1. 18  PostMagazine
A maid sits at the kitchen table going through the
schedule while the geisha put on their make-up
and tighten their hair arrangements.
Regular customers must be pampered. No
one is to be forgotten or made to feel unim-
portant. A wrongly placed word or an unlit
cigarette can result in tens of thousands of dollars
in lost income. There are five characteristics of
a successful geisha, Kokimi says. You must
never just get by in your training, you must be
able to drink without getting drunk, you must
be a good conversation partner, you must keep
secrets and, perhaps surprisingly, you should not
be too beautiful.
“Your looks must not overshadow your other
qualities,” Kokimi explains. “Or you will not be a
good geisha.”
This leads to discussion of the 2005 film
version of the Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a
Geisha, in which Chinese beauty Zhang Ziyi plays
Sayuri, a fisherman’s daughter who is sold to a
geisha house in Kyoto at the age of nine.
“I did not like the film,” Kokimi says primly.
“It did not give the correct description of what it
is like to be a geisha. On the other hand, it takes
place in Kyoto, where things are different; they
focus more on attracting men by youthful beauty.
To me that is not serious.”
Although never direct, sex is a part of the
geisha’s world. Sensuality and its appreciation
hover just below the surface of every encounter,
in a whisper, a glance or a flirtatious comment.
Add a dose of alcohol to that and the stage is set
for unwanted advances, or even sexual harass-
ment. But, surprisingly, clients seldom cross the
unspoken line.
“They know the rules,” says Kozue, a 25-year-
old who has just started on her geisha career.
She took the same path as most other young
geisha-wannabes. During her teens she took
ballet and jazz dance classes, but when she went
to see the Azuma Odori – the Shinbashi geishas’
annual spring performance – she knew immed-
iately what she wanted to be. She contacted
Kokimi, who took her in as an apprentice at
Kikumorikawa and for one year trained her to
sing, to dance, to perform the tea ceremony, and
in all the other traditional arts required.
“My parents were very sceptical about it all
when I told them,” Kozue says. “It was mostly my
father, who had seen old movies in which the
geisha always has a danna, a sugar daddy. I am
sure that still happens but it is not necessary to
have a danna.” She purses her lips: “I do not
have one.”
The geisha system has changed in the years
since Japan became a modern, industrialised
economy. These days there are no poor families
selling their daughters to geisha houses. There
are no mizuage auctions either, a rite of passage in
which an apprentice geisha’s virginity was sold to
the highest bidder, as described in Golden’s book.
The modern geisha is a self-employed member
of the service industry. She gets her jobs through
a booking agency or directly from her regular
customers. Having been in the profession for a
short period of time, Kozue has yet to build a
network of clients, so she relies on older geishas
to take her to appointments with them.
“I think most requests are for something like
‘three geishas who can dance’, and the client lets
the booking agency make the arrangements,”
Kozue says, whose favourite customers are actors
and other contenders in the entertainment
industry. “They know what it’s like to perform
and they are usually very knowledgeable.”
Some of the blame for the many miscon-
ceptions about geisha must be levelled at the
women themselves. According to rules of their
own making, a geisha is not allowed to have a
steady boyfriend and she must leave the job when
she gets married.
Kokimi has passed the stage when a family is
an option. There has been no lack of suitors over
the years, and she admits she has often fallen in
love. But she made a promise when she was 18,
when her mother told her a secret.
“It was such a shock when my mother told me
my biological father passed away when I was
three years of age, and that the famous author
who lived with us for about 10 days every month
spent the rest of the time with his other family.
I promised myself I would never have kids if
I wasn’t married.”
“We can go on dates,” says Himechiyo, 33,
who has been in the business for six years,
“but that rarely happens since I am always at
work.” Himechiyo used to work as a receptionist
at carmaker Mitsubishi Motors but being a
geisha is a lot more fun and interesting, she
says; the money is much better, and she gets
to dance and meet fascinating people almost
every night.
However, there are drawbacks. “I sometimes
miss the social life that other people have, the
friends you meet regularly,” she says.
A working day for Himechiyo starts at 8am,
when she has breakfast in her condominium,
across the Sumida River from Ginza. She puts on
a kimono and takes a taxi to a hair salon. After
that, she walks a short distance to the booking
agency, on a side street off fashionable Chuo-dori,
home to a glittering row of luxury department
stores and boutiques. She takes classes for a few
hours, usually in dance, but also in the shamisen,
a three-stringed musical intrument, and other
subjects. Then she checks with her agent for the
night’s bookings: who called? What do they want?
Which of the 16 authorised geisha restaurants in
Tokyo have they booked?
In the early afternoon she runs errands before
it is time to go home and prepare.
She is wealthy and independent and she has
some of the most powerful men in the country at
her feet, literally, every night. Would she ever turn
her back on the glamorous geisha world in favour
of the family life she professes to miss? Is there a
husband who could convince her to wipe off the
make-up and become Yoko Yoshida again?
“I want to have two kids,” she says. “I think I
would be happy with an ordinary man. He does
not have to be rich or famous. In fact, I think it’s
better if he isn’t.”
A geisha in the Shinbashi area will usually
have two bookings of one or two hours, depend-
ing on the client’s request, per night. The best
time to perform is about halfway through a
dinner: later, and there is the risk that the
customers will be too drunk to sit still and be
quiet; earlier, and people may be too hungry
to concentrate.
“Sometimes they just want a dance perform-
ance, but other times they want us to sit down
and chat a little,” says Himechiyo.
Her schedule is usually very tight, so when
the time is up she excuses herself and leaves.
The client knows her taxi is waiting, so it rarely
happens that someone asks her to stay longer.
The client gets what he has paid for.
Most people cannot book a geisha on a
whim. At an hourly rate of US$700 and up,
few can afford to make a reservation – but even
if they wanted to they could find it impossible.
Himechiyo and the other geisha have a rule never
to accept bookings from people they have not
been introduced to. This exclusivity is part of the
experience, they argue, and also serves as an
insurance policy against embarrassing incidents.
“I still remember the first
time I saw a geisha
perform. I was stunned. A
good geisha can illuminate
a whole dinner party”
Clockwise from right: Kokimi prepares
her make-up before a performance;
Souyou Ogawa conducts a lesson in the
traditional tea ceremony; nowadays
fewer Japanese women are prepared to
undergo the rigorous training required
to become a geisha.