the events of the last twenty-four hours weighed heavily upon me. The danger had passed, if only for a short time. I began to calm down, relax. I allowed my tired body to drift off, sleep for a minute, maybe two, but I couldn’t rest. Always in the back of my mind, I was asking, asking, why were those men following us? Why?
What wouldn’t my father tell me?
2
The soft hush of a breath lingering in the night air, the scent of forbidden love hanging still upon a wayward breeze, a stifling heat making lovers sweat under mosquito nets as they thrust and writhed in passion. All this cast a sensual spell over me as we returned to the city of Kioto.
Raindrops, big and plump, landing on gray-tiled roofs. Caterpillars humping along the road. A night filled with fear, but also with magic.
The magic of the fairy tale yet to come.
But first—
“We’re not out of danger yet, Kathlene.”
“I know, Father.”
“You’ve always trusted me, my daughter.”
“Yes, Father.”
“Do you believe whatever I do, it’s because I love you?”
“Yes.”
“Even if I take you to a place that may be unseemly for a young girl?”
“Yes.” I held my hand to my chest as if to quiet my rapidly beating heart. I sensed something wonderful and strange was about to happen to me. A mystery, but what?
“I’ve been thinking, my daughter, and questioning. I wouldn’t see you hurt for anything in the world, yet I’m faced with the most difficult decision of my life.”
“What decision?”
“Where we can hide. No place is safe from the Prince’s devils. Unless—”
I took my father’s hand in mine. It was cold. “Yes, Father?”
“Unless we hide in a place where no one would think of looking for us, a place filled with the secrets of men’s desires, a place devoted to the seeking of pleasure, a place I never dreamed I would expose my daughter to seeing. Yet what choice do I have? If the Prince’s devils find us, they will invoke the most unspeakable sin upon—”
“No! They won’t find us. They won’t.”
He held me tighter, so tight I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t understand my father’s turmoil. What was he talking about? Where was he taking me?
“Don’t judge me, Kathlene. Understand I’ve thought long and hard about what I’m about to do, and though I know you’ll be exposed to a certain kind of life that doesn’t please me, I have no other choice.”
“Where are we going?”
“To the Teahouse of Mikaeri Yanagi.”
“Mikaeri Yanagi,” I repeated. “What does that mean?”
“The Teahouse of the Look-Back Tree.”
The Look-Back Tree? I questioned. Look back at what?
“Simouyé will hide us,” he continued. “I’m certain of this.”
“Simouyé?” I asked, noting with interest my father didn’t follow the tradition of adding the honorific san to this strange name. A name that had no meaning to me but sounded very pleasing to my ears the way Father said it.
With a late-night summer rain come to visit us and the thumping of the jinrikisha clattering on the wet street, my father squeezed my hand. “Simouyé is a great friend, Kathlene, and a woman I can trust—” he looked down at me and I saw tenderness in his eyes “—with my greatest possession.”
“Father…” I started to ask, wondering who was this Simouyé. A teacher? A friend? Or something more? Something mysterious?
A geisha?
“Yes, Kathlene?” Father asked.
I took a deep breath, then found the courage to ask him, “Have you ever visited a geisha house?”
Taken aback by my question, swallowing a hard lump in his throat, he hesitated, then answered me with, “A geisha is a woman of high refinement and irreproachable morals. Though she often falls in love, sometimes the man she loves is unable to care for her as he wished he could do.”
“I want to be a geisha,” I said with the confidence of my youth.
He looked shocked at my words. “You? My daughter, a geisha? That’s impossible. You’re gaijin, a foreigner. According to tradition, a gaijin can’t become a geisha,” he said, tugging on my blond hair.
I succumbed to a sadness unnoticed by my father, my shoulders slumped, my smile turned upside down. With his spirits lifted by his amusement at my admission of wanting to be a geisha, my father sat back and expelled a deep breath and fell into silence.
Just as well. My ears were stinging from his words.
Gaijin can’t be geisha, he said.
I don’t believe him. When all this trouble is over, I’ll show him I can be a geisha. When I grow up—
Wait a minute. Wait.
Something interesting was going on. Peeking out of the oilcloth curtain, I became intrigued with the elegant-looking paneled houses situated along a canal with high walls surrounding them. In this part of Kioto, the streets were small and narrow and filled with dark wooden houses. I could see each multistoried house situated along the canal had a wooden platform in back, extending out over the wide riverbank. The colorful, red paper lanterns on the square verandas, swinging back and forth in the rain, held my interest. Big, black Japanese letters danced in bold characters on the lanterns. The rain blurred the writing, but the words were names. Girls’ names. I remembered seeing similar lanterns in the Shinbashi geisha district in Tokio.
I smiled. I knew where we were from the books I’d read. Near Gion, in Ponto-chô. The geisha district near the River Kamo. A special thrill shivered through me, knowing I was here in this magical place.
I slid to the edge of my seat and stuck my head out the window. Big raindrops hit my nose, my eyelids, my lips, giving me a taste of the strangeness of this place called Ponto-chô, my eyes dancing from one house on the river to the next. So much about the world of geisha excited me. I wondered which one was the Teahouse of the Look-Back Tree as the jinrikisha driver pulled us closer and closer to our destination. He hadn’t stopped running since we left the countryside, and more than once I saw him looking back at me when I poked my head out of the oilcloth curtain.
The sight of him made me take even more delight in the idea of hiding in the teahouse. If the boy could run and run and run, I imagined what pleasures he could sustain for a long time under the silkiness of a futon.
What if I were a geisha and he were my lover?
What delights awaited me, delights hidden under the tiniest bit of blue cloth barely covering his penis?
I leaned back into the jinrikisha as thunder rolled and rolled overhead. I wasn’t frightened. The sound of the rain ripping open the clouds made me imagine the thunder was the power of a samurai warrior driving his manly sword into a sighing maiden. Thrusting rain. Drenching rain.
Oooohhh, I wanted to feel these pleasures, but my heart was heavy, wondering if my father and I would be safe in the teahouse.
I closed my eyes and let the rain hit my face, wishing the danger would pass, wishing I could change the way I looked so they couldn’t find me, wishing the raindrops could sculpt my features like