in her room, and Mother would have charged me the cost of new ones. But now at last the season had changed; Hatsumomo’s brilliant career was dying on the branch, while mine had begun to blossom. I was the daughter of the okiya and its prime geisha. I don’t think Mother even cared where the truth lay.

“There is no journal, Mother,” I said. “Hatsumomo is making it up.”

“Am I?” said Hatsumomo. “I’ll just go find it, then, and while Mother reads through it, you can tell her how I made it up.”

Hatsumomo went to my room, with Mother following. The hallway floor was a terrible mess. Not only had Hatsumomo broken a bottle and then stepped on it, she’d tracked ointment and blood all around the upstairs hall-and much worse, onto the tatami mats in her own room, Mother’s room, and now mine as well. She was kneeling at my dressing table when I looked in, closing the drawers very slowly and looking a bit defeated.

“What journal is Hatsumomo talking about?” Mother asked me.

“If there’s a journal, I’m certain Hatsumomo will find it,” I said.

At this, Hatsumomo put her hands into her lap and gave a little laugh as though the whole thing had been some sort of game, and she’d been cleverly outwitted.

“Hatsumomo,” Mother said to her, “you’ll repay Sayuri for the brooch you accused her of stealing. What’s more, I won’t have the tatami in this okiya defiled with blood. They’ll be replaced, and at your expense. This has been a very costly day for you, and it’s hardly past noon. Shall I hold off calculating the total, just in case you’re not quite finished?”

I don’t know if Hatsumomo heard what Mother said. She was too busy glaring at me, and with a look on her face I wasn’t accustomed to seeing.

If you’d asked me, while I was still a young woman, to tell you the turning point in my relationship with Hatsumomo, I would have said it was my mizuage . But even though it’s quite true that my mizuage lifted me onto a high shelf where Hatsumomo could no longer reach me, she and I might well have gone on living side by side until we were old women, if nothing else had happened between us. This is why the real turning point, as I’ve since come to see it, occurred the day when Hatsumomo read my journal, and I discovered the obi brooch she’d accused me of stealing.

By way of explaining why this is so, let me tell you something Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku once said during an evening at the Ichiriki Teahouse. I can’t pretend I was well acquainted with Admiral Yamamoto-who’s usually described as the father of the Japanese Imperial Navy-but I was privileged to attend parties with him on a number of occasions. He was a small man; but keep in mind that a stick of dynamite is small too. Parties always grew noisier after the Admiral arrived. That night, he and another man were in the final round of a drinking game, and had agreed that the loser would go buy a condom at the nearest pharmacy-just for the embarrassment of it, you understand; not for any other purpose. Of course, the Admiral ended up winning, and the whole crowd broke into cheers and applause.