I composed a look of sympathy.
“Because,” she said, and now a look crossed her crabbed face, a wistful look, a look of hope followed closely by one of defiance, “my daughter . . . we sent her away. To my parents. She cannot live here. She cannot even come to visit, surrounded by all this lechery. Only if he runs a clean shop will she ever see her father again.” Kana’s eyes welled, and she blotted the figures she was making in the long expense column. “Otherwise, we will close the brothel. Just close it down. I am thinking of starting a rice shop instead. That at least would be profitable.” She pulled her handkerchief out of her sleeve and wiped her eyes. She touched my arm. I had listened.
I tipped my head toward the stairs. It wasn’t allowed. “Can I go?”
“Run along.”
I
T WAS LATE
morning, a quiet time in that world, and upstairs Shino and the girls were practicing their “dance.”
They had reason now. There was not so much laughter. They walked like tigers, soft-footed, the way she told them to. Their metal hairpins—those that in all the pictures stuck out of their piled-up hair, indicating their status in the hierarchy (the more hairpins, the more you cost)—were expertly hidden inside their wrists, pushed into the sleeves of their kimonos. Their eyes were fierce. Shino led. She glided and thrust her hands into the eyes, the ears (one on each side), the soft hollow under the chin, the heart of her invisible opponent. Jab, jab, jab, block, punch, turn—quickly, like a bird pecking, in, out—and then the pins were invisible again, shrugged away.
“Do not hesitate. If you strike, strike to kill. If you can’t succeed, don’t go forth. If you go forth with ambivalence, you will not succeed.” She moved so smoothly her unpinned hair lay flat over her shoulders and undisturbed down her back. She showed no effort; her step and her long spine were elegant. She was a good teacher—methodical, patient, and firm. I stood there, loving her. Maybe she didn’t suit the stated requirements, but she was beautiful.
A long, exhaled hiss marked the end of the
kata.
The girls relaxed their fierce faces. Shino nodded my way. She had known I was there. Of course she had—felt sweat off me, probably smelled the road and even the saltwater, maybe my longing for her. Sensing was part of her skill. She bent her neck in mock deference: I was still dressed as a boy. In her eyes I saw she was glad we were back.
“Ei! Just in time. You can help us. Let’s see how strong you are,” she said. “Reach out and strike me. You’re going to try to force me backward.”
I reached out. I put my hands on her shoulders. I pushed backward. She was just a whippet, thin as a stray dog, but long. She had her hairpins at my throat in a flash; I didn’t even see her move. One elbow had blocked my hands, and the other fist was under my ribs. I was off balance and fell away from her.
The courtesans clapped discreetly. Then they kicked the tails of their kimonos out from under their feet and got to work. They tried blocking and punching, making it all look like noble deportment. They sank to one knee in the usual way, head bowed, but thrust one forearm in a block as they rose and slid the other hand, pin extended under the middle finger, deep under the ribs of this imaginary man. They rose and brought their hands together, pins out so they could stick directly into a man’s ears while they knocked his chin with a knee.
“Keep your weight forward. Use your center—surge up but stay in one small knot of force,” Shino was saying. “Then you will get him away from you. Don’t let your arms stretch out so he can twist one; keep your elbows in.”
We were carried away with ourselves. We didn’t hear Jimi in the hall. Nor did Shino sense his entry. She failed her own lesson. We all failed the lesson. He grabbed my shirt—thinking I was a boy, I suppose—and threw me backward. He collared Shino, clenching her kimono in his fist and shoving it into her throat.
“What the hell are you doing?”
The prostitutes stayed in role. Whimpering and squealing like so many little pigs, they dropped to their knees and pitched forward in deep bows, hiding their faces. Their hands dug comically in the heaps of hair to put their hairpins back in place. Except for Shino.
“We are having our dance lesson,” she said calmly, seeming not to notice that she was being choked. She did not look down. She gazed at Jimi, her black eyes serene. There was that unquenched thing in them again that I’d seen the first time I met her, when Tsutaya insulted her. I suddenly wondered what her real name was, the girl who saw no reason to submit, and who had bought herself this sentence.
“Dance lesson!”
Jimi did not see into the depths of her eyes. He was not a subtle man. But he sniffed something; he got a whiff of it. He was a big fish in the waters of other people’s helplessness, a predator. But for a brief instant, his power over the girls wavered. A larger shadow passed over him. His eyes scoured Shino. He saw only a
yakko.
He could not see his prostitutes as capable of anything. If he had imagined they were learning self-defense, he would have laughed. He knew something was off balance. But he could not grasp that it was him.
He lifted his right hand and slapped Shino across the face. A sharp tool in his hand, a blade to cut his tobacco, sliced her jaw. There was no blood at first. Then it seeped out the edges of the clean cut and stood.
She swayed. She had no other reaction.
He loosened his hand from her collar.
The blood filled the gash and slowly, minutely, began to overflow. He examined it with mild interest. I knew what he was hoping—that he hadn’t marked her and brought her value down. “You’ve done something to your face,” he murmured.
Shino tidied her kimono and twisted her heavy hair rapidly, pinning it in place. Without his noticing, she edged out of range. Then she touched her cheek.
“I am so sorry. It’s a rather wild dance,” she murmured. “It’s meant to follow the drinking competition. It occurs near the end of an evening, as a prelude. That’s why the hair is loose.” She began to put her pins back.
The others remained on their faces. I was on the floor myself; I didn’t want to see.
He must have thought she got off too easily. “Insolent bitch,” he said, lunging forward to take her elbow and twist it behind her back. But Shino was not there. He lost his balance. She knelt, slipping her knee behind his. He tumbled over her onto his side.
For a minute he lay there. Impossible to say how it had happened.
Shino was kneeling beside his head. “I am so very sorry,” she said, “so clumsy. It is my mistake.”
He might have exploded, beat her, if she showed nerves. But she didn’t. “I only meant to bow to you, but as I moved forward you did too, and we collided. I do apologize. I must have caused you to tumble. Please, let me help you . . .”
She looked at me over his back, and in this moment, when her life could have ended, when her life did, in fact, take a nasty turn, I swear she raised one eyebrow. Then she cocked her head: get out!
I ran. Street urchin with the hair of a boy, no one cared to stop me.
Mitsu finally came back to the tattoo shop where my father and I waited. She said Shino was lucky.
“She was not hurt.”
“Not hurt?”
“Only a scratch. It will heal in no time.”
“Only Jimi was hurt.
Izn it?
” I said, to make my father laugh. He didn’t.
“What else? Give us the news.”
But Mitsu was in no hurry. She was not going to give up her moment in the spotlight so easily. She sighed and smoothed her hair, asked for tea; Waki brought it, dainty and concerned. My father wore a look of stone—not allowed pity, not allowed fear.
“She was lucky. Oh, she was lucky. He could have killed her. He may yet have scarred her for life. Unknown how it will come out, that cut.
Izn it?
As it is, she is only—” Mitsu took a giant breath, stretched her eyes and pushed them out, forced her lips down at the corners, and blew out a big O.
“She is what?” Hokusai stood on one foot and then the other. What he could not show in his face he showed in his calf muscles, his thighs, his arms and fists; they clenched and unclenched. I had been vomiting. It was my fault; I knew it was my fault. I wished she had killed Jimi. I was sure she could have, with those hairpins. But I would never tell.
“She is bruised. Where he beat her. Around her arms and back. Where it will not damage her worth. The others are caring for her. They have sent for herbs and bandages. They have secured a spell: a paper on which is written a list of each of the grand shrines of Ise. She has eaten this, and the bleeding has stopped.”
It seemed very recent and accurate news.
My father paced. He knew something of Western medicine and did not believe in spells. On the other hand, he did not disbelieve them either.
“How do you know this, Mitsu?” Hokusai squinted.
Mitsu knew everything about everyone. She never had to explain. She looked wounded. Did we not trust her account?
“I have my ways,” she said. “I have been in the district a long time. Longer than you have. Longer than any of you.
“She was teaching the others to dance. To be graceful, you know. Kana, she’s my friend, the
yarite.
I knew her when she was only a poor-class prostitute
.
Kana feels guilty. She encouraged her. Shino was only trying to help. But the dance got rather wild. Jimi thought they were plotting somehow. Kana protested Shino’s innocence. She truly did.”
Mitsu looked very important. Very sober. “Kana has saved Shino’s life. She will be punished for insolence only, even though Jimi somehow—
inexplicably
—hurt his back as he was attempting to stop the commotion.” Mitsu stretched up her terrible eyebrows and pulled down the edges of her mouth. Like a villain in a Kabuki poster, she was. She was lavish with the horror of her message.
“All the same, he tied her to a post and threatened her with his whip. He punched her. The courtesans were all crying, begging him to stop. Can you imagine?
They were only dancing.
What possessed the man?”
I knew what had possessed him: that serene and inner defiance in Shino’s eyes. She had stood up to him, and in such an elegant way that it made him feel stupid.
“And what could the man do?” Mitsu could be heard repeating to all and sundry. “His prostitutes all stood up for her. They said they were all at fault, and if he punished her, he must punish all of them. And he couldn’t punish them all without going without a week’s income, maybe even ruining his business. I know because I’m a businesswoman too. He had to listen, especially to Hana-ogi.”
We were unfreezing, my father and I.
“That is all very well, but . . . but . . .” The eyebrows were working, the eyes popping, the lips stretching. I cursed her theatricality. I wanted the news as calmly as I could have it. “She won’t escape unharmed. She won’t get out of this one. You wait. This is not over. He hates her, always did. She’s a troublemaker.
Izn it?
Even now he is walking down there”—she jerked her head to the far end of the Yoshiwara, toward the low-class canalside brothels—“looking for a good price for her.”
In an hour the news came to us: she was sold.
“Her new owner is very mean,” Mitsu said, “and the women do not look healthy.” Kind though she was, you could see the gleam in her eye as she fed on our suffering. “But it is not all bad,” she added cheerfully. “Now the blind masseur can afford her. You know he has been in love with her for years.”
W
E WAITED A
week and then went at twilight to Shino’s new brothel.
It was a two-story house, flimsy and unpainted, on a back street beside the dirty moat. The musty water gave off an odor. There would be no high Chinese chest, no velvet draperies. The women from these places did not dress in finery or promenade to the teahouses in the late afternoon. They sat inside the lattice on display.
And there she was.
The light was on her face but not on us. We stood to one side, nearly touching the veranda, looking at the little crowd as if we were inside with the courtesans, not on the street with the window-shoppers. She was perfectly composed. She wore thick white makeup, and I couldn’t see the cut Jimi gave her.
A man crooked his finger.
Shino got up off her knees and walked, knees locked together, feet swinging out behind just a little, making the ends of her kimono sway like a tail, to the edge of the veranda. She looked over at us but gave no sign of recognition. She murmured something to the yobbo. Her manner was not very flirtatious, and the yobbo lost interest. She backed away and sat again.
The blind man came around the corner. He positioned himself in front of her, just as if he could see. His face was up, his ears wide, his fat tentacle fingers waving. The yobbo backed off. Mitsu had guessed right: the masseur had become Shino’s client.
I visited her new brothel when I could.