Samurai Trails: A Chronicle of Wanderings on the Japanese High Road

by Lucian Swift Kirtland

We walked over the soft mats examining the work of the craftsman builder who had made his material yield its beauty through the grain and line of each plank, board, beam, pillar, and panel. I moved a cushion to the balcony and sat down to study the room in deeper perspective. I never followed out this sedate contemplation, for instead I happened to look over the balcony. Across the court of the garden I saw into an open room of a wing. Three little girls, from about five to seven years of age, were being trained in the arts of the geisha. At that moment their instruction was in the dance.

The work was being gone through seriously but the teachers were sympathetic and encouraging. A dancing master assumed the general superintendence: several older girls, full-fledged geishas, sat offering suggestions from their experience. They were in simple, everyday dress and not in geisha costume. The novitiates sometimes begin their training even younger than five years. Quite often such children are orphans who come into the profession by legal adoption; others are the children of parents who have apprenticed their daughters under an arrangement which virtually amounts to a sale. Naturally the geisha master does not select children who do not possess the promise of grace, beauty, and charm. The long training is expensive and it is intended that there shall be a return on the investment. The little girls, whom we could see, were practising over and over again the steps of some classical dance to the music of a samisen. From the expression of their faces to the position of their fingers in carrying their fans, every possibility of technic which should enter into the dance was receiving the minutest attention.

For many years, Hori whispered, the training of those little girls must go on to one end—to interest, to entertain, and to amuse men. They will be taught to wear the gorgeous silks and embroideries of the geisha; they will be taught that every movement of the hand and arm in pouring tea or passing the cup should be an art; they will be taught when they should smile, when they should laugh, and when they should sympathize; they will be taught how to converse, how to repeat the classical tales and the tales of folklore and how deftly to introduce merry stories of the day. After all this training the graduation comes when they enter actively into the life of the geisha. In this budding a girl may amuse partly by the mere gossamer fragility of her youth, but later maturity brings the capital of acquired experience, not only in the art of entertaining but through having learned that the charm of woman is largely the solace that she can bring through sympathy and understanding.

What is the end? It may be better or worse, tragic or domestic, marriage, shame, servitude, modest anonymity, or the retirement to the teaching of her art to another generation. Her life is one obviously wherein the path has many by-ways to temptation. There is much that must be insincere and tinsel. If many a little heart, sweet, modest, and unhardened, is crushed, nevertheless if there be forgiving gods among those to whom she prays, surely those gods must know that these Mary Magdalenes are (so a poet of the yoshiwara wrote) in the greater truth as the flowers of the lotus. Though their feet have touched the black mud of the stagnant pond, “the heart of the geisha is the flower of the lotus.”

We heard a footstep at the door and turned to see a geisha standing there. She was tall and slender. The delicate paleness of her face was even whiter through fear. She saw us, barbarians, sitting in the refinement of the tea-house room. The carmine spots on her lips shone brightly, giving to her expression the unreality of the frightened look a doll might have if suddenly brought to life. She was carrying a samisen. Her fingers tightly clutched the wrappings. She came across the room toward us and as her knees bent against the skirt of her kimono I could see that they were trembling. She sat down and tried to smile. The duty of a geisha is to smile. She smiled with the same last effort of loyalty which carries the soldier into a hopeless charge.

I felt an abysmal brute to be there. Absurd perhaps, but it was as if the command of some strange, scornful, hitherto unheeded, almost unknown spirit of justice was calling me to name some defence why man in his arrogance has assumed the right to pluck the beauty of the flowers and has assumed the justification that the reason for the perfume and the beauty is that they were created for him. It was a strange beginning for the gaiety of a geisha luncheon.

Tsuro-matsu drew back the fold of her sleeve to her elbow and raised the teapot. The spout trembled against the rim of the cup which she was filling. She handed the cup to Hori and until that moment I do not believe that she had noticed that he was a Japanese.

“The child is frightened to death,” said O-Owre-san. “Say something, Hori, quick! If she wants to go home——”

Tsuro-matsu had read the meaning of the words from their tone before Hori tried to translate. She smiled and this time her lips parted from her pretty teeth spontaneously. Then she said that Hisu-matsu, a second geisha, would soon come. When the messenger had arrived for them they had first to send for their hair dresser. The messenger had told them that the guests at the tea-house were foreigners. Thus her frightened anticipation had had its beginning before she had entered the room. We asked what had been her fears.

Tsuro-matsu did not wish to say. She had once before seen foreigners but only from her balcony. We still persisted in our question. When she realized that the truth would please us more than compliments, even if the telling somewhat offended against the etiquette of hospitality, she ventured slowly to repeat some of the tales which had been passed along by imaginative tongues until they had eventually reached the geisha house of Kama-Suwa. We sat waiting to hear some legend truly scandalous, but there was nothing of such atrocity. She had not heard of Buddhist children being stolen for sacrifice on Christian altars. Our barbarities of the Western world that worried the geisha sensibility were departures not from mercy but from manners. We were wild and rough and of much noise, always in a hurry, and knowing nothing of the refinements, such as tea drinking, and we were always to be discovered dropping rice grains from our chopsticks onto the floor. And, as a conclusion, the foreigner, such was her information, had no appreciation for gentle conversation, nor for any of the arts of social intercourse of which the geisha, in her vocation, is the guardian priestess.