 sisters, as well as by Mother. When we 
had all assembled in the exterior garden, a maid led us through the entrance hall and down a 
beautiful meandering corridor to a small tatami room in the back. I'd never been in such 
elegant surroundings before. Every piece of wood trim gleamed; every plaster wall was 
perfect in its smoothness. I smelled the sweet, dusty fragrance of kuroyaki-"char-black"-a sort 
of perfume made by charring wood and grinding it into a soft gray dust. It's very old-
fashioned, and even Mameha, who was as traditional a geisha as you would find, preferred 
something more Western. But all the kuroyaki worn by generations of geisha still haunted the 
Ichiriki. I have some even now, which I keep in a wooden vial; and when I smell it, I see 
myself back there once again. 

The ceremony, which was attended by the mistress of the Ichiriki, lasted only about ten 
minutes. A maid brought a tray with several sake cups, and Mameha and I drank together. I 
took three sips from a cup, and then passed it to her and she took three sips. We did this 
with three different cups, and then it was over. From that moment on, I was no longer known 
as Chiyo. I was the novice geisha Sayuri. During the first month of apprenticeship, a young 
geisha is known as a "novice" and cannot perform dances or entertain on her own without 
her older sister, and in fact does little besides watching and learning. As for my name of 
Sayuri, Mameha had worked with her fortune-teller a long while to choose it. The sound of a 
name isn't all that matters, you see; the meaning of the characters is very important as well, 
and so is the number of strokes used to write them-for there are lucky and unlucky stroke 
counts. My new name came from "sa," meaning "together," "yu," from the zodiac sign for the 
Hen-in order to balance other elements in my personality-and "ri," meaning "understanding." 
All the combinations involving an element from Mameha's name, unfortunately, had been 
pronounced inauspicious by the fortune-teller. 

I thought Sayuri was a lovely name, but it felt strange not to be known as Chiyo any longer. 
After the ceremony we went into another room for a lunch of "red rice," made of rice mixed 
with red beans. I picked at it, feeling strangely unsettled and not at all like celebrating. The 
mistress of the teahouse asked me a question, and when I heard her call me "Sayuri," I 
realized what was bothering me. It was as if the little (girl named Chiyo, running barefoot 
from the pond to her tipsy house, no longer existed. I felt that this new girl, Sayuri, with her 
gleaming white face and her red lips, had destroyed her. 

Mameha planned to spend the early afternoon taking me around Gion to introduce me to the 
mistresses of the various teahouses and okiya with which she had relationships. But we 
didn't head out the moment lunch was done. Instead she took me into a room at the Ichiriki 


and asked me to sit. Of course, a geisha never really "sits" while wearing kimono; what we 
call sitting is probably what other people would call kneeling. In any case, after I'd done it, 
she made a face at me and told me to do it again. The robes were so awkward it took me 
several tries to manage it properly. Mameha gave me a little ornament in the shape of a 
gourd and showed me how to wear it dangling on my obi. The gourd, being hollow and light, 
is thought to offset the heaviness of the body, you see, and many a clumsy young apprentice 
has relied upon one to help keep her from falling down. 

Mameha talked with me a while, and then just when we were ready to leave, asked me to 
pour her a cup of tea. The pot was empty, but she told me to pretend to pour it anyway. She 
wanted to see how I held my sleeve out of the way when I did it. I thought I knew exactly 
what she was looking for and tried my best, but Mameha was unhappy with me. 

"First of all," she said, "whose cup are you filling?" 

"Yours!" I said. 

"Well, for heaven's sake, you don't need to impress me. Pretend I'm someone else. Am I a 
man or a woman?" 

"A man," I said. 

"All right, then. Pour me a cup again." 

I did so, and Mameha practically broke her neck trying to peer up my sleeve as I held my arm 
out. 

"How do you like that?" she asked me. "Because that's exactly what's going to happen if you 
hold your arm so high." 

I tried pouring again with my arm a bit lower. This time, she pretended to yawn and then 
turned and began a conversation with an imaginary geisha sitting on the other side of her. 

"I think you're trying to tell me that I bored you," I said. "But how can I bore you just pouring a 
cup of tea?" 

"You may not want me looking up your sleeve, but that doesn't mean you have to act prissy! 
A man is interested in only one thing. Believe me, you'll understand all too soon what I'm 
talking about. In the meantime, you can keep him happy by letting him think he's permitted to 
see parts of your body no one else can see. If an apprentice geisha acts the way you did just 
then-pouring tea just like a maid would-the poor man will lose all hope. Try it again, but first 
show me your arm." 

So I drew my sleeve up above my elbow and held my arm out for her to see. She took it and 
turned it in her hands to look at the top and the bottom. 

"You have a lovely arm; and beautiful skin. You should make sure every man who sits near 
you sees it at least once." 

So I went on, pouring tea again and again, until Mameha felt satisfied that I drew my sleeve 
out of the way enough to show my arm without being too obvious what I was doing. I looked 
laughable if I hiked my sleeve up to my elbow; the trick was to act like I was merely pulling it 
out of the way, while at the same time drawing it a few finger-widths above my wrist to give a 
view of my forearm. Mameha said the prettiest part of the arm was the underside, so I must 


always be sure to hold the teapot in such a way that the man saw the bottom of my arm 
rather than the top. 

She asked me to do it again, this time pretending I was pouring tea for the mistress of the 
Ichiriki. I showed my arm in just the same way, and Mameha made a face at once. 

"For heaven's sake, I'm a woman," she said. "Why are you showing me your arm that way? 
Probably you're just trying to make me angry." 

"Angry?" 

"What else am I supposed to think? You're showing me how youthful and beautiful you are, 
while I'm already old and decrepit. Unless you were doing it just to be vulgar . . ." 

"How is it vulgar?" 

"Why else have you made such a point of letting me see the underside of your arm? You 
may as well show me the bottom of your foot or the inside of your thigh. If I happen to catch a 
glimpse of something here or there, well, that's all right. But to make such a point of showing 
it to me!" 

So I poured a few more times, until I'd learned a more demure and suitable method. 
Whereupon Mameha announced that we were ready to go out into Gion together. 

Already by this time, I'd been wearing the complete ensemble of an apprentice geisha for 
several hours. Now I had to try walking all around Gion in the shoes we call okobo. They're 
quite tall and made of wood, with lovely, lacquered thongs to hold the foot in place. Most 
people think it very elegant the way they taper down like a wedge, so that the footprint at the 
bottom is about half the size of the top. But I found it hard to walk delicately in them. I felt as 
if I had roof tiles strapped to the bottoms of my feet. 

Mameha and I made perhaps twenty stops at various okiya and teahouses, though we spent 
no more than a few minutes at most of them. Usually a maid answered the door, and 
Mameha asked politely to speak with the mistress; then when the mistress came, Mameha 
said to her, "I'd like to introduce my new younger sister, Sayuri," and then I bowed very low 
and said, "I beg your favor, please, Mistress." The mistress and Mameha would chat for a 
moment, and then we left. At a few of the places we were asked in for tea and spent perhaps 
five minutes. But I was very reluctant to drink tea and only wet my lips instead. Using the 
toilet while wearing kimono is one of the most difficult things to learn, and I wasn't at all sure 
I'd learned it adequately just yet. 

In any case, within an hour I was so exhausted, it was all I could do to keep from groaning as 
I walked along. But we kept up our pace. In those days, I suppose there were probably thirty 
or forty first-class teahouses in Gion and another hundred or so of a somewhat lower grade. 
Of course we couldn't visit them all. We went to the fifteen or sixteen where Mameha was 
accustomed to entertaining. As for okiya, there must have been hundreds of those, but we 
went only to the few with which Mameha had some sort of relationship. 

Soon after three o'clock we were finished. I would have liked nothing better than to go back 
to the okiya to fall asleep for a long while. But Mameha had plans for me that very evening. I 
was to attend my first engagement as a novice geisha. 

"Go take a bath," she said to me. "You've been perspiring a good deal, and your makeup 
hasn't held up." 


It was a warm fall day, you see, and I'd been working very hard. 

Back at the okiya, Auntie helped me undress and then took pity on me by letting me nap for a 
half hour. I was back in her good graces again, now that my foolish mistakes were behind me 
and my future seemed even brighter than Pumpkin's. She woke me after my nap, and I 
rushed to the bathhouse as quickly as I could. By five, I had finished dressing and applying 
my makeup. I felt terribly excited, as you can imagine, because for years I'd watched 
Hatsumomo, and lately Pumpkin, go off in the afternoons and evenings looking beautiful, and 
now at last my turn had come. The event that evening, 