Memoirs of a Geisha (4 page)

Satsu and I sat a long while on the pier, until at length Mr. Tanaka called us inside the Japan Coastal Seafood Company's headquarters and led us down a long corridor. The corridor couldn't have smelled more strongly of fish guts if we had actually been inside a fish. But down at the end, to my surprise, was an office, lovely to my nine-year-old eyes. Inside the doorway, Satsu and I stood in our bare feet on a slimy floor of stone. Before us, a step led up to a platform covered with tatami mats. Perhaps this is what impressed me so; the raised flooring made everything look grander. In any case, I considered it the most beautiful room I'd ever seen—though it makes me laugh now to think that the office of a fish wholesaler in a tiny town on the Japan Sea could have made such an impression on anyone.

On the platform sat an old woman on a cushion, who rose when she saw us and came down to the edge to arrange herself on her knees. She was old and cranky-looking, and I don't think you could ever meet anyone who fidgeted more. When she wasn't smoothing her kimono, she was wiping something from the corner of her eye or scratching her nose, all the while sighing as though she felt very sorry there was so much fidgeting to be done.

Mr. Tanaka said to her, “This is Chiyo-chan and her older sister, Satsu-san.”

I gave a little bow, to which Mrs. Fidget responded with a nod. Then she gave the biggest sigh she'd given yet, and began to pick with one hand at a crusty patch on her neck. I would have liked to look away, but her eyes were fixed on mine.

“Well! You're Satsu-san, are you?” she said. But she was still looking right at me.

“I'm Satsu,” said my sister.

“When were you born?”

Satsu still seemed unsure which of us Mrs. Fidget was addressing, so I answered for her. “She's the year of the cow,” I said.

The old woman reached out and patted me with her fingers. But she did it in a most peculiar way, by poking me several times in the jaw. I knew she meant it as a pat because she wore a kindly look.

“This one's rather pretty, isn't she? Such unusual eyes! And you can see that she's clever. Just look at her forehead.” Here she turned to my sister again and said, “Now, then. The year of the cow; fifteen years old; the planet Venus; six, white. Hmm . . . Come a bit closer.”

Satsu did as she was told. Mrs. Fidget began to examine her face, not only with her eyes but with her fingertips. She spent a long while checking Satsu's nose from different angles, and her ears. She pinched the lobes a number of times, then gave a grunt to indicate she was done with Satsu and turned to me.

“You're the year of the monkey. I can tell it just looking at you. What a great deal of water you have! Eight, white; the planet Saturn. And a very attractive girl you are. Come closer.”

Now she proceeded to do the same thing to me, pinching my ears and so on. I kept thinking of how she'd scratched at the crusty patch on her neck with these same fingers. Soon she got to her feet and came down onto the stone floor where we stood. She took a while getting her crooked feet into her zori, but finally turned toward Mr. Tanaka and gave him a look he seemed to understand at once, because he left the room, closing the door behind him.

Mrs. Fidget untied the peasant shirt Satsu was wearing and removed it. She moved Satsu's bosoms around a bit, looked under her arms, and then turned her around and looked at her back. I was in such a state of shock, I could barely bring myself to watch. I'd certainly seen Satsu naked before, but the way Mrs. Fidget handled her body seemed even more indecent to me than when Satsu had held her bathing dress up for the Sugi boy. Then, as if she hadn't done enough already, Mrs. Fidget yanked Satsu's pants to the floor, looked her up and down, and turned her around facing front again.

“Step out of your pants,” she said.

Satsu's face was more confused than I'd seen it in a long while, but she stepped out of her pants and left them on the slimy stone floor. Mrs. Fidget took her by the shoulders and seated her on the platform. Satsu was completely naked; I'm sure she had no more idea why she should be sitting there than I did. But she had no time to wonder about it either, for in an instant Mrs. Fidget had put her hands on Satsu's knees and spread them apart. And without a moment's hesitation she reached her hand between Satsu's legs. After this I could no longer bring myself to watch. I think Satsu must have resisted, for Mrs. Fidget gave a shout, and at the same moment I heard a loud slap, which was Mrs. Fidget smacking Satsu on the leg—as I could tell later from the red mark there. In a moment Mrs. Fidget was done and told Satsu to put her clothes back on. While she was dressing, Satsu gave a big sniff. She may have been crying, but I didn't dare look at her.

Next, Mrs. Fidget came straight at me, and in a moment my own pants were down around my knees, and my shirt was taken off me just as Satsu's had been. I had no bosoms for the old woman to move around, but she looked under my arms just as she'd done with my sister, and turned me around too, before seating me on the platform and pulling my pants off my legs. I was terribly frightened of what she would do, and when she tried to spread my knees apart, she had to slap me on the leg just as she'd slapped Satsu, which made my throat begin to burn from holding back my tears. She put a finger between my legs and gave what felt to me like a pinch, in such a way that I cried out. When she told me to dress again, I felt as a dam must feel when it's holding back an entire river. But I was afraid if Satsu or I began to sob like little children, we might look bad in Mr. Tanaka's eyes.

“The girls are healthy,” she said to Mr. Tanaka when he came back into the room, “and very suitable. Both of them are intact. The older one has far too much wood, but the younger one has a good deal of water. Pretty too, don't you think? Her older sister looks like a peasant beside her!”

“I'm sure they're both attractive girls in their way,” he said. “Why don't we talk about it while I walk you out? The girls will wait here for me.”

When Mr. Tanaka had closed the door behind them, I turned to see Satsu sitting on the edge of the platform, gazing upward toward the ceiling. Because of the shape of her face, tears were pooled along the tops of her nostrils, and I burst into tears myself the moment I saw her upset. I felt myself to blame for what had happened, and wiped her face with the corner of my peasant shirt.

“Who was that horrible woman?” she said to me.

“She must be a fortune-teller. Probably Mr. Tanaka wants to learn as much about us as he can . . .”

“But why should she look at us in that horrible way!”

“Satsu-san, don't you understand?” I said. “Mr. Tanaka is planning to adopt us.”

When she heard this, Satsu began to blink as if a bug had crawled into her eye. “What are you talking about?” she said. “Mr. Tanaka can't adopt us.”

“Father is so old . . . and now that our mother is sick, I think Mr. Tanaka is worried about our future. There won't be anyone to take care of us.”

Satsu stood, she was so agitated to hear this. In a moment her eyes had begun to squint, and I could see she was hard at work willing herself to believe that nothing was going to take us from our tipsy house. She was squeezing out the things I'd told her in the same way you might squeeze water from a sponge. Slowly her face began to relax again, and she sat down once more on the edge of the platform. In a moment she was gazing around the room as if we'd never had the conversation at all.

*  *  *

Mr. Tanaka's house lay at the end of a lane just outside the town. The glade of pine trees surrounding it smelled as richly as the ocean back on the seacliffs at our house; and when I thought of the ocean and how I would be trading one smell for another, I felt a terrible emptiness I had to pull myself away from, just as you might step back from a cliff after peering over it. The house was grander than anything in Yoroido, with enormous eaves like our village shrine. And when Mr. Tanaka stepped up into his entryway, he left his shoes right where he walked out of them, because a maid came and stowed them on a shelf for him. Satsu and I had no shoes to put away, but just as I was about to walk into the house, I felt something strike me softly on my backside, and a pine cone fell onto the wood floor between my feet. I turned to see a young girl about my age, with very short hair, running to hide behind a tree. She peered out to smile at me with a triangle of empty space between her front teeth and then ran away, looking back over her shoulder so I'd be certain to chase her. It may sound peculiar, but I'd never had the experience of actually meeting another little girl. Of course I knew the girls in my village, but we'd grown up together and had never done anything that might be called “meeting.” But Kuniko—for that was the name of Mr. Tanaka's little daughter—was so friendly from the first instant I saw her, I thought it might be easy for me to move from one world into another.

Kuniko's clothing was much more refined than mine, and she wore zori; but being the village girl I was, I chased her out into the woods barefoot until I caught up to her at a sort of playhouse made from the sawed-off branches of a dead tree. She'd laid out rocks and pine cones to make rooms. In one she pretended to serve me tea out of a cracked cup; in another we took turns nursing her baby doll, a little boy named Taro who was really nothing more than a canvas bag stuffed with dirt. Taro loved strangers, said Kuniko, but he was very frightened of earthworms; and by a most peculiar coincidence, so was Kuniko. When we encountered one, Kuniko made sure I carried it outside in my fingers before poor Taro should burst into tears.

I was delighted at the prospect of having Kuniko for a sister. In fact, the majestic trees and the pine smell—even Mr. Tanaka—all began to seem almost insignificant to me in comparison. The difference between life here at the Tanakas' house and life in Yoroido was as great as the difference between the odor of something cooking and a mouthful of delicious food.

As it grew dark, we washed our hands and feet at the well, and went inside to take our seats on the floor around a square table. I was amazed to see steam from the meal we were about to eat rising up into the rafters of a ceiling high above me, with electric lights hanging down over our heads. The brightness of the room was startling; I'd never seen such a thing before. Soon the servants brought our dinner—grilled salted sea bass, pickles, soup, and steamed rice—but the moment we began to eat, the lights went out. Mr. Tanaka laughed; this happened quite often, apparently. The servants went around lighting lanterns that hung on wooden tripods.

No one spoke very much as we ate. I'd expected Mrs. Tanaka to be glamorous, but she looked like an older version of Satsu, except that she smiled a good deal. After dinner she and Satsu began playing a game of go, and Mr. Tanaka stood and called a maid to bring his kimono jacket. In a moment Mr. Tanaka was gone, and after a short delay, Kuniko gestured to me to follow her out the door. She put on straw zori and lent me an extra pair. I asked her where we were going.

“Quietly!” she said. “We're following my daddy. I do it every time he goes out. It's a secret.”

We headed up the lane and turned on the main street toward the town of Senzuru, following some distance behind Mr. Tanaka. In a few minutes we were walking among the houses of the town, and then Kuniko took my arm and pulled me down a side street. At the end of a stone walkway between two houses, we came to a window covered with paper screens that shone with the light inside. Kuniko put her eye to a hole torn just at eye level in one of the screens. While she peered in, I heard the sounds of laughter and talking, and someone singing to the accompaniment of a shamisen. At length she stepped aside so I could put my own eye to the hole. Half the room inside was blocked from my view by a folding screen, but I could see Mr. Tanaka seated on the mats with a group of three or four men. An old man beside him was telling a story about holding a ladder for a young woman and peering up her robe; everyone was laughing except Mr. Tanaka, who gazed straight ahead toward the part of the room blocked from my view. An older woman in kimono came with a glass for him, which he held while she poured beer. Mr. Tanaka struck me as an island in the midst of the sea, because although everyone else was enjoying the story—even the elderly woman pouring the beer—Mr. Tanaka just went on staring at the other end of the table. I took my eye from the hole to ask Kuniko what sort of place this was.

“It's a teahouse,” she told me, “where geisha entertain. My daddy comes here almost every night. I don't know why he likes it so. The women pour drinks, and the men tell stories—except when they sing songs. Everybody ends up drunk.”

I put my eye back to the hole in time to see a shadow crossing the wall, and then a woman came into view. Her hair was ornamented with the dangling green bloom of a willow, and she wore a soft pink kimono with white flowers like cutouts all over it. The broad obi tied around her middle was orange and yellow. I'd never seen such elegant clothing. None of the women in Yoroido owned anything more sophisticated than a cotton robe, or perhaps linen, with a simple pattern in indigo. But unlike her clothing, the woman herself wasn't lovely at all. Her teeth protruded so badly that her lips didn't quite cover them, and the narrowness of her head made me wonder if she'd been pressed between two boards as a baby. You may think me cruel to describe her so harshly; but it struck me as odd that even though no one could have called her a beauty, Mr. Tanaka's eyes were fixed on her like a rag on a hook. He went on watching her while everyone else laughed, and when she knelt beside him to pour a few more drops of beer into his glass, she looked up at him in a way that suggested they knew each other very well.

Kuniko took another turn peeking through the hole; and then we went back to her house and sat together in the bath at the edge of the pine forest. The sky was extravagant with stars, except for the half blocked by limbs above me. I could have sat much longer trying to understand all I'd seen that day and the changes confronting me . . . but Kuniko had grown so sleepy in the hot water that the servants soon came to help us out.