A Geisha for the American Consul (a short story) Read online

  About the Book

  Two cultures. One man and one woman. One moment in time.

  Cultures collide when Okichi, a beautiful geisha, is sent to work for the American envoy in Japan. Age and pride meet youth and grace. How will she survive in a home where no one speaks her language, where she understands nothing and she must submit to a strange barbarian’s will?

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  An extract from Across a Bridge of Dreams

  Also by Lesley Downer

  About the Author

  Copyright

  A Geisha for the American Consul

  Lesley Downer

  Chapter 1

  Shimoda, Japan. Spring 1857, Year of the Snake, a Yin Fire year.

  ‘TODAY’S THE MOST important day of your life,’ said Mother, measuring out the ingredients for tooth-blackening lacquer and mixing them together. ‘Today you have to look your very best.’

  Okichi gazed at the murky reflection in the tarnished bronze mirror as the old woman fussed around her. She could do her own make-up perfectly well but today Mother had insisted on doing it for her.

  ‘But, Mother …’

  Okichi wrinkled her nose at the familiar smell of vinegar and metal. Black teeth signified that she was an adult, a fully qualified geisha, not a foolish virgin, and today they had to be polished to a perfectly smooth finish. She bared her teeth and sat very still as the old woman brushed on the vile-tasting mixture.

  ‘But, Mother,’ she began again when the mixture had dried. ‘I’m just going to be a servant. I don’t need all this make-up.’

  ‘By all the gods, child, have you learnt nothing after all these years? How can you be so naive? Men are men the world over! Why on earth do you think he asked for you? You’ll earn far more for me if he takes you as his geisha – or his concubine or his wife – than you ever would as a mere servant.’

  The thought made Okichi shudder. She had always known hardship. Ever since she was a little girl, she’d been taught to do as she was told without grumbling. She knew it was best not to think too much or ask questions. But this was different. No one had ever asked such a sacrifice of anyone before.

  She couldn’t help noticing the afternoon sunlight creeping across the straw mats that covered the floor, bringing the dread moment ever closer. Outside on the street the cherry blossoms were in full bloom. It was the balmiest of spring days.

  ‘Isn’t that what you want? Isn’t that what we all want?’ Mother demanded with an air of finality. She took a pair of ancient tweezers from her make-up box and tweezed out Okichi’s eyebrows until they’d disappeared completely.

  Okichi called her ‘Mother’ but she was not her real mother. That was probably why she was so tough on her. She was certainly old, older than Okichi by a long way, and her high-cheekboned face was sallow and withered. But she was slender and elegant still, and held herself very straight. She ruled the teahouse with a rod of iron, keeping the customers in line as much as she did Okichi.

  Okichi thought of her real mother and sighed. She saw her regularly and took money to her; she made a far better living as a geisha than her faded mother ever could by taking in washing, and it was her bounden duty to support her family.

  And now was her chance to really help them, to make a lot of money.

  Mother picked out a wide, flat brush and slathered thick, white make-up over Okichi’s face. The make-up was made from lead and it ruined women’s skin. Mother had been a famous geisha in her time until the make-up destroyed her once-celebrated beauty, and Okichi knew it wouldn’t be long before she too had turned into an old woman. But that was the way it was for those who lived by their looks. All too soon they lost their beauty and their life was over.

  Okichi watched as her own face disappeared and became a mask, glowing enticingly in the candlelight. The more beautiful the image in the mirror, the more her heart sank. Mother outlined her eyes, first in black, then in red, and used her thumb to put in two charcoal smudges – ‘moth-wing eyebrows’ she called them – high on Okichi’s forehead, above where her eyebrows had been.

  ‘Don’t fidget, child,’ snapped Mother. ‘Stop chewing your lips.’

  Okichi had been trying so hard not to think about the reason for all this fuss, but now the image pushed itself into her thoughts – the event that had turned her life upside down.

  *

  It had been an evening around the time of the last full moon. She remembered sliding open the door of the public bath house and stepping into the cool spring air, as she had every day of her life, flushed from the hot water, scrubbed and clean, wearing a cotton kimono loosely tied with a sash. As she stepped out she bumped into someone, started back and her wooden washing bowl fell to the ground with a clatter. The damp towels came spilling out.

  It wasn’t a Japanese man she’d bumped into, it was one of those barbarians she sometimes saw around the port. They were hairy, like monkeys – it was hard to imagine how any human being could have so much hair. She’d never been so close to one before. He had grainy greyish-pink skin and a big nose like all foreigners, and she could tell by the grey hair and beard and the whiskers sprouting from his cheeks that he was old. She caught a whiff of his smell. Bata kusai, the foreigners were called, ‘stinking of butter’, because of the nauseating grease they ate, made of the undrinkable white liquid that came from the udders of cows.

  He’d stopped and stared. Normally she’d have kept her eyes modestly lowered but no one could help looking at the barbarians; they didn’t really count as people at all.

  *

  ‘Concentrate, child. Turn around,’ snapped Mother. Okichi felt the cool touch of the brush on her back as Mother slathered it with the white paste, leaving a titillating fork of unpainted skin at the nape of her neck, to draw men’s eyes to that most tender, desirable part of a woman’s body.

  Then she helped her into a perfumed kimono, tying it in place with ribbons and a broad obi sash, smoothed her hair and put combs and ornaments into it.

  When Okichi looked in the mirror, she was no longer a country girl from the port of Shimoda, a carpenter’s daughter whose widowed mother took in washing for a living. She was an enchantress, the stuff of men’s fantasies.

  *

  Waiting on her knees beside the door for the palanquin to arrive, Okichi twisted her fingers, running over the events of her short life again and again in her mind. What mistake had she made? When was the moment when she might have nipped this terrible fate in the bud?

  She had always known her life was not her own. In this world no one chose what became of them. You were born into a particular class of family – samurai, tradesman, carpenter, fisherman – and that decided your fate. And for years Okichi’s life had unrolled just as anyone might have expected.

  Okichi had been one of twelve children. She was pretty and she had a lovely voice, so her parents had done what any parents would and sold her to a geisha house when she was four to be trained to sing and dance. She was lucky, she would have a profession. And that was what she’d assumed she’d do for the rest of her life.

  Like all the girls at the geisha house she’d finished her training when she was thirteen, then been deflowered. In Okichi’s case, Mr Kimura, who had a big house down by the docks, had come to the geisha house to perform the rite. Mother had made sure Okichi realized he had paid a large amount of money for the privilege and should be suitably grateful. Okichi had closed her eyes and gritted
her teeth. It was a necessary rite of passage. At the end of the ordeal she’d be an adult, have her first customers, start earning money. It had all been perfectly normal.

  That was the year that the first of many strange events occurred, when everything started to change.

  Shimoda, where she lived, was a major port of call for vessels shuttling between the great cities of Osaka and Edo. It was a noisy, bustling place, full of sailors and countless porters unloading cargo at the dock. There was always great demand for women of all levels and prices, from prostitutes and courtesans to singers and dancers like Okichi. The singers and dancers were called geisha, and they were a cut above the women who merely sold sex.

  But that year, her thirteenth, fishermen out in their boats had seen something strange and ominous – puffs of smoke on the horizon, then far in the distance four black dots, moving fast towards them. They were not like any ships anyone had ever seen before. They sped along even on a day so windless they should have been becalmed, as if driven by some unearthly force, bypassing Shimoda and heading straight for the shogun’s fabled capital, Edo.

  That night a comet flashed across the sky. People crowding the street looked up at it, full of foreboding. It seemed like a harbinger of doom.

  Rumours filled the geisha houses. Geisha were always the first to hear any news, for their customers told them everything that was going on. These were not demons, their customers said, but something far more dangerous: tojin, ‘barbarians’. Everyone knew about the ‘Holland-men’ who lived on a small island off Nagasaki. But none of the Dutch ships had ever been beyond Nagasaki, let alone dared approach the shogun’s sacred capital.

  Shortly afterwards officials arrived from the great city of Edo itself in high hats and long starched gowns, stepping out of boats more splendid than anyone had ever seen before. Even the rowers wore livery. The city elders were in a panic.

  The country was under threat, the officials declared. The barbarians had left but they’d said they would return next year with more ships and plenty of weapons. Every city was to arrange its own defences and Shimoda, with its excellent harbour, right at the tip of the Izu Peninsula, was particularly vulnerable to attack.

  The temple bells rang out night and day. The townsfolk started erecting defences, building cannon emplacements along the shore, shipping armaments down from Edo, setting them in place. All day long there was hammering and banging. But the work was only half done when the dreaded Black Ships, as Okichi now knew they were called, appeared once more on the horizon. Exactly a year had passed and as the tojin had threatened, they’d come back. As before they sailed on to Edo. The people of Shimoda waited, wondering what was to become of them.

  Nothing happened for another half a year. Then the official boats arrived again. News passed from the city elders to the merchants and the dock owners, to the inn keepers, the samurai families on the hill and the geisha houses, until the whole city was buzzing with it. The shogun in Edo had granted Shimoda an extraordinary honour. It was to be a coaling station, one of only two in the entire country, where barbarian ships would refuel and barbarian sailors would come onshore to rest and refresh.

  So the fearsome foreigners were now to be treated as friends. It made no sense, but orders were orders. No one had ever seen a foreigner before. Many of the townsfolk were sick with fear and apprehension. But Okichi’s father, a carpenter, saw the bright side. Whatever they might feel about them, foreigners meant jobs and jobs meant money.

  The first to arrive were from a place far over the seas called Russia. Huge, pale-faced men with bushy beards filled the inns and crowded the brothel district. No one wanted to touch these outlandish creatures, not even the prostitutes, but after they’d overcome their initial revulsion they were pleased with the extra work. As the Shimoda boatmen’s song went,

  ‘How grateful we are to the honourable foreigner

  Who gives two gold ryo for the one ryo whore!’

  It might be all right for prostitutes but it was certainly not all right for high-class geisha like Okichi.

  When babies arrived they were smothered at birth and buried in a graveyard up in the hills where they wouldn’t pollute the town. No one wanted such changelings anywhere nearby.

  That same year there was an earthquake and a tsunami. Okichi’s father, working down at the docks, was one of those who were killed. Life had already been hard for Okichi’s mother and family but now it became harder still. Left on her own she had to find a way to rebuild their house and support those of her twelve children who were still young. She seemed to grow old overnight. She started taking in washing but Okichi knew it was up to her – Okichi – to do all she could to help.

  Doggedly the survivors set about rebuilding their shattered town. The Russian ships docked there had also been destroyed. The pale-faced sailors employed the young men of the city to work on building new ships, teaching them the secrets of the fast foreign vessels. After the Russians had steamed away the shogun ordered two more, the first in Japan’s budding navy.

  It was a while later that more barbarians arrived, just two of them, an older and a younger one. The townsfolk couldn’t tell one sort from another but these, it seemed, were not sailors, and they weren’t just passing through. They had come to stay. The city elders arranged for them to live in a disused temple called Gyokusenji a little way from the town, far enough to stop them worrying the townsfolk.

  *

  To Okichi none of this made much of a difference – until the day she stepped out of the bathhouse right into the path of one of them.

  At the time of the encounter she was seventeen and living with her lover, Tsurumatsu – Shimoda was an easy-going place, so there was no problem with working as a geisha in the daytime and evenings and going home to her lover at night.

  Okichi had done well. She was the best singer and dancer in the city and she knew she was also good at charming her customers and pleasing them in bed.

  At first Tsurumatsu had been happy to have foreigners in town. Thanks to the Russians he’d become a skilled ship’s carpenter and was sure he would soon have enough money to repay Okichi’s debt to the geisha house – the money they had given her parents and spent on her training – and buy her freedom. Life had seemed full of hope.

  A few days after the incident outside the bathhouse a summons had come from the city elders. They had never paid attention to such lowly people as Tsurumatsu and Okichi before. Bewildered, they had made their way to the magistrate’s office and waited trembling on their knees, wondering what they had done to be issued with such an order.

  The foreigners wanted ‘nurses’, one of the assistant magistrates told them: servants, in other words. Low-ranking though the magistrate was, he had drawn himself up as if to show he was fully aware of the unbridgeable gap of status between them, the scabbards of his two swords glinting in his belt.

  Okichi remembered how Tsurumatsu had literally quivered with rage. She laid a hand on his knee, terrified that he might end up losing his head.

  ‘Okichi’s mine,’ he had said through gritted teeth. ‘There are plenty of women in Shimoda. Find another.’

  Okichi had knelt silently behind him, staring at the ground. This was her fate they were talking about. She twisted her fingers, wishing she could interfere, but it was not a woman’s place to speak. She knew that she was Tsurumatsu’s property and he would fight to keep her.

  The chief magistrate himself had spoken up. ‘Okichi’s the best,’ he said mildly. ‘Everyone knows that. She’s the prettiest, she sings the sweetest, she dances the finest, she’s the best at pleasing men. In any case, she’s the one they’ve asked for.’

  ‘Barbarians all look the same to us and we must all look the same to them,’ Tsurumatsu had growled. ‘Offer them another woman. They’ll never know the difference. This one’s spoken for.’

  ‘The order’s come down from Edo. We have to give the foreigners whatever they want,’ the magistrate barked, so loudly it made Okichi jump. ‘And t
hey want Okichi as their servant.’

  ‘Their servant!’ snarled Tsurumatsu, his handsome lip curling. ‘Foreigners are hairy like monkeys but underneath they’re men, same as us. If it’s just servants they want, why do they have to have Okichi? And why does she have to live with them?’

  ‘She has to keep an eye on them and report on what they’re up to,’ said the magistrate. ‘It’s her patriotic duty.’ He scowled at Tsurumatsu. ‘If you stand in our way you’ll find yourself behind bars – or worse.’

  ‘You’ll have to think up some crime to accuse me of,’ retorted Tsurumatsu.

  ‘Obstructing the shogun’s officers in the performance of their duties. We’ll give you a few days to think it over.’

  ‘I’ll never give you up,’ Tsurumatsu had told Okichi again and again as they went about their lives, trying not to think about the terrible threat that hung over them.

  But then the elders had made an offer that was too good to refuse. Tsurumatsu was to have a post in Edo and a staggering promotion, from lowly carpenter to high-ranking samurai, no less, attending their lord at his mansion in Edo.

  In her most despairing moments Okichi had wondered if that was what Tsurumatsu had been secretly hoping for all along, if that was the reason he’d been holding out. He hadn’t really cared about her at all. She blinked hard as she thought about it. She mustn’t cry, she knew, or she would ruin her make-up.

  He’d said ‘Goodbye’ with a carelessness that cut her to the quick. That was the bitterest betrayal of all.

  *

  One of the men who worked at the geisha house hobbled in. He’d come to help her into the palanquin. It was enormous, covered in shiny black lacquer, specially built for the foreigners with their stiff bodies and long legs. Inside there was a meaty odour, like the smell that hung around the foreigners’ bodies.

  Okichi had never been in a palanquin before – she’d always walked everywhere. As she got in she felt her life changing right at that moment, changing for ever. She thought of Tsurumatsu and his cruelty, how he had given her up for his own advancement, and her eyes filled with tears. She blinked them away.