meha meant about finding the proper time. 
I told her that if she could suggest what I ought to say, I would be eager to speak with Mother 
tomorrow. 

"Now, Chiyo, stumbling along in life is a poor way to proceed. You must learn how to find the 
time and place for things. A mouse who wishes to fool the cat doesn't simply scamper out of 
its hole when it feels the slightest urge. Don't you know how to check your almanac?" 

I don't know if you've ever seen an almanac. To open one and flip through the pages, you'd 
find it crammed with the most complicated charts and obscure characters. Geisha are a very 
superstitious lot, as I've said. Auntie and Mother, and even the cook and the maids, scarcely 
made a decision as simple as buying a new pair of shoes without consulting an almanac. But 
I'd never checked one in my life. 

"It's no wonder, all the misfortunes you've experienced," Mameha told me. "Do you mean to 
say that you tried to run away without checking if the day was auspicious?" 

I told her my sister had made the decision when we would leave. Mameha wanted to know if 
I could remember the date, which I managed to do after looking at a calendar with her; it had 
been the last Tuesday in October 1929, only a few months after Satsu and I were taken from 
our home. 


Mameha told her maid to bring an almanac for that year; and then after asking my sign-the 
year of the monkey-she spent some time checking and cross-checking various charts, as 
well as a page that gave my general outlook for the month. Finally she read aloud: 

" 'A most inauspicious time. Needles, unusual foods, and travel must be avoided at all costs.' 
" Here she stopped to look up at me. "Do you hear that? Travel: After that it goes on to say 
that you must avoid the following things . . . let's see . . . 'bathing during the hour of the 
rooster,' 'acquiring new clothing,' 'embarking on new enterprises,' and listen to this one, 
'changing residences.'" Here Mameha closed the book and peered at me. "Were you careful 
about any of those things?" 

Many people have doubts about this sort of fortune-telling; but any doubts you might have 
would certainly have been swept away if you'd been there to see what happened next. 
Mameha asked my sister's sign and looked up the same information about her. "Well," she 
said after looking at it for a while, "it reads, 'An auspicious day for small changes.' Perhaps 
not the best day for something as ambitious as running away, but certainly better than the 
other days that week or the next." And then came the surprising thing. "It goes on to say, 'A 
good day for travel in the direction of the Sheep,'" Mameha read. And when she brought out 
a map and found Yoroido, it lay to the north northeast of Kyoto, which was indeed the 
direction corresponding to the zodiac sign of the Sheep. Satsu had checked her almanac. 
That was probably what she'd done when she left me there in the room under the stairwell at 
the Tatsuyo for a few minutes. And she'd certainly been right to do it; she had escaped, while 
I hadn't. 

This was the moment when I began to understand how unaware I'd been-not only in planning 
to run away, but in everything. I'd never understood how closely things are connected to one 
another. And it isn't just the zodiac I'm talking about. We human beings are only a part of 
something very much larger. When we walk along, we may crush a beetle or simply cause a 
change in the air so that a fly ends up where it might never have gone otherwise. And if we 
think of the same example but with ourselves in the role of the insect, and the larger universe 
in the role we've just played, it's perfectly clear that we're affected every day by forces over 
which we have no more control than the poor beetle has over our gigantic foot as it descends 
upon it. What are we to do? We must use whatever methods we can to understand the 
movement of the universe around us and time our actions so that we are not fighting the 
currents, but moving with them. 

Mameha took up my almanac again and this time selected several dates over the following 
weeks that would be auspicious for significant change. I asked whether I should try to speak 
with Mother on one of the dates, and exactly what I should say. 

"It isn't my intention to have you speak with Mrs. Nitta yourself," she said. "She'll turn you 
down in an instant. If I were her, so would I! As far as she knows, there's no one in Gion 
willing to be your older sister." 

I was very sorry to hear her say this. "In that case, Mameha-san, what should I do?" 

"You should go back to your okiya, Chiyo," she said, "and mention to no one that you've 
spoken with me." 

After this, she gave me a look that meant I should bow and excuse myself right then, which I 
did. I was so flustered I left without the Kabuki magazines and shamisen strings Mameha 
had given me. Her maid had to come running down the street with them. 

Chapter eleven 


I should explain just what Mameha meant by "older sister," even though at the time, I hardly 
knew much about it myself. By the time a girl is finally ready to make her debut as an 
apprentice, she needs to have established a relationship with a more experienced geisha. 
Mameha had mentioned Hatsumomo's older sister, the great Tomi-hatsu, who was already 
an old woman when she trained Hatsumomo; but older sisters aren't always so senior to the 
geisha they train. Any geisha can act as older-sister to a younger girl, as long as she has at 
least one day's seniority. 

When two girls are bound together as sisters, they perform a ceremony like a wedding. 
Afterward they see each other almost as members of the same family, calling each other 
"Older Sister" and "Younger Sister" just as real family members do. Some geisha may not 
take the role as seriously as they should, but an older sister who does her job properly 
becomes the most important figure in a young geisha's life. She does a great deal more than 
just making sure her younger sister learns the proper way of blending embarrassment and 
laughter when a man tells a naughty joke, or helping her select the right grade of wax to use 
under her makeup. She must also make sure her younger sister attracts the notice of people 
she'll need to know. She does this by taking her around Gion and presenting her to the 
mistresses of all the proper teahouses, to the man who makes wigs for stage performances, 
to the chefs at the important restaurants, and so on. 

There's certainly plenty of work in all of this. But introducing her younger sister around Gion 
during the day is only half of what an older sister must do. Because Gion is like a faint star 
that comes out in its fullest beauty only after the sun has set. At night the older sister must 
take her younger sister with her to entertain, in order to introduce her to the customers and 
patrons she's come to know over the years. She says to them, "Oh, have you met my new 
younger sister, So-and-so? Please be sure to remember her name, because she's going to 
be a big star! And please permit her to call on you the next time you visit Gion." Of course, 
few men pay high fees to spend the evening chatting with a fourteen-year-old; so this 
customer probably won't, in fact, summon the young girl on his next visit. But the older sister 
and the mistress of the teahouse will continue to push her on him until he does. If it turns out 
he doesn't like her for some reason . . . well, that's another story; but otherwise, he'll probably 
end up a patron of hers in good time, and very fond of her too-just as he is of her older sister. 

Taking on the role of older sister often feels about like carrying a sack of rice back and forth 
across the city. Because not only is a younger sister as dependent on her older sister as a 
passenger is on the train she rides; but when the girl behaves badly, it's her older sister who 
must bear responsibility. The reason a busy and successful geisha goes to all this trouble for 
a younger girl is because everyone in Gion benefits when an apprentice succeeds. The 
apprentice herself benefits by paying off her debts over time, of course; and if she's lucky, 
she'll end up mistress to a wealthy man. The older sister benefits by receiving a portion of 
her younger sister's fees-as do the mistresses of the various teahouses where the girl 
entertains. Even the wigmaker, and the shop where hair ornaments are sold, and the sweets 
shop where the apprentice geisha will buy gifts for her patrons from time to time . . . they may 
never directly receive a portion of the girl's fees; but certainly they all benefit by the 
patronage of yet another successful geisha, who can bring customers into Gion to spend 
money. 

It's fair to say that, for a young girl in Gion, nearly everything depends on her older sister. 
And yet few girls have any say over who their older sisters will be. An established geisha 
certainly won't jeopardize her reputation by taking on a younger sister she thinks is dull or 
someone she thinks her patrons won't like. On the other hand, the mistress of an okiya that 
has invested a great deal of money in training a certain apprentice won't sit quietly and just 
wait for some dull geisha to come along and offer to train her. So as a result, a successful 
geisha ends up with far more requests than she can manage. Some she can turn away, and 
some she can't . . . which brings me to the reason why Mother probably did feel-just as 


Mameha suggested-that not a single geisha in Gion would be willing to act as my older 
sister. 

Back at the time I first came to the okiya, Mother probably had in mind for Hatsumomo to act 
as my older sister. Hatsumomo may have been the sort of woman who would bite a spider 
right back, but nearly any apprentice would have been happy to be her