Books: Sad Gay Ladies of Japan

THREE GEISHAS (253 pp.)—Kikou Yamafa—John Day ($3.50).

The Japanese judge the private life of a geisha by the discretion of her indiscretions. Occidentals have been known to ignore her rigorous dance and song training and to lump her with the common prostitute, but this is patently unfair. Together with the hetaerae of ancient Greece and the courtesans of France, the geisha belongs to the aristocracy of dalliance.

Author Yamata (Lady of Beauty) is quick to admit that some geishas are merely beautiful dumb brunettes. But the trio whose authentic life stories she tells in her spare, grave and yet oddly debonair book, were bright, courageous women possessed of enough tragic dignity to become enshrined in Japan’s human legend.

The Lonely Singer. Okichi, the first of Author Yamata’s geishas, has a special interest for Americans as a kind of lively skeleton in the U.S. diplomatic closet. Just short of 100 years ago, it was Okichi’s destiny at the age of 18 to be assigned as paramour to 50-year-old Townsend Harris, first U.S. consul to Japan. Indeed, Harris, a white-thatched descendant of Roger Williams, threatened to break off trade treaty negotiations with Japanese officialdom until the girl was installed in his living quarters near the seacoast town of Shimoda. Long before she caught the consul’s roving eye, Okichi was renowned for her beauty, her regal bearing and her torch songs. Her true love was her childhood sweetheart, a peasant carpenter named Tsuru-Matsu. but after Townsend Harris’ ultimatum. Japanese officials lured Tsuru-Matsu away from Okichi with promises of making him a samurai. On the rebound from this desertion. Okichi agreed to go to lonely, kindly Consul Harris, and she fell in love with her middle-aged diplomatic Pinkerton.

Unfortunately for her, Harris’ arrangements with the Japanese called for the geisha to be spirited away whenever the “black ships” of the Americans were in port—and as these absences lengthened, Okichi consoled herself with sake. Consolation became alcoholic degradation, and Harris would have nothing more to do with her. No samurai, but still a carpenter. Tsuru-Matsu came back and married her; but love and liquor would not mix. When she was told that Townsend Harris had been buried “among the silent hills of Brooklyn.” Okichi lingered on a few years, then suffered a paralytic stroke; dragging herself painfully to the banks of the Inubusawa River, she committed suicide.

Nowadays Shimoda stages an annual “Carnival of the Black Ships” celebrating the U.S. opening of Japan to the West, and an actress assumes the honored role of Okichi. But, says Author Yamata, U.S. ambassadors do not stay to acknowledge that portion of the ceremony.

The Discreet Career Girl. O-Koi, second of the geishas, tailored her kimono-clad ambitions along career-woman lines. Her first lover was a stockbroker, her only husband a famed Kabuki actor who later deserted her. After two leading wrestlers (as prestigious in Japan as bullfighters in Spain) staged a public match for her favors, she came to the attention of the Prime Minister, Taro Katsura, and became his mistress. Throughout the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. O-Koi had a place in Katsura’s inmost councils without betraying a single confidence.

But the geisha had hitched her fortunes to a falling star. Though Japan won the war, the peace terms were unpopular, and the press reviled Katsura and his “concubine.” With rioters in the streets, O-Koi had the presence of mind to tack a FOR RENT sign on her house, and hid out in a back room. The lovers were reunited before Katsura’s death, and O-Koi later entered a Buddhist nunnery, where she died after the end of World War II.

The Plucky Poet. The story of Tsumakichi has the universal appeal of plain grit. During one night of horror in her 17th year, Tsumakichi woke to find a human head rolling past her on the teahouse veranda, saw a samurai sword flash twice toward her own body, leaving her armless. Her berserk adoptive father, the manager of the teahouse, had lopped off the heads of five of the six people sleeping under his roof that night. Primarily a dancer, she painfully mastered a new art. Holding a paintbrush between her teeth, she learned to paint ideograms and to draw designs on silk belts. Reading her own poetry, she won new fame throughout Japan. Tsumakichi, too, eventually entered a Buddhist nunnery, and is still alive, surrounded at 67 by the reverence that is accorded a Helen Keller.

The geisha may be disappearing with the swift-changing status of the Japanese woman. But whether she prove phoenix or fossil, the geisha has found a compassionate historian in Author Yamata, a writer who knows how to highlight her heroines against the backdrop of theatrical restaurants and teahouses through whose sliding bamboo panels these sad gay ladies of Japan move to their discreet, historic and bittersweet rendezvous.