Women of the Pleasure Quarters by Lesley Downer Page B

comical, weathered face. He had gone into the fashion business, then ran a restaurant, and finally came home to help his mother with her bar.
    “I wish I knew who his father was,” Kurota confided under cover of the noise. “Must have been someone famous.” Famous or not, the master was a joker.
    “Do you know what
uzura
[quail] is in English?” he chuckled as he served us a dish of raw grated yam topped with seaweed and raw quail’s egg. “It’s the name of the American ex–vice president—Dan Quayle!”
    Everyone laughed uproariously.
    “Where’s your wife?” I asked Kurota. Here I was in the great modern city of Tokyo with two well-traveled cosmopolitan television producers. Yet, apart from the old geisha, I was the only woman in the whole place. It was rather rude to ask such a direct question; but enough saké had been drunk and I thought I could get away with it.
    “At home, sleeping,” said Kurota, unfazed. “She was a magazine editor until we got married. Then she said, ‘I can’t be bothered to work anymore.’ That’s the way it is with Japanese wives. She stays home, has children, and brings them up. Her world is very narrow—the PTA [Parent Teachers Association] and the parents of our children’s friends; that’s about it. I go out and enjoy myself, then get home late and wake her up and she gets angry. She says, ‘Why did you wake me up?’ and goes back to sleep. In the West, people go to the pub for a drink, then go home, get changed, and go out with their wives. But we Japanese can’t do that, our homes are too far away.”
    “That’s why we have geisha,” said his friend, butting in. “Ordinary girls are good at having babies and bringing up children. But geisha are good at chatting. You see this old geisha here . . .”
    The old geisha was engaged in some outrageous conversation with the four businessmen, fluttering her fan coquettishly while her tongue rattled wickedly. The men, flushed and shiny-faced, returned her banter, guffawing loudly.
    “An ordinary old lady would be very cozy,” Kurota’s friend went on. “But the world she knows is very small and the things she can talk about are very few. Geisha know how to please gentlemen, how to make them have a good time. But they wouldn’t make good wives.”
    The day after my memorable evening with Mr. Kurota and his friend, I dropped into his offices to thank him for his hospitality. I started chatting about how much I had enjoyed the meal, the company, the old geisha, and the master with his clowning and jokes. But Mr. Kurota had changed. The affable, chummy character of the previous night, who had ribbed me mercilessly about my age and the Beatles, had disappeared. Brusque and businesslike, he changed the subject. Shortly afterward he growled that he had a meeting and left.
    Too late, I realized that I had committed an unforgivable faux pas. Whatever had happened in the night-time world of the geisha happened only there. Whatever one said, whatever one did was forgotten the next day. There were no memories and no repercussions. There was no crossover into the real world.
    Two Faces of Womanhood
    A practical guide to doing business in Japan, published as recently as 1987, offers advice to the Western executive who is invited to a geisha party. The Japanese host would naturally, out of courtesy, invite his wife too if she is traveling with him. What is the executive to do?
    The proper response, advises the author, is to make sure that your wife is otherwise engaged. Buy her a ticket to kabuki or the ballet, then “tell your Japanese contact how sorry your wife is not to be able to accept his kind invitation. He will accept your excuse graciously, with a secret sigh of relief!” He reassures the worried Western wife that nothing untoward goes on at a geisha party. “You are not sending your husband off to a den of iniquity.” 10
    Until Westerners turned up in Japan 150-odd years ago, Japanese society operated in a way