Women of the Pleasure Quarters Read Online Free PDF

there. When she finally appeared, I offered her the cakes, bowing and murmuring in self-deprecating tones, “This is really nothing at all, but please take it.”
    She took the bag and gave me a warm smile.
    “The most delicious cakes!” she said. “You’re learning, little by little.”
    I had also learned to ask no more. I thanked her profusely for her very great kindness and for teaching me so much, apologized for my shortcomings, chatted inconsequentially for a while, then left, feeling pleased with myself.
    I had never guessed that cakes would make such a difference. After that, whenever I was to visit anyone, I always made a pilgrimage to Kanshindo. I became a regular customer. The two apron-clad women who ran the shop took to asking how I was and I always stopped for a chat. And when I proffered my cakes, the geisha would exclaim with delight or nod approvingly and look at me as if to say, “Aha, I can see you know what’s what.” I had found one of the keys to the door.
    Doors Open
    There was another key lying around waiting to be found—or maybe it was a door opening rather than a key.
    One day I was walking home when a geisha caught up with me, scurrying along on her silk-covered sandals. She was tall and slender with a dancer’s long neck and a striking face, handsome rather than beautiful, with a long chin, high cheekbones, thoughtful eyes, and a wide sensuous mouth. She was wearing, as geisha (as opposed to maiko) do, an elegant, understated kimono in shades of pale mauve, with a plain obi, and her hair was swept back. Perhaps it was because she was wearing heavy makeup (though not the white face paint of the maiko, which geisha wear only on formal occasions) that I failed to recognize her though, to my embarrassment, she seemed to know me well.
    “Going home, are you? Or dropping in to the coffee shop?” she asked gaily. Then she mentioned that she was on her way back from Tokyo where she had been performing in an
odori-kai,
a convention for professional dancers, and suddenly I realized who she was.
    Whenever I had seen her before, I had always taken her for a university student or a secretary. When I went for breakfast she was often there, a quiet, serious girl with large owlish glasses who sat at the far end of the counter reading her paper. She usually wore a dress or a simple blouse and skirt over slim bare legs and had short neat hair and a scrubbed clean face. I had always been rather curious about her. She looked like a bit of a bluestocking, very far removed from a geisha, as if, like me, she was an outsider, not really part of this world at all.
    I knew that she was a talented dancer. But plenty of women learned
Nihon buyo
or
jiutamai,
the forms of traditional Japanese dance practiced by geisha, as a hobby. It had never occurred to me that such a serious-looking, intellectual young woman might be a geisha herself.
    The following day at breakfast she was not there. By now it was midsummer, approaching the season of the Gion festival. All the geisha had had fans made of hand-crafted paper shaped like gingko leaves and inscribed with their professional names in beautifully brushed black characters, which they handed out as souvenirs. The master and mistress of the coffee shop had a whole collection, pinned up in rows across the wall.
    “Look,” said the master, reading some of the names to me. “And see this one? That’s our Fumiko. You know her. She’s famous, she’s one of the top dancers in the district.”
    I looked blank.
    “She sits just over there. You know, with the big glasses!”
    Something was changing in my perception of the coffee shop and its customers and in their perception of me. For weeks I had gone there simply to have breakfast. Sometimes I chatted to people, often I didn’t. Sometimes some of the older ladies engaged me in conversation. And as I became a familiar face, the plump, motherly owner would inquire how I was getting on with my research.
    I looked at these