Seller Of Dreams
Opening chapters of our passionate new serial
If Mother says grass is black, it’s black… Toshimi kept her eyes lowered as she slipped into the banqueting hall, wishing she could make herself invisible. She smelled cigarette smoke, heard men’s deep voices talking and laughing. Then the room fell silent and all eyes turned on her.
Soon she would have to cast off her shyness, saunter in boldly as the other girls did, but for now all she could think of was the strangeness of it all.
She peeked around. The room was full of middle-aged men, cross-legged on the soft rice straw matting along both sides of a long table. The hostess, a plump matronly geisha, took her elbow, nudging her to a cushion behind one of them.
“Make sure his glass is never empty, even for a second,” she hissed.
She gave Toshimi’s collar a tug so that it plunged low, drawing attention to the only part of her upper back not painted stark white – the two-pronged fork of skin like a serpent’s tongue at the nape of her neck. Toshimi’s hair, swept up to focus attention on that bit of bare flesh, was oiled into two wings held in place with pomade, with rolls of paper and bundles of yak’s hair tucked in to give volume, so the hairdresser had explained.
The whole creation was laden down with hairpins, fabric flowers, ribbons, combs and dangling silver chains that tinkled as she walked. It was so heavy she could hardly keep her head balanced. Her layered kimonos, orange and gold and turquoise, weighed heavily too.
Her face was covered in a thick layer of make-up, as alabaster white as her back. Her eyebrows were brushed in like moths’ wings, the sides of her nose and contours of her face etched in pink, her eyes outlined in black and a tiny rose petal of safflower paste adorned just her lower lip. She’d watched in the mirror, mesmerised, as a senior geisha applied paint and powder.
Now she knelt as gracefully as she could, trying to keep her knees together. She’d practised for hours but in front of all these staring eyes she felt terribly self-conscious. The men chuckled.
“Ah. A new maiko,” said one in kindly tones. “Come and sit here.”
“She’s not a maiko, a trainee geisha, not yet,” said the motherly geisha. “She’s a beginner – an egg, we call it. She’ll sit where I put her.”
A tiny, withered old geisha plucked out a melody on a shamisen and warbled out a plaintive song as maids filed in and placed the first dishes of the meal before the guests. Each had a geisha or maiko to attend to him, plying their charges with sake, teasing, chattering, laughing.
The guest Toshimi had been charged to serve downed his drink in one. She leaned forward, reached for the sake flask and topped up his cup.
“That’s it,” said the man, laughing. “Fill it to the brim.” To her sixteen-yearold eyes he was ancient, his skin creased and corrugated, as old as her grandfather at least. “Your first party?” He smiled encouragingly. “You must drink too.”
He filled her cup. She sipped the warm, sweet liquor. There was so much she had to learn – to drain the last drop of sake, flirt with the customers, put her hand on this grizzled old man’s knee – but for now she was excused.
“What is your hobby?” asked the man. It was the question the guests always asked. They were wealthy businessmen or politicians and the young girls who served them drinks were teenagers. What else could they possibly talk about?