e 
to look up at her. 

"What unusual eyes!" she said. "I thought I might have imagined it. What color would you call 
them, Tatsumi?" 

Her maid came back into the entryway and took a look at me. "Blue-gray, ma'am," she 
replied. 

"That's just what I would have said. Now, how many girls in Gion do you think have eyes like 
that?" 

I didn't know if Mameha was speaking to me or Tatsumi, but neither of us answered. She 
was looking at me with a peculiar expression-concentrating on something, it seemed to me. 
And then to my great relief, she excused herself and left. 

Granny's funeral was held about a week later, on a morning chosen by a fortune-teller. 
Afterward we began putting the okiya back in order, but with several changes. Auntie moved 
downstairs into the room that had been Granny's, while Pumpkin-who was to begin her 
apprenticeship as a geisha before long-took the second-floor room where Auntie had lived. In 
addition, two new maids arrived the following week, both of them middle-aged and very 


energetic. It may seem odd that Mother added maids although the family was now fewer in 
number; but in fact the okiya had always been understaffed because Granny couldn't tolerate 
crowding. 

The final change was that Pumpkin's chores were taken away from her. She was told instead 
to spend her time practicing the various arts she would depend upon as a geisha. Usually 
girls weren't given so much opportunity for practice, but poor Pumpkin was a slow learner 
and needed the extra time if anyone ever did. I had difficulty watching her as she knelt on the 
wooden walkway every day and practiced her shamisen for hours, with her tongue poking 
out the side of her mouth 
like she was trying to lick her cheek clean. She gave me little smiles whenever our eyes met; 
and really, her disposition was as sweet and kind as could be. But already I was finding it 
difficult to bear the burden of patience in my life, waiting for some tiny opening that might 
never come and that would certainly be the only chance I'd ever get. Now I had to watch as 
the door of opportunity was held wide open for someone else. Some nights when I went to 
bed, I took the handkerchief the Chairman had given me and lay on my futon smelling its rich 
talc scent. I cleared my mind of everything but the image of him and the feeling of warm sun 
on my face and the hard stone wall where I'd sat that day when I met him. He was my 
bodhisattva with a thousand arms who would help me. I couldn't imagine how his help would 
come to me, but I prayed that it would. 

Toward the end of the first month after Granny's death, one of our new maids came to me 
one day to say I had a visitor at the door. It was an unseasonably hot October afternoon, and 
my whole body was damp with perspiration from using our old hand-operated vacuum to 
clean the tatami mats upstairs in Pumpkin's new room, which had only recently been 
Auntie's; Pumpkin was in the habit of sneaking rice crackers upstairs, so the tatami needed 
to be cleaned frequently. I mopped myself with a wet towel as quickly as I could and rushed 
down, to find a young woman in the entryway, dressed in a kimono like a maid's. I got to my 
knees and bowed to her. Only when I looked at her a second time did I recognize her as the 
maid who had accompanied Mameha to our okiya a few weeks earlier. I was very sorry to 
see her there. I felt certain I was in trouble. But when she gestured for me to step down into 
the entryway, I slipped my feet into my shoes and followed her out to the street. 

"Are you sent on errands from time to time, Chiyo?" she asked me. 

So much time had passed since I'd tried to run away that I was no longer confined to the 
okiya. I had no idea why she was asking; but I told her that I was. 

"Good," she said. "Arrange for yourself to be sent out tomorrow afternoon at three o'clock, 
and meet me at the little bridge that arches over the Shirakawa Stream." 

"Yes, ma'am," I said, "but may I ask why?" 

"You'll find out tomorrow, won't you?" she answered, with a little crinkle of her nose that 
made me wonder if she was teasing me. 

I certainly wasn't pleased that Mameha's maid wanted me to accompany her somewhere-
probably to Mameha, I thought, to be scolded for what I'd done. But just the same, the 
following day I talked Pumpkin into sending me on an errand that didn't really need to be run. 
She was worried about getting into trouble, until I promised to find a way of repaying her. So 
at three o'clock, she called to me from the courtyard: 

"Chiyo-san, could you please go out and buy me some new shamisen strings and a few 
Kabuki magazines?" She had been instructed to read Kabuki magazines for the sake of her 


education. Then I heard her say in an even louder voice, "Is that all right, Auntie?" But Auntie 
didn't answer, for she was upstairs taking a nap. 

I left the okiya and walked along the Shirakawa Stream to the arched bridge leading into the 
Motoyoshi-cho section of Gion. With the weather so warm and lovely, quite a number of men 
and geisha were strolling along, admiring the weeping cherry trees whose tendrils drooped 
onto the surface of the water. While I waited near the bridge, I watched a group of foreign 
tourists who had come to see the famous Gion district. They weren't the only foreigners I'd 
ever seen in Kyoto, but they certainly looked peculiar to me, the big-nosed women with their 
long dresses and their brightly colored hair, the men so tall and confident, with heels that 
clicked on the pavement. One of the men pointed at me and said something in a foreign 
language, and they all turned to have a look. I felt so embarrassed I pretended to find 
something on the ground so I could crouch down and hide myself. 

Finally Mameha's maid came; and just as I'd feared, she led me over the bridge and along 
the stream to the very same doorway where Hatsumomo and Korin had handed me the 
kimono and sent me up the stairs. It seemed terribly unfair to me that this same incident was 
about to cause still more trouble for me-and after so much time had passed. But when the 
maid rolled open the door for me, I climbed up into the gray light of the stairway. At the top 
we both stepped out of our shoes and went into the apartment. 

"Chiyo is here, ma'am!" she cried. 

Then I heard Mameha call from the back room, "All right, thank you, Tatsumi!" 

The young woman led me to a table by an open window, where I knelt on one of the 
cushions and tried not to look nervous. Very shortly another maid came out with a cup of tea 
for me-because as it turned out, Mameha had not one maid, but two. I certainly wasn't 
expecting to be served tea; and in fact, nothing like this had happened to me since dinner at 
Mr. Tanaka's house years earlier. I bowed to thank her and took a few sips, so as not to 
seem rude. Afterward I found myself sitting 
for a long while with nothing to do but listen to the sound of water passing over the knee-high 
cascade in the Shirakawa Stream outside. 

Mameha's apartment wasn't large, but it was extremely elegant, with beautiful tatami mats 
that were obviously new, for they had a lovely yellow-green sheen and smelled richly of 
straw. If you've ever looked closely enough at a tatami mat, you'd notice that the border 
around it is edged in fabric, usually just a strip of dark cotton or linen; but these were edged 
in a strip of silk with a pattern of green and gold. Not far away in an alcove hung a scroll 
written in a beautiful hand, which turned out to be a gift to Mameha from the famous 
calligrapher Matsudaira Koichi. Beneath it, on the wooden base of the alcove, an 
arrangement of blossoming dogwood branches rose up out of a shallow dish that was 
irregular in shape with a cracked glaze of the deepest black. I found it very peculiar, but 
actually it had been presented to Mameha by none other than Yoshida Sakuhei, the great 
master of the setoguro style of ceramics who became a Living National Treasure in the years 
after World War II. 

At last Mameha came out from the back room, dressed exquisitely in a cream kimono with a 
water design at the hem. I turned and bowed very low on the mats while she drifted over to 
the table; and when she was there, she arranged herself on her knees opposite me, took a 
sip of tea the maid served to her, and then said this: 

"Now . . . Chiyo, isn't it? Why don't you tell me how you managed to get out of your okiya this 
afternoon? I'm sure Mrs. Nitta doesn't like it when her maids attend to personal business in 
the middle of the day." 


I certainly hadn't expected this sort of question. In fact, I couldn't think of anything at all to 
say, even though I knew it would be rude not to respond. Mameha just sipped at her tea and 
looked at me with a benign expression on her perfect, oval face. Finally she said: 

"You think I'm trying to scold you. But I'm only interested to know if you've gotten yourself into 
trouble by coming here." 

I was very relieved to hear her say this. "No, ma'am," I said. "I'm supposed to be on an 
errand fetching Kabuki magazines and shamisen strings." 

"Oh, well, I've got plenty of those," she said, and then called her maid over and told her to 
fetch some and put them on the table before me. "When you go back to your okiya, take 
them with you, and no one will wonder where you've been. Now, tell me something. When I 
came to your okiya to pay my respects, I saw another girl your age." 

"That must have been Pumpkin. With a very round face?" 

Mameha asked why I called her Pumpkin, and when I explained, she gave a laugh. 

"This Pumpkin girl," Mameha said, "how do she and Hatsumomo get along?" 

"Well, ma'am," I said, "I suppose Hatsumomo pays her no more attention than she would a 
leaf that has fluttered into the courtyard." 
