ged to specialize and go on to become true dancers, rather than shamisen 
players or singers. Unfortunately, the reason Pumpkin, with her soft, round face, spent so 
much of her time practicing shamisen was because she hadn't been selected as a dancer. 
As for me, I wasn't so exquisitely beautiful that I was given no choice but to dance, like 
Hatsumomo. It seemed to me I 
would become a dancer only by demonstrating to my teachers that I was willing to work as 
hard as necessary. 

Thanks to Hatsumomo, however, my lessons got off to a very bad start. My instructor was a 
woman of about fifty, known to us as Teacher Rump, because her skin gathered at her throat 
in such a way as to make a little rear end there beneath her chin. Teacher Rump hated 
Hatsumomo as much as anyone in Gion did. Hatsumomo knew this quite well; and so what 
do you think she did? She went to her-I know this because Teacher Rump told it to me some 
years later-and said: 

"Teacher, may I be permitted to ask you a favor? I have my eye on one of the students in 
your class, who seems to me a very talented girl. I'd be extremely grateful if you could tell me 
what you think of her. Her name is Chiyo, and I'm very, very fond of her. I'd be greatly in your 
debt for any special help you might give her." 

Hatsumomo never needed to say another word after this, because Teacher Rump gave me 
all the "special help" Hatsumomo hoped she would. My dancing wasn't bad, really, but 
Teacher Rump began at once to use me as an example of how things should not be done. 
For example, I remember one morning when she demonstrated a move to us by drawing her 
arm across her body just so and then stamping one foot on the mats. We were all expected 
to copy this move in unison; but because we were beginners, when we finished and stamped 
our feet, it sounded as if a platter stacked with beanbags had been spilled onto the floor, for 
not a single foot hit the mats at the same moment as any other. I can assure you I'd done no 
worse at this than anyone else, but Teacher Rump came and stood before me with that little 


rear end under her chin quivering, and tapped her folding fan against her thigh a few times 
before drawing it back and striking me on the side of the head with it. 

"We don't stamp at just any old moment," she said. "And we don't twitch our chins." 

In dances of the Inoue School, the face must be kept perfectly expressionless in imitation of 
the masks worn in Noh theater. But for her to complain about my chin twitching at the very 
moment when her own was trembling in anger . . . well, I was on the edge of tears because 
she'd struck me, but the other students burst out laughing. Teacher Rump blamed me for the 
outburst, and sent me out of the classroom in punishment. 

I can't say what might have become of me under her care, if Mameha hadn't finally gone to 
have a talk with her and helped her to figure out what had really happened. However much 
Teacher Rump might have hated Hatsumomo beforehand, I'm sure she hated her all the 
more after learning how Hatsumomo had duped her. I'm happy to say she felt so terrible 
about the way she had treated me that I soon be-$ came one of her favorite students. 

I won't say I had any natural talent of any kind at all, in dance or in anything else; but I was 
certainly as determined as anyone to work single-mindedly until I reached my goal. Since 
meeting the Chairman on the street that day back in the spring, I had longed for nothing so 
much as the chance to become a geisha and find a place for myself in the world. Now that 
Mameha had given me that chance, I was intent on making good. But with all my lessons 
and chores, and with my high expectations, I felt completely overwhelmed in my first six 
months of training. Then after that, I began to discover little tricks that made everything go 
more smoothly. For example, I found a way of practicing the shamisen while running errands. 
I did this by practicing a song in my mind while picturing clearly how my left hand should shift 
on the neck and how the plectrum should strike the string. In this way, when I put the real 
instrument into my lap, I could sometimes play a song quite well even though I had tried 
playing it only once before. Some people thought I'd learned it without practicing, but in fact, 
I'd practiced it all up and down the alleyways of Gion. 

I used a different trick to learn the ballads and other songs we studied at the school. Since 
childhood I've always been able to hear a piece of music once and remember it fairly well the 
next day. I don't know why, just something peculiar about my mind, I suppose. So I took to 
writing the words on a piece of paper before going to sleep. Then when I awoke, while my 
mind was still soft and impressionable, I read the page before even stirring from my futon. 
Usually this was enough, but with music that was more difficult, I used a trick of finding 
images to remind me of the tune. For example, a branch falling from a tree might make me 
think of the sound of a drum, or a stream flowing over a rock might remind me of bending a 
string on the shamisen to make the note rise in pitch; and I would picture the song as a kind 
of stroll through a landscape. 

But of course, the greatest challenge of all, and the most important one for me, was dance. 
For months I tried to make use of the various tricks I'd discovered, but they were of little help 
to me. Then one day Auntie grew furious when I spilled tea onto a magazine she was 
reading. The strange thing was that I'd been thinking kind thoughts toward her at the very 
moment she turned on me. I felt terribly sad afterward and found myself thinking of my sister, 
who was somewhere in 

Japan without me; and of my mother, who I hoped was at peace in paradise now; and of my 
father, who'd been so willing to sell us and live out the end of his life alone. As these 
thoughts ran through my head, my body began to grow heavy. So I climbed the stairs and 
went into the room where Pumpkin and I slept-for Mother had moved me there after 
Mameha's visit to our okiya. Instead of laying myself down on the tatami mats and crying, I 
moved my arm in a sort of sweeping movement across my chest. I don't know why I did it; it 


was a move from a dance we'd studied that morning, which seemed to me very sad. At the 
same time I thought about the Chairman and how my life would be so much better if I could 
rely on a man like him. As I watched my arm sweep through the air, the smoothness of its 
movement seemed to express these feelings of sadness and desire. My arm passed through 
the air with great dignity of movement-not like a leaf fluttering from a tree, but like an ocean 
liner gliding through the water. I suppose that by "dignity" I mean a kind of self-confidence, or 
certainty, such that a little puff of wind or the lap of a wave isn't going to make any difference. 

What I discovered that afternoon was that when my body felt heavy, I could move with great 
dignity. And if I imagined the Chairman observing me, my movements took on such a deep 
sense of feeling that sometimes each movement of a dance stood for some little interaction 
with him. Turning around with my head tipped at an angle might represent the question, 
"Where shall we spend our day together, Chairman?" Extending my arm and opening my 
folding fan told how grateful I felt that he'd honored me with his company. And when I 
snapped my fan shut again later in the dance, this was when I told him that nothing in life 
mattered more to me than pleasing him. 

Chapter thirteen 

During the spring of 1934, after I'd been in training for more than two 11 years, Hatsumomo 
and Mother decided that the time had come for I/ Pumpkin to make her debut as an 
apprentice geisha. Of course, no one told me anything about it, since Pumpkin was on orders 
not to speak with me, and Hatsumomo and Mother wouldn't waste their time even 
considering such a thing. I found out about it only when Pumpkin left the okiya early one 
afternoon and came back at the end of the day wearing the hairstyle of a young geisha-the 
so-called momaware, meaning "split peach." When I took my first look at her as she stepped 
up into the entrance hall, I felt sick with disappointment and jealousy. Her eyes never met 
mine for more than a flicker of an instant; probably she couldn't help thinking of the effect her 
debut was having on me. With her hair swept back in an orb so beautifully from her temples, 
rather than tied at the neck as it had always been, she looked very much like a young 
woman, though still with her same babyish face. For years she and I had envied the older 
girls who wore their hair so elegantly. Now Pumpkin would be setting out as a geisha while I 
remained behind, unable even to ask about her new life. 

Then came the day Pumpkin dressed as an apprentice geisha for the first time and went with 
Hatsumomo to the Mizuki Teahouse, for the ceremony to bind them together as sisters. 
Mother and Auntie went, though I wasn't included. But I did stand among them in the formal 
entrance hall until Pumpkin came down the stairs assisted by the maids. She wore a 
magnificent black kimono with the crest of the Nitta okiya and a plum and gold obi; her face 
was painted white for the very first time. You might expect that with the ornaments in her hair 
and the brilliant red of her lips, she should have looked proud and lovely; but I thought she 
looked more worried than anything else. She had great difficulty walking; the regalia of an 
apprentice geisha is so cumbersome. Mother put a camera into Auntie's hands and told her 
to go outside and photograph Pumpkin having a flint sparked on her back for good luck the 
very first time. The rest of us remained crowded inside the entrance hall, out of view