“Some people meet nice guys. I haven’t, I haven’t fallen in love. But I know people who have.”
Exactly twenty years ago, she remembered, a guest and a geisha fell desperately in love here in Atami. They had met at a geisha party. But the man was married and had children and couldn’t divorce. For four or five years they saw each other as often as they could. Then one day they disappeared. The man had written a note and left it at his house, saying that they had gone to commit suicide together. His family guessed that he was in Atami with the geisha.
“We were all terribly shocked. They sent out search parties, they searched and searched in the woods at the foot of Mount Fuji but they couldn’t find them. It must have been five or six years later that they came across the bones. I guess they had taken sleeping pills.
“My generation, people in their forties, we understood. Twenty- or thirty-year-olds wouldn’t. They wanted to die in beauty.”
Cherry Blossoms and Golf Flags
The geisha of Kyoto, said Yuko, were like “a flower in a high place.” Everyone would love the chance to spend time in their company but for most they were completely out of reach. They were too expensive and in any case their doors were open only to the few.
Atami did not have such a long history. But it offered the pleasures of the geisha world to all comers at an affordable price. Admittedly the pleasures were less refined. Nowadays few customers ever asked for a traditional teahouse party with dancing and games. Men no longer wanted or appreciated such things. An evening with geisha in Atami was more likely to be spent chatting and singing karaoké.
Not, of course, that the Atami geisha were prostitutes, she added firmly—perish the thought! In that sense they were very far from
onsen
geisha. The so-called geisha at the hot spring up the road and the ones on the Japan Sea coast—now they were nothing but prostitutes. But in Atami they were decent girls. After all, it was a top government-approved holiday resort. If a man wanted to date a geisha, he could do that, but it would have to be private. Officially sanctioned prostitution was a thing of the past.
No one knew exactly how many
onsen
geisha there were. Geisha were not required to register or to have a license, added to which it could not be denied that there were a fair number of “pillow geisha,” women who called themselves geisha but whose dancing and musical skills were far from their most appealing feature. Geisha were part of the
onsen
experience and Japan was peppered with
onsen
; thus it seemed likely that there were far more
onsen
geisha than town geisha, probably several thousand. However, if the situation in Atami was anything to go by, it was a dying profession.
In Atami, unlike less organized
onsen,
there was a register of geisha. It was kept at the Atami Geisha Union and arranged by geisha houses, with a dark cherry blossom symbol to indicate a shamisen player and a pale cherry blossom to indicate a dancer; a small golf flag indicated a golf player. The key thing with golf, of course, was not to be better than the customer, let alone beat him. The geisha’s job was to stroll around chatting girlishly, playing just well enough not to frustrate the customer, so that he could feel properly gratified when he won.
But it was becoming harder and harder to make a living as a geisha in Atami. In 1969 there had been 1,200 registered geisha. By 1991 the number had fallen to 800. There were now less than 400; in just eight years the number had halved. Of the 400, 30 had the golf flag beside their name.
“There just wasn’t the work,” said Yuko. As a result fewer and fewer young women were joining up to become geisha any more and those that did often left to get a “normal” job.
“Twenty years ago, whenever there was a shamisen player along, we’d dance. If you were a good dancer, you carried on dancing no matter how old you were. But these days there are hardly any guests who want to see that kind of thing. There are hardly any guests who can understand our arts. One geisha gave up and became a maid in a hotel. She used to be one of the most famous dancers in Atami.
“But tonight is special. Tonight we’ll have a good time. Tonight we’re going to have a traditional teahouse party. These guests came four years ago and loved it and asked to have the same kind of party again. There’ll be lots of saké. You’ll see!”
The Businessmen’s Big Night Out
“This way,” said Yuko, sliding open the door of a large hotel. She slipped out of her silk-covered sandals and led the way down some stairs into a basement and along a corridor to a closed door. From inside came shouts and raucous laughter. She knelt, slid open the door and, hands to the floor in formal greeting, sang out, “Evening, everybody!”
Yuko in geisha mode was not radically different from Yuko in off-duty mode. She had put on a rather matronly kimono of sheeny green silk and a beige obi with a subtle pattern of chrysanthemums, carefully selected, I thought, to be dressy—it would not do for the guests to think she was not dressing for the occasion—but not intimidatingly glamorous or costly. She had added a little makeup and her hair was swept into a loose bun.
“This is my guest from England,” she added, gesturing to me. Kneeling alongside her, I bowed, rose to my feet, and followed her rather awkwardly into the banqueting hall.
It was the size of a village hall, lined with tatami mats, with a stage at one end walled with glimmering gold leaf. Disposed around three sides of the room were fifteen to twenty elderly men in identical indigo-and-white-striped cotton yukata bathrobes. Most sat cross-legged with large expanses of hairy shins and knobbly bare feet on display. In front of each was a small square table of lacquered wood holding a saké cup, a beer glass, and an array of tiny dishes of food.
Sauntering into the room, Yuko settled me in a corner between a couple of grizzled men.
“This is Yamada-san,” she said. The ancient craggy-faced gentleman to my right nodded to me, then turned back to his beer. “He’s the leader. He’ll take care of you.”
The men were members of a businessmen’s club from one of the wealthier Tokyo boroughs and this was their annual outing. Most were in their sixties and seventies with a good proportion in their eighties. The oldest was eighty-eight. All were successful, prosperous men, all owned their own businesses and all, as it happened, represented different professions. To my left was a gray-haired fifty-four-year-old solicitor who described himself as the baby of the group.
“People of my age find this kind of thing offensive, especially women,” he said, wrinkling his brow severely, anxious to disassociate himself from the unruly oldsters. “That’s why there’s so few people here. Half the club were against having a geisha party for the annual outing. A lot didn’t want to come.”
Still, he himself was there and a few minutes later he was laughing as loudly as everyone else.
Besides Yuko, there were three other geisha moving skillfully from group to group, keeping the saké and beer flowing and the conversation sparkling. One was the comedienne, in full regalia with a stiff waxed wig, white face, and ornate gray-and-white kimono with a honeycomb pattern of red-and-mauve chrysanthemums and a red obi. At fifty-something, on her the white makeup looked faintly ghoulish. But as far as she was concerned, that just added to the comic effect. She was the Dolly Parton of the group, shamelessly flaunting her sexuality no matter what her age. But, being Japanese, she revealed not an ample bosom but an ample expanse of back.
Then there was a chubby-faced twenty-one-year-old, bringing a breath of youth to the proceedings. Like the maiko of Kyoto, she was shy and inarticulate; but such naiveté only made her all the more charming. The cast was completed by the shamisen “older sister,” a tiny birdlike woman of ninety who spoke hardly at all but proved to have a raucous cackle; she laughed loudest and longest at the dirtiest jokes.
Mr. Yamada, the horse-faced eighty-year-old to my right, had, it transpired, been the most enthusiastic advocate of this particular form of outing. The evening was not far advanced when, twisting a scarf and knotting it rakishly around his head like the lads who carry the portable shrine in a Japanese festival, he grabbed the microphone and began to belt out a song with “older sister” accompanying him on the shamisen. The change of costume released a raffish new persona. He was no longer Mr. Yamada the Company Boss but a wild man who had cast aside all inhibitions for the night. He had brought his wife along. A faded woman with short black hair, she sat on the other side of the room, laughing merrily.
“Did you catch the words?” asked the chubby-faced solicitor, back in disapproval mode. He seemed to have positioned me, a fellow youngster, as his ally for the night. “ ‘Let’s go to Fukagawa.’ You know about Fukagawa?”
I knew very well about Fukagawa, once home to the most stylish geisha of all.
“That means, ‘Let’s go to a whore house!’ ” he tutted sternly.
Things were hotting up. A beefy man—owner-chairman of a printing company, said the solicitor, my newfound friend—took the stage with his face painted like a doll’s, a ribbon tied around his head and his bathrobe pulled up to his knees, revealing a pair of hefty calves. Hand in hand with Yuko, he performed a comic dance, then took a theatrical peek inside her kimono. Then a frail eighty-four-year-old stepped up in an ornate geisha wig with a red pinafore over his yukata and did a creaky arthritic dance. His reward was more than just a peek inside a kimono. To huge applause Yuko rolled on the floor and the tiny old man rolled on top of her. The ancient shamisen player was cackling with laughter.
At eight-thirty the party moved on to the karaoké bar in the basement of the hotel. Still in their cotton yukata bathrobes, the men lounged on leather sofas around small tables in the darkened room.
“I could have any of this lot for thirty thousand yen [$300],” bragged the beefy owner-chairman of a printing company, giving me a nudge. I looked at him, wondering if I had heard right. “Or forty thousand yen [$400] for overnight.”
“No, fifty thousand yen [$500],” another guest corrected him.
“That young geisha,” leered the printer. “I could definitely have her.” He paused and edged closer to me.
“But I don’t want to sleep with those old bags,” he said with a cheeky smile. “I’d rather sleep with you! What about it? I’m single. Let’s get married!”
Smiling, I told him I’d have to get to know him a bit better first. Somehow my role had subtly changed. At the beginning of the evening I had been the observer, asking questions and making notes. But now the men had found a slot for me in the flower and willow world. As far as they were concerned, they had an extra girl—and this one was free! They weren’t even being billed at 10,000 yen ($100) an hour for me. What was there to do except be a geisha, laugh, be charming, and flirt, with the unshakable determination to creep off at the end of the evening to my solitary bed.
Another two hours passed. Those members of the party still on their feet stepped into wooden clogs lined up at the entrance to the hotel and headed off in their yukata into the silent neon-lit streets. Occasionally we passed another group of revelers, also in matching hotel-issue yukata, clattering past the darkened shops.
Finally we came to an open restaurant, a window of light along a dark alley. Squeezed around a small table, the men ordered noodles, rice balls, yakitori (chicken kebabs)—simple fare, very different from the elaborate cuisine on offer at the banquet earlier. Saké and beer were still flowing.
As the men belted out a chorus of “Let’s go to Yoshiwara,” the comedienne stood up, turned to face the wall, and gyrated rhythmically, rubbing her groin against it. Then she grabbed the young solicitor. He tried to resist, then gave in, laughing. She pulled him on top of her, thrashing her arms and legs in simulated ecstasy. “Aah,” she groaned, pushing him off and sitting up. “Now I’m going to have a baby. What shall I call it?”
“They’re really drunk, that’s why they’re making so much noise,” explained one man.
“They’re not that drunk,” muttered Yuko.
Mr. Yamada was singing at the top of his voice. “Be quiet,” scolded his wife, who was still with the group. “You have the loudest voice of all!”
At one o’clock the evening came to an abrupt end. Farewells were peremptory, the intimacy suddenly over. The men disappeared into the darkness, clattering along the road to their hotel.
“I need to deal with money,” said Yuko. She looked tired and a little sad. “Your hotel is that way, up the hill and around the corner. You can find it.”
And, having taken care of me so solicitously, she disappeared in the wake of the men, leaving me alone on the dark street. All through the evening she had laughed, bantered, and made sure that everyone was chatting, everyone was happy, and everyone had plenty to drink. Unlike the spoiled young girls who chose to become maiko in Kyoto, the geisha of Atami were working girls not so far removed from the young women from poor families who used to be sold in the bad old prewar days. They had to make a living. Their job was to be eternally bright and cheerful, no matter how they might really feel. Her smile was part of her job. It was for everyone, she had no favorites.
Was she, perhaps, in need of a little extra income, I wondered. But it seemed an ungenerous thought and I put it out of my mind.
Snow Country
The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. The earth lay white under the night sky. The train pulled up at a signal stop. A girl who had been sitting on the other side of the car came over and opened the window in front of Shimamura. The snowy cold poured in.
Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972)
5
Not long before I left Japan I took the train through the mountains to the city of Kanazawa on the coast of the Japan Sea, a stretch of country immortalized by the Nobel Prize–winning author Yasunari Kawabata in his 1937 novel,
Snow Country.
The celebrated first sentences evoke a landscape buried deep in snow, white and magical.
When Kawabata was writing, men went on solitary excursions to the Snow Country to take the waters and enjoy the companionship of the beautiful white-skinned geisha. Many formed relationships there. But for the geisha who foolishly allowed themselves to fall in love, it was a lonely existence. They would be left pining for months, waiting for the day when their lover stepped unannounced off a train from Tokyo to spend a few precious hours with them—a poignant image which the words “snow country” also evoke. Kawabata’s novel is about one such wealthy dilettante and the geisha who loves him.