Again she prayed, and in the darkness eight-armed Kannon appeared, stiff and tall, clasping two forearms at her heart, with her other wrists upraised, her other arms outstretched. It must have been because the girl paid threefold reverence to the Three Buddhist Treasures and twofold reverence to the Shinto gods that Kannon took pity on her. Sad and a little stern, darkskinned, in a robe of tarnished gold, the goddess bowed her wide-eyed face toward the girl, promising to preserve her beauty over a long span of years. Yukiko would become a cherry tree, and every spring she would come into flower. Only then would she become again a maiko. Thus for but a handful of each year’s days would she incarnate the lovely being who she now was. Her month would last a decade; her year, a century and more. At other times she would be a cherry tree.
The goddess warned her: What you wish for may not be for the best. You will be trapped in many births and deaths. The sadness you experience will be your retribution.
The girl bowed meekly, her eyes closed as if she were remembering the first song of the cuckoo; and Kannon was touched.
Are you satisfied? asked the goddess.
Yukiko nodded. At once joy overcame her.
When she first reappeared to her Elder Sisters they screamed. It had been several springs; they all looked older, and two new maikos had been taken on by the house. The Emperor had been exiled, they said. Bowing to each, clapping her hands (which made even less noise than before), she requested forgiveness, and promised to return each time the cherry blossoms opened, for so long as they should wish. And because she was rare in several qualities, and cost them nothing, they accepted her; she proved good for business. So the sake flowed sweetly out from her sleeves, and the highest-ranking musicians came to pluck the strings of the shamisen whenever she danced, and even jaded rich men could never drink enough of her. At first the other geishas hated this new Yukiko, for even the way she stamped her feet could not be imitated, no matter how brilliantly they danced, and never mind that their wardrobes entailed kimonos of lavender with golden cherry flowers, and pale pink cherry blossoms upon night-blue, and more others than I could ever tell, while she wore always the same yellow kimono with the pink and white blooms, wrapping herself in layers of farewell, smiling with her perfectly blackened teeth, bowing with perfect grace. When the two maikos and Yukiko danced the Miyako Odori, Taeko wore pink and Sachiko wore blue, while Yukiko wore yellow, of course; cherry blossoms were on their kimonos and on their scarlet obis, and cherry-blossom hairpins adorned their hair. Taeko and Sachiko were beautiful, Yukiko was the one whom they all watched. Who can compete with the moon? The woman who tries is mad, and geishas need to be businesswomen. Therefore they made their peace with this willow-eyebrowed girl, who readily advanced their names to men who desired other company, as sooner or later most men did, since only for six days or seven could one see Yukiko, to whom her Elder Sisters now spitefully referred as the Cherry Tree Ghost, a name which hurt her because she believed herself to be alive.
On this subject something will now be said. No one in this floating world has more discerning eyes than an old geisha, and as the cherry-springs continued to spend themselves one upon the other, the Elder Sisters watched Yukiko with small alert smiles, inclining their heads whenever she bowed down before them. — Younger Sister, they’d say, there’s a stray hair on your neck. Please let me fix it for you. — Or: Dear Younger Sister, isn’t that a loose thread on your sleeve? Please hold still. — And with this or that pretense, they looked her over close up, while she softly thanked them, knowing quite well that all was in place. It lay in their interest as jealous human beings to see her age, so that they could comfort one another with smiling assurance that she too must die. Spring fluttered down upon spring, with winter in between, and while the wrinkles of the Elder Sisters lengthened, and their chins began to multiply, they discontentedly agreed that no flaw yet appeared on Yukiko’s face. But there was one Elder Sister whose eyes were sharpest of all, and among the many fields in which she hunted was Yukiko’s collar, once scarlet, now nearly silver; and after half a century she thought to spy another silver thread. After all, even Elder Sisters make mistakes. Some observant Noh actors agreed that her movements were becoming more fluid, her sleeves slowly clapping and parting like the pulsations of anemones; but this signified nothing more sinister than her increasing mastery. Even behind drawn shutters, in that upstairs room lit only with candle-flames, and the simplest painted screen behind her, she appeared to be dancing in a sky of blossoms.
So there were men who claimed to love her, and as her Elder Sisters aged and died, other geishas learned to dance at her side, and new young men grew up to admire her. She had scarcely known anyone else. Her parents, who had sold her to the teahouse on her third birthday, were since ascended in cremation-smoke; likewise her brother, who had never visited her; now her brother’s children followed the same road; so that her antecedents might as well have been the faded square vermilion seal of Hojo Ujiyasu, whose lines resemble a labyrinth. Perhaps Kannon weighed this when she considered Yukiko’s prayer. What had the girl ever received but loneliness, humiliation, merciless practice and principled punishment, all of which produced in her the determined longing to embody grace? Had she changed her collar and grown old with the rest of them, she might have won allies, dependents, starstruck clients and perhaps even friends of a sort, although the sorrow which I have sometimes seen in the eyes of older women in that world makes me suspect that a strictly governed childhood can never be remedied. So Yukiko had abandoned nobody! None knew who she was, for she was a tree on the other side of Jade River, on a hill nearly as far away as Rainy Mountain; there she stood dreaming while the earth froze around her skirts, and her arms were as wrinkled and withered as her unremembered grandmother’s.
When whitish-pink cherry blossoms began to swell in the whitish-grey sky, then Yukiko remembered who she was, and drew in her arms. Next, her mind itself burst into flower. Finding herself once more in the back room of the teahouse, with the round mirror before her and her wig on its stand, she brushed the white shironuri on her face. They learned to set that room aside for her on the night after the first cherry flower fell at Kiyomizu Temple.
What she was sufficed her at first — all the more as others died. (This speaks more poorly of them than of her.) How many women would decline to be beautiful forever, or even nearly forever? Although they came precisely to forget the iron-and-autumn world, after too much sake her clients might mention famines, rebellions and executions, and she gave thanks to Kannon that such matters could no longer touch her. Rice was cheaper or dearer, maikos’ costumes unfailingly splendid; that was all. The geishas called her Eldest Sister. Her wrists bloomed slowly up, and she crossed her brilliant sleeves, singing “Black Hair.” She seemed beyond change. But she had been given only until the blossoms fell, so that still her hours resembled those swirls of silver thread advancing around her neck, soon to meet beneath her shoulders and drown the scarlet forever. Thus each spring she changed her collar, becoming again a cherry tree in the lonely hills.