THE YOSHIWARA WOMEN
_Kyushu dai-ichi no ume
Kon-ya kimi ga tame ni hiraku.
Hana no shingi wo shiran
to hosseba,
San-ko tsuki wo funde kitare_.
The finest plum-blossom of Kyushu
This night is opening for thee.
If thou wishes to know the true character of this flower,
Come at the third hour singing in the moonlight.
_Yoshiwara Popular Song_.
As the result of an affecting scene with his wife, Geoffrey's
opposition to the Yoshiwara project collapsed. If everybody went to
see the place, then it could not be such very Bad Form to do so.
Asako rang up Reggie; and on the next afternoon the young diplomat
called for the Barringtons in a motor-car, where Miss Yaé Smith was
already installed. They drove through Tokyo. It was like crossing
London for the space of distance covered; an immense city--yet is it a
city, or merely a village preposterously overgrown?
There is no dignity in the Japanese capital, nothing secular or
permanent, except that mysterious forest-land in the midst of the
moats and the grey walls, where dwell the Emperor and the Spirit of
the Race. It is a mongrel city, a vast congeries of native wooden
huts, hastily equipped with a few modern conveniences. Drunken poles
stagger down the streets, waving their cobwebs of electric wires.
Rickety trams jolt past, crowded to overflowing, so crowded that
humanity clings to the steps and platforms in clots, like flies
clinging to some sweet surface. Thousands of little shops glitter,
wink or frown at the passer-by. Many of them have western plate-glass
windows and stucco fronts, hiding their savagery, like a native woman
tricked out in ridiculous pomp. Some, still grimly conservative,
receive the customer in their cavernous interior, and cheat his eyes
in their perpetual twilight. Many of these little shops are so small
that their stock-in-trade flows over on to the pavement. The toy
shops, the china shops, the cake shops, the shops for women's ribbons
and hairpins seem to be trying to turn themselves inside out. Others
are so reticent that nothing appears save a stretch of clean straw
mats, where sulky clerks sit smoking round the _hibachi_ (fireboxes).
Then, when the eye gets accustomed to the darkness, one can see behind
them the ranks of the tea-jars of Uji, or layers of dark kimono stuff.
The character of the shops changed as the Barringtons and their party
approached their destination. The native element predominated more and
more. The wares became more and more inexplicable. There were shops
in which gold Buddhas shone and brass lamps for temple use, shops
displaying queer utensils and mysterious little bits of things, whose
secret was hidden in the cabalistic signs of Chinese script. There
were stalls of curios, and second-hand goods spread out on the
pavement, under the custody of wizened, inattentive old men, who
squatted and smoked.
Red-faced maids stared at the foreigners from the balconies of lofty
inns and eating-houses near Uyeno station. Further on, they passed
the silence of old temple walls, the spaciousness of pigeon-haunted
cloisters, and the huge high-pitched roofs of the shrines, with their
twisted horn-like points. Then, down a narrow alley appeared the
garish banners of the Asakusa theatres and cinema palaces. They heard
the yelling of the door-touts, and the bray of discordant music. They
caught a glimpse of hideous placards whose crude illustrations showed
the quality of the performance to be seen within, girls falling from
aeroplanes, demon ghosts with bloody daggers, melodrama unleashed.
Everywhere the same crowds loitered along the pavements. No hustle, no
appearance of business save where a messenger-boy threaded the maze
on a break-neck bicycle, or where a dull-faced coolie pulled at an
overloaded barrow. Grey and brown, the crowd clattered by on their
wooden shoes. Grey and black, passed the _haikara_ young men with
their yellow side-spring shoes. Black and sabre-dragging, the
policeman went to and fro, invisibly moored to his wooden sentry-box.
The only bright notes among all these drab multitudes were the little
girls in their variegated kimonos, who fluttered in and out of the
entrances, and who played unscolded on the footpaths. These too were
the only notes of happiness; for their grown-up relatives, especially
the women, carried an air, if not an actual expression, of animal
melancholy, the melancholy of driven sheep or of cows ruminant.
The crowds were growing denser. Their faces were all set in one
direction. At last the whole roadway was filled with the slow-moving
tide. The Harringtons and their friends had to alight from their car
and continue the rest of the way on foot.
"They are all going to see the show," Reggie explained to his party,
and he pointed to a line of high houses, which stood out above the low
native huts. It was a square block of building some hundreds of yards
long, quite foreign in character, having the appearance of factory
buildings, or of a barracks or workhouse.
"What a dismal-looking place!" said Asako.
"Yes," agreed Reggie, "but at night it is much brighter. It is all lit
up from top to bottom. It is called the Nightless City."
"What bad faces these people have!" said Asako, who was romantically
set on seeing evil everywhere, "Is it quite safe?"
"Oh yes," said their guide, "Japanese crowds are very orderly."
Indeed they suffered no inconvenience from the crowd beyond much
staring, an ordeal which awaits the foreigner in all corners of Tokyo.
They had reached a very narrow street, where raffish beer-shops were
doing a roaring trade. They caught a glimpse of dirty tablecloths and
powdered waitresses wearing skirts, aprons and lumpy shoes--all very
_haikara_. On the right hand they passed a little temple from whose
exiguous courtyard two stone foxes grinned maliciously, the temple of
the god Inari, who brings rich lovers to the girls who pray to him.
They passed through iron gates, like the gates of a park, where two
policemen were posted to regulate the traffic. Beyond was a single
line of cherry-trees in full bloom, a single wave of pinkish spray, a
hanging curtain of vapourous beauty, the subject of a thousand
poems, of a thousand allusions, licentious, delicate and trite,--the
cherry-blossoms of the Yoshiwara.
At a street corner stood a high white building plastered with golden
letters in Japanese and English--"Asahi Beer Hall."
"That is the place," said Yaé, "let us get out of this crowd."
They found refuge among more dirty tablecloths, Europeanised
_mousmés_, and gaping guests. When Yaé spoke to the girls in Japanese,
there was much bowing and hissing of the breath; and they were invited
upstairs on to the first floor where was another beer-hall, slightly
more exclusive-looking than the downstair Gambrinus. Here a table
and chairs were set for them in the embrasure of a bow-window, which,
protruding over the cross-roads, commanded an admirable view of the
converging streets.
"The procession won't be here for two hours more," said Yaé, pouting
her displeasure.
"One always has to wait in Japan," said Reggie. "Nobody ever knows
exactly when anything is going to happen; and so the Japanese just
wait and wait. They seem to like it rather. Anyhow they don't get
impatient. Life is so uneventful here that I think they must like
prolonging an incident as much as possible, like sucking a sweet
slowly."
Meanwhile there was plenty to look at. Asako could not get over her
shock at the sea of wicked faces which surged below.
"What class of people are these?" Geoffrey asked.
"Oh, shop-people, I think, most of them," said Yaé, "and people who
work in factories."
"Good class Japanese don't come here, then?" Geoffrey asked again.
"Oh no, only low class people and students. Japanese people say it is
a shameful thing to go to the Yoshiwara. And, if they go, they go very
secretly."
"Do you know any one who goes?" asked Reggie, with a directness which
shocked his friend's sense of Good Form.
"Oh, my brothers," said Yaé, "but they go everywhere; or they say they
do."
* * * * *
It certainly was an ill-favoured crowd. The Japanese are not an ugly
race. The young aristocrat who has grown up with fresh air and healthy
exercise is often good-looking, and sometimes distinguished and
refined. But the lower classes, those who keep company with poverty,
dirt and pawnshops, with the pleasures of the _saké_ barrel and the
Yoshiwara, are the ugliest beings that were ever created in the image
of their misshapen gods. Their small stature and ape-like attitudes,
the colour and discolour of their skin, the flat Mongolian nose, their
gaping mouths and bad teeth, the coarse fibre of their lustreless
black hair, give them an elvish and a goblin look, as though
this country were a nursery for fairy changelings, a land of the
Nibelungen, where bad thoughts have found their incarnation. Yet the
faces have not got that character for good and evil as we find them
among the Aryan peoples, the deep lines and the firm profiles.
"It is the absence of something rather than its presence which appals
and depresses us," Reggie Forsyth observed, "an absence of happiness
perhaps, or of a promise of happiness."
The crowd which filled the four roads with its slow grey tide was
peaceable enough; and it was strangely silent. The drag and clatter
of the clogs made more sound than the human voices. The great majority
were men, though there were women among them, quiet and demure. If
ever a voice was lifted, one could see by the rolling walk and the
fatuous smile that its owner had been drinking. Such a person would
be removed out of sight by his friends. The Japanese generally go
sight-seeing and merry-making in friendships and companies; and the
_Verein_, which in Japan is called the _Kwai_, flourishes here as in
Germany.
Two coolies started quarreling under the Barringtons' window. They too
had been drinking. They did not hit out at each other like Englishmen,
but started an interchange of abuse in gruff monosyllables and
indistinguishable grunts and snorts.
"_Baka! Chikushomé! Kuso_! (Fool! Beast! Dung!)"
These amenities exasperating their ill humour, they began to pull at
each other's coats and to jostle each other like quarrelsome curs.
This was a sign that affairs were growing serious; and the police
intervened. Again each combatant was pushed away by his companions
into opposite byways.
With these exceptions, all tramplings, squeezings, pushings and
pokings were received with conventional grins or apathetic staring.
Yet in the paper next day it was said that so great had been the crowd
that six deaths had occurred, and numerous persons had fainted.
"But where is the Yoshiwara?" Geoffrey asked at last. "Where are these
wretched women kept?"
Reggie waved his hand in the direction of the three roads facing them.
"Inside the iron gates, that is all the Yoshiwara, and those high
houses and the low ones too. That is where the girls are. There are
two or three thousand of them within sight, as it were, from here.
But, of course, the night time is the time to see them."
"I suppose so," said Geoffrey vaguely.
"They sit in shop windows, one might say," Reggie went on, "only with
bars in front like cages in the Zoo. And they wear gorgeous kimonos,
red and gold and blue, and embroidered with flowers and dragons. It
is like nothing I can think of, except aviaries full of wonderful
parrakeets and humming-birds."
"Are they pretty?" Asako asked.
"No, I can't say they are pretty; and they all seem very much alike to
the mere Westerner. I can't imagine any body picking out one of them
and saying, 'I love her'--'she is the loveliest.' There is a fat,
impassive type like Buddha. There is a foxy animated type which
exchanges _badinage_ with the young nuts through the bars of her cage;
and there is a merely ugly lumpy type, a kind of cloddish country-girl
who exists in all countries. But the more exclusive houses don't
display their women. One can only see a row of photographs. No doubt
they are very flattering to their originals."
Asako was staring at the buildings now, at the high square prison
houses, and at the low native roofs. These had each its little
platform, its _monohoshi_, where much white washing was drying in the
sun.
At the farther end of one street a large stucco building, with a
Grecian portico, stood athwart the thoroughfare.
"What is that?" said Asako; "it looks like a church."
"That is the hospital," answered Reggie.
"But why is there a hospital here?" she asked again.
Yaé Smith smiled ever so little at her new friend's ignorance of the
wages of sin. But nobody answered the question.
* * * * *
There was a movement in the crowd, a pushing back from some unseen
locality, like the jolting of railway trucks. At the same time there
was a craning of necks and a murmur of interest.
In the street opposite, the crowd was opening down the centre. The
police, who had sprung up everywhere like the crop of the dragons'
teeth, were dividing the people. And then, down the path so formed,
came the strangest procession which Geoffrey Barrington had ever seen
on or off the stage.
High above the heads of the crowd appeared what seemed to be a
life-size automaton, a moving waxwork magnificently garbed in white
brocade with red and gold embroidery of phenixes, and a huge red sash
tied in a bow in front. The hem of the skirt, turned up with red and
thickly wadded, revealed a series of these garments fitting beneath
each other, like the leaves of an artichoke. Under a monumental
edifice of hair, bristling like a hedgehog with amber-coloured pins
and with silver spangles and rosettes, a blank, impassive little face
was staring straight in front of it, utterly expressionless, utterly
unnatural, hidden beneath the glaze of enamel--the china face of a
doll.
It parted the grey multitude like a pillar of light. It tottered
forward slowly, for it was lifted above the crowd on a pair of
black-lacquered clogs as high as stilts, dangerous and difficult to
manipulate. On each side were two little figures, similarly painted,
similarly bedizened, similarly expressionless, children of nine or
ten years only, the _komuro_, the little waiting-women. They served to
support the reigning beauty and at the same time to display her long
embroidered sleeves, outstretched on either side like wings.
The brilliant figure and her two attendants moved forward under the
shade of a huge ceremonial umbrella of yellow oiled paper, which
looked like a membrane or like old vellum, and upon which were written
in Chinese characters the personal name of the lady chosen for the
honour and the name of the house in which she was an inmate. The
shaft of this umbrella, some eight or nine feet long, was carried by a
sinister being, clothed in the blue livery of the Japanese artisan,
a kind of tabard with close-fitting trousers. He kept twisting the
umbrella-shaft all the time with a gyrating movement to and fro, which
imparted to the disc of the umbrella the hesitation of a wave. He
followed the Queen with a strange slow stride. For long seconds
he would pause with one foot held aloft in the attitude of a
high-stepping horse, which distorted his dwarfish body into a diabolic
convulsion, like Durer's angel of horror. He seemed a familiar spirit,
a mocking devil, the wicked _Spielmann_ of the "Miracle" play, whose
harsh laughter echoes through the empty room when the last cup is
emptied, the last shilling gone, and the dreamer awakes from his
dream.
Behind him followed five or six men carrying large oval lanterns,
also inscribed with the name of the house; and after them came a
representative collection of the officials of the proud establishment,
a few foxy old women and a crowd of swaggering men, spotty
and vicious-looking. The _Orian_ (Chief Courtesan) reached the
cross-roads. There, as if moved by machinery or magnetism, she slowly
turned to the left. She made her way towards one of a row of small,
old-fashioned native houses, on the road down which the Barringtons
had come. Here the umbrella was lowered. The beauty bowed her
monumental head to pass under the low doorway, and settled herself on
a pile of cushions prepared to receive her.
Almost at once the popular interest was diverted to the appearance of
another procession, precisely similar, which was debouching from the
opposite road. The new _Orian_ garbed in blue, with a sash of gold and
a design of cherry-blossom, supported by her two little attendants,
wobbled towards another of the little houses. On her disappearing a
third procession came into sight.
"Ah!" sighed Asako, "what lovely kimonos! Where do they get them
from?"
"I don't know," said Yaé, "some of them are quite old. They come out
fresh year after year for a different girl."
Yaé, with her distorted little soul, was thinking that it must be
worth the years of slavery and the humiliation of disease to have that
one day of complete triumph, to be the representative of Beauty upon
earth, to feel the admiration and the desire of that vast concourse of
men rising round one's body like a warm flood.
Geoffrey stared fascinated, wondering to see the fact of prostitution
advertised so unblushingly as a public spectacle, his hatred and
contempt breaking over the heads of the swine-faced men who followed
the harlot, and picked their livelihood out of her shame.
Reggie was wondering what might be the thoughts of those little
creatures muffled in such splendour that their personality, like that
of infant queens, was entirely hidden by the significance of what they
symbolized. Not a smile, not a glance of recognition passed over the
unnatural whiteness of their faces. Yet they could not be, as they
appeared to be, sleep-walkers. Were they proud to wear such finery?
Were they happy to be so acclaimed? Did their heart beat for one man,
or did their vanity drink in the homage of all? Did their mind turn
back to the mortgaged farm and the work in the paddy-fields, to
the thriftless shop and the chatter of the little town, to the
_saké_-sodden father who had sold them in the days of their innocence,
to the first numbing shock of that new life? Perhaps; or perhaps they
were too taken up with maintaining their equilibrium on their high
shoes, or perhaps they thought of nothing at all. Reggie, who had a
poor opinion of the intellectual brightness of uneducated Japanese
women, thought that the last alternative was highly probable.
"I wonder what those little houses are where they pay their visits,"
Reggie said.
"Oh, those are the _hikité chaya_" said Yaé glibly, "the Yoshiwara
tea-houses."
"Do they live there?" asked Asako.
"Oh, no; rich men who come to the Yoshiwara do not go to the big
houses where the _oiran_ live. They go to the tea-houses; and they
order food and _geisha_ to sing, and the _oiran_ to be brought from
the big house. It is more private. So the tea-houses are called
_hikité chaya_, 'tea-houses which lead by the hand.'"
"Yaé," said Reggie, "you know a lot about it."
"Yes," said Miss Smith, "my brothers have told me. They tell me lots
of things."
After a stay of about half an hour, the _oiran_ left their tea-houses.
The processions reformed; and they slowly tottered back to the places
whence they had come. Across their path the cherry petals were already
falling like snowflakes; for the cherry-blossom is the Japanese symbol
of the impermanence of earthly beauty, and of all sweet things and
pleasant.
"By Jove!" said Geoffrey Harrington to the world in general, "that
was an extraordinary sight. East is East and West is West, eh? I never
felt that so strongly before. How often does this performance take
place?"
"This performance," said Reggie, "has taken place for three days every
Spring for the last three hundred years. But it is more than doubtful
whether it will ever happen again. It is called _Oiran Dochu_, the
procession of the courtesans. Geoffrey, what you have seen to-day is
nothing more or less than the Passing of Old Japan!"
"But whom do these women belong to?" asked Geoffrey. "And who is
making money out of all this filth?"
"Various people and companies, I suppose, who own the different
houses," answered Reggie. "A fellow once offered to sell me his whole
establishment, bedding and six girls for £50 down. But he must
have been having a run of bad luck. In most countries it is a
most profitable form of investment. Do you remember 'Mrs. Warren's
Profession'? Thirty-five per cent I think was the exact figure. I
don't suppose Japan is any exception."
"By Jove!" said Geoffrey, "The women, poor wretches, they can't help
themselves; and the men who buy what they sell, one can't blame them
either. But the creatures who make fortunes out of all this beastiness
and cruelty, I say, they ought to be flogged round the place with a
cat-o'-nine-tails till the life is beaten out of them. Let's get away
from here!"
As they left the beer-house a small round Japanese man bobbed up from
the crowd, raised his hat, bowed and smiled. It was Tanaka. Geoffrey
had left him behind on purpose, that his servants, at least, might not
know where he was going.
"I think--I meet Ladyship here," said the little man, "but for long
time I do not spy her. I am very sorry."
"Is anything wrong? Why did you come?" asked Geoffrey.
"Good _samurai_ never leave Lordship's side. Of course, I come," was
the reply.
"Well, hurry up and get back," said his master, "or we shall be home
before you."
With renewed bowings he disappeared.
Asako was laughing.
"We can never get rid of Tanaka," she said, "can we? He follows us
like a detective."
"Sometimes I think he is deliberately spying on us," said her husband.
"Cheer up," said Reggie, "they all do that."
The party dispersed at the Imperial Hotel. Asako was laughing and
happy. She had enjoyed herself immensely as usual; and her innocence
had realized little or nothing of the grim significance of what she
had seen.
But Geoffrey was gloomy and distrait. He had taken it much to heart.
That night he had a horrible dream. The procession of the _oiran_ was
passing once more before his eyes; but he could not see the face of
the gorgeous doll whom all these crowds had come out to admire. He
felt strangely apprehensive, however. Then at a corner of the street
the figure turned and faced him. It was Asako, his wife. He struggled
to reach her and save her. But the crowds of Japanese closed in upon
him; he struggled in vain.