Women of the Pleasure Quarters by Lesley Downer

could ever afford. But the gambler had money and, more important, the right connections. He took her to meet the proprietress of a geisha house in one of the five Tokyo flower towns and she was accepted. Thereafter she lived with him and worked as a member of the geisha house.
    Then she met Hideo. Compared to the customers at the teahouses where she entertained, he was a boy, not much older than she was. He was smooth-skinned and bespectacled, earnest and serious, part of a fresher, cleaner, more real world than she had ever seen before. He talked intensely about art, aesthetics, music, and the meaning of life. Whatever he said was sincere. He did not flirt or play games like the customers did.
    And he had no money. He had only himself to offer. He could not even take her out on a date, let alone support her or buy her expensive kimonos. On the rare occasions when they went out for a meal, she paid. For the first time in her life, here was a man that she could love for himself, not because of what she could get from him.
    Their love affair had to be secret. She was not supposed to spend time with anyone who was not a customer, let alone sleep with him. He was getting for nothing what other men paid a fortune for, if they got it at all.
    “She was so bright and full of joy,” said the young man wistfully. “She really made me feel alive. I’d been feeling low when I met her. She’d come over and we’d go out drinking. It was as if the sun had come out.”
    Then, a year after she met Hideo, a customer who had seen her at teahouse parties took a fancy to her. Following the proper procedure, he approached the teahouse proprietress and said that he would like to become her
danna,
a word that in the geisha world means patron-
cum
-lover, almost like a husband. He was the chairman of an enormous corporation, one of the most powerful and wealthy businessmen in Japan. To become the mistress of a man like this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
    There was only one problem. She loved Hideo and she knew that while he would tolerate the professional gambler whom he considered no more than a meal ticket, he would hate it if she had a “real”
danna
. If she became the property of such a man, she would no longer be free to carry on any clandestine relationships; and in any case Hideo would never agree to play second fiddle.
    Hideo knew nothing of all this. She did not discuss it with him. Then one Sunday she was invited to the chairman’s country villa. She could not decide what to do. If she went, Hideo would know immediately that something was afoot. If she did not, she might never again have such an opportunity. But she was a girl from the Osaka slums. She had learned the hard way that the only important thing in life was survival.
    That weekend she told Hideo that she was going, just for the day, to the customer’s villa.
    “I thought, ‘I see,’ ” said Hideo. “ ‘So that’s the way it’s going.’ ”
    The next Sunday and the Sunday after that, she went to the chairman’s villa. Finally she accepted his offer to become her
danna;
it was too good to refuse.
    “I was too poor for her,” Hideo said regretfully. “Of course I suffered after she had gone. It was unbearable. But I’m proud that I had an affair with her. I don’t regret it, not in the slightest. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. It was the happiest year of my life.”
    Women in a Men’s World
    Now, as a general rule, where passionate love is the theme in Japanese literature of the best class, it is not that sort of love which leads to the establishment of family relations. It is quite another sort of love,—a sort of love about which the Oriental is not prudish at all,—the mayoi, or infatuation of passion, inspired by merely physical attraction; and its heroines are not the daughters of refined families, but mostly hetarae, or professional dancing girls.
    Lafcadio Hearn 9
     
    In theory modern Japanese men, born after the war,