At the topmost levels of society, geisha were a key part of that evening activity. It would not be an overstatement to say that geisha parties were essential to the running of the country. In the Akasaka
ryotei
—as exclusive as elite private clubs, akin to the Harvard or the Yale Club—Japan’s political rulers, the Liberal Democratic Party, would discuss matters of state and make deals after unwinding over a meal and several flasks of saké. The geisha, women they had known as friends or lovers for years, knew instinctively when to keep the tone light and when to slip discreetly out of the room. Sometimes the older and wiser among them might join in a conversation or add their commonsensical view to help unravel a knotty problem. It was a little like going home and talking things over with the wife—except that was something a Japanese man, of that generation at any rate, would never do.
Geisha, of course, would never give direct advice. Japan is a country where the ex-geisha wife of a business magnate is much admired for being, as people say, “clever enough never to let a man realize how clever she is.” The essence of the feminine ideal is to make a man think that he is the one who has the brilliant ideas. But a geisha might well prod even the finance minister in one direction or another, cooing something along the lines of “You were saying you might raise the interest rates. How clever of you to think of that!”
Bernard Krisher, a veteran American journalist who has lived in Japan for forty years, put it bluntly. “Most Japanese men can’t converse with their wives,” he said. “But they find that they can with geisha. That’s why the geisha system has survived so long. It’s more than sex.
“Many people look down on geisha, but they are the only people who can talk on an equal level to the prime minister. They can tease him and joke with him. No one else can do that. They’re like cats—dignified and totally independent. They demand your love. You have to take care of them and feed them. But you can’t get them to jump on your lap if they don’t want to.”
Krisher’s take on geisha was simple. “They are mistresses,” he said, “like a Japanese version of the Colette story.
“What foreigners can’t comprehend is that someone will spend two thousand dollars and not even try to take a geisha home. Japanese get embarrassed, having to tell a visiting foreigner that it’s just not going to happen. They’re not programmed to sleep with someone for money. But if you ask someone five or six times for something, on five or six occasions, finally you can get what you want. The more often you go to a geisha house, the more chance there is that you can probably sleep with someone. I did that a lot in the sixties. I didn’t pay. For them too it was a novel experience. They’re also human beings and they’re women. But it would be on that basis—love, not payment.”
But in the end the partying had to stop. Being too closely tied to the country’s wheelers and dealers proved to be Akasaka’s downfall. The problems began in the mid-nineties when the Ministry of Finance—until then an impregnable bastion of faceless bureaucrats who effectively ran the country—found itself under fire, under suspicion of incompetence and corruption.
For years the MOF had controlled the country’s financial institutions, feeding vital information to banks and wielding control over everything from the opening and closing of bank branches to the uniforms the female clerks wore. There were executives at each bank whose job was to wine and dine the relevant MOF officials, often at vast expense, at classy restaurants, exclusive clubs, golf links, and teahouses. But with the Japanese economy on the skids, the public prosecutors decided to take a good look at the MOF’s affairs. At the beginning of 1998 they breached the gates of the fortress, took away lorry loads of papers, and arrested four officials, accusing them of accepting bribes from the financial institutions they were paid to oversee.
None of this was directly to do with the geisha. But the Japanese tabloids, scenting blood, took to hanging around the places politicians and bureaucrats were known to frequent, on the lookout for more stories of big spending and, better still, sexual improprieties. Once upon a time such behavior would have been taken for granted and not considered worthy of note. But now it sold papers. And the obvious place for a stakeout was the Akasaka teahouses.
Suddenly the once thriving geisha district became very quiet. When politicians got together, they did so in the more anonymous surroundings of a hotel restaurant or a golf links. In Akasaka business went into a steep decline. Rumors flitted around the small world of the geisha. Business was so bad that one previously famous Akasaka geisha, it was said, was called to teahouses at most twice a month. She had been reduced to appearing on television in kimono fashion shows and had had to move from her palatial apartment to one so cramped it lacked even its own toilet. From 300 geisha in the sixties, the numbers fell to 90, working in 13
ryotei;
of those, only a few had regular work. Effortlessly Shimbashi floated back to the top of the hierarchy.
The Sophisticated Ladies
of Shimbashi
Butterfly
Or falling leaf,
Which ought I to imitate
In my dancing?
Geisha song
3
Tokyo’s flower and willow world is not a clearly delineated geographical area, visibly separate from the real-life world in the way Kyoto’s is. I had passed Kanetanaka for years without ever realizing that its sand-colored walls and enormous gates concealed not the palatial private home of a minor prince or the heir to an industrial fortune but one of the most venerable teahouses in Shimbashi. I had been to kabuki performances in the Shimbashi Embujo without knowing that it had been built for the Shimbashi geisha to perform their annual dances, which took place in May. I had walked down innumerable tiny alleys near the Tsukiji fish market without having the faintest idea that some of the shabby facades with potted plants lined up outside hid geisha houses. And if I saw a woman in a kimono flitting down one of these streets, I would never have guessed she was a geisha. The geisha of Tokyo were far more discreet and circumspect than their Kyoto counterparts.
Here, one day, I was sitting in the coffee shop of a hotel which I had never realized before was in the heart of the geisha world, talking to a glamorous young woman. It had been a matter of the right connections. I had phoned up and dropped a rather weighty name. I was amazed at the alacrity with which she said, “Let’s have lunch.”
“Did you know we still have rickshaws in Shimbashi?” she asked in a soft, musical voice, after we had placed our orders. “There are two and two rickshaw men. When I go from one
ryotei
to another I sometimes call them. But I worry what will become of us in the future. Japan has changed; it’s not like the old Japan. Lots of Japanese have never been to a geisha party; they think we’re doing something bad. These days it’s very difficult. If I was doing this for the money I would give up.”
Anyone looking at her might have taken Shuko for an executive in the fashion industry or the young wife of a wealthy man but certainly not a geisha. Dressed in an exquisitely coordinated beige suit topped with a floaty jacket, an outfit which had clearly come from a Paris or Milan couturier, she wore her long hair loose and tumbling around her shoulders. She had a pale, refined, pretty face, softly oval, with a sensuous mouth which curved into a provocative smile, and almond eyes brought out with just a hint of makeup. She was lovely in a feminine way rather than intimidatingly beautiful.
But it was less her appearance than some indefinable presence that set her apart. She was poised, confident, funny, and charming. She would, I imagined, be any man’s perfect woman—sexy yet motherly. To me, as a woman, she had another face. We talked girl to girl, though she still gently, so that I hardly noticed, made sure that my glass was full and that I had everything I wanted. I was perfectly taken care of, in fact. She spoke earnestly, seriously, yet managed at the same time to keep the conversation light, interspersing her remarks with smiles and silvery laughter.
The Shimbashi geisha, she told me, prided themselves on their “wifeliness.” Within the Tokyo flower and willow world, that was the Shimbashi flavor. The Akasaka geisha were more overtly sexy. They wore more makeup and brighter kimonos. The Shimbashi geisha, conversely, were the embodiment of good taste. Their kimonos were sober and modest, their hair swept into simple buns and their makeup subtle, more suited to the sophisticated and wealthy customers they entertained.
Shuko regularly spent her evenings in the company of some of the country’s most powerful and brilliant minds, men who headed industrial conglomerates, banks, financial institutions, and major corporations. To prepare herself, she kept up to date with the news, read the latest books, and went to exhibitions. Not that the guests expected intellectual conversation. They were there to relax, not to have their minds taxed. The geisha party was the one place where a man could let slip the mask which social convention required him to wear. There the company chairman who bore a huge weight of responsibility from morning till night and made mammoth decisions which affected millions of yen or millions of people could, if he wanted, play the fool or be babied by geisha who called him not Mr. Suzuki but by some cozy nickname like Su-chan, as if he were a child. At work he might be a god; but at the geisha party he could have an entirely different face.
But the most important quality was confidentiality. No one would ever have a political or business discussion in a hostess club, where the guests at one table could easily overhear the conversation at another. In a teahouse, each banquet took place in a separate room and the guests never knew who else was present in the teahouse that night. When a guest wanted to go to the toilet, the geisha made sure that he never bumped into a guest from another party on his way; the corridors were always empty. And if a guest happened to be part of two parties on the same evening, when he arrived the second time the geisha never gave the game away. They always greeted him with “How are you, sir? We haven’t seen you for such a long time!”
But what if a man, having had a little too much to drink and finding himself surrounded by beautiful women attending to his every need, wanted more? Had there not been times when Shuko herself, enjoying the company of the same brilliant men night after night, had felt drawn to one of them? What of love?
“Many men have asked me to marry them,” she smiled with a toss of her long black hair. “Men enjoy our company because we’re free spirits. It makes it safe for them. Whenever they spend time with us they can imagine they’re having a romance because they know we can’t leave our profession. We’re caged birds.”
Shuko was now out of her twenties, the age by which most Japanese women expect to be married. Did she not worry that she would miss out on what was the Holy Grail of most Japanese women’s lives?
“I’m not interested in marriage,” she said firmly. She paused, then smiled woman to woman and added wistfully, “But a lover would be nice . . .”
“The trouble is,” I said, “when you reach our age, most men are married.”
She looked puzzled.
“In the West,” I said, sensing a cultural chasm, “we prefer not to have affairs with married men.”
“All our customers are married,” she replied carelessly. That, of course, would be the pool from which she would take a lover.
A Teahouse Party
There was something afoot when I arrived at Kanetanaka a couple of days later. Usually the quiet backstreet was dark and empty, especially by eight o’clock at night. But that evening there was a line of gleaming limousines with darkened windows filling the road and a crush of young men in dark suits standing around in the doorway. They ignored me as I pushed between them into the entrance hall.
As I was slipping out of my shoes, Shuko came running to greet me, along with a bevy of other geisha, scurrying with tiny steps across the tatami. She had metamorphosed. Her hair was swept into a tidy knot, her face powdered and rouged, her eyes outlined in black, her eyebrows penciled into two immaculate brown moth wings and her mouth the color of a camellia flower. She wore a cornflower-blue kimono of thin silk with a design of white flowers on the sleeves and hem. Her dark-blue obi was decorated with a summery pattern of gingko leaf–shaped fans sprinkled with tiny flowers. On her feet she wore white cotton tabi socks.
Even the way she carried her body had changed. Instead of the glamorous creature with whom I lunched in hotel restaurants and who flew to Milan and Paris for her clothes, she was the embodiment of woman, warm, caring, and attentive. I was the guest and she the hostess. It put a kind of distance between us.
Twittering a welcome, the women led me through the imposing entrance hall, decorated with a gorgeously painted gold screen, and along a corridor to an austerely traditional room with sand-colored walls and tatami mats. The only furniture was a low red-lacquered table with a cushion on each side and two antique wooden armrests topped with padded tapestry, such as samurai would have used. In the
tokonoma,
the alcove which forms the focal point of a Japanese room, was a red camellia blossom artfully placed in a bamboo vase. Taking pride of place on the wall behind it was a scroll with a few words brushed in bold black characters. My host, Mr. Matsumoto, was already there. A regular customer of Shuko’s, he had agreed on her suggestion to invite me along to one of his regular get-togethers with the geisha of Shimbashi.
“Good to meet you,” he said, rising to his feet and stepping forward to shake my hand. “Shuko has told me all about you!”
I had assumed that anyone who frequented geisha parties, particularly in such a grand setting, must be old; but he could not have been more than fifty. He was a handsome, trim man with a relaxed, cosmopolitan air. His hair was fashionably short, his dark suit discreetly expensive. He was the owner, it transpired, of a highly successful import-export business and spent his life flitting between Japan and the United States. Beyond that, of course, we did not discuss his work or family. After all, we had crossed into the flower and willow world. It would have been unspeakably boorish.