" 

"I haven't done anything, Auntie, I promise you." 

"You must never trust her, not even if she tries to help you. Already she's burdened you with 
so much debt you may never work it off." 

"I don't understand ..." I said, "about debt'?" 

"Hatsumomo's little trick with that kimono is going to cost you more money than you've ever 
imagined in your life. That's what I mean about debt." 

"But. . . how will I pay?" 

"When you begin working as a geisha, you'll pay the okiya back for it, along with everything 
else you'll owe-your meals and lessons; if you get sick, your doctor's fees. You pay all of that 
yourself. Why do you think Mother spends all her time in her room, writing numbers in those 
little books? You owe the okiya even for the money it cost to acquire you." 

Throughout my months in Gion, I'd certainly imagined that money must have changed hands 
before Satsu and I were taken from our home. I often thought of the conversation I'd 
overheard between Mr. Tanaka and my father, and of what Mrs. Fidget had said about Satsu 
and me being "suitable." I'd wondered with horror whether Mr. Tanaka had made money by 
helping to sell us, and how much we had cost. But I'd never imagined that I myself would 
have to repay it. 

"You won't pay it back until you've been a geisha a good long time," she went on. "And you'll 
never pay it back if you end up a failed geisha like me. Is that the way you want to spend 
your future?" 

At the moment I didn't much care how I spent my future. 

"If you want to ruin your life in Gion, there are a dozen ways to do it," Auntie said. "You can 
try to run away. Once you've done that, Mother will see you as a bad investment; she's not 
going to put more money into someone who might disappear at any time. That would mean 


the end of your lessons, and you can't be a geisha without training. Or you can make yourself 
unpopular with your teachers, so they won't give you the help you need. Or you can grow up 
to be an ugly woman like me. I wasn't such an unattractive girl when Granny bought me from 
my parents, but I didn't turn out well, and Granny's always 

hated me for it. One time she beat me so badly for something I did that she broke one of my 
hips. That's when I stopped being a geisha. And that's the reason I'm going to do the job of 
beating you myself, rather than letting Granny get her hands on you." 

She led me to the walkway and made me lie down on my stomach there. I didn't much care 
whether she beat me or not; it seemed to me that nothing could make my situation worse. 
Every time my body jolted under the pole, I wailed as loudly as I dared, and pictured Hatsumomo's lovely face smiling down at me. When the beating was over, Auntie left me crying 
there. Soon I felt the walkway tremble under someone's footsteps and sat up to find 
Hatsumomo standing above me. 

"Chiyo, I would be ever so grateful if you'd get out of my way." 

"You promised to tell me where I could find my sister, Hatsumomo," I said to her. 

"So I did!" She leaned down so that her face was near mine. I thought she was going to tell 
me I hadn't done enough yet, that when she thought of more for me to do, she would tell me. 
But this wasn't at all what happened. 

"Your sister is in ajorou-ya called Tatsuyo," she told me, "in the district of Miyagawa-cho, just 
south of Gion." 

When she was done speaking, she gave me a little shove with her foot, and I stepped down 
out of her way. 

Chapter seven 

Id never heard the word jorou-ya before; so the very next evening, when Auntie dropped a 
sewing tray onto the floor of the entrance I hall and asked my help in cleaning it up, I said to 
her: 

"Auntie, what is a jorou-ya?" 

Auntie didn't answer, but just went on reeling up a spool of thread. 

"Auntie?" I said again. 

"It's the sort of place Hatsumomo will end up, if she ever gets what she deserves," she said. 

She didn't seem inclined to say more, so I had no choice but to leave it at that. 

My question certainly wasn't answered; but I did form the impression that Satsu might be 
suffering even more than I was. So I began thinking about how I might sneak to this place 
called Tatsuyo the very next time I had an opportunity. Unfortunately, part of my punishment 
for ruining Mameha's kimono was confinement in the okiya for fifty days. I was permitted to 
attend the school as long as Pumpkin accompanied me; but I was no longer permitted to run 
errands. I suppose I could have dashed out the door at any time, if I'd wanted to, but I knew 
better than to do something so foolish. To begin with, I wasn't sure how to find the Tatsuyo. 
And what was worse, the moment I was discovered missing, Mr. Bekku or someone would 
be sent to look for me. A young maid had run away from the okiya next door only a few 


months earlier, and they brought her back the following morning. They beat her so badly over 
the next few days that her wailing was horrible. Sometimes I had to put my fingers in my ears 
to shut it out. 

I decided I had no choice but to wait until my fifty-day confinement was over. In the 
meantime, I put my efforts into finding ways to repay Hatsumomo and Granny for their 
cruelty. Hatsumomo I repaid by scraping up pigeon droppings whenever I was supposed to 
clean them from the stepping-stones in the courtyard and mixing them in with her face 
cream. The cream already contained unguent of nightingale droppings, as I've mentioned; so 
maybe it did her no harm, but it did give me satisfaction. Granny I repaid by wiping the toilet 
rag around on the inside of her sleeping robe; and I was very pleased to see her sniffing at it 
in puzzlement, though she never took it off. Soon I discovered that the cook had taken it 
upon herself to punish me further over the kimono incident-even though no one had asked 
her to-by cutting back on my twice-monthly portions of dried fish. I couldn't think of how to 
repay her for this until one day I saw her chasing a mouse down the corridor with a mallet. 
She hated mice worse than cats did, as it turned out. So I swept mouse droppings from 
under the foundation of the main house and scattered them here and there in the kitchen. I 
even took a chopstick one day and gouged a hole in the bottom of a canvas bag of rice, so 
she'd have to take everything out of all the cabinets and search for signs of rodents. 

One evening as I was waiting up for Hatsumomo, I heard the telephone ring, and Yoko came 
out a moment later and went up the stairs. When she came back down, she was holding 
Hatsumomo's shamisen, disassembled in its lacquer carrying case. 

"You'll have to take this to the Mizuki Teahouse," she said to me. "Hatsumomo has lost a bet 
and has to play a song on a shamisen. I don't know what's gotten into her, but she won't use 
the one the teahouse has offered. I think she's just stalling, since she hasn't touched a 
shamisen in years." 

Yoko apparently didn't know I was confined to the okiya, which was no surprise, really. She 
was rarely permitted to leave the maid's room in case she should miss an important 
telephone call, and she wasn't involved in the life of the okiya in any way. I took the shamisen 
from her while she put on her kimono overcoat to leave for the night. 

And after she had explained to me where to find the Mizuki Teahouse, I slipped into my 
shoes in the entryway, tingling with nervousness that someone might stop me. The maids 
and Pumpkin-even the three older women-were all asleep, and Yoko would be gone in a 
matter of minutes. It seemed to me my chance to find my sister had come at last. 

I heard thunder rumble overhead, and the air smelled of rain. So I hurried along the streets, 
past groups of men and geisha. Some of them gave me peculiar looks, because in those 
days we still had men and women in Gion who made their living as shamisen porters. They 
were often elderly; certainly none of them were children. It wouldn't surprise me if some of 
the people I passed thought I'd stolen that shamisen and was running away with it. 

When I reached the Mizuki Teahouse, rain was beginning to fall; but the entrance was so 
elegant I was afraid to set foot in it. The walls beyond the little curtain that hung in the 
doorway were a soft orange hue, trimmed in dark wood. A path of polished stone led to a 
huge vase holding an arrangement of twisted branches from a maple tree with their brilliant 
red leaves of fall. At length I worked up my courage and brushed past the little curtain. Near 
the vase, a spacious entryway opened to one side, with a floor of coarsely polished granite. I 
remember being astounded that all the beauty I'd seen wasn't even the entry-way to the 
teahouse, but only the path leading to the entryway. It was exquisitely lovely-as indeed it 
should have been; because although I didn't know it, I was seeing for the first time one of the 


most exclusive teahouses in all of Japan. And a teahouse isn't for tea, you see; it's the place 
where men go to be entertained by geisha. 

The moment I stepped into the entryway, the door before me rolled open. A young maid 
kneeling on the raised floor inside gazed down at me; she must have heard my wooden 
shoes on the stone. She was dressed in a beautiful dark blue kimono with a simple pattern in 
gray. A year earlier I would have taken her to be the young mistress of such an extravagant 
place, but now after my months in Gion, I recognized at once that her kimono-though more 
beautiful than anything in Yoroido-was far too simple for a geisha or for the mistress of a 
teahouse. And of course, her hairstyle was plain as well. Still, she was far more elegant than 
I was, and looked down at me with contempt. 

"Go to the back," she said. 

"Hatsumomo has asked that-" 

"Go to the back!" she said again, and rolled the door 