Part 2

Madame Sadayakko: The Geisha Who Bewitched the West
by Lesley Downer

(Page 2 of 3)

Young Japanese steamed off on P & O liners to Europe and America to study and foreign experts came to teach-British engineers to share the secrets of the industrial revolution; French to explain their system of law and military affairs; Germans to teach the Japanese about their parliamentary system; and Americans to teach commerce, agriculture, and technology. A British engineer arrived to oversee the building of the first railway, the Tokyo-Yokohama line. Within a couple of years after the coup there was a postal service, a telegraph service, a banking system, and a growing, well-equipped modern conscript army.

All this, however, was hugely expensive. Inflation soared and there were cripplingly heavy taxes. For many of the established families who had prospered under the old order, the changes spelled ruin. Among them were the Koyamas.

In 1871 Otaka discovered she was pregnant again with her twelfth child. It was the worst possible time. The new banking system had put currency traders out of business. To make matters worse, according to one version of the story, the head clerk had been caught embezzling funds. Things were so bad that Buddha was considering selling the ancestral business. Added to all this, the couple were middle aged by now. They already had eleven mouths to feed.

Little Sada was born on July 18, 1871. For a few years Buddha managed to keep the family together. They moved to a grander part of town and set up a pawnbroking business, providing cash to impoverished aristocrats who had lost their privileges after the change of government. They still had money from their previous business and for a while were able to keep up their lifestyle.

The stories of Sada's earliest years are a little confusing. According to one version of events, by the time Sada was four, the family was already feeling the pinch. Daughters were expendable, little more than commodities. They sent her off to the Hamada geisha house to work as a maid. Not long after, there was a plan to bundle her off to yet another household. But the little girl had a mind of her own.

In later years, when she was sitting over sake with her daughter, Tomiji, Sada liked to recount the story of her narrow escape. One of her brothers, Sokichi, had been apprenticed to a metal sculptor called Matsuo Kano and it had been arranged that he would marry Kano's daughter that winter. Little Sada, too, was sent to stay at the Kano house.

There were two boys there who were her playmates. The five-year-old was lively and full of fun. But the older one, who was ten, was rather dull and quiet. One day all three were splashing about in the bath together. The older boy suddenly said, "You're going to be my wife, little Sada." Young though she was, she knew very well what that meant. Horrified at the idea of marrying such a dull boy, she ran away from the house first thing next morning.

But where was she to run to? In the bustling thoroughfares and back alleys of Nihonbashi, full of fishmongers yelling their wares, the child was completely lost. She spent all day wandering the streets until she finally spotted the dark wooden walls of the Hamada House. The Kanos may have been customers there; most likely it was Kamekichi, the proprietress of the house, who had arranged the "marriage" with the intention of selling the child on and recuperating her costs. The Kanos sent a messenger to bring the little girl back. But she clung on to Kamekichi's hand and refused to leave.

Her granddaughter Hatsu has a picture of her at that age, around four or five, with some of her brothers and sisters. She looks rather poised, confident, and very determined. She is an exquisite little girl with a delicate heart-shaped face and none of the plumpness of childhood. Her hair is swept back in the traditional child's style, a complicated knot, oiled and held in place with combs. She wears a multilayered, flower-patterned kimono; the dark satin under-collar is visible at the neck.

In later years, anxious to conceal the ignominy of her upbringing, Sada insisted that "my mother loved music and sent me to have dancing lessons from the age of four." In fact there is a contract that shows that her father had entered into an agreement with Kamekichi that was really a disguised form of indentured servitude. This did not reflect on Buddha's reputation as a good man, for in those days there was nothing unusual about such a course.

Officially Sada was never "sold." The sale of persons had been outlawed in 1872 by a new government eager to appear as Western and modern as possible. But in fact the law changed nothing but the terminology. Sada's family "borrowed" a sizable amount of money from the Hamada House in exchange for their daughter. The process and the sum involved were probably much the same as Algernon Mitford (the grandfather of the famous Mitford sisters, who spent many years in Japan) described in a book published in 1871: "Children destined to be trained as singers are usually bought when they are five or six years old, a likely child fetching from about thirty-five to fifty shillings; the purchaser undertakes the education of his charge and brings the little thing up as his own child."

No doubt the little girl shed bitter tears, sent away from her mother and family at such a tender and impressionable age. But of course there was nothing she could do and nothing she could say. She was part of a culture where one took the worst life had to throw at one and bore it in silence.

When Sada was seven, Buddha died. Otaka had no idea how to cope. By now the family had fallen deep into poverty. Perhaps before his death there might have been some thought of eventually redeeming the little girl. But instead she was officially taken into the Hamada geisha house as Kamekichi's adopted daughter.

Just as Norma Jean Baker became Marilyn Monroe and took on a glamorous new persona along with the name, so when a child joined the ranks of the geisha she took a new name to mark her new station in life. It is an apt comparison in more ways than that. For the geisha of those days really were like the movie stars or rock stars of ours. They were showgirls who danced, sang, and entertained the privileged and wealthy few at exclusive teahouse parties: the word gei-sha literally means "arts person." But the most beautiful were also stars whose names were on everyone's lips. Ordinary folk who could not afford to enjoy their company could buy woodblock prints or hand-tinted albumen photographs depicting them. Townswomen emulated their fashions and hairstyles and everyone avidly followed their exploits, which were endlessly recorded in the gossip columns of the day.

Yet no one quite knew what went on at those private parties; and people had little doubt that the geisha were "no better than they should be." It was very similar to Europe and America in that same licentious yet prudish Victorian era, where everyone admired and adored the great actresses of the day but, as the old song went, would never dream of putting their own daughter on the stage.

The Yoshicho geisha district that was to be Sada's home for many years was a bustling community of over three hundred geisha. The streets were crammed with two-story wooden houses with steep tiled roofs and bamboo shutters, packed roof to roof along shadowy alleyways. Cutting through the area were thoroughfares where hundreds of rickshaws clattered madly along on metal wheels, while their drivers bawled warnings to pedestrians who got in their way. There were streets of geisha houses, where the geisha lived; ryoriya teahouses, where they entertained over a formal dinner; machiai "meetinghouses," where customers went to relax after dinner with a favorite geisha; and streets of tiny shops devoted to geisha paraphernalia-clogs, kimono fabrics, shamisens, fans, combs, cosmetics, and hair pomade. In the evening rickshaws crowded at street corners and boats bumped against each other on the canals, waiting to take geisha to their first assignations of the evening.

In those days Tokyo was a city of waterways, a Venice of the east. Canals, rivers, and streams lined with willows and cherry trees crisscrossed the city. Boats of every imaginable shape and size-pleasure boats with pointed roofs and horn-shaped prows, great square-bottomed boats with awnings and canopies, sculls, gondolas, the odd paddle steamer, canal boats loaded with goods-bobbed about, transporting rice, fish, vegetables, and other produce and carrying passengers of every station in life.

Teahouses had their own boathouses where they kept small flotillas. Of an evening pleasure boats would set out laden with geisha and their customers, with brightly colored paper lanterns hung around the edges of the roof. The plinking of three-stringed shamisens, beating of small drums, reedy singing, and merry laughter would float across the water as they drifted by. There were also many smaller boats where, inside the makeshift cabin, behind closed paper shoji screens, one might make out two shadows, silhouetted in the yellow lamplight.

Many powerful and wealthy men frequented the Yoshicho geisha houses. The district was in the shadow of the Imperial Palace, a rickshaw ride from the government offices and the Imperial Debating Hall, where the country's new rulers met to argue and plan. A few minutes' walk away from the Yoshicho district were the great merchant houses and currency exchanges of Nihonbashi, where Sada was born. The Tokyo Stock Exchange, opened in 1878, was just around the corner. And in those days when great men wanted to relax, the obvious place was their favorite teahouse.

Today the Hamada House is the only teahouse left in the district. It is still run by distant descendants of Kamekichi, though it has been rebuilt and moved a few blocks to a different location. From outside it is a grand understated mansion in the Japanese style with sand-colored walls and large, forbidding wooden gates. Stepping-stones lead through a small garden with neatly trimmed trees, a tiny pond, and a couple of stone lanterns. Inside are enormous silent rooms lined with fragrant tatami matting.

In Sada's time the sumptuous rooms were walled with painted screens covered in gold leaf, which reflected the smoky yellow flame of oil lamps and tapers. There powerful men lounged, chatting, laughing, arguing, and tippling sake. When the geisha rose to their feet to sing and dance, they clapped their hands to the music or jumped up to show off their own dancing skills.

But while the customers were at play, the geisha were working. As a modern-day Yoshicho geisha put it, "It was a beautiful dream. As the men left, they'd say, 'I'll come and see you tomorrow.' And we'd say, 'I'll be waiting for you.' In the old days everyone knew it was a game. We'd all say how much we loved them. That was the spell we wove. It was nothing to do with love really."

In the evening it was all glamour. Then in the daytime the geisha took off their makeup and the harsh reality became visible.

Most children who were sent to geisha houses as indentured servants spent their early years dusting, laundering, and scrubbing floors until their hands were chapped and raw. They were the lowliest of the low, slapped and beaten for the smallest offense. But Sada was lucky.

"When I was taken in to the Hamada House, it was as a daughter. Even though I was a geisha, I was different from ordinary geisha." Thus she told her tale.

For Kamekichi was a perceptive woman who realized that she was an exceptional child. With the proper training she could be a star, the most sought-after, highest-earning geisha of the city. She gave little Sada all the love and attention that the child had never had from her real mother and Sada was devoted to her in return.

When she took Sada in as her adopted daughter Kamekichi was thirty-five. The female playwright and theater critic Shigure Hasegawa, born in the same Nihonbashi district as Sada just eight years later, in 1879, described her as "a woman with a very powerful personality-tough, strong willed, and rather mannish. She was quite haughty because she came from a good family." In her day she had been celebrated in the geisha world for her beautiful singing voice. She had been married once but was now widowed. She had, however, been provided-by her husband or perhaps a patron-with the means to buy a property and set up her own geisha house.

Copyright © March 2003, Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.

About the Author

Lesley Downer is the author of On the Narrow Road, which was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book of the Year Award; The Brothers: The Hidden World of Japan's Richest Family, chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of 1995; and the highly acclaimed Women of the Pleasure Quarters. Ms. Downer is also a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal.