Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

her classes that she began to wring the sash of her robe as we left the school for breakfast in the okiya. But just as we slipped into our shoes, another young girl our age came rushing across the garden with her hair in disarray. Pumpkin seemed calmer after seeing her.
    *  *  *
    We ate a bowl of soup and returned to the school as quickly as we could, so that Pumpkin could kneel in the back of the classroom to assemble her shamisen. If you’ve never seen a shamisen, you might find it a peculiar-looking instrument. Some people call it a Japanese guitar, but actually it’s a good deal smaller than a guitar, with a thin wooden neck that has three large tuning pegs at the end. The body is just a little wooden box with cat skin stretched over the top like a drum. The entire instrument can be taken apart and put into a box or a bag, which is how it is carried about. In any case, Pumpkin assembled her shamisen and began to tune it with her tongue poking out, but I’m sorry to say that her ear was very poor, and the notes went up and down like a boat on the waves, without ever settling down where they were supposed to be. Soon the classroom was full of girls with their shamisens, spaced out as neatly as chocolates in a box. I kept an eye on the door in the hopes that Satsu would walk through it, but she didn’t.
    A moment later the teacher entered. She was a tiny old woman with a shrill voice. Her name was Teacher Mizumi, and this is what we called her to her face. But her surname of Mizumi sounds very close to
nezumi
—“mouse”; so behind her back we called her Teacher Nezumi—Teacher Mouse.
    Teacher Mouse knelt on a cushion facing the class and made no effort at all to look friendly. When the students bowed to her in unison and told her good morning, she just glowered back at them without speaking a word. Finally she looked at the board on the wall and called out the name of the first student.
    This first girl seemed to have a very high opinion of herself. After she’d glided to the front of the room, she bowed before the teacher and began to play. In a minute or two Teacher Mouse told the girl to stop and said all sorts of unpleasant things about her playing; then she snapped her fan shut and waved it at the girl to dismiss her. The girl thanked her, bowed again, and returned to her place, and Teacher Mouse called the name of the next student.
    This went on for more than an hour, until at length Pumpkin’s name was called. I could see that Pumpkin was nervous, and in fact, the moment she began to play, everything seemed to go wrong. First Teacher Mouse stopped her and took the shamisen to retune the strings herself. Then Pumpkin tried again, but all the students began looking at one another, for no one could tell what piece she was trying to play. Teacher Mouse slapped the table very loudly and told them all to face straight ahead; and then she used her folding fan to tap out the rhythm for Pumpkin to follow. This didn’t help, so finally Teacher Mouse began to work instead on Pumpkin’s manner of holding the plectrum. She nearly sprained every one of Pumpkin’s fingers, it seemed to me, trying to make her hold it with the proper grip. At last she gave up even on this and let the plectrum fall to the mats in disgust. Pumpkin picked it up and came back to her place with tears in her eyes.
    After this I learned why Pumpkin had been so worried about being the last student. Because now the girl with the disheveled hair, who’d been rushing to the school as we’d left for breakfast, came to the front of the room and bowed.
    â€œDon’t waste your time trying to be courteous to me!” Teacher Mouse squeaked at her. “If you hadn’t slept so late this morning, you might have arrived here in time to learn something.”
    The girl apologized and soon began to play, but the teacher paid no attention at all. She just said, “You sleep too late in