“Bad luck!” Mitsu caught the
yakko
’s arm and held her a minute. “Bad luck,” she said, “to come before that one. He’s not as pure as he makes out. And he’ll get you for it.”
The
yakko
began to walk back towards the moat, skidding in the snow on her clogs, hurrying, her arms flailing.
“You won’t get out now,” called Mitsu. “Your time is set.”
The
yakko
stopped. She picked up a stone and threw it into the water. It made a hollow
plonk
and disappeared, leaving ripples of perfect roundness in the black water. Then she went still, as if frozen. She was all white now, except for her beautiful garment.
“Itz strange, izn’t?” Mitsu said. “In real dreams you don’t have so many rules. But these are not real dreams, they’re—” She gave a gusty breath. “At least they are real dreams, but they are not our dreams. We live by playing roles in the dreams of others. They can buy their dreams.”
The proprietor came out the door. “Wherez she going?” he shouted. “Come back.”
“She isn’t going anywhere,” said Mitsu. “She has become a ghost.”
That was the end. Everyone moaned. People shouted for more. The storyteller vacated the stage. My sisters were gone. When I found my way home, my mother was angry. No one had time to answer my questions. I knew in a way that stories came from real life. But could they come this close to us? Was that my yakko? My Shino? Could it be? I sat in a corner and rocked myself and pulled at my chin.
“Look at her! She’s doing it again! She’s going to make her chin even longer.”
T
HE NEXT TIME
we were in the Yoshiwara I ran off, looking for her.
“Ei! Come back.” Hokusai put down his brush with a clatter of annoyance and ran over to scoop me up: I screamed with delight.
“Worthless child!” he said, loudly enough for anyone to hear. “Why am I saddled with this wild thing?” He ran bowlegged back to his travelling mat on the ground and scolded: “You stay still or your father cannot work, and when your father cannot work, you cannot eat!” That was his favourite line.
And then Shino appeared.
“May I take her to the caterers? I have to pick up some cakes for tonight and take them back to my house,” she said.
“Take her!” he said. He didn’t look up from his page. “By all means, take her.”
That’s how I got to see inside her high-class brothel.
The Corner Tamaya
THE CORNER TAMAYA
was on the corner of the boulevard and Edocho 2, the second big street of the Yoshiwara. It was built of wood, with three steps going up from the walk. The entrance hall was filled with red cabinets and silk floor cushions. There was an ebony Go board and vessels for incense. “These are from China,” whispered Shino.
“How do you know?”
“They’re like the ones we had at home.”
To one side was an alcove with a low desk in it. There a woman sat on her heels, looking harassed. She was not young, but her clothes were heavy and ornate, layer on layer of velvet and patterned silk. She was doing three things at once: writing, giving orders to a small girl, and throwing her voice behind her up the stairs to order someone else. Her name was Kana, Shino whispered, and she was the housekeeper, a former prostitute who had married the boss.
“Here you are, Shino,” she said bitterly. “Back at last. Hurry with those to the kitchen.” She didn’t look down far enough to notice me. I was very short.
We went back to the kitchen, which was warm and splashed with water from a well in the centre. Light came down through a vent in the roof. Shino caught the eye of a cook and passed him her parcel. On the way back we saw the bookkeeper, occupied with his abacus. She whispered to me, “He sold me my bedding. I had no money. I don’t like it either—it’s a rough cotton futon and all dull grey, nothing soft or smooth against my skin.”
I didn’t have a futon of my own; my sisters and I pulled one tattered thing back and forth between us.
“He said, ‘You’re an apprentice. What does it matter what you sleep on? When you are accepting clients you will buy beautiful bedding.’ He wrote down the cost in a column beside my name. ‘This is your account.’ But there were so many charges against it already! ‘I just got here. What are those?’ I asked him. He ticked them off. ‘A month of food. The bedding. Tips for the bearers who brought you here.’ Do you get that, Ei? I paid for my own trip to jail.”
She laughed at her story, and I watched her face to see if it still split up the way it did when I first saw her. It did.
“When I came here I didn’t understand money. In my home the women didn’t handle coins. Except, maybe, when we sneaked out to buy pictures.”
I handled the coins my father paid no attention to: mon, momme. I pointed to the ones in her palm. “I know some,” I said. There was a squared one. The large brown ones had a hole; those were the ones the moneylenders kept tied in long laces, where they sat at the foot of the Ryogoku Bridge.
“You can help me, then. You worldly thing.”
I was delighted.
T
he upstairs was one large space around the staircase. In cubicles between thin screens, the courtesans slept; their doors were curtained. I could hear their voices. When one screen opened I saw a small cooking stove and a teapot and some folded bedding. There was the room of the great
tayu
Hana-ogi; there was the room of the second-best, Fumi; here was the small room where Shino lived, beside her.
A rumpled-looking man with greasy hair emerged. He looked at Shino frankly and she lowered her eyes. She was an apprentice, under sixteen and off limits, for now.
As he passed, a courtesan appeared behind him. When he turned at the stairwell, their eyes met. They held each other’s gaze as he descended. The courtesan gestured to her heart and sighed. The man’s head disappeared from the stairwell. His footsteps passed the desk; there was the clink of coins. The courtesan’s lip curled. “I ’ope your balls wither an’ your dick falls off an’ you never, ever show up ’ere again!” She whirled and was gone, behind her curtain.
Two other girls hung over the stairwell. “Headz up! He’z comin’!”
“He’z not!”
“Iz too.”
“Znot!”
“Whadda dra-ag! Why duzn he go?”
“He’z in love!”
“Shee’z good. Super good.”
Everyone giggled.
The courtesans crept to the centre window overlooking the street and watched as the man halted halfway down the front steps. He looked up to the second storey.
“Now he’z goin’. Look.”
“Farewell, my sweet potato. My little shrimp. My dumpling—”
“Takao! Get out there,” shouted the housekeeper up the stairs, “and see him off.”
The courtesan came out of her room again, pulling her robe around her. She leaned out the open balcony. “The minutes will drag till I see you again,” she lisped. “I’m, like, faintin’ with pain to see you go.” The last was a bit half-hearted.
The other girls groaned and elbowed each other. The housekeeper thumped up the stairs and hit one of them smartly on the side of her head.
“Takao! A little creativity, pulleez.”
“So sorry. I yam trying, but I’m zausted. I never sleep till it’z day, and then it’z so noi-zy!”
A cross-looking beauty stepped out from behind a screen. On seeing us her face became kinder.
“Oh, Shino, there yu are. C’n yu come and make me some tea and help me clean up? Come . . . But whooz that chi-yuld?”
So this was Fumi, the second-best. I had read about her in the saiken. I had seen her picture, or what passed for her picture. I had seen her parading on the boulevard enfolded in her mammoth robes. She looked thin and hunched.
“This is Ei!” pronounced Shino in her bell-like tones, pushing me forward. “She’s the daughter of that artist Hokusai who is painting along the boulevard. I said she could come with me.”
“How kind yu are, Shino,” said Fumi, looking me over absently and putting a hand on my head. “I fear it will only do yu harm. But the urchin can come too.”
I sat on the floor.
Fumi had a low black lacquer chest and two round mirrors on handles. Holding one in each hand she looked this way and that to see the back of her head. “Need that hairdresser again. Too bad I canna ’ford it.” She had a small brush, which she offered Shino, instructing her to powder her neck. Then she gave Shino a hairpin to tuck up the hairs that had escaped and fallen onto her nape.
“Your old man’z an artist? We usta have one here watchin’ our every move,” said Fumi. “We were, like, pozen all the time. He watched how we dressed and when we played our music and when we looked at the moon—evrythin’. But he duzn come here anymore. Maybe he’z, like, scared he’ll get fined or go to jail”—here her face became tragic—“or end up on the White Sands or even, like, banished. Can you ’magine? Jus’ for painting us. It’z ’cause we’re so evil.” She raised her eyebrows at me. “So here I am—all in my glory—and whooz to see? Only these yobs.”
“You’re beautiful anyway,” said Shino.
We were all gazing in the mirrors, as if we couldn’t look directly at her face. From where I sat the mirror was too bright, reflecting the sun. I couldn’t see her at all.
“I know,” said Fumi, looking contentedly in the bronze circle. She moved aside. Now I could see my own face behind hers. It was an awful sight. “But beauty’z not everything.”
“You think so?” Shino’s face was unreadable.
“Oh, yeah. Men say they wan’ beauty,” Fumi said. “They dream aboudit; they pay a fortune. But what they really wan’ is kindness. Yu’ll do fine in here ’f yu’re gennle and considerate. Yu’ve just got to forget everything that’z for yu and remember everything that’z for them.”
Shino moved around, setting up the kettle on the little grill.
“I’m no good at pleasing,” she said. “I didn’t please my real husband. So how can I please a false husband in the pleasure quarter?”
The courtesan twitched her lips in her mirror. It might have been a smile.
“That’s a very good question. Jus’ keep yur eyes open,” she said. “Yu’ve godda brain. Yu’ll finna way.”
A
fter that, if I was lonely or bored when my father worked in the Yoshiwara, I’d go to the Corner Tamaya and ask for Shino. One morning when she’d been up late and I was up early, I even crawled into her bed and lay there beside her. I was curled up in the warmth when a crowd of the other women came in to get her.
“Yu up, yakko? C’mon, geddup!”
They pushed past the screen, about five of them; behind them I could see Kana.
Shino had been sound asleep and woke up confused. But she sat up. Her hair was down in a soft, long braid that lay like a rope in the bed.
They giggled.
“Lookit her! She’z so, like, stiff. She’z, like, a lady! She’ll, like, never gedda man. No one’z, like, ever gonna wan’ her,” one of them said.
Kana hit one of them on the back of the legs. “You’re just ignorant country oafs! Shino knows a lot. A lot. You should take advantage. She knows writing and music; she can draw, she can dance. She’ll do jus’ fine. Fumi thinks so anyway.” She pulled the futon off us. “C’mon downstairs, yakko. And bring yur liddle friend. It’z time to eat.”
Shino protested as she got up.
“I don’t like to be called that. You’ve given me a name. Can’t you call me by it?”
“It’s jus,’ like, easier to call yu the yakko,” yawned one of them. “Besides yur so . . . yur, like, so . . .”
“I know I am,” Shino said quietly.
We got up. Everybody clattered downstairs to the kitchen.
I
t was the one day a month when the prostitutes took it over. Normally they sat back on their knees, as if they had no interest in food, while clients filled their stomachs. But I had heard their stomachs grumble. Today they could eat as much as they wanted. They elbowed one another to grab the bean curd with corn, the fried fish, the white radish and eggplant in miso, and the bits of grilled chicken. Their mouths dripped with sauce, and they sputtered as they spoke in their funny dialect.
“Fumi says being beautiful is not the most important thing here. She says even if I’m not beautiful, I can be successful by being good,” said Shino.
“Fumi is, like, todally wrong. Being beautiful iz most important,” said one of them. “Izn it?”
They said that a lot. “Izn it?” I had started to say it to my mother, to tease her. It got my father in trouble for leaving me in the brothels while he worked. Still she didn’t ask that I stay at home.
“Even if I were to believe you,” said Shino in her careful way, “and I am not certain I do, can you tell me who determines what is beautiful?”
I slurped my soba noodles. The artists did, I thought.