The interior of the school building seemed to me as old and dusty as an abandoned house. Down at the end of the long hallway stood a group of six or eight girls. I felt a jolt when I set eyes on them, because I thought one might be Satsu; but when they turned to look at us I was disappointed. They all wore the same hairstyle-the wareshinobu of a young apprentice geisha-and looked to me as if they knew much more about Gion than either Pumpkin or I would ever know.
Halfway down the hall we went into a spacious classroom in the traditional Japanese style. Along one wall hung a large board with pegs holding many tiny wooden plaques; on each plaque was written a name in fat, black strokes. My reading and writing were still poor; I’d attended school in the mornings in Yoroido, and since coming to Kyoto had spent an hour every afternoon studying with Auntie, but I could read very few of the names. Pumpkin went to the board and took, from a shallow box on the mats, a plaque bearing her own name, which she hung on the first empty hook. The board on the wall, you see, was like a sign-up sheet.
After this, we went to several other classrooms to sign up in just the same way for Pumpkin’s other lessons. She was to have four classes that morning-shamisen, dance, tea ceremony, and a form of singing we call nagauta. Pumpkin was so troubled about being the last student in all of her classes that she began to wring the sash of her robe as we left the school for breakfast in the okiya. But just as we slipped into our shoes, another young girl our age came rushing across the garden with her hair in disarray. Pumpkin seemed calmer after seeing her.
We ate a bowl of soup and returned to the school as quickly as we could, so that Pumpkin could kneel in the back of the classroom to assemble her shamisen. If you’ve never seen a shamisen, you might find it a peculiar-looking instrument. Some people call it a Japanese guitar, but actually it’s a good deal smaller than a guitar, with a thin wooden neck that has three large tuning pegs at the end. The body is just a little wooden box with cat skin stretched over the top like a drum. The entire instrument can be taken apart and put into a box or a bag, which is how it is carried about. In any case, Pumpkin assembled her shamisen and began to tune it with her tongue poking out, but I’m sorry to say that her ear was very poor, and the notes went up and down like a boat on the waves, without ever settling down where they were supposed to be. Soon the classroom was full of girls with their shamisens, spaced out as neatly as chocolates in a box. I kept an eye on the door in the hopes that Satsu would walk through it, but she didn’t.
A moment later the teacher entered. She was a tiny old woman with a shrill voice. Her name was Teacher Mizumi, and this is what we called her to her face. But her surname of Mizumi sounds very close to nezumi-“mouse”; so behind her back we called her Teacher Nezumi-Teacher Mouse.
Teacher Mouse knelt on a cushion facing the class and made no effort at all to look friendly. When the students bowed to her in unison and told her good morning, she just glowered back at them without speaking a word. Finally she looked at the board on the wall and called out the name of the first student.
This first girl seemed to have a very high opinion of herself. After she’d glided to the front of the room, she bowed before the teacher and began to play. In a minute or two Teacher Mouse told the girl to stop and said all sorts of unpleasant things about her playing; then she snapped her fan shut and waved it at the girl to dismiss her. The girl thanked her, bowed again, and returned to her place, and Teacher Mouse called the name of the next student.
This went on for more than an hour, until at length Pumpkin’s name was called. I could see that Pumpkin was nervous, and in fact, the moment she began to play, everything seemed to go wrong. First Teacher Mouse stopped her and took the shamisen to retune the strings herself. Then Pumpkin tried again, but all the students began looking at one another, for no one could tell what piece she was trying to play. Teacher Mouse slapped the table very loudly and told them all to face straight ahead; and then she used her folding fan to tap out the rhythm for Pumpkin to follow. This didn’t help, so finally Teacher Mouse began to work instead on Pumpkin’s manner of holding the plectrum. She nearly sprained every one of Pumpkin’s fingers, it seemed to me, trying to make her hold it with the proper grip. At last she gave up even on this and let the plectrum fall to the mats in disgust. Pumpkin picked it up and came back to her place with tears in her eyes.
After this I learned why Pumpkin had been so worried about being the last student. Because now the girl with the disheveled hair, who’d been rushing to the school as we’d left for breakfast, came to the front of the room and bowed.
“Don’t waste your time trying to be courteous to me!” Teacher Mouse squeaked at her. “If you hadn’t slept so late this morning, you might have arrived here in time to learn something.”
The girl apologized and soon began to play, but the teacher paid no attention at all. She just said, “You sleep too late in the mornings. How do you expect me to teach you, when you can’t take the trouble to come to school like the other girls and sign up properly? Just go back to your place. I don’t want to be bothered with you.”
The class was dismissed, and Pumpkin led me to the front of the room, where we bowed to Teacher Mouse.
“May I be permitted to introduce Chiyo to you, Teacher,” Pumpkin said, “and ask your indulgence in instructing her, because she’s a girl of very little talent.”
Pumpkin wasn’t trying to insult me; this was just the way people spoke back then, when they wanted to be polite. My own mother would have said it the same way.
Teacher Mouse didn’t speak for a long while, but just looked me over and then said, “You’re a clever girl. I can see it just from looking at you. Perhaps you can help your older sister with her lessons.”
Of course she was talking about Pumpkin.
“Put your name on the board as early every morning as you can,” she told me. “Keep quiet in the classroom. I tolerate no talking at all! And your eyes must stay to the front. If you do these things, I’ll teach you as best I can.”
And with this, she dismissed us.
In the hallways between classes, I kept my eyes open for Satsu, but I didn’t find her. I began to worry that perhaps I would never see her again, and grew so upset that one of the teachers, just before beginning the class, silenced everyone and said to me:
“You, there! What’s troubling you?”
“Oh, nothing, ma’am. Only I bit my lip by accident,” I said. And to make good on this-for the sake of the girls around me, who were staring-I gave a sharp bite on my lip and tasted blood.
It was a relief to me that Pumpkin’s other classes weren’t as painful to watch as the first one had been. In the dance class, for example, the students practiced the moves in unison, with the result that no one stood out. Pumpkin wasn’t by any means the worst dancer, and even had a certain awkward grace in the way she moved. The singing class later in the morning was more difficult for her since she had a poor ear; but there again, the students practiced in unison, so Pumpkin was able to hide her mistakes by moving her mouth a great deal while singing only softly.
At the end of each of her classes, she introduced me to the teacher. One of them said to me, “You live in the same okiya as Pumpkin, do you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, “the Nitta okiya,” for Nitta was the family name of Granny and Mother, as well as Auntie.
“That means you live with Hatsumomo-san.”
“Yes, ma’am. Hatsumomo is the only geisha in our okiya at present.”