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at what it means to be a woman in Japan. What is the dividing line between geisha and prostitutes and between wives and geisha? And what of the men who spend their time with geisha? Almost all the people who recorded the geisha and their lives in stories, novels, and woodblock prints were men. In the few surviving writings and paintings by geisha, they portray themselves very differently, not as siren queens but down-to-earth women.
    In Japan in the heyday of the geisha, relations between men and women operated very differently from the way in which we do things in the West. Until recently, all but the lowest classes had arranged marriages. The purpose of marriage was to create an alliance between families; to go against one’s family and marry for love would have been quite unthinkable. It was also—hard though it is to imagine—considered shockingly improper to enjoy sex with one’s wife. The function of conjugal relations was to produce children to perpetuate the family line. As for pleasure, men were expected to find that elsewhere.
    I also look at the Japanese attitude to love and sex, untouched until recently by either the European notion of romantic love or Christian sexual morality. This is a culture in which hedonism, sensualism, and the art of the erotic, not at all the same as sex, were uninhibitedly developed in very sophisticated ways. In the floating world of the geisha, it was love, not sex or sensual pleasure, which was taboo.

chapter 1
    japan before the geisha
    High-class Courtesans
and the Culture of Desire
    Because they fall
    we love them—
    the cherry blossoms.
    In this floating world,
    does anything endure?
    Ariwara no Narihira (823–880) 1
    The City of Purple Hills
and Crystal Streams
    More than a thousand years ago, long before geisha were even thought of, Kyoto was the center of an extraordinarily effete, decadent, and promiscuous culture which transformed love into an art form and beauty into a cult. Centuries later, when pleasure quarters were built where men could transcend their everyday lives and imagine themselves noblemen of leisure, the courtesans and geisha modeled the dreams which they sold on the romantic culture of the Heian princes.
    The Heian period lasted from 794 to 1195, the time of the Vikings, King Canute, and William the Conqueror. It began with the construction of a beautiful new capital in an auspicious location, a wide bowl-shaped valley surrounded by tree-clad hills, with sparkling rivers bordering it to each side. The official name was Heian-kyo, the Capital of Peace and Tranquility. Poets called it the City of Purple Hills and Crystal Streams; we know it as Kyoto.
    There a city grew up of vermilion-painted palaces, slender-pillared temples, and spacious mansions of wood with wattled roofs. Noblemen and princes rumbled up and down the broad mud-paved boulevards in the shadow of the overhanging willows, in lavishly decorated oxcarts attended by retinues of liveried outriders. Under the rule of the emperor and his all-powerful ministers of state, the Fujiwara family, the country basked in three centuries of peace and prosperity. For the pampered aristocrats of the Heian court, it was a time of unending leisure which they filled with the pursuit of art and beauty. They spent their days moon-viewing, mixing incense, writing poems, and playing the game of love.
    In this strange hothouse world, women lived their lives away from the sight of men, hidden in a kind of purdah in windowless unheated houses, shadowy by day and lit with oil lamps and tapers by night. When men came to visit they received them sitting behind latticed screens draped with silk curtains or opaque hangings. When they went out, they traveled concealed behind the closed window blinds of their ox-carriages, though they made sure that there was always an exquisite silk sleeve trailing outside to hint at the beauty within.
    For within their secret world, the Heian noblewomen were articulate, literate, and highly