Women of the Pleasure Quarters by Lesley Downer Read Free Book Online

Shosho, she devised the sternest of ordeals. He was to come to her house for a hundred nights and sleep outside on a bench used to support the shafts of her chariot before she would even consider his suit. Night after night he hitched up his stiff silk trousers and donned his tall lacquered hat or put on a wide-brimmed wicker hat and straw rain cape and ventured out into the elements. Evading the night watchmen and the barrier guards he walked through wind, rain, and snow, made a notch on the shaft bench, then waited through the night there, shivering. Ninety-nine days had passed and the joyful day, when he was to receive the reward for all his efforts, was dawning when he suddenly died, of heartbreak, perhaps, or exposure.
    For such hard-heartedness, Komachi suffered the cruelest punishment of all—the loss of her beauty. Instead of dying young, like Cleopatra or Helen of Troy, and leaving a beautiful memory, she lived to be a hundred. After the death of Captain Shosho she was spurned and driven from court and ended up a tattered, crazed beggar woman. In folk legend and Noh plays she is portrayed as an ancient withered crone, hideously ugly, haunted by the unhappy spirits of the men who died for love of her.
    Like the cherry blossoms, beauty is all too fleeting; and this is what gives her story its poignancy. The beauty of women can drive men to distraction and to their deaths but in the end men get their revenge: such women die old and alone. Komachi’s tragic end made her all the more the perfect precursor of the geisha. Like her they too came to be regarded with ambivalence. They were sirens, so beautiful that men could not resist them—yet to yield and fall in love with one was to court disaster. At least in legend, if not in real life, Komachi had to be punished for her fearsome powers.
    Shizuka’s Last Dance
    Even at the height of Heian promiscuity, when noblemen had no problem finding a companion for the night and flitted merrily from one aristocratic woman’s chamber to another, there were also prostitutes who offered a different sort of pleasure. At one end of the scale were ordinary prostitutes who wandered the streets, waterways, hills, and woods and were referred to as “wandering women,” “floating women,” and “play women.” At the other extreme were cultivated, refined professionals whom in English we might call courtesans. Some were of good family, fallen upon hard times; others were noted for their beauty, brilliance, or talent. Skilled musicians, dancers, and singers, they were often the invited guests and chosen companions of aristocrats. These high-class courtesans were the original precursors of the geisha. 4
    The most popular of the courtesans were the
shirabyoshi
dancing women (
shirabyoshi
literally means “white rhythm”). To heighten their allure, they cross-dressed in white male clothing and manly court caps. They carried swords like men and performed highly charged erotic songs and dances to music with a rhythmic beat. Like the supermodels and rock singers of today, they were stars and the chosen companions of the country’s most powerful men.
    The most celebrated of all was Shizuka Gozen, the concubine of the twelfth-century hero Yoshitsune. (Shizuka, alas, is probably legendary though the great warrior who was her lover is a very important historical figure, a doughty Richard the Lionheart of Japan; the two heroes, Japanese and Western, coincide in both period and story.) She was renowned throughout the country for her extraordinary beauty and also for the power of her dancing, so magical that once, when the country had been suffering from drought for a hundred days, the gods responded by sending rain as soon as she began to dance. This is not as extraordinary as it sounds. Dance began as a way of supplicating the gods in Japan and the women who worked in Shinto shrines often combined the roles of shamaness and prostitute. Centuries later when the first geisha appeared, they