Mother had told me I could begin my training within a few months if I worked hard and behaved myself. As I learned from Pumpkin, beginning my training meant going to a school in another section of Gion to take lessons in things like music, dance, and tea ceremony. All the girls studying to be geisha took classes at this same school. I felt sure I’d find Satsu there when I was finally permitted to go; so by the end of my first week, I’d made up my mind to be as obedient as a cow following along on a rope, in the hopes that Mother would send me to the school right away.
Most of my chores were straightforward. I stowed away the futons in the morning, cleaned the rooms, swept the dirt corridor, and so forth. Sometimes I was sent to the pharmacist to fetch ointment for the cook’s scabies, or to a shop on Shijo Avenue to fetch the rice crackers Auntie was so fond of. Happily the worst jobs, such as cleaning the toilets, were the responsibility of one of the elderly maids. But even though I worked as hard as I knew how, I never seemed to make the good impression I hoped to, because my chores every day were more than I could possibly finish; and the problem was made a good deal worse by Granny.
Looking after Granny wasn’t really one of my duties-not as Auntie described them to me. But when Granny summoned me I couldn’t very well ignore her, for she had more seniority in the okiya than anyone else. One day, for example, I was about to carry tea upstairs to Mother when I heard Granny call out:
“Where’s that girl! Send her in here!”
I had to put down Mother’s tray and hurry into the room where Granny was eating her lunch.
“Can’t you see this room is too hot?” she said to me, after I’d bowed to her on my knees. “You ought to have come in here and opened the window.”
“I’m sorry, Granny. I didn’t know you were hot.”
“Don’t I look hot?”
She was eating some rice, and several grains of it were stuck to her lower lip. I thought she looked more mean than hot, but I went directly to the window and opened it. As soon as I did, a fly came in and began buzzing around Granny’s food.
“What’s the matter with you?” she said, waving at the fly with her chopsticks. “The other maids don’t let in flies when they open the window!”
I apologized and told her I would fetch a swatter.
“And knock the fly into my food? Oh, no, you won’t! You’ll stand right here while I eat and keep it away from me.”
So I had to stand there while Granny ate her food, and listen to her tell me about the great Kabuki actor Ichimura Uzaemon XIV, who had taken her hand during a moon-viewing party when she was only fourteen. By the time I was finally free to leave, Mother’s tea had grown so cold I couldn’t even deliver it. Both the cook and Mother were angry with me.
The truth was, Granny didn’t like to be alone. Even when she needed to use the toilet, she made Auntie stand just outside the door and hold her hands to help her balance in a squatting position. The odor was so overpowering, poor Auntie nearly broke her neck trying to get her head as far away from it as possible. I didn’t have any jobs as bad as this one, but Granny did often call me to massage her while she cleaned her ears with a tiny silver scoop; and the task of massaging her was a good deal worse than you might think. I almost felt sick the first time she unfastened her robe and pulled it down from her shoulders, because the skin there and on her neck was bumpy and yellow like an uncooked chicken’s. The problem, as I later learned, was that in her geisha days she’d used a kind of white makeup we call “China Clay,” made with a base of lead. China Clay turned out to be poisonous, to begin with, which probably accounted in part for Granny’s foul disposition. But also as a younger woman Granny had often gone to the hot springs north of Kyoto. This would have been fine except that the lead-based makeup was very hard to remove; traces of it combined with some sort of chemical in the water to make a dye that ruined her skin. Granny wasn’t the only one afflicted by this problem. Even during the early years of World War II, you could still see old women on the streets in Gion with sagging yellow necks.
One day after I’d been in the okiya about three weeks, I went upstairs much later than usual to straighten Hatsumomo’s room. I was terrified of Hatsumomo, even though I hardly saw her because of the busy life she led. I worried about what might happen if she found me alone, so I always tried to clean her room the moment she left the okiya for her dance lessons. Unfortunately, that morning Granny had kept me busy until almost noon.
Hatsumomo’s room was the largest in the okiya, larger in floor space than my entire house in Yoroido. I couldn’t think why it should be so much bigger than everyone else’s until one of the elderly maids told me that even though Hatsumomo was the only geisha in the okiya now, in the past there’d been as many as three or four, and they’d all slept together in that one room. Hatsumomo may have lived alone, but she certainly made enough mess for four people. When I went up to her room that day, in addition to the usual magazines strewn about, and brushes left on the mats near her tiny makeup stand, I found an apple core and an empty whiskey bottle under the table. The window was open, and the wind must have knocked down the wood frame on which she’d hung her kimono from the night before-or perhaps she’d tipped it over before going to bed drunk and hadn’t yet bothered to pick it up. Usually Auntie would have fetched the kimono by now, because it was her responsibility to care for the clothing in the okiya, but for some reason she hadn’t. Just as I was standing the frame erect again, the door slid open all at once, and I turned to see Hatsumomo standing there.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said. “I thought I heard a little mousie or something. I see you’ve been straightening my room! Are you the one who keeps rearranging all my makeup jars? Why do you insist on doing that?”
“I’m very sorry, ma’am,” I said. “I only move them to dust underneath.”
“But if you touch them,” she said, “they’ll start to smell like you. And then the men will say to me, ‘Hatsumomo-san, why do you stink like an ignorant girl from a fishing village?’ I’m sure you understand that, don’t you? But let’s have you repeat it back to me just to be sure. Why don’t I want you to touch my makeup?”
I could hardly bring myself to say it. But at last I answered her. “Because it will start to smell like me.”
“That’s very good! And what will the men say?”
“They’ll say, ‘Oh, Hatsumomo-san, you smell just like a girl from a fishing village.’ ”
“Hmm… there’s something about the way you said it that I don’t like. But I suppose it will do. I can’t see why you girls from fishing villages smell so bad. That ugly sister of yours was here looking for you the other day, and her stench was nearly as bad as yours.”
I’d kept my eyes to the floor until then; but when I heard these words, I looked Hatsumomo right in the face to see whether or not she was telling me the truth.
“You look so surprised!” she said to me. “Didn’t I mention that she came here? She wanted me to give you a message about where she’s living. Probably she wants you to go find her, so the two of you can run away together.”
“Hatsumomo-san-”
“You want me to tell you where she is? Well, you’re going to have to earn the information. When I think how, I’ll tell you. Now get out.”
I didn’t dare disobey her, but just before leaving the room I stopped, thinking perhaps I could persuade her.