mono. And, in fact, the underrobe's collar shows as well, just like the 
collar of a man's shirt when he wears a business suit. Part of Auntie's job in the okiya was to 
sew a silk collar each day onto the underrobe Hatsumomo planned to wear, and then remove 
it the next morning for cleaning. An apprentice geisha wears a red collar, but of course 
Hatsumomo wasn't an apprentice; her collar was white. 

When Hatsumomo came out of her room, she was wearing all the items I've described-
though we could see nothing but her underrobe, held shut with a cord around her waist. Also, 
she wore white socks we call tabi, which button along the side with a snug fit. At this point 
she was ready for Mr. Bekku to dress her. To see him at work, you'd have understood at 
once just why his help was necessary. Kimono are the same length no matter who wears 
them, so except for the very tallest women, the extra fabric must be folded beneath the sash. 
When Mr. Bekku doubled the kimono fabric at the waist and tied a cord to hold it in place, 
there was never the slightest buckle. Or if one did appear, he gave a tug here or there, and 
the whole thing straightened out. When he finished his work, the robe always fit the contours 
of the body beautifully. 

Mr. Bekku's principal job as dresser was to tie the obi, which isn't as simple a job as it might 
sound. An obi like the one Hatsumomo wore is twice as long as a man is tall, and nearly as 
wide as a woman's shoulders. Wrapped around the waist, it covers the area from the 
breastbone all the way to below the navel. Most people who know nothing of kimono seem to 
think the obi is simply tied in the back as if it were a string; but nothing could be further from 
the truth. A half dozen cords and clasps are needed to keep it in place, and a certain amount 
of padding must be used as well to shape the knot. Mr. Bekku took several minutes to tie 
Hatsumomo's obi. When he was done, hardly a wrinkle could be seen anywhere in the fabric, 
thick and heavy as it was. 

I understood very little of what I saw on the landing that day; but it seemed to me that Mr. 
Bekku tied strings and tucked fabric at a frantic rate, while Hatsumomo did nothing more than 
hold her arms out and gaze at her image in the mirror. I felt miserable with envy, watching 
her. Her kimono was a brocade in shades of brown and gold. Below the waist, deer in their 
rich brown coloring of autumn nuzzled one another, with golds and rusts behind them in a 
pattern like fallen leaves on a forest floor. Her obi was plum-colored, interwoven with silver 
threads. I didn't know it at the time, but the outfit she wore probably cost as much as a 
policeman or a shopkeeper might make in an entire year. And yet to look at Hatsumomo 
standing there, when she turned around to glance back at herself in the free-standing mirror, 
you would nave thought that no amount of money on earth could have made a woman look 
as glamorous as she did. 

All that remained were the final touches on her makeup and the ornaments in her hair. Auntie 
and I followed Hatsumomo back into her room, where she knelt at her dressing table and 
took out a tiny lacquer box containing rouge for her lips. She used a small brush to paint it 


on. Thefashion at that time was to leave the upper lip unpainted, which made the lower lip 
look fuller. White makeup causes all sorts of curious illusions; if a geisha were to paint the 
entire surface of her lips, her mouth would end up looking like two big slices of tuna. So most 
geisha prefer a poutier shape, more like the bloom of a violet. Unless a geisha has lips of this 
shape to begin with-and very few do-she nearly always paints on a more circle-shaped 
mouth than she actually has. But as I've said, the fashion in those days was to paint only the 
lower lip, and this is what Hatsumomo did. 

Now Hatsumomo took the twig of paulownia wood she'd shown me earlier and lit it with a 
match. After it had burned for a few seconds she blew it out, cooled it with her fingertips, and 
then went back to the mirror to draw in her eyebrows with the charcoal. It made a lovely 
shade of soft gray. Next she went to a closet and selected a few ornaments for her hair, 
including one of tortoiseshell, and an unusual cluster of pearls at the end of a long pin. When 
she'd slipped them into her hair, she applied a bit of perfume to the bare flesh on the back of 
her neck, and tucked the flat wooden vial into her obi afterward in case she should need it 
again. She also put a folding fan into her obi and placed a kerchief in her right sleeve. And 
with this she turned to look down at me. She wore the same faint smile she had worn earlier, 
and even Auntie had to sigh, from how extraordinary Hatsumomo looked. 

Chapter six 

I hatever any of us may have thought about Hatsumomo, she was like an empress in our 
okiya since she earned the income by which we all lived. And being an empress she would 
have been very displeased, upon returning late at night, to find her palace dark and all the 
servants asleep. That is to say, when she came home too drunk to unbutton her socks, 
someone had to unbutton them for her; and if she felt hungry, she certainly wasn't going to 
stroll into the kitchen to prepare something by herself-such as an umeboshi ochazuke, which 
was a favorite snack of hers, made with leftover rice and pickled sour plums, soaked in hot 
tea. Actually, our okiya wasn't at all unusual in this respect. The job of waiting up to bow and 
welcome the geisha home almost always fell to the most junior of the "cocoons"-as the young 
geisha-in-training were often called. And from the moment I began taking lessons at the 
school, the most junior cocoon in our okiya was me. Long before midnight, Pumpkin and the 
two elderly maids were sound asleep on their futons only a meter or so away on the wood 
floor of the entrance hall; but I had to go on kneeling there, struggling to stay awake until 
sometimes as late as two o'clock in the morning. Granny's room was nearby, and she slept 
with her light on and her door opened a crack. The bar of light that fell across my empty futon 
made me think of a day, not long before Satsu and I were taken away from our village, when 
I'd peered into the back room of our house to see my mother asleep there. My father had 
draped fishing nets across the paper screens to darken the room, but it looked so gloomy I 
decided to open one of the windows; and when I did, a strip of bright sunlight fell across my 
mother's futon and showed her hand so pale and bony. To see the yellow light streaming 
from Granny's room onto my futon ... I had to wonder if my mother was still alive. We were so 
much alike, I felt sure I would have known if she'd died; but of course, I'd had no sign one 
way or the other. 

One night as the fall was growing cooler, I had just dozed off leaning against a post when I 
heard the outside door roll open. Hatsumomo would be very angry if she found me sleeping, 
so I tried my best to look alert. But when the interior door opened, I was surprised to see a 
man, wearing a traditional, loose-fitting workman's jacket tied shut at the hip and a pair of 
peasant trousers-though he didn't look at all like a workman or a peasant. His hair was oiled 
back in a very modern manner, and he wore a closely trimmed beard that gave him the air of 
an intellectual. He leaned down and took my head in his hands to look me square in the face. 

"Why, you're a pretty one," he said to me in a low voice. "What's your name?" 


I felt certain he must be a workman, though I couldn't think why he'd come so late at night. I 
was frightened of answering him, but I managed to say my name, and then he moistened a 
fingertip with his tongue and touched me on the cheek-to take off an eyelash, as it turned 
out. 

"Yoko is still here?" he asked. Yoko was a young woman who spent every day from 
midafternoon until late evening sitting in our maids' room. Back in those days the okiya and 
teahouses in Gion were all linked by a private telephone system, and Yoko was kept busier 
than almost anyone in our okiya, answering that telephone to book Hatsu-momo's 
engagements, sometimes for banquets or parties six months to a year in advance. Usually 
Hatsumomo's schedule didn't fill up completely until the morning before, and calls continued 
through the evening from teahouses whose customers wanted her to drop in if she had time. 
But the telephone hadn't been ringing much tonight, and I thought probably Yoko had fallen 
asleep just as I had. The man didn't wait for me to answer, but gestured for me to keep quiet, 
and showed himself down the dirt corridor to the maids' room. 

The next thing I heard was Yoko apologizing-for she had indeed fallen asleep-and then she 
carried on a long conversation with the switchboard operator. She had to be connected with 
several teahouses before she at last located Hatsumomo and left a message that the Kabuki 
actor Onoe Shikan had come to town. I didn't know it at the time, but there was no Onoe 
Shikan; this was just a code. 

After this, Yoko left for the night. She didn't seem worried that a man was waiting in the 
maids' room, so I made up my mind to say nothing to anyone. This turned out to be a good 
thing, because when Hatsumomo appeared twenty minutes later, she stopped in the 
entrance hall to say to me: 

"I haven't tried to make your life really miserable yet. But if you ever mention that a man 
came here, or even that I stopped in before the end of the evening, that will change." 

She was standing over me as she said this, and when she reached into her sleeve for 
something, I could see even in the dim light that her forearms were flushed. She went into 
the maids' room and rolled the door shut behind her. I heard a short muffled conversation, 
and th