Women of the Pleasure Quarters Read Online Free PDF Page B

women I knew so well, with their unmade-up faces, in their slacks and blouses, some still in flimsy nightgowns, with their piled up helmets of lacquered hair. How could I not have realized? All this time I had been scouring the district, making phone calls, using connections, trotting here and there with cakes, when I was already right inside the geisha world.
    In fact it was just as well that I had been so oblivious. For instead of behaving like a journalist and alienating everyone by bombarding them with questions, I had, entirely by accident, done exactly the right thing. I had sat quietly, not being obnoxious, not asking nosy questions, speaking when spoken to, just eating breakfast, day after day. It was a bit like stalking wildlife. They were used to me. I had won their confidence.
    I still did nothing. I was well trained by now. I had plenty of people to meet and places to go. Then several days later the owner leaned across the counter and said in confidential tones, “You wanted to find out about geisha, didn’t you? Hara-san says she’d like to talk to you.”
    I knew Hara-san well, a warm rather beautiful woman in her mid-seventies with a pile of snowy-white hair, large, luminous eyes and a smile which lit up her face. It turned out that she was the
okami-san
—the owner-mistress—of a teahouse a few doors away from my inn. The word “teahouse,” incidentally, is a literal but rather misleading translation of
ochaya.
Geisha live in a “geisha house”
(okiya)
and work in a “teahouse”
(ochaya),
where there is music, dancing, partying, sometimes food, and always plenty of alcohol; tea is the last thing you would expect to find there.
    I went off to visit Hara-san, taking, of course, Kanshindo cakes. Talking to someone so familiar was an entirely different experience from quizzing a geisha who barely knew me. With childlike innocence, she poured out her heart, showing me photographs of herself as a beautiful, grave-faced young geisha.
    Suddenly doors were flying open. I traipsed in and out of houses with my notebook and tape recorder, listening to stories. Some were uneventful, others extraordinarily moving. I was amazed at the openness with which women would reveal the most harrowing experiences of their youth.
    Now, a good two months after I had first arrived, when I walked down the street maiko recognized me. They stopped to bow and say
“Ohayo dosu!,”
the quaint geisha phrase for “Good morning,” or
“Oné-san, oki-ni,”
“Big sister, thank you!” The ones I knew would whisk me off on shopping expeditions, clattering along beside me on their clogs, taking my arm to make sure I was not swept off my feet by one of the lethal passing motorbikes, sheltering me with their oiled paper umbrellas when it rained, chattering and giggling sweetly. I felt pampered, protected, charmed, and hugely honored that they had chosen to befriend me. It was easy to see how beguiling such behavior must be for the wealthy businessmen who were their customers.
    As a single woman, I had always been something of an oddity in Japan. People would ask why I was not married and had no children until, as I passed some unspoken but recognizable age, they became embarrassed even to ask. None of the geisha was remotely interested. After all, they themselves were not married. Some had children, some not. Those who had were single parents. No doubt they assumed that I had the occasional lover, as they did. As I lived among them it began to dawn on me that I—a modern Western career woman—was not far removed from a geisha myself; though when I put this theory to the geisha I knew, they looked distinctly dubious. Perhaps that was the answer. Perhaps they were the original liberated women and the rest of the world had just caught up with them.
    I felt, I realized, extraordinarily at home. In Japan, outside the geisha community, everyone seemed to get up with the lark. Here, like me, they got up late. One would not dream of dropping