Women of the Pleasure Quarters Read Online Free PDF Page A

carrying my body differently, walking with dainty steps, bowing, nodding, smiling until my face hurt. Most disconcertingly, when I called Japanese who had nothing to do with geisha or the geisha world, I found myself talking with exaggerated politeness in sweet, high-pitched velvety tones: “Oh, that would really be too kind, thank you so, so much!”
    The next day, full of anticipation, I went along to the large concrete Kaburenjo carrying the precious business card. It was a rather unprepossessing building to house such an august body as the geisha union. My hopes rose when I discovered that Mr. Kimura was really quite young, maybe only forty or fifty. He had clipped hair, glasses, and an office worker’s suit. He took me off to a small side office and asked me brusquely what I wanted. I repeated my speech in my most unctuous tones, being as modest and undemanding as it was possible to be.
    “No chance,” he growled. It struck me that, for all my efforts, neither the mama nor anyone else in authority bothered much with politeness at all.
    “I’ll ask them upstairs, but I’m sure they’ll say no,” he said, scowling, and showed me the door. “You can try again next week if you like,” he added, which I now understood to mean “Forget it.” Downcast, I went back to my small sunny room to lick my wounds and ponder my next step.
    The Best Cakes
    Whenever I had time, I went to tea ceremony class. The teacher, a comely, charismatic young man, had two faces. When he was conducting the class he wore
hakama,
the formal starched and pleated men’s kimono, and took on the persona of the
sensei
(teacher), barking orders and correcting the smallest mistake. Off duty he was a hip young man who worked as a stylist for a glossy magazine.
    Tea ceremony is a series of precise choreographed movements performed in a spirit of stillness and concentration which also involves the serving and consuming of food and drink. It is somewhere between tai chi and the Roman Catholic mass but on a very small, intimate scale. Being very rusty, I was at the bottom of the class and had to be coaxed to remember even the most basic things, such as to hold my arms as if there were an egg tucked into each armpit. Fortunately the teacher belonged to the same school that I had studied before, so at least I did not have to relearn details like the folding of the silk napkin.
    “For the name, Ippodo; for the history, Kamibayashi; for the taste, Koyama—that’s what we say in Kyoto,” he told us one day, naming the three most famous tea shops in the city. Then he listed the four most famous cake shops. To my relief, the shop where I had bought the mama’s cakes was among them.
    “Do you know Kanshindo?” he added, glancing at me. “You should go there this season. It’s very old, it’s where the geisha buy their cakes. It’s famous for its mizu yokan [a bland slab of red bean paste jelly eaten in summer]. It’s very difficult to find, only Gion people know it. If you take them Kanshindo mizu yokan, the geisha will be very surprised and impressed. Shall I tell you where it is?”
    And he drew me a small sketch map.
    I needed to report back to the mama and take her a gift to thank her for her kindness in introducing me to Mr. Kimura; it was irrelevant that it had not been a success. I called her, made an appointment to visit, and went in search of the cake shop. I walked down Shijo Street, looking carefully. There were plenty of alleys off the main road but nothing where the teacher had indicated. Then I noticed a gap between two buildings just wide enough to slip through. It led to a dark, narrow path lined with blank walls and the closed doors of bars. Halfway along was a small stall, not even a shop, with wrapped slabs of bean jelly in a display case. I bought a couple, wrapped in Kanshindo paper, and carried them off in the Kanshindo carrier bag.
    That evening I went to see the mama. As always, I was precisely on time. As always, she was not