Women of the Pleasure Quarters
History of the Geisha
By LESLEY DOWNER
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japan before the geisha
High-class Courtesans and the Culture of Desire
Because they fall we love them the cherry blossoms. In this floating world,
does anything endure?
Ariwara no Narihira (823-880)1
The City of Purple Hills and Crystal Streams
More than a thousand years ago, long before geisha were even thought of, Kyoto
was the center of an extraordinarily effete, decadent, and promiscuous culture
which transformed love into an art form and beauty into a cult. Centuries later,
when pleasure quarters were built where men could transcend their everyday lives
and imagine themselves noblemen of leisure, the courtesans and geisha modeled
the dreams which they sold on the romantic culture of the Heian princes.
The Heian period lasted from 794 to 1195, the time of the Vikings, King Canute,
and William the Conqueror. It began with the construction of a beautiful new
capital in an auspicious location, a wide bowl-shaped valley surrounded by
tree-clad hills, with sparkling rivers bordering it to each side. The official
name was Heian-kyo, the Capital of Peace and Tranquility. Poets called it the
City of Purple Hills and Crystal Streams; we know it as Kyoto.
There a city grew up of vermilion-painted palaces, slender-pillared temples, and
spacious mansions of wood with wattled roofs. Noblemen and princes rumbled up
and down the broad mud-paved boulevards in the shadow of the overhanging
willows, in lavishly decorated oxcarts attended by retinues of liveried
outriders. Under the rule of the emperor and his all-powerful ministers of
state, the Fujiwara family, the country basked in three centuries of peace and
prosperity. For the pampered aristocrats of the Heian court, it was a time of
unending leisure which they filled with the pursuit of art and beauty. They
spent their days moon-viewing, mixing incense, writing poems, and playing the
game of love.
In this strange hothouse world, women lived their lives away from the sight of
men, hidden in a kind of purdah in windowless unheated houses, shadowy by day
and lit with oil lamps and tapers by night. When men came to visit they received
them sitting behind latticed screens draped with silk curtains or opaque
hangings. When they went out, they traveled concealed behind the closed window
blinds of their ox-carriages, though they made sure that there was always an
exquisite silk sleeve trailing outside to hint at the beauty within.
For within their secret world, the Heian noblewomen were articulate, literate,
and highly educated. One, named Murasaki Shikibu, was the author of the
world's first novel, The Tale of Genji, written around the year 1000,
which recounts the romantic adventures of the charismatic Prince Genji. Several
of the court women kept diaries in which they recorded their thoughts and
feelings in extraordinary detail, leaving us very intimate accounts of what life
was like for the aristocrats of those days.
This was probably one of the most lax societies the world has ever seen.
Promiscuity was the norm. Following the Confucian precepts which governed
society, marriage was a purely political affair arranged by the parents to
create an advantageous alliance between families. Love and marriage had nothing
to do with each other. A court lady was more likely to suffer censure for a
lapse of taste in the colors of her robes than for her numerous lovers.
But what made the Heian period most extraordinary was the way in which art and
the cult of beauty were bound up with love. For more than sexual desire or
gut-wrenching passion, love was an art form, an opportunity to put brush to
paper, to immortalize the moment in a small literary gem.
Having heard that a certain lady was very beautiful or, even more titillating,
had beautiful handwriting, a nobleman would sit down to compose a waka, a
thirty-one-syllable poem, and brush it, in his finest calligraphy, on delicately
hued scented paper. When she received it, the lady would assess the handwriting
and color of the paper as well as the wit and appropriateness of the poem before
brushing a reply. The nobleman would be waiting with bated breath to see whether
her handwriting and poem lived up to expectations.
If the exchange of poems was satisfactory, he would eventually assay a visit. He
would creep in at night and immediately, in the pitch darkness, remove his
clothes, lift the silken counterpane, lie down on the hard straw mat next to the
lady and without further ado consummate the relationship. Slipping away before
dawn, he would then brush an eloquent morning-after poem, bewailing the rising
of the sun or the crowing of the cock announcing the hour of farewell. The lady
in her turn would brush a reply. Thus through poems they communicated their
decision as to whether to continue the affair or not.
The most famous of all the Heian beauties was Ono no Komachi, a lady-in-waiting
in the imperial court. So beautiful, proud, and passionate was she that she has
never been forgotten. Her name has come down through the ages as Japan's
all-time femme fatale.
Her story is recounted in Noh plays and legend. With her raven tresses that
cascaded to the floor, a face like a blossom, and eyebrows painted into perfect
crescent moons, she drove the noblemen of her day mad with desire. She would
glide through the cedar-scented halls in her multilayered gauze and damask
robes, oblivious to the thousands of love letters which lay discarded about her
chambers. At night she slept in a room bright with tortoiseshell where golden
flowers decorated the walls and strings of crystal beads hung in the doorway.
When she passed the cup at banquets, people said it was as if the moon lay on
her trailing sleeve.
But she was not just a pretty face. She was brilliant, accomplished, powerful,
and tough-minded, a woman of burning passions which she wrote about in waka
poems read and loved to this day.
Of the fickleness of men's love she wrote:
A thing which fades
With no outward sign
Is the flower
Of the heart of man
In this world!2
Unlike the maidens of medieval Europe, waiting passively for a knight in shining
armor to come courting, she herself burned with fiery passion:
This night of no moon
There is no way to meet him.
I rise in longing
My breast pounds, a leaping flame,
My heart is consumed in fire.3
She would only give herself to a man who could prove himself worthy of her. For
the most lovelorn of all, a commander of the imperial guard named Fukakusa no
Shi'i no Shosho, she devised the sternest of ordeals. He was to come to
her house for a hundred nights and sleep outside on a bench used to support the
shafts of her chariot before she would even consider his suit. Night after night
he hitched up his stiff silk trousers and donned his tall lacquered hat or put
on a wide-brimmed wicker hat and straw rain cape and ventured out into the
elements. Evading the night watchmen and the barrier guards he walked through
wind, rain, and snow, made a notch on the shaft bench, then waited through the
night there, shivering. Ninety-nine days had passed and the joyful day, when he
was to receive the reward for all his efforts, was dawning when he suddenly
died, of heartbreak, perhaps, or exposure.
For such hard-heartedness, Komachi suffered the cruelest punishment of allthe
loss of her beauty. Instead of dying young, like Cleopatra or Helen of Troy, and
leaving a beautiful memory, she lived to be a hundred. After the death of
Captain Shosho she was spurned and driven from court and ended up a tattered,
crazed beggar woman. In folk legend and Noh plays she is portrayed as an ancient
withered crone, hideously ugly, haunted by the unhappy spirits of the men who
died for love of her.
Like the cherry blossoms, beauty is all too fleeting; and this is what gives her
story its poignancy. The beauty of women can drive men to distraction and to
their deaths but in the end men get their revenge: such women die old and alone.
Komachi's tragic end made her all the more the perfect precursor of the
geisha. Like her they too came to be regarded with ambivalence. They were
sirens, so beautiful that men could not resist themyet to yield and fall in
love with one was to court disaster. At least in legend, if not in real life,
Komachi had to be punished for her fearsome powers.
Shizuka's Last Dance
Even at the height of Heian promiscuity, when noblemen had no problem finding a
companion for the night and flitted merrily from one aristocratic woman's
chamber to another, there were also prostitutes who offered a different sort of
pleasure. At one end of the scale were ordinary prostitutes who wandered the
streets, waterways, hills, and woods and were referred to as "wandering women,"
"floating women," and "play women." At the other extreme were cultivated,
refined professionals whom in English we might call courtesans. Some were of
good family, fallen upon hard times; others were noted for their beauty,
brilliance, or talent. Skilled musicians, dancers, and singers, they were often
the invited guests and chosen companions of aristocrats. These high-class
courtesans were the original precursors of the geisha.4
The most popular of the courtesans were the shirabyoshi dancing women
(shirabyoshi literally means "white rhythm"). To heighten their
allure, they cross-dressed in white male clothing and manly court caps. They
carried swords like men and performed highly charged erotic songs and dances to
music with a rhythmic beat. Like the supermodels and rock singers of today, they
were stars and the chosen companions of the country's most powerful men.
The most celebrated of all was Shizuka Gozen, the concubine of the
twelfth-century hero Yoshitsune. (Shizuka, alas, is probably legendary though
the great warrior who was her lover is a very important historical figure, a
doughty Richard the Lionheart of Japan; the two heroes, Japanese and Western,
coincide in both period and story.) She was renowned throughout the country for
her extraordinary beauty and also for the power of her dancing, so magical that
once, when the country had been suffering from drought for a hundred days, the
gods responded by sending rain as soon as she began to dance. This is not as
extraordinary as it sounds. Dance began as a way of supplicating the gods in
Japan and the women who worked in Shinto shrines often combined the roles of
shamaness and prostitute. Centuries later when the first geisha appeared, they
claimed the beautiful and spirited dancer as their ancestor.5
Shizuka's story began when her lover, Yoshitsune, was forced to flee Kyoto
to escape his wicked half-brother, the shogun (generalissimo) Yoritomo. Besides
warriors to defend him, he took with him twelve women with whom he was on
intimate terms. But he soon realized that this enormous retinue was slowing him
down and sent all the women back, including his favorite, Shizuka, who was
pregnant with his child.
When she reached Kyoto, she was arrested and taken to Yoritomo's court.
There she was interrogated as to Yoshitsune's whereabouts. But, being
plucky as well as beautifulcharacteristics which would come to distinguish the
geisha tooshe refused to give anything away. Far worse was to come. The cruel
Yoritomo, discovering that she was pregnant, ordered that if the child was a
boy, he should be killed immediately; he could not risk allowing any son of
Yoshitsune's to live. The baby was barely out of Shizuka's womb
when Yoritomo's retainers snatched him from her arms, took him down to the
beach, and dashed his brains out against a rock.
Before letting her go, Yoritomo was determined to see this most famous of
dancers perform. Caring nothing for her feelings, he sent an order for her to
dance before him. Disdainfully she refused. Then his retainers persuaded her
that she should perform a dance of supplication before the gods at Hachiman
Shrine. Too late, she realized that she had been fooled. Yoritomo was watching,
hidden behind a bamboo blind.
Shizuka's dance is still performed on the Japanese stage. Wearing an
exquisite garment of Chinese damask over long white skirts which swirled around
her feet like a train and a voluminous long-sleeved overgarment embroidered with
diamonds, and with her floor-length hair swept into a loose knot on her head,
she unfurled her crimson fan and stepped forward. First she performed one of the
erotic shirabyoshi dances after which the dancers were named, singing and
dancing with such grace and beauty that everyone who watched was bewitched.
Thenwhen she was sure she had them in the palm of her handshe burst
full-throatedly into a defiant love song. Passionately she sang of Yoshitsune,
her love and yearning for him, and her joy that he had successfully managed to
evade his evil half-brother Yoritomo. Yoritomo was torn between rage at such
effrontery and pleasure at the exquisite beauty of her voice. But she was, after
all, a mere woman and therefore harmless, so he let her go unpunished.
She was still only eighteen. She returned to Kyoto where she cut off her
floor-length tresses, shaved her head, and became a nun. A year later, or so the
story goes, she died of grief. As for the historical Yoshitsune, he was tracked
down and killed.
Japan's Great Cultural Renaissance
Living only for the moment, giving all our time to the pleasures of the moon,
the snow, cherry blossoms, and maple leaves. Singing songs, drinking sake,
caressing each other, just drifting, drifting. Never giving a care if we have no
money, never sad in our hearts. Only like a plant moving on the river's
current; that is what is called ukiyothe Floating World.
Ryoi Asai, c. 16616
Had you arrived in Kyoto at the turn of the seventeenth century, you would have
found yourself swept along with the mob to the sprawling entertainment district
beside the River Kamo, stretching as far as the massive red gates of Yasaka
Shrine at the foot of the Eastern Hills. One of the chief attractions was the
burgeoning pleasure quarters packed with teahouses and taverns where womenwho
a century later would become known as geishasold tea or sake and might,
for a consideration, entertain you with singing, dancing, or more, depending on
the depth of your purse. Here and there on open-air stages, under wooden roofs,
groups of women performed lively dances to the plink plonk of the shamisen or
the tootle of the flute while their audiences lounged on red felt rugs or low
platforms, tucking into picnics.
Kyoto was the official capital of the country and, along with the bustling
mercantile city of Osaka, the center of commerce and culture. Artists of the
time painted people in festive robes dancing through the streets between
red-painted temples and tile-roofed wooden houses, and crowding to see
performances of dance, music, and drumming. Outside the wattle fencing
surrounding the stages were stalls selling food. Inside, women in rich kimonos,
men with wicker hats or samurai swords, even a couple of Portuguese with big
collars, bulbous noses, and tall hats, stood watching the shows.
You could gawk at puppets, wrestling, jugglers, or sword swallowers, laugh at
the clowns and jesters, admire the rare animals in cages, try your skill at
target practice, shoot darts in the blowpipe parlor, or while away the day in
singing and dancing. There you would have felt sorely tempted to fritter away
the rest of your life in fun. There was everything a person could want, enough
to distract and delight him for the rest of his days. It was an entertainment
mecca, a nonstop medieval carnival such as Chaucer might have enjoyed.
On the other side of the world, a century had passed since the heyday of the
Italian Renaissance and the glorious rule of the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I, in
Britain. In Japan, after more than four hundred years of warfare and upheaval,
there was peace again such as had not been seen since the halcyon days of the
pleasure-loving Heian aristocrats. The country had changed beyond all
recognition. As the medieval knightsthe samuraifought their bloody civil
wars, Kyoto had been burned to ashes time and time again. Now all that was over.
The different warring states that made up Japan had been unified, leaving the
people free to turn their attention to becoming prosperous and developing the
arts of peace. It was the beginning of an extraordinary Japanese Renaissance.
The man who brought all this about was the great general Ieyasu Tokugawa, who
defeated the last of his rival warlords in the Battle of Sekigahara in October
1600 and declared himself shogun and ruler of all Japan. The emperor had always
been merely the titular ruler of the country. He spent most of his time isolated
in his splendid palace in Kyoto, performing religious rituals, and had no real
power. It was Shogun Ieyasu who was the true ruler. He chose as the seat of his
military administration the little fishing village of Edo, an area of marshland
and rivers a few days' walk to the east of Kyoto, where he had established
his castle a decade earlier. Edo gradually grew in size and importance.
Eventually it was to become the great city of Tokyo.
Determined that the country would never again descend into civil war, the
shogunsIeyasu and his successorsset about fencing in the population with
rigid systems of control. Among other measures, they sealed off the country from
the outside world to ensure that no subversive ideas entered to disturb the
delicate balance. Foreigners and in particular Catholics were not allowed in and
Japanese were not allowed to leave. Anyone breaking these rules was liable to
execution. Only one small window was left openthe remote southern port of
Nagasaki, where Chinese junks brought their goods and a few Protestant Dutch
merchants were allowed to trade.
For the next two and a half centuries the Japanese were to develop a unique
culture and lifestyle, largely free from outside influences. Western explorers
were extending the bounds of the world they knew; in 1610 Henry Hudson
discovered Hudson Bay, in 1620 the Pilgrim Fathers reached New England and
millions of slaves were being shipped from Africa to the Old and the New Worlds.
The Dutch were a power all over the globe and had laid claim to an area which
they called New Amsterdam, later to be known as New York. But the doors of Japan
remained firmly closed.
To create a well-ordered society in which there would be no room for the
slightest possibility of rebellion or upheaval, the shogunate adopted
neo-Confucianism, with its rigid codes of behavior and emphasis on hierarchy
and respect for authority, as the official basis of government and the
underlying ethical code for society. The system remained in force until the end
of the Tokugawa period in 1853, after which in theory it began to change. But
many of the attitudes and social structures which it engendered remain in place
to this day.
The shoguns divided society into rigid classes, with a different set of laws
governing each. Sumptuary laws were issued decreeing what each class could and
could not wear, what they should eat, how they should wear their hair, where
they could and could not live, whom they could marry, and how they should
decorate their houses.
At the top of the hierarchy were the daimyo, provincial princes who governed
their own domains but had to pledge fealty to the shogun. Then came the samurai,
the military class who had grown in numbers mightily during the years of warfare
and were now the army, police, and administrators of the new system. Below the
samurai came the farmers, who ranked high because they were responsible for
producing the rice by which everyone lived, though in fact they had miserable
lives. They were followed by the artisans, who were also producers; they were
craftsmen and builders.
Right at the bottom came tradesmen and merchants who, so the argument went,
produced nothing. They just passed goods around from the producers to everyone
else, skimming off a profit along the way, and were thus considered worthless
parasites. In reality, of course, they were absolutely essential to the life of
the country, ensuring that goods were shuttled from the provinces, where they
were produced, to be sold in the cities.
In practice the main division was between the samurai and the rest, lumped
together as "townsmen." But the trouble with relegating merchants to
the very bottom was that the samurai desperately needed and wanted the goods
which the merchants sold and quickly spent their miserable stipends on them.
Over the centuries their stipends never increased at all; they were rigidly
prescribed. So the merchants started lending money, first to the samurai, then
the daimyo, and eventually to the shogun himself, and thus became richer and
There were a couple of classes so low that they did not even fea- ture in the
Tokugawa ranking system. One was the hinin (nonhumans), most of whom were
beggars or did the work that no one else wanted to do. The other encompassed
popular entertainerseveryone from grand courtesans, dancers, tea-serving
wenches, sake servers, and itinerant prostitutes to actors, roving
minstrels, musicians, jugglers, and jesters. They were all lumped together under
the term kawaramonoriverbed folkand (unless, like the courtesans, they were
lucky enough to have a patron) they lived in ghettos in the dry riverbeds and
along the river banks, frontier areas of the city which were outside government
control, considered unsuitable for permanent habitation because of flooding.
This was the class from which the geisha were to emerge.
Like everything else in the highly regulated Confucian society of
seventeenth-century Japan, prostitution needed to be organized. The best way to
manage it was to control it, to herd as many prostitutes as possible into one
place and to make prostitution legal there but illegal anywhere else. Along
with the kabuki theater, the pleasure quarters were classified as the "bad
places" where the lower orders, and anyone else who wanted to, could go
to let off steam and exercise their baser instincts. But, "bad"
though they were, they fulfilled a recognized need. Ironically the geisha and
the whole culture of eroticism arose directly out of the rigid strictures of
Confucianism; the walled cities of pleasure which were to become the heart of
the counterculture in Japan were created with whole-hearted government approval.
Confucianism required unquestioning obedience to authority. Within the state,
this was the shogun, acting in the name of the emperor. Within the household, it
was the father, who was to be accorded as much loyalty and respect as one would
give the ruler of the country. The basic unit of society was not the individual
but the family, which had to be preserved and protected at all costs. A woman
had to obey her father, then, after she was married, her husband, and finally,
if her husband predeceased her, her son.
Marriage was a political matter, nothing to do with love. It was an alliance
between families which was arranged by the head of the household with the help
of a go-between, far too important a matter to be left to the will of the
individuals concerned. Rather than marrying the man, a woman married into the
household. She became a yome, which means "daughter-in-law" as well
as "bride," and moved into her husband's house with her
in-laws, where she was more like a glorified domestic servant than our concept
of a wife.
As for conjugal sex, the only function was to produce a male heir who would
ensure the continuance of the household and carry out the ritual respects due to
the ancestors. Apart from that, sexual gratification was not supposed to take
place within marriage. In other words, a husband was not supposed to love his
wife, enjoy sex with her, or give her sexual pleasure. That was the theory;
though in reality many a Japanese mother provided her daughter with a
"pillow book" of sexual techniques to try and lure her husband away
from the sirens of the pleasure quarters and the manifold other temptations
available to him.
Just so long as a man did his duty by his wife, supported her financially and
produced an heir, he was at liberty to amuse himself in any way he pleased. As
François Caron, who was in Japan with the Dutch East India Company in 1639,
observed, "One Man hath but one Wife, though as many Concubines as he can
keep; and if that Wife do not please him, he may put her away, provided he
dismiss her in a civil and honorable way. Any Man may lie with a Whore, or
common Woman, although he be married, with impunitie; but the Wife may not so
much as speak in private with another Man, without hazarding her life."7
Besides enjoying oneself with the wife and concubines, there was no disgrace in
visiting the "bad places." And the options were not limited to the
pleasure quarters or the female sex. In fact, a man who chose to stay home with
his wife and children would have seemed a bit of a wet-blanket goody goody,
probably tight-fisted, and certainly far from a stylish man about town.
The Lusty Lady of Izumo
One of the most urgent tasks for the new shogunate was to clamp down on vice,
which had increased enormously over the years of civil war. Kyoto had become a
center of prostitution, with women who had lost their menfolk, itinerant nuns,
and unemployed shrine maidens wandering the streets. There were also thousands
of prostitutes servicing travelers along the rivers and roads, at ports, and in
front of shrines and temples where pilgrims gathered. The problem came to a
head not long after Ieyasu Tokugawa established peace.
The cause of all the trouble was a woman named Izumo no Okuni (Okuni of Izumo).
Okuni claimed to be a shrine maiden and shamaness from the Grand Shrine at Izumo
(from where she took her name) though this may have just been an invention to
give her an air of mystery. She was, in any case, a dazzling dancer and by
definition a prostitute; in those days, the two were one and the same.
Around 1603, when peace had barely been established, she set up an open-air
stage in the dry riverbed of the Kamo and, with her troupe of wandering female
entertainers, began to dance. Those who saw her were electrified. After two
centuries of civil war, people were hungry for pleasure, diversion, and
beautiful women in silk kimonos. It was from Okuni and her dancing that the
geisha, with their irresistible combination of charm, entertainment, and
eroticism, were to develop.
As word spread, crowds descended on the riverbed to watch Okuni perform. Artists
of the time portrayed her dancing wildly, accompanied by singers, a
flute-player, and people beating hand drums before an eager audience of
top-knotted samurai and robed women and children, sheltered by huge red
parasols, with the townsfolk jam-packed in front of the stage.
Some of her dances were adapted from ancient folk dances. One of these was the
Buddhist prayer dance, for which she dressed in priest's robes, sporting a
conical black hat and baggy black trousers and carrying a bell which she struck
with a small hammer. Sometimes she dressed as a Shinto priest and at other times
she mimicked a Christian one, wearing a large golden rosary.
But the most thrilling part of her show was when she played a man. Audiences
cheered, applauded, and roared with laughter when she sauntered out wearing
brocade trousers and an animal skin jacket. With a painted mustache like a
dashing young man about town, she would mime chatting up a teahouse woman,
wooing a courtesan, or having an assignation in a bathhouse. Okuni's
dancing was not just brilliant but cheerfully erotic. It was so extraordinary
that a new word had to be coined: kabuki, from the verb kabuku, meaning
"to frolic" or "to be wild and outrageous."
Okuni's sexy dancing was the seed of the kabuki theater and also of the
floating world of the courtesans and geisha.
Okuni's fame spread all over the country. In 1607 she and her all-women
troupe went on tour to Edo and gave a public performance at the shogun's
castle there. Soon there were imitatorstroupes of prostitutes and courtesans
performing erotic dances and bedroom farces throughout the great cities. It was
showbiz; the actresses were stars. But, while the court ladies and townswomen
imitated their stylish ways, men were more interested in their bodies. A
contemporary wrote, "Men threw away their wealth, some forgot their
fathers and mothers, others did not care if the mothers of their children were
jealous . . ."
There was nothing wrong with eroticism. But the shogunate could not risk
anything that threatened public order. When men started fighting over the
actresses, it was time to put a stop to it. In 1628, after a major brawl, the
authorities banned women from performing in public. It was a law that was
extremely difficult to enforce. It had to be passed again in 1629, 1630, 1640,
1645, 1646, and 1647. Finally the manager of the last offending theater was
thrown into prison and women disappeared from the public stage, not to reappear
for another 250 years.
Banned from public performance, some of the women dancers took up work as
prostitutes, licensed or unlicensed. Others found positions in samurai
households where they gave private performances or set themselves up as
teachers of music and dance. These were the sort of women who a century later
were to become known as geisha.8
The authorities had banned women's kabuki. But they had said nothing about
kabuki performed by young men, which now became hugely popular. The young men
incorporated acrobatics and juggling into their kabuki and the most beautiful
took on female roles.
Alas for the efforts of the authorities, these beautiful young men too were
prostitutes. Those who played women dressed the part off stage as well as on.
They lived in little shacks near the riverbanks, notably in the area of Kyoto
called Miyagawa-cho, now one of the geisha districts, and used their
performances to attract customers. Most of them were under fifteen, the age of
adulthood, which probably made them all the more attractive.
For Buddhist priests who had abjured the company of women it was perfectly
acceptable thus to work off their frustrations with a clean conscience. The
youths also appealed to samurai, among whom homosexuality was considered the
purest form of love. In any case, in this societyfree of Christianity's
guilt-inducing notions of sinlove was simply love. Homosexual and heterosexual
love were seen as different sides of the same coin. Both, as far as the
authorities were concerned, were equally liable to lead to public disorder.
Eventually in 1652, after the death of a shogun who had himself been partial to
young men, this variety of kabuki was also banned and replaced by kabuki played
by adult males, as it is today. Thereafter kabuki and the women's world of
courtesans and geisha together made up the heart of the demimonde.
Pleasure for Sale: The Shimabara Licensed Quarter
Japan's first pleasure quarter opened in Kyoto even before Ieyasu
Tokugawa's great victory of 1600. In 1589, when Tokugawa's
predecessor, the enlightened warlord Hideyoshi Toyotomi, was governing the
country from his castle in Osaka, one of his favorites, a stable hand called
Saburoemon Hara, asked permission to open a brothel. Hideyoshi granted him a
license, and he built a small walled-in quarter with a single gate, not far on
foot, horseback, or by palanquin from the emperor's palace. He called it
Yanagimachi (Willow Town). There he set up brothels and teahouses and installed
some high-class, educated courtesans to lure the sophisticated gentlemen of
It was an immediate success. Hideyoshi himself used to sneak in, in disguise,
with his retainers. It was, however, altogether too close to the imperial palace
for propriety and in 1602 was moved to a site further south. In 1641 the quarter
was finally established a decent distance from the center of the city where it
would not corrupt upstanding citizens. Thereafter business continued until it
burned down in 1854. But it reached the apogee of its prosperity and fame in the
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when, in the West, Louis XIV, the
Sun King, was establishing his glittering court at Versailles and in Britain the
pretty orange-seller, Nell Gwynn, was bewitching the Stuart king, Charles II,
with her charms.
Thanks to the peace which the shogunate had brought about, the country was
quickly becoming prosperous. An end of warfare meant that all hands could be
turned to production, developing arts, crafts, and trade. Seeking a share of the
growing pool of wealth, people flocked to the rapidly expanding cities.
This was the height of the Japanese Renaissance, the gli ttering Genroku period.
By then, money lenders and merchants had built up stupendous fortunes. Samurai,
trying to subsist on their stipends, were forbidden to get a job; not only was
there no upward mobility, there was no downward mobility either. There was
nothing they could do but borrow from the money lenders, who got richer and
richer. Every now and then edicts were issued forbidding merchants from, for
example, wearing silk, living in a three-story house, and decorating their rooms
with gold and silver leaf or furnishing them with gold lacquer objects; edicts
had to be issued, of course, because that was precisely what they were doing.
These supposedly low-class townsmen lavished their money on luxuries, filling
their storehouses with fabulously expensive gold screens, ceramics, lacquerware,
tea bowls, books, prints, and sumptuous kimono. All this big spending further
stimulated the economy by providing a market for the artisans.
But no matter how rich the merchants became, they were prohibited from using
their wealth to improve their status by, for example, marrying into a samurai
family or moving into the samurai section of town. And the wealthier they
became, the more likely it was that the government would confiscate everything
they had. Merchants did not pay taxes, as that would have given them rights;
instead, every now and then, the shogunate found a pretext to seize their
riches. Therefore it made ample sense to squander as much of one's fortune
as possible, as quickly as possible, on pleasureand where better to do so than
in the newly burgeoning pleasure quarters!
Something had gone badly wrong in the shoguns' plans. The idea had been to
sweep vice under the carpet, to restrict the perpetrators of vicethe
prostitutes and the kabuki actors, their companions in sinto specific areas of
the capital and thus control both them and their vulgar customers, the
nouveau-riche merchants. But instead the pleasure quarters rapidly turned into
the most glamorous part of town. Everyone from samurai to the imperial princes
and even the emperor himself sneaked off for surreptitious visits.
As well as sex, romance, and sensual pleasure, Shimabara offered all that a
sophisticated man about town might demand: elegance, culture, and brilliant
conversation with beautiful women in an atmosphere of refinement. It was a place
where merchants could entertain clients and show off their glamorous
connections, basking in the company of these not-quite-reputable stars. As for
what happened afterward, that was practically irrelevant. The show was the
In 1661 a writer called Ryoi Asai coined a word for this new way of living:
ukiyo (the floating world) from which came the term ukiyo-e (pictures of the
floating world) for the woodblock prints which depicted the courtesans,
prostitutes, and later, geisha who were its denizens. In the past, the word
ukiyo had been a Buddhist term, referring to the transience of all things. In
Ryoi's Tales of the Floating World, it took on a new slant. Life was
indeed transient; so what better way to spend one's time than in the
pursuit of pleasure, like a gourd bobbing lightly along the stream of life!
For men it was a topsy-turvy world of pleasure which was the reverse in every
way from the world of work and family outside its gates. There, it was said, a
man would forget what time of day it was, what period of history, and even his
own wife. There the outcast courtesans and prostitutes could play at being
queens and the low-grade merchants kings. As for the samurai, who were
supposedly at the top of the tree, they were dismissed as bumpkins.
For the women, however, it was no dream. It was where they lived and worked.
Even if they wanted to leave, their wings were clipped. Gorgeous though they
were, the inhabitants of the pleasure quarters were caged birds. They had been
brought to the quarter as small children and had grown up entirely in this
hothouse world of women. They knew nothing else. For all their finery and
glamour, they were virtual slaves, indentured to the brothel owners.
Almost all were from the lower classes, the beautiful children of impoverished
rural families or debt-ridden townsfolk. There were professional procurers or
pimps, called zegen, who scoured the countryside and poorer sections of the
city. When they found a suitable child, they would offer the parents a set sum
of money. Buying or selling of persons was illegal so the child would be bound
with a contract for a fixed period of time, usually ten years.
For the parents, sending a child off to the pleasure quarters was nothing out of
the ordinary; it is still done to this day in Asia. Apart from the much-needed
money and the brutal necessity of reducing the number of mouths to be fed, they
probably felt they were giving their daughter a chance in life. Going to Kyoto
to eat fine food, wear fine clothes, meet fine people, and be educated offered
far more hope than staying in the countryside hoeing the soil for the rest of
her life. As for the child, according to the Confucian code it was her filial
duty to put the well-being of her family ahead of her own. Girls who were sold
to the pleasure quarters were considered virtuous and admirable for having
sacrificed themselves for their family.
Most were recruited when they were six or seven and had only the haziest
memories of life outside the walls of the pleasure quarter. While peasants were
lucky if they had millet, the children in Shimabara ate white rice, wore
beautiful kimonos, and learned to walk, talk, and comport themselves in the
exaggeratedly feminine style of the quarter. Shimabara had its own dialect, as
did the other pleasure quarters, with distinctive slang that was charmingly
polite yet playfully seductive. Any child who managed to escape could thus be
immediately identified by the way she spoke and sent back again. For visitors it
made the pleasure quarters feel all the more like a dream world, an exotic
The children were the property of the brothel owner. Before they even arrived,
they had already incurred an enormous debt: the outlay involved in buying them
from their parents. Their food and kimono were provided by the brothel; but
every grain of rice and every bolt of silk only served to increase the burden of
debt. By the time they were old enough to start working, their debt was so huge
that they had no choice but to work day and night in a desperate attempt to
Initially the children worked as maids. When they were older, if they showed
promise they became kamuro (child attendants to a courtesan). The courtesan
taught them how to behave and ensured that they were trained in accomplishments
such as calligraphy, tea ceremony, and music. There were many little secrets to
be absorbed: how to lure men, how to wind them around their little fingers with
tears or protestations of undying love, how to write love letters, how to hold
men off long enough to drive them mad with desire, how to pleasure them in the
bedchamber, and how to fake an orgasm while conserving one's energy for
the next customer. The key rule was to play at love but never, never to allow
oneself to feel it. That way lay disaster.
At thirteen or fourteen, when the child reached sexual maturity, there was a
grand celebration accompanied by a rite of passage which the girl had to accept
with gritted teethmizuage, literally "raising or offering up the
waters"ritual deflowerment, conducted by a patron who had paid mightily
for the privilege. If she was uncommonly lovely she might be designated a koshi,
the second rank of courtesan, though there were many that slipped through the
net and ended up as lower-grade prostitutes, sitting patiently behind the
latticed windows of the teahouses waiting to be chosen by a customer.
At the very pinnacle of the hierarchy of prostitutes and courtesans were the
tayu, the aristocrats of the courtesan world. Some were the concubines and
courtesans of the imperial princes; unlike the lower ranks of courtesans, tayu
were permitted inside the palace. And in their leisure time the princes went on
horseback or by palanquin to amuse themselves at the famous Shimabara pleasure
quarters where the tayu lived.
If a man wanted to enjoy the company of a tayu, the first step was to go to an
ageya, a house of assignation (the precursor of the teahouses of the geisha
districts) to apply for a meeting. If he was a sophisticate, he would ask for
one of the tayu by name; some were so popular that it might take months before a
day became free in their calendar. The owner of the ageya would write a letter
to the bordello where the courtesan lived, roll it up, and give it to a
messenger. While the customer was waiting, he would enjoy the services of
jesters and dancing girls and ply them with food and drink, all of which, of
course, would be added to his bill.
Hours later, the tayu would sweep in, dressed in layer upon layer of gorgeous
kimonos and accompanied by a flotilla of child attendants and dancing girls,
having progressed at snail's pace along the boulevard with her entourage.
They would while away the evening playing music, dancing, exchanging poems, and
enjoying the tea ceremony and incense ceremonyexactly as if they were ladies
and gentlemen of the Heian court. Sex did not automatically follow. After all,
it would lower the courtesan's worth if she were too easily available. A
proprietor who owned a beautiful tayu would want to increase the value of his or
her investment by making her as exclusive as possible.
If the man wanted to spend the night with the courtesan, he would have to engage
in a long and very expensive courtship. The earliest that one could hope to
experience her luxurious silk bedding was at the third visit. And even then, if
the tayu was not satisfied with the man's performance, she could decline
to sleep with him. If she did agree to spend the night with him, the cost was 90
silver nuggets (momme) which equaled one and a half gold nuggets (ryo), in
modern currency about $675. It was costly but, for a wealthy man, the only sort
of person whom a tayu would consider, hardly prohibitive.9
The koshi, the second rank courtesans, charged sixty silver nuggets, and the
sancha (teahouse waitresses-cum-courtesans) charged thirty. At the Shimabara
even the lowest class of prostitutes, the hashi, whom one could buy for just one
silver nugget, were said to be elegant.
But no matter how famous the courtesans became, they were still slaves of debt,
constrained to work out their ten-year contract. In fact the system ensured
that, no matter how hard they worked, their debts only increased. There were
always new costs being incurredthe purchasing of the splendid kimonos
necessary to carry on their trade, the costs of bedding and of clothing and
supporting their retinue of retainers, the tips that had to be paid to the
bordello staff. They had just three days off a year. If they missed a
day's work for any reason at all they had to pay the bordello out of their
own pocket the sum they would have earned. Most carried on working until they
were twenty-seven, the usual retirement age. Those who were successful would
have plenty of supplicants begging to marry them after that.
They probably accepted the hardships with stoicism. That was the way it was in
the floating world and, in any case, any other life would have had its hardships
too. Within the narrow confines of their gilded cage they were queens. The one
chance of escapeif they wanted itwas to find someone prepared to buy out
their contract and make them his wife or mistress. As the old saying went, the
courtesan's favorite lie was "I love you," the
customer's "I will marry you."
The names and rankings changed over the centuries but everyone agreed that the
greatest courtesans of all time were the tayu of seventeenth-century Shimabara.
The Courtesan and the Swordsman
In the early days of the Shimabara quarter, there were seven celebrated tayu
courtesans in Kyoto. Of these, Yoshino was the most adored. Many legends have
gathered around her, not least that she was the lover of Miyamoto Musashi, the
greatest swordsman of all time and author of The Book of Five Rings (a bible for
practitioners of the martial arts and more recently for businessmen). He learned
his secrets, so the story goes, from the gentle but insightful Yoshino.
Yoshino was entertaining him and his friends in the pleasure quarter one snowy
night when he slipped quietly out of the room. She was the only one to notice
him leave. He returned a few minutes later. But there was a splash of red on the
hem of his kimono.
"What is that?" asked one of his friends.
"Just a peony petal," said Yoshino and quickly wiped it away with a
When the party came to an end, she suggested lightly that he had better stay
there with her. With her unerring instinct she had guessed that he had been
engaged in a duel to the death in the few minutes he had been away. The
retainers of the two men whom he had killed, several dozen of them, were waiting
right outside to ambush him and exact revenge.
Sitting in her chamber he was silent, tense in anticipation of the hopeless
battle that lay ahead. Suddenly Yoshino picked up her biwa, a priceless lute,
took a knife, and smashed the curved sound box to pieces. From the ruined
instrument she picked out the crosspiece, a single piece of wood, and showed it
This, she explained, was the heart of the instrument; all the sound came from
this. If the crosspiece were as taut and unyielding as he was at that moment, a
single stroke of the plectrum would break it. But if he could be as flexible and
responsive as it was, no one could defeat him. Inspired by her words, he bounded
out into the snow and, with a few nonchalant slashes of his sword, decimated the
dozens of men gathered outside. For the rest of his sword-wielding career, he
never forgot her or her advice.
The historical Yoshino was born on the third day of the third month 1606. She
was sold to the pleasure quarters at the age of six and at fourteen was so
beautiful and accomplished that she was promoted to the rank of tayu, a rare and
extraordinary honor. So famous and so hugely desired was she that she had no
need ever to bestow her favors on anyone. Her wealthy and adoring patrons made
sure that her income was high enough for her to be able to pay all her annual
expenses in advance. But no matter how much they paid her, she kept them at a
distance, hopelessly yearning for her.
One day she was called to entertain at a gathering of Kyoto's most
influential literary coterie, presided over by the emperor's fourth son.
There she met Joeki Haiya, a merchant's son. Not only was he handsome,
refined, and accomplished enough to satisfy the most demanding courtesan, he was
an adept of the tea ceremony, which he hosted with wonderful finesse, and also
extremely rich. At the time he was twenty-two, she twenty-six. He fell
hopelessly in love, so much so that he laid out the enormous fortune necessary
to buy out her contract, forbeautiful, accomplished, and celebrated though she
wasshe was still the property of the bordello keeper. Having bought her
freedom, he married her.
Thus far is history. The rest may or may not be legend. Joeki's adoptive
father, goes the story, was furious that the boy had brought the family into
disrepute and disowned him. After all, Yoshino might be a superstar but until
she married she had been a glorified prostitute who made her living by selling
her body (or so he thought). Reduced to poverty, the lovebirds retired to a
humble house on the outskirts of Kyoto. Joeki began to sell off his much-loved
collection of tea ceremony utensils to support them.
Then one day Joeki's father, far from home, was caught in a rainstorm and
sought shelter under the eaves of an unprepossessing house. Through the window
he heard a gentle, refined voice inviting him to rest inside. He walked across
the stepping stones of a humble but perfectly arranged garden and into a house
where everything, though poor, was of the most exquisite taste. On a wall was a
single piece of calligraphy by the most accomplished master of the day.
The lady of the house appeared, dressed in a plain, humble kimono which could
only enhance her radiant beauty. Dignified and gracious, she knelt and performed
a tea ceremony for him, whipping up a bowl of foaming green tea. On returning
home he recounted the tale of his adventure to friends and discovered that this
vision was none other than Yoshino. He summoned his son immediately, was
reconciled with him, and took the couple back into his family.
Yoshino died in 1643 at the age of thirty-eight (very young in modern terms but
not so extraordinary in those days). Joeki grieved for her for the rest of his
life. Without her, he declared, the magnificent city of Kyoto, with all its
luxury and culture, was nothing but a desert.
Music of a Bygone Age
Once the most glittering of pleasure quarters, today Shimabara has become a
shabby backwater. But there are a couple of splendid old buildings with
blackened beams and tatami-matted rooms, where five or six women still preserve
the tayu traditions. There in a huge, ancient house called Wachigaiya, I came
face to face with one.
She was a tiny fairy-like creature, barely visible beneath her voluminous
layered kimonos. Her face was chalky, her eyebrows and eyes etched in black and
her underlip an intense peony red. Her hair was swept into loops and coils, as
bulky as a Restoration wig. On it she supported an enormously ornate headdress
studded with tortoiseshell and silver hairpins and decorated with silk flowers
and foliage, with dangling mother-of-pearl ornaments and strings of coral
weighted with gold-leaf blossoms.
She was wrapped in layer upon layer of priceless antique kimonos. At her throat
was a thick collar of beige brocade embroidered with a swirling pattern of
irises. On top of that came a red kimono with a quilted hem which swept the
floor and swung heavily as she walked, and above that an exquisite robe of thick
black silk glistened with lustrous gold flowers, swirling around her feet like a
train. The obi, a swathe of orange silk brocade with a gold-thread design of
chrysanthemums and maple leaves, was tied in the front in an enormous knot which
hung in great folds from her waist to her knees. This was a symbol of her
availability. In theory it might be untiedif you happened to be rich and
fortunate enough to be permitted to do so.
Underneath it all, she had a cheeky, elfin face with a tiny nose and pointed
chin. How long had she been a tayu, I asked, then gasped when she opened her
small mouth to answer. In the chalky-white face with the blood-red lips, her
teeth were painted black. It was macabre, like looking into a black hole.
Four years was the answer. She was twenty-four and she was interested in the
particular styles of dance and music which the tayu performed, quite different
from the dance and music of the geisha tradition. She was fascinated, she said,
by the history and traditions of the tayu and the stories of the great tayu of
old. She loved the world of darkness and shadow in which the tayu moved. It was,
she said, more shibui than the geisha tradition. The word shibui, which
literally translates as "astringent" or "sober," evokes
a mood of old gold, glimmering shadows, and rust.
Dusk had fallen. In the banqueting hall guests were waiting, cross-legged on the
floor. The women among them knelt demurely. Huge smoking candles flickered, set
in tall golden candlesticks. Dimly visible in the gloom of an alcove was an
ancient scroll bearing a poem brushed with exquisite skill.
Then the tayu appeared, framed in the doorway like a visitation from another
age. She was transformed, she was a shamaness. Aloof, withdrawn, self-contained,
she did not speak, smile, or glance at the guests. She was to be looked at, not
to look. As she swept gracefully into the room, deftly swinging the heavy
quilted train of the kimono, more layers became visible, rippling at the sleeve
Solemnly she knelt, lifted a shallow red-lacquered bowl brimming with sak and
put it to her lips. Then she picked up a kokyu, an instrument shaped like a
small shamisen with a square base and long narrow neck, and rested it on her
knees. Taking a bow strung so loosely that it looked as if it could not possibly
produce any sound, she scraped it across the strings to coax out a thin scratchy
melody, turning the instrument so that the bow touched each of the three
It was an extraordinary, archaic sound. It lifted the hairs on the back of your
neck and took you back across the centuries to a time when, one could imagine,
rakes and dandies dissipated fortunes in places such as this. Lastly, rising to
her feet, she danced, mesmerizingly slow and stately, while the guests and I,
sitting in the shadows, watched, entranced.
But the most unforgettable thing was that under the layers and layers of brocade
and silk, her tiny feet were bare. It was the most erotic sight, it sent a
shiver up the spine. They peeked from beneath the heavy finery, the only
reminder that underneath the painted face, the priceless headdress, the three
layers of under-kimono and four layers of over-kimono, there was a real woman.
It must have been even more poignant in the old days, if anyone then ever
stopped to think about it. For in those days, for all their sumptuous finery,
their robes embroidered with gorgeous landscapes and their velvet and damask
bedding, the courtesans did not own their own bodies. They were chattels, to be
bought and sold.
The Harlot Queens of the Nightless City
Closing time is midnight
So why do I now hear
The wooden clappers
Strike out four times?
In Yoshiwara, even the
Wooden rhythm sticks are liars.
Geisha song 10
When Saburoemon Hara was petitioning to start a brothel in the great city of
Kyoto, Edo was nothing but a few fishermen's shacks in a marshy area where
three rivers met. But once Shogun Ieyasu established it as his capital it became
a boomtown such as the world had never seen before. It was here, in the rough
northeast of the country, in the shadow of the shogun's castle, that a
pleasure quarter was to develop which would put all the others in the shade.
This was where the culture of love was to be taken to its zenith and the geisha
were to flower.
It was a gold rush. People flocked from all over the country to help in the
building of the new city and make their fortunes. Mansions, palaces, temples,
shrines, shops, stalls, and houses sprang up, while alleys, roads, and a maze of
canals that made the city an eastern Venice spiraled out from the walls of the
shogun's castle to the newly reclaimed land beside the river. In 1500 Edo
had a population of 1,000; in the early 1600s it was an urban center of 150,000.
By the end of the seventeenth century it was the largest city in the world with
a population of well over one million. London, the largest European city, had
yet to reach a million.
Edo was a man's city, a frontier town akin to those of America's
Wild West, with just as many bars, brothels, and brawls. More than half the
population were samurai, retainers of the daimyo (the ex-warlords who governed
the provinces). This was a direct result of the shogun's policy of sankin
kotai (alternate attendance), which required all the daimyo to maintain a
mansion in Edo as well as their provincial seat. While they had to shuttle back
and forth, their families lived permanently in Edo, effectively hostages,
supported by a huge staff of vassal samurai. Most of the samurai were unmarried;
they could not afford to support a family on their stipends. To add to this
multitude of men there were thousands of merchants and tradesmen from Kyoto,
Osaka, and points west, who arrived to set up businesses and sent money to their
wives and children back home. As the great comic novelist Saikaku Ihara wrote
toward the end of the century, it was "a City of Bachelors."
All these frustrated men provided fertile soil for prostitution. Among the flood
of people hoping to make fortunes or at least stay afloat in the new city were a
goodly number of harlots, not to mention procurers and brothel-keepers who came
from all over the country. Even before anyone had been given a license to open a
pleasure quarter, professional brothel-keepers from Kyoto who had spotted an
irresistible opportunity were erecting a red-light district with streets and
beautiful wooden houses in a broad grassland dense with rushes near the coast.
Just as in later years, when the geisha areas became cultural centers, the
district offered far more than sex. There was also plentiful entertainment:
kabuki, shrine dancing, temple dancing, the spider dance, the lion dance,
wrestling, singing, and twanging joruri music. "How these conspiring
courtesans allure men without resorting to force is beyond our
comprehension," wrote a commentator of the time disapprovingly.11
Following the initiative of Hara, who had founded Shimabara, a wealthy
brothel-owner named Jinemon Shoji petitioned the shogun for a license to
establish an official pleasure quarter. Like Shimabara, the Yoshiwara was built,
rebuilt, moved, and burned down in a fire before it was finally established in
1656 in a reed plain (yoshi wara) a decent hour's journey from the city.
By the end of the century it was far larger than the country's other
famous pleasure quarters. Shimabara women were said to be the most beautiful;
Shinmachi, where the playboy merchants of Osaka went to enjoy themselves, had
the most sumptuous buildings and luxurious facilities; the women of Maruyama in
Nagasaki wore the most gorgeous kimonos; but the Yoshiwara girls outdid them all
with their hari (attitude or style). At its height there were more than three
thousand courtesans in the Yoshiwara, though only a few held the rank of tayu.
For the people of Edo, the Yoshiwara offered nonstop drama. The vast majority,
who could never even dream of being able to afford an evening with a courtesan,
could still follow their exploits in print. For the pleasure quarters together
with the kabuki theater were the heart of a cultural renaissance, both
democratic and subversive, produced by, for, and about the townsfolk and treated
with great suspicion by the sho- gunate who made periodic attempts to clamp down
on it. The courtesans and their clientele were the prime subject matter of
woodblock prints, kabuki plays, and the courtesan critiques and tayu biographies
which poured off the newly developed printing presses. Like the lives of the
rich and famous today, they offered endless fascination and vicarious
The stories of the time are full of grand guignolpassion, love, debauchery,
men ruined for love, suicides, deathsand also of ribald humor. Like the great
tayu of Kyoto, the courtesans of the Yoshiwara stood the usual
customer/merchandise relationship on its head. They were at liberty to turn down
any client, no matter how wealthy or aristocratic. Many of the sizzling stories
of the day, much appreciated by the townsfolk, concern courtesans who rejected
lovesick nobles and fell in love with handsome but low-born and impoverished
Much as the lower orders loved such bodice-ripping melodramas, the real lives of
the courtesans tended to be a lot more down to earth. Besides the elegant,
high-class courtesans of the official pleasure quarter, there were also many
unlicensed and distinctly lower-class prostitutes operating illegally. Around
the mid-1600s, many of these were to be found in bathhouses. These were a little
like the Turkish baths of today, with large reception areas where customers
could lounge, drink tea, and be entertained after bathing. As far as the
Yoshiwara brothel-keepers were concerned, this was unwarranted competition. They
frequently petitioned the shogunate to have it stamped out.
Katsuyama was a real-life prostitute who appeared at a bathhouse called Tanzen
in 1646. She was a beauty with a warm, open face and a cheeky, larger-than-life
personality. But what the customers loved most was when she dressed up as a man.
There had been nothing like it since Izumo no Okuni took to the stage dressed as
a man back in 1603 and stunned the populace with her wild kabuku dancing.
Wearing a wicker hat, man's kimono, and two swords like a samurai,
Katsuyama would bring the house down with the Tanzen-bushi dance, named after
the bathhouse, strutting and swaggering in jaunty macho fashion. As with all
such dances, there was an erotic coda.
Katsuyama became so popular that she outshone all the tayu of the Yoshiwara. In
1653, after a brawl between a bunch of townsfolk and some rival samurai, the
authorities closed down the bathhouse. Katsuyama was head-hunted by one of the
top Yoshiwara bordellos, which gave her instant promotion to tayu. When she made
her first grand procession down the main boulevard of the quarter to an
assignation with a client, the great courtesans were so curious about this up-
start that they all turned out to watch. They were so impressed with the cocky
way in which she kicked out her feet in the "figure of eight" walk
and with her distinctive topknot that the "Katsuyama gait" and the
"Katsuyama knot" continued to be in vogue for a century afterward.
The whole thing was a game. Like any game, you had to play it to the best of
your ability and you had to stick to the rules; but in the long run it was not
to be taken too seriously. And whatever went on in the licentious night-time
dreamworld of the Yoshiwara was always forgotten the next day. It never infected
the world outside those enchanted walls. That tradition carried over into the
world of the geisha. Mystery was of the essence.
It was all showbiz. But in the floating world, nothing could continue unchanged
for long. By the eighteenth century, the pleasure quarter culture had been
thriving for over a hundred years. The courtesans, with their stilted
conversation and layer upon layer of starchy clothing, were beginning to seem a
little passe. It was time for something new.
Gradually the number of women worthy to be designated tayu began to decline. The
term itself, which had been used exclusively in Shimabara, disappeared as the
focus of culture and life shifted to Edo. The last recorded tayu was in 1761.
(The tayu of Wachigaiya, sadly, are not a continuation of the line but
actresses, playing out a charade, a re-creation of a lost era.)
It was then that a new breed of woman first began to step out not just in the
pleasure quarters but in the town: a woman who was not a caged bird, who dressed
with understated sophistication, not showy glitter, and who sold not her body
but her arts.
(C) 2001 Lesley Downer All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-7679-0489-3