Autobiography of a Geisha
by Sayo Masuda
(Vintage)
Sayo Masuda didn’t know her name until she was 14, and a geisha-in-training. At six, she was Nursie, a nanny for children even smaller than herself. She was Monkey Baby when exiled by her employers to work in the rice paddies, and Crane, because she hopped on one foot, then the other, to stay warm. In 1937, when she was 12, her family sold her to a geisha house in a hot springs resort for the price of a bag of rice. There, she writes, “they all decided they would call me Low, as in low intelligence”.
She was recovering in hospital from a fall when a doctor addressed her as Miss Masuda. “So I have a name,” she writes, her delight and astonishment evident, all these years later.
The geisha house was “not the soft life I’d thought it to be”, but it was an improvement on rice paddies, and she threw herself into her new life. She was sent to a school run by the local branch of the Geisha Registry Office and was taught a range of skills: how to sing and dance, to play the drum and the lute-like shamisen. Tips on pleasing one’s danna, or patron, came from the other geishas. “They love it if you nibble at their ears,” she was told.
After she graduated, her virginity was sold – several times, actually – and she became the mistress of a gangster called Cockeye.
“For a geisha, to have your contract redeemed and become a mistress is a giant step up in the world. Living ‘with a cat in your lap and a fan in your hand’ … was everyone’s fondest hope.” She was mistress number three, required to be available every third day from seven to eight at night. Mistress number two advised her to get her danna to buy her a house.
Instead, she got a factory job, although her danna scoffed at the notion. “All you know how to do is sleep in until ten in the morning and sit in front of the mirror while you fix your hair and stroke your bum. If you last a month, I’ll give you the gold medal for bravery in battle.” Her job lasted longer than her liaison.
After the war, Masuda was sometimes a geisha and sometimes a peddler; she loved, lost, and managed to hold on in a defeated, poverty-stricken Japan. Yet there’s very little self-pity in this true tale of survival. “In every human heart is a place where you put your broken dreams,” she writes. “When something doesn’t work out, no matter what it may be, you just have to give it up and stuff it in with your broken dreams. And make sure you keep the lid on tight.”
Autobiography of a Geisha started as a short piece entered in a magazine competition in the mid-1950s by Masuda. She won; her story was picked up by a Japanese publishing house and with a skilled editor was expanded into a book. She’s still alive, an old lady living in a small town among neighbours who have no idea of her past – and, says her editor, she intends to keep it that way.