A faint aura of sadness surrounds Korika. Her face is long anyway, the face of a Kyoto beauty. Occasionally, when she is unaware of being observed, her whole body lapses into a melancholy pose as she gazes into the distance, her attention momentarily cut off from the lively chatter around her. Her friends call her the shirōto okamisan, the "amateur proprietress," because she spent twenty years away from the geisha world before taking over as mistress of a teahouse, the Korika.

Korika left Pontochō when she was twenty-one. She had become linked to a patron who was a high government official, and he had prevailed upon her to move to Tokyo. Korika lived there as his mistress for many years, and then, after his wife died, she moved into his house to care for him as a wife herself. He was proud of her and often brought friends and colleagues home, where she welcomed them and entertained them with her Kyoto manner. This in itself was a very unusual mark of his affection and regard for her.

Korika had been known as one of the top dancers in Pontochō at the time she left. Her geisha name had been Ichiko. Pontochō's customers in the 1930s had taken note of this group of three girls, always seen together: Ichiraku (my okāsan), comely and good-humored; Satomi, the so-called Western-style beauty because of her round eyes; and Ichiko (Korika), slim, elegant, the ideal image of a Kyoto geisha. She was proclaimed the true beauty of the three. Her patron had pulled quite a coup in winning her. The other two congratulated her on moving to the capital, and on the rich and famous patron she had acquired; but even more, they sighed and envied her happiness, because it was plain that this older man was crazy about Korika, and she was completely devoted to him.

Once in a while something will remind Korika of her patron—she refers to him as her husband—and tears well up in her eyes. An old customer who knew them both told me that he had died suddenly about ten years before, without having made adequate provision for her. She had thought they were as good as married by common law, or else she hadn't really thought about it at all, but his family was of a different opinion. It was a cruel blow to her. Never a particularly practical person, and all her life accustomed to being taken care of, she never thought to protest. She humbly accepted a small amount of money from his family and departed. There were no children.

Many people who had known them together over the years were outraged at this treatment. One of her patron's close friends suggested that she return to Pontochō, where he and a few others would help her settle down with her own teahouse. There she could be among friends, continue with her music, and make a living doing what she did best, keeping a house that people loved to visit.

So Korika came back to Pontochō, where her friend Michiko was the lively and vivacious proprietress of an inn and where Satomi, wearing evening gowns, presided over one of Kyoto's oldest hostess bars. She slipped back into the community she had left over twenty years before, and the newer customers now never suspect that she was not always there. Still, late at night when we had all been drinking too much, a sadness would steal over her. As a dancer, she is accustomed to punctuating her speech with gestures from the fan she always carries. She would move it rapidly, as if cooling her face, to hide her blinking eyes.

Satomi and Michiko are much more practical than Korika, though Satomi, by some lights, has had a hard life. She left the geisha world when she was still a maiko, not to become someone's mistress, but to marry. Hers was a love match, of course. No one arranges marriages for maiko. Her husband ran a small dry goods store on the other side of the city. He had first met Satomi when she and her two close companion maiko were hired to dance at his sister's wedding. Smitten, he wheedled his father into paying for almost nightly visits to Pontochō, where he made the geisha laugh because of his single-minded interest in Satomi and his lack of attention to anyone else.

In the etiquette of the geisha banquets, such intensity is somewhat uncomfortable. A party is an environment for flirting, jokes, aesthetic indulgence, and laughter. Serious passion may be permissible as an undercurrent, but it should not be allowed to surface in public. The more sophisticated geisha teased the young man. He was also scolded by his father, who was anything but happy at the prospect of a geisha daughter-in-law. On the other hand, Satomi herself seemed modest and sensible enough; and because his son, his only son, threatened to leave the business otherwise, the father finally gave in. He paid a sum of money to Satomi's house to cover her debts, and the two were married.

Satomi had a lot to learn as a wife. As a maiko, she had been told not to bother her pretty head about financial matters. A generation ago, maiko could walk into stores in the neighborhood, picking out this and that, and say, "Charge it to my house," never paying attention to the price. They didn't even handle money. Part of this cultivated ignorance of practical affairs was to give them an image that was a step removed from hard reality. Customers liked to think of maiko as charming dolls, spoiled and protected. As a shopkeeper's wife, however, Satomi suddenly had the responsibility for keeping track of the books and managing a household, something she was completely unprepared for. Her mother-in-law, true to form, was less than helpful.

Satomi was forbidden to see her geisha friends. She told me that once during this time when visiting the Gion Shrine with her new baby son, she saw a few of her Pontochō cronies. They knew not to speak to her and she of course, in the presence of her mother-in-law, turned her back. That night she lay awake, stifling sobs with her bed quilt.

Her marriage lasted for seventeen years, and there was another baby. When this second child, a girl, entered high school, Satomi obtained a divorce and came back to Pontochō. She never talks about her life as a housewife, and I don't know what finally soured her marriage so irrevocably. Her daughter is now married, with young children of her own, so Satomi, though she hardly looks it, is a grandmother. Her Bar Satomi draws on disaffected geisha, among others, for hostesses, and Satomi as mama-san provides a relaxed, Western-style drinking environment for customers who need a break from teahouse entertainment. Her customers are elderly and faithful, and parties that begin at the Mitsuba or at Korika's teahouse often end at Bar Satomi.

On this evening of February 3, Satomi was to be one of the guests at a boisterous Setsubun party at the Mitsuba. The group was the Dragon Club, an assemblage of about fifteen wealthy, cosmopolitan Kyotoites—businessmen, a tea master, company presidents, a famous potter, and several ex-geisha proprietresses—who had all been born in the same year of the dragon. Every other month this club throws itself a party, choosing elegant and interesting banquet halls all over the city for its gatherings. Setsubun was a perfect excuse for a party, and they decided to hold it at the Mitsuba in case things got too silly. My okāsan, Michiko, as a member of the club, was delighted to be hostess.

My okāsan is primarily interested in hosting banquets, creating her own style of entertaining for a select group of customers and friends, and generally leading the life of a busy socialite. She chooses flowers for the alcoves, plans the banquet menus, and arranges for geisha to attend the parties held at her establishment. Like her two best friends, she left her geisha career early, but she did not stray far from the center of Kyoto.

Michiko was born in 1916 in Pontochō. Her mother ran a small teahouse, and her father, her mother's patron from her geisha days, worked for a trading company. Michiko could have inherited her mother's teahouse directly had she been so inclined, but she really wanted to become a maiko. From all accounts (including her own), she was the toast of the town. A large water color of Ichiraku in her maiko days now hangs at the landing of the Mitsuba's main staircase. It was painted by a well-known artist in the early 1930s who used her as a model of plump Kyoto beauty.

Her first patron, a man from the same company her father had worked for, made it financially possible for her to retire from the geisha life at age twenty. Her ambitions ran beyond her mother's little teahouse, however. When her patron's company needed a manager for the new inn they had just built for business entertainment, she happily accepted the position. She was given a free hand in running the inn, provided, of course, that she would keep some rooms always available for employees of the firm and arrange entertainment for them. The Mitsuba is a large, beautiful building, and it gave her precisely the kind of base she wanted.

In 1975, Michiko managed to buy the Mitsuba. She had been working toward ownership for many years and finally, triumphantly, made the last monthly payment to the trading company. The president of that firm remains a loyal customer. He allowed her to keep the name Mitsuba, which originally referred to the three-leaf design of the company trademark, although the connection between the firm and the inn is now only a sentimental one. When the last payment was made, Michiko threw a huge party in celebration, picking up the tab for about ninety guests who came in three successive groups for a full banquet meal with attending geisha.

The small teahouse her own mother had managed was taken over by a maidservant who had earned the right of inheritance after years of faithful service. This woman is about the same age as Michiko, and the two are very close. In their early teens they shared the same living quarters, calling the same woman "mother": Michiko had been born to her, the maidservant in a sense adopted by her.

Michiko continued to operate the inn throughout the Second World War. Kyoto suffered no destruction from air raids, so places like the Mitsuba were in great demand by government officials and leaders of industry from nearby Osaka, which had been heavily bombed. The Mitsuba was used for strategic planning sessions, for parties—meager though the fare became in the later days of the war—and for geisha entertainment. Kyoto's geisha population even increased slightly in wartime because of the influx of geisha from Osaka.

With only the briefest lull at the beginning of the Allied occupation, a time when the whole country waited to see what would happen, the Mitsuba was soon thronged with customers again. For a time, many of the guests were high-ranking American soldiers. At the Mitsuba they were but a block from the Pontochō Kaburenjō, the geishas' dance theater. The theater had been converted, with the help of the capable okāsan of the Dai-Ichi teahouse, who headed the Pontochō Geisha Association at the time, into a Western-style dance floor for the G.I.s.

About that time, Michiko fell in love with a businessman from Tokyo, a man who had been invited as a guest to the Mitsuba by one of her old customers. This man had a wife and child in Tokyo, although he and his wife were not on good terms. Taking up with the ex-geisha Ichiraku in Kyoto did not improve his relationship with his wife. The affair blossomed. The mistress of the Mitsuba was thirty-two, he was in his early forties. When she was thirty-seven, she bore him a son, a spoiled baby boy and the pride of her life. Michiko's patron, by now divorced, asked her to move to Tokyo.

She thought about it. Her life in Kyoto was very full. There were always women around, friends and relatives to help her care for the baby, and she managed the Mitsuba with hardly a crimp in her style. Everything she knew was in Kyoto, and she was known there—fairly well-known, in fact, in precisely that circle of wealthy Kyoto-ites she most admired and loved to be part of If she went to Tokyo to live, she reasoned, she would give it all up to sit in a small apartment with her baby. Her patron might visit from time to time, but she could hardly live in his house. The choice was not difficult for her, and she stayed in Kyoto.

Three or four times a year, she and her patron would go off for a long weekend at some seacoast or mountain resort. I watched her prepare for these excursions with some amusement because, though there were many details to be arranged in her absence from the Mitsuba, her mind was clearly elsewhere. It would drive the maids to exasperation. Finally she would go have her hair done, relax under the familiar fingers of her hairdresser, then come home for her suitcase, asking one of us to call a car to take her to the station. We would all wave goodbye from the curb in front of the inn. Once, the dour auntie made a comment about a woman her age acting like a dog in heat; and I found myself irritated by her sharp tongue. I told her she was just jealous, and that I at least thought it was very touching to see okāsan go off with the excitement of a young girl to meet the man she was still in love with after twenty-five years.

Of the trio of okāsans, the mistress of the Mitsuba is the only one who still has a man. "How lucky you are Mi-chan," sighs Korika. Michiko's career in the geisha world has been a successful one by any measure—but it also seems to have been a happy one.

Dalby, Liza Crihfield. Geisha. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.