Chapter 36
Happy Holidays to all! Here's my (belated) ChristmaChanuKwanzaaka gift to all of you, plus one more for being late. Enjoy!
Disclaimer - I do not own any scenes, dialogue, or characters from the original Memoirs of a Geisha book or movie.
The next morning, I happened to run into Mameha in the courtyard of the little school on my way back from lunch. She was just coming in from a morning engagement, probably, and I couldn't resist the temptation to accost her.
"Last night was quite a show!" I smiled by way of greeting. "Sayuri-chan must be a quick student if even you could manage to teach her how to speak so well."
"I didn't teach her a thing," Mameha smiled back, still smug. "But really, Hatsumomo-san, perhaps you might want to drop in on more parties – you must be getting rusty if a child could turn the tables on you so easily."
"Well, if it was so easy for her, then she should have no trouble doing it again tonight. I fully intend to be there to see her exercise what little wit she has, so be sure to look out for me! And while we're at it, perhaps we should show tonight's guests how well her words stack up against mine." That was enough to make Mameha's cozy little expression drop a little; I meant every word I said, and she could plainly see it on my face. Satisfied that I'd thoroughly ruined Miss Perfect's morning, I swept off into the building.
That night I had an engagement that I absolutely could not miss, so even when the message came for me that they'd walked into their first teahouse of the evening, I had to ignore it. I was a little peeved that they'd get to enjoy even one party in peace, but the host made up for it by passing out generous tips at the end of the party. Once it was over, we dropped in on another small get together at the Mizuki when a maid came bearing the message that they'd just arrived at another party – now the real fun could begin.
Even though I'd just come in a few minutes ago, I immediately excused the both of us and hailed the first rickshaw I saw. As soon as we got there, I slipped the maid who saw us to the room a little something for herself before opening the door. The look on Mameha's face when she saw us walking through the door was nothing less than priceless. I expected her to stand her ground and try to create a repeat of her success last night, but instead she immediately made up some excuse and walked out of the party, her sad-faced apprentice following faithfully behind. So she was planning to avoid me rather than risk losing an open fight, was she? Then I'd just have to tail her to every party until I made her fight back.
We stayed at the party a few minutes, chatting and joking, while I spun tales about how I once had to reprimand Sayuri for attempting to set up a secret meeting with the son of my dresser (Mr. Bekku hadn't a wife, much less any known children). Soon enough, we got the notice that they'd entered yet another party several blocks away, and again we were immediately out the door and into the nearest rickshaw.
Along the way, Pumpkin whimpered a nervous, "Are we going to follow Mameha-san and Chi- I mean, Sayuri-chan to every party tonight?"
"Of course. And not just tonight – every party that I get word they're attending, we're crashing. By the time I'm done with them, precious little Sayuri is going to wish that she tried that much harder to run away properly." She let loose a small dog-like whine, to which I threatened to throw her out of the rickshaw if she ever did it in public again. You'd think that the little brat would wise up and see that crushing her little ex-friend was the only she'd ever survive.
At least she was careful not to say anything more as we dismounted in front of the teahouse and was led inside. We got to the party just in time to see Mameha getting in the starting position for a dance. She almost dropped her fan when she saw us, but managed to hide her shocked expression under a fake smile while mine was completely genuine. Over the course of the performance, her shock turned into clear signs of an absolute fury that she was impotent to express. All she could to was bow to the audience as soon as she'd done and immediately flee from the scene. I considered going after her to gloat, but I had a much better idea.
"Such a lovely performance," I sighed as soon as their footsteps receded. "Really, it's so nice to see Mameha dancing so well by herself. She sometimes has her troubles on stage and I have to do what I can to help her out."
"I thought she had a reputation for being the best dancer in all of Gion," said an aging geisha across from me. I don't have to tell you who's side she was obviously on in our rivalry.
"Well, she certainly has talent, so she deserves to be called one of the best. I'm glad that I spent all those years tutoring her when we were apprentices. I can only hope that her new apprentice turns out to be so fortunate, the poor thing…"
"What's so poor about her?" the same hag huffed. "She looked like a lovely girl to me."
"Yes, I've met her before. She's perfectly lovely, that… Oh, what was her name?"
"Sayuko," the man across from me replied.
"No, not Sayuko! You must be drunk again," said his companion. "It was Sayuri."
"That's it! She has such a terrible secret, but I really shouldn't tell you. It would be too embarrassing for her and she seems like such a nice girl…"
"She's certainly very pretty, though I didn't get to get much of an impression," the drunk man said.
"And such unusual eyes!" the old geisha gushed, happy that the conversation should turn in her idol's favor. "Do you think she's part-foreign?"
"I'm glad you all think so. The last party I attended with them was so hostile towards her! One man said that her eyes were the color of smashed worms."
"Well, I've certainly never heard a color described that way before," another man huffed.
"Neither have I. People can be so odd sometimes! Well, we've talked about her enough, so I'm just going to go ahead and tell you. But you must promise not to repeat it to anyone else! Rumors spread so fast these days… Anyway, she appears to have some sort of disorder that makes her bosoms look all droopy and wrinkled like an old woman's. It's terrible! I saw her in the bathhouse once a while ago, and I nearly screamed. Later, I felt so terrible for the poor thing that I almost cried…"
"A tragedy for such an attractive girl," someone exclaimed, and the rest of the table seemed to agree. I nodded and sighed with the rest of them, but on the inside I grinned.
We didn't hear a single word from our spies for the rest of the night. I took it to mean that Mameha finally saw how serious I was about wrecking Sayuri and sent her home for the time being. I was satisfied even without the confrontation I was looking for; she thought she had the best of me and I proved her wrong. And I'd be happy to prove it again and again, if they ever dared give me the chance.
A week passed since that night, and I hadn't heard a peep out of her or Mameha. Just to be sure that my spies were still working, I took a quick trip to the registry office during lunch and asked to see where they'd been billing lately – to my surprise, Mameha had been attending parties normally, but without Sayuri. That was just fine with me; there was nothing to be gained out of fighting Mameha alone.
Since it appeared that she'd learned her lesson and was keeping her precious apprentice home and out of harms' way, it was safe to say that I'd won the first round of this war. But even an idiot could see that it wasn't over yet, and if I wanted to keep my advantage, I'd better make good use of the time. I got a good idea of how when I heard the news from the headmistress a few days later; she came to congratulate me on Pumpkin earning runner-up status for the Apprentice's Award. Without me noticing, dragging her to all those extra parties while we were hounding Mameha all around town seriously boosted Pumpkin's earnings until she had the second-highest in all of Gion.
It was then that I got the idea; if we up the pace with which we enter and exit parties throughout Gion, then she should easily become the top earning apprentice and win. The award itself wasn't what mattered, it was what Mother would think when she saw.
When I explained my plan to Pumpkin that night before we went out, she looked as if she would collapse into tears. I'd already been dragging her to every party I attended every night since day one of her apprenticeship, without fail. Some would say that it was a monstrous workload for a young girl, but I'd like to see them have room for mercy when their status is on the line.
An apprentice with an older sister as popular as me would still only attend roughly ten or twelve parties per night – about half her older sisters' schedule – for the sake of building bonds and establishing a reputation. By the end of the first week of my new training program, Pumpkin was up to twenty-five. She attended all of my pre-scheduled engagements, plus any others I could manage to squeeze into one night.
While I was only feeling slightly fatigued, Pumpkin looked close to imploding upon herself. At the end of every night, she was so tired that it was all she could do to climb the stairs to go to bed. Not that I felt much pity – it may seem absolutely insane at first, but that kind of pace was normal for a popular geisha during the New Year's celebrations and she could easily expect even more during the cherry-blossom viewing season. If this was too much for her, she'd be better off running away now.
But she stuck with it and, the very next month, she won the Apprentice's Award. The moment I got the congratulatory letter from the geisha association, I immediately went straight home to Mother and slapped it on her desk.
"Well, what do you know," she rasped after re-reading the letter to be sure she hadn't made a mistake. "Your training Pumpkin wasn't as worthless as I thought it would be."
"If I was worthless, this okiya wouldn't be where it is now," I gloated. "Meanwhile, Miss Prissy's barely taken Chiyo out for an engagement since the girl debuted."
"Sayuri, you mean," she corrected me calmly, lighting a pipe. "And she has taken her out on a few engagements here and there, but you're quite right; so far, Mameha has failed miserably in properly training the girl."
I was thrilled to hear it. I knew better than to expect that Mother would adopt Pumpkin just on that alone, but we were definitely close to it. If we could keep up the high earnings – and Mameha could keep up her sorry performance – then Pumpkin would be the daughter of the Nitta okiya by years' end.
Late one afternoon, a couple of weeks later, I was attending a banquet at a hotel just outside of Gion with Pumpkin faithfully at my side. I hated banquets, but I still took on as many as I thought my brain could take for the sake of boosting revenue for both myself and Pumpkin. I was aiming for her to win the Apprentice's Award for a second time, so we attended every party, banquet, and outing one of us happened to catch wind of. That was one of the benefits of being as immensely popular a geisha as I was – people are honored to be graced by your presence, regardless of whether or not you actually received an invitation.
One of the men was just in the middle of some long, droning, self-important story, when a maid crept in and informed me that there was a message waiting for me at the reception desk. For a moment, I wondered if Mameha was back at it again with Sayuri, but it only turned out to be Korin.
"I'm at a sumo tournament with Awajiumi-san," she began excitedly. "You won't believe who's here with the sponsor!"
"Well, spit it out already!" I snapped. "I have a room of dottering old fools to get back to here."
"Not anymore; it's Mameha, with that apprentice of hers that you hate so much." So she was back at her old tricks. I knew better than to think that she was down for good after only some light harassment, but I'd expected it to take longer than that for her to bounce back. After getting the location from Korin, I went back to the party, grabbed my apprentice, and bowed out of the party early by pleading a home emergency. In ten minutes, we were out on the street and in a rickshaw headed straight for Kyoto University.
Since the event was sold out, Korin had offered to give us her seat in exchange for any dirt I managed to uncover, which I always did. Not that it was really hers to give away; she was there as a guest of Awajiumi, who still got free seats in the first tier whenever he decided to witness a match from his old stable. No one really knows why, seeing as how he was a very bad wrestler in his day, but the prevailing story was that it was in exchange for once helping the stable owner earn a night with a young geisha he was fond of.
When we finally arrived at the location, Korin was there to hand us her ticket.
"Tell Awajiumi-san that I went home, will you?" she said as she hopped in the rickshaw herself. "He's drunk and talking some nonsense about coming out retirement and going back to wrestling again, so watch out." Drunk was most certainly right, as I found out; the usher led us down to the first tier only to find that Awajiumi was well into his second bottle of hot sake.
"Either I'm drunk or you've actually gotten beautiful, Korin-san," he slurred as his way of a joke.
"Well, you're certainly right about the first thing if you can't even recognize me," I teased as I sat next to him. Pumpkin preferred to sit as far away from the two of us as space would allow, and I preferred her to be there.
"Aw, of course I know it's you, Hatsumomo-san – even I blind man knows it when you come down the street. The real question is, when am I going to recognize some yokozuna?" He tried heckling the stage, but thankfully his ruined voice didn't carry very well, even under the influence.
I took the opportunity to scan the crowd in search of my adversaries and found them directly in front of us, all the way across the stadium. Then I saw that their hosts were Iwamura Electric and it all suddenly made sense. I'd entertained them a number of times myself – just about every popular geisha had – but Mameha was a clear favorite of theirs. She was apparently fond of them as well, so it made sense that she felt safe taking Sayuri to an event hosted by them. What I'm sure she didn't bet on was her allies crossing paths with me.
At that exact moment, Sayuri looked over and I was sure our eyes met – I got all the proof I needed of that a minute later, when I saw them both run off somewhere. They were too far away for me to actually do anything to them, but it still made me all warm and fuzzy on the inside to see them running scared just from my very presence. I wondered if they'd left for good, but they both returned to their seats a few minutes later.
Unfortunately, they seemed to have figured out that they were perfectly safe from me being all the way across the hall, as they went right back to chatting with their hosts as if they never saw me. After several more minutes of conversing with the drunken Awajiumi and being relegated to only watching my rivals from a distance, I was more than ready to pack up and leave when I saw the strangest thing; the apprentice Sayuri herself sitting there laughing and joking with Nobu Toshikazu as if they were childhood friends. The sight of a man who liked to peg himself as dignified sitting there laughing with a child – it was just too funny.
By that point in my life, I'd been a geisha for over ten years, so I could say without hesitation that Nobu Toshikazu was easily the ugliest man to ever visit Gion. So when I saw that Miss Perfect had dressed her apprentice up in one of her most famous kimono and dragged her all the way out here just to make nice with Mr. Lizard, I instantly knew exactly what she was up to; she honestly intended for him to become Sayuri's future danna. And if it wasn't that, she'd most certainly try to pawn the girl's mizuage off on him. The thought of it alone was enough to make me want to die from laughter. Although, it wasn't such a bad plan, I had to admit – in order for Mameha to win her bet, she'd need to find Sayuri a danna who was solidly wealthy, and Nobu was that if nothing else. I myself would've tried a similar plan with Pumpkin, if it hadn't been so clear that she couldn't charm a rock.
So, something came out of this trip, after all – I might not have been able to crash their party and ruin Little Miss Stupid's reputation once and for all, but at least I managed to uncover her older sister's plan for success. The first step to destroying someone's only hope is to identify what it is.
I knew that I'd hit my mark when, for days afterwards, the girl could be found with her nose in any magazine that even mentioned Iwamura Electric. I knew that I probably should've been concerned they had such a clear and solid plan working in their favor, but the whole thing was just so hilarious to me that I honestly couldn't bring myself to kick it down just yet. To think that Miss Perfect, who prided herself on having the best of everything and making sure anyone associated with her did as well, would finally stoop down to having to appeal to the ugliest man she knew just to win a bet – it was better than when she was stuck with Tamame.
I was even beginning to consider letting the girl stay a while longer just to see her struggle to appear infatuated with him, when a chance encounter several days later showed me the error of my ways. I walked into her room looking to "borrow" a stick of wood for drawing in eyebrows since I'd just run out and was in the middle of getting ready for an important engagement. Mameha had called her some time ago leaving the room empty, so I decided to have a little fun.
I could already see her knee-high stack of magazines on Nobu in the corner, but I wondered what else she was hiding in preparation for her new life with Mr. Lizard? I quickly searched the room for gifts, letters, maybe a book of engagements, but found nothing of the sort. Only just a little disappointed, I went to the vanity to grab what I'd originally come for and found a square of folded linen on the floor instead. I thought that she simply dropped her own handkerchief, but when I picked it up and took a look, I noticed a monogram on the edge for Iwamura Electric.
I could've just as easily taken it as a token given to her by Nobu, but it looked quite old and I remembered from my previous encounters that he didn't carry a monogram on his belongings (he found them unnecessary), but his partner did. Following a hunch, I grabbed a magazine that was sitting on the table and flipped through it. I found one page dog-eared for repeated reading; an article on the biography of Iwamura Ken. That's when it all came together.
I don't know when or how they could've met previously, but it was obvious that Mameha's plan already had a serious kink in it – her apprentice was already in love and with her intended's business partner and best friend, no less. I immediately erupted in a volcano of laughter. I was in such utter hysterics that the commotion attracted Auntie and a few other maids. She tried to scold me about goofing off when I should've been getting ready, not to mention prying in Sayuri's room, but I could've cared less what the old bat was saying to me; I'd just discovered the best piece of information of my entire career so far.
My mirth lasted all the way out the door and into the Mizuki some time later. In the middle of the gathering, as I was waiting for a maid to bring another geisha a shamisen so I could put on a dance, I got a wonderful idea; I'd spent this whole time thinking of ways that I could destroy Mameha's plans, but what if I assisted them? Surely she couldn't have guessed that her own apprentice had already broken the cardinal rule being a geisha and fallen in love – if I suddenly became their best ally in her endeavor to seduce Nobu Toshikazu in becoming Sayuri's danna, they wouldn't know what to make of it!
Meanwhile, poor little Sayuri would have to watch as her precious Chairman slipped farther and farther away from her, until he was out of her reach forever. Such grief has driven many a foolish young geisha throughout history to elope, attempt to run away forever, or even decide to take much more permanent measures. The thought alone was enough to make me grin.
This was going to be, by far, my best plan yet.