in shame and made a 
great show of lamenting the misery of my life compared with Pumpkin's. But as it happened, I 
had just been musing about how much my prospects seemed to have improved and how 
successfully Mameha and I had kept her plan from Hatsumomo-whatever her plan was. My 
first instinct when Hatsumomo spoke was to smile, but instead I kept my face like a mask, 
and felt pleased with myself that I'd given nothing away. Hatsumomo gave me an odd look; I 
ought to have realized right then that something had passed through her mind. I stepped 
quickly to one side, and she passed me. That was the end of it, as far as I was concerned. 

Then a few days later, Mameha and I went to the Shirae Teahouse to meet Dr. Crab once 
again. But as we rolled open the door, we found Pumpkin slipping her feet into her shoes to 
leave. I was so startled to see her, I wondered what on earth could possibly have brought her 
there. Then Hatsumomo stepped down into the entryway as well, and of course I knew: 
Hatsumomo had outsmarted us somehow. 

"Good evening, Mameha-san," Hatsumomo said. "And look who's with you! It's the 
apprentice the Doctor used to be so fond of." 

I'm sure Mameha felt as shocked as I did, but she didn't show it. "Why, Hatsumomo-san," 
she said, "I scarcely recognize you . . . but my goodness, you're aging well!" 

Hatsumomo wasn't actually old; she was only twenty-eight or twenty-nine. I think Mameha 
was just looking for something nasty to say. 

"I expect you're on your way to see the Doctor," Hatsumomo said. "Such an interesting man! 
I only hope he'll still be happy to see you. Well, good-bye." Hatsumomo looked cheerful as 
she walked away, but in the light from the avenue I could see a look of sorrow on Pumpkin's 
face. 

Mameha and I slipped out of our shoes without speaking a word; neither of us knew what to 
say. The Shirae's gloomy atmosphere seemed as thick as the water in a pond that night. The 


air smelled of stale makeup; the damp plaster was peeling in the corners of the rooms. I 
would have given anything to turn around and leave. 

When we slid open the door from the hallway, we found the mistress of the teahouse keeping 
Dr. Crab company. Usually she stayed a few minutes even after -we'd arrived, probably to 
charge the Doctor for her time. But tonight she excused herself the moment we entered and 
didn't even look up as she passed. Dr. Crab was sitting with his back facing us, so we 
skipped the formality of bowing and went instead to join him at the table. 

"You seem tired, Doctor," Mameha said. "How are you this evening 

Dr. Crab didn't speak. He just twirled his glass of beer on the table to waste time -even 
though he was an efficient man and never wasted a moment if he could help it. 

"Yes, I am rather tired," he said at last. "I don't feel much like talking." 

And with that, he drank down the last of his beer and stood to leave. Mameha and I 
exchanged looks. When Dr. Crab reached the door to the room, he faced us and said, "I 
certainly do not appreciate when people I have trusted turn out to have misled me." 

Afterward he left without closing the door. 

Mameha and I were too stunned to speak. At length she got up and slid the door shut. Back 
at the table, she smoothed her kimono and then pinched her eyes closed in anger and said 
to me, "All right, Sayuri. What exactly did you say to Hatsumomo?" 

"Mameha-san, after all this work? I promise you I would never do anything to ruin my own 
chances." 

"The Doctor certainly seems to have thrown you aside as though you're no better than an 
empty sack. I'm sure there's a reason . . . but we won't find it out until we know what 
Hatsumomo said to him tonight." 

"How can we possibly do that?" 

"Pumpkin was here in the room. You must go to her and ask." 

I wasn't at all sure Pumpkin would speak with me, but I said I would try, and Mameha 
seemed satisfied with this. She stood and prepared to leave, but I stayed where I was until 
she turned to see what was keeping me. 

"Mameha-san, may I ask a question?" I said. "Now Hatsumomo knows I've been spending 
time with the Doctor, and probably she understands the reason why. Dr. Crab certainly 
knows why. You know hy. Even Pumpkin may know why! I'm the only one who doesn't. 

Won't you be kind enough to explain your plan to me?" 

Mameha looked as if she felt very sorry I'd asked this question. For a long moment she 
looked everywhere but at me, but she finally let out a sigh and knelt at the table again to tell 
me what I wanted to know. 

"You know perfectly well," she began, "that Uchida-san looks at you with the eyes of an 
artist. But the Doctor is interested in something else, and so is Nobu. Do you know what is 
meant by 'the homeless eel'?" 


I had no idea what she was talking about, and I said so. 

"Men have a kind of ... well, an 'eel' on them," she said. "Women don't have it. But men do. 
It's located-" 

"I think I know what you're talking about," I said, "but I didn't know it was called an eel." 

"It isn't an eel, really," Mameha said. "But pretending it's an eel makes things so much easier 
to understand. So let's think of it that way. 

Here's the thing: this eel spends its entire life trying to find a home, and what do you think 
women have inside them? Caves, where the eels like to live. This cave is where the blood 
comes from every month when the 'clouds pass over the moon,' as we sometimes say." 

I was old enough to understand what Mameha meant by the passage of clouds over the 
moon, because I'd been experiencing it for a few years already. The first time, I couldn't have 
felt more panicked if I'd sneezed and found pieces of my brain in the handkerchief. I really 
was afraid I might be dying, until Auntie had found me washing out a bloody rag and 
explained that bleeding was just part of being a woman. 

"You may not know this about eels," Mameha went on, "but they're quite territorial. When 
they find a cave they like, they wriggle around inside it for a while to be sure that . . . well, to 
be sure it's a nice cave, I suppose. And when they've made up their minds that it's 
comfortable, they mark the cave as their territory ... by spitting. Do you understand?" 

If Mameha had simply told me what she was trying to say, I'm sure I would have been 
shocked, but at least I'd have had an easier time sorting it all out. Years later I discovered 
that things had been explained to Mameha in exactly the same way by her own older sister. 

"Here's the part that's going to seem very strange to you," Mameha went on, as if what she'd 
already told me didn't. "Men actually like doing this. In fact, they like it very much. There are 
even men who do little in their lives besides search for different caves to let their eels live in. 
A woman's cave is particularly special to a man if no other eel has ever been in it before. Do 
you understand? We call this 'mizuage! " 

"We call what 'mizuage''?" 

"The first time a woman's cave is explored by a man's eel. That is what we call mizuage." 

Now, mizu means "water" and age means "raise up" or "place on"; so that the term mizuage 
sounds as if it might have something to do with raising up water or placing something on the 
water. If you get three geisha in a room, all of them will have different ideas about where the 
term comes from. Now that Mameha had finished her explanation, I felt only more confused, 
though I tried to pretend it all made a certain amount of sense. 

"I suppose you can guess why the Doctor likes to play around in Gion," Mameha continued. 
"He makes a great deal of money from his hospital. Except for what he needs to support his 
family, he spends it in the pursuit of mizuage. It may interest you to know, Sayuri-san, that 
you are precisely the sort of young girl he likes best. I know this very well, because I was one 
myself." 

As I later learned, a year or two before I'd first come to Gion, Dr. Crab had paid a record 
amount for Mameha's mizuage-maybe A7000 or A8000. This may not sound like much, but 
at that time it was a sum that even someone like Mother-whose every thought was about 
money and how to get more of it-might see only once or twice in a lifetime. Mameha's 


mizuage had been so costly partly because of her fame; but there was another reason, as 
she explained to me that afternoon. Two very wealthy men had bid against each other to be 
her mizuage patron. One was Dr. Crab. The other was a businessman named Fujikado. 
Ordinarily men didn't compete this way in Gion; they all knew each other and preferred to 
reach agreement on things. But Fujikado lived on the other side of the country and came to 
Gion only occasionally. He didn't care if he offended Dr. Crab. And Dr. Crab, who claimed to 
have some aristocratic blood in him, hated self-made men like Fujikado- even though, in 
truth, he was a self-made man too, for the most part. 

When Mameha noticed at the sumo tournament that Nobu seemed taken with me, she 
thought at once of how much Nobu resembled Fujikado-self-made and, to a man like Dr. 
Crab, repulsive. With Hatsumomo chasing me around like a housewife chasing a cockroach, 
I certainly wasn't going to become famous the way Mameha had and end up with an 
expensive mizuage as a result. But if these two men found me appealing enough, they might 
start a bidding war, which could put me in the same position to repay my debts as if I'd been 
a popular apprentice all along. This was what Mameha had meant by "catching Hatsumomo 
off-balance." Hatsumomo was delighted that Nobu found me attractive; what she didn't 
realize was that my popularity with Nobu would very likely drive up the price of my mizuage. 

Clearly we had to reclaim Dr. Crab's affections. Without him Nobu could offer what he 
wanted for my mizuage-tha