was dead set against it, you know, and she tried to talk me out of it. ‘What’s the point of setting up a restaurant in a solitary spot like that?’ she’d say. ‘You’ll never get anyone to come! Stay with us here, instead, please!’ She’d be almost in tears. But at the time I was fed up with the world. I’d been a man’s mistress at eighteen, I’d worked like mad as a madam till I was forty, and the thought of doing that for the rest of my life made everything seem completely pointless. All I wanted was a quiet life, you see, somewhere away from people. I couldn’t afford just to amuse myself as I pleased, though. So I set up this place. In the beginning, no one thought it would last. The times weren’t what they are now. I knew nothing about publicity, I just went around to everyone I knew, giving away hand towels printed with the name and location, and asking them to give the place a try. I knew a lot of people, thanks to my job all those years, and other tea-house owners—the ones who’d send clients on to the Silver Flower—might bring their customers out, but the place was just too isolated, and they felt as if they’d come to some distant province. There wasn’t much transportation in those days, and once you crossed the river you felt that you’d arrived at the back of beyond. That sounds crazy now, doesn’t it, when it takes less than ten minutes by car!”
She laughed a man’s full-throated laugh. The world was so different now from what it had been back then, she could hardly believe it.
“I’d had to ignore everyone’s opinion to go ahead, and I was really worried about whether there would be any customers. The place started out less than half the size it is now. I’d managed somehow to get it going, but I was afraid no one would actually come all the way out there. The first one who did was actually the kabuki actor Danshirō, of the Omodaka House. The Omodaka House was another Yoshiwara brothel, practically next door to the Silver Flower. I’d known him for a long time. When he heard I’d opened my restaurant he became my very first customer. I can’t tell you how happy I was. And he didn’t come alone, you know. He brought his friend Yaozō with him, as well as five well-known kabuki actors. Nearly ten of them came crowding in, and threw us into a panic!”
The memory of how the minute her place opened she had had to look after almost ten customers, meanwhile scolding her inexperienced waitresses, had become her very favorite story, one that she proudly repeated to Shinkichi whenever she saw him. The shigure clam chazuke she had been so nervous about was a surprise hit. She felt big tears running down her cheeks, she said, when they told her they’d never eaten anything so delicious.
That was when it all began. Kind Danshirō spread the word to everyone at the Kabuki-za, and a procession of the greatest stars—Utaemon, Uzaemon, Ichizō, the real pillars of the stage at the time—turned up there. They in turn told others, until the fame of the Shigure Teahouse spread far and wide.
“They say actors are coldhearted, but it’s not true. If Danshirō hadn’t come then, the place wouldn’t have become famous anything like that quickly. ‘If you’re tired of fancy dishes, try the Shigure Teahouse at Mukōjima,’ he’d tell everyone, so the name of my place really got around. That makes him the Shigure Teahouse’s great benefactor. That’s why I still take special care of guests from the entertainment world.”
“Doesn’t taking care of them too well sometimes get you into trouble, though?”
“Why no, not at all. Why should it? I’m too old by now to lose my head over a man, but on the other hand, I’d hate just to dry up and wither away, and besides, I denied myself so much, for so long, while I was running that brothel, I won’t have anyone criticize me for indulging myself a little.”
“No one’s particularly criticizing you, but I was just wondering whether you don’t carry it a bit far.”
“Nonsense! There’s no such thing as going too far in playing around with men. Isn’t keeping each fling to one night, then moving on to the next, a lot safer than losing your head over one man? What’s dangerous is going on and on with the same one. You get stuck on him, you drag him home, you sit him down across the brazier from you—why, by that time, even you would never come back!”
In short, Oriku kept her little affairs tidy and clean. She had felt until she turned forty as though life was over for her. Then unlooked for success had found her. She had enjoyed her flings, and she had been fond of younger men, but she had never gotten in too deep. In principle, each man had one night only, but she never left unpleasant feelings between herself and any man she had spent even a day with. Instead, she remained his friend and did all she could for him.
An actor by the name of Ichikawa Monnosuke was the one who started her off on this second life. Monnosuke, an onnagata, played the role of the wife for great actors like Danjūrō or Kikugorō. He lacked any particular looks, but he had a clear voice and a well-modulated delivery, and his acting, while not showy, conveyed great skill.
He would play the wife to Danjūrō’s Chōbei in the great Bathhouse Scene; if the play was Ōmori Hikoshichi, he would do Lady Chihaya; and Osono in the Saké Shop Scene was his greatest success of all. As much at home in historical as in domestic dramas, and a special stand-out in plays adapted from the puppet theater, he really was extremely good. He never won any great popularity because his performances, however expert, offered little beauty, but Oriku liked him very much.
“Did you make love with every man who appealed to you, no matter who?”
“What a dumb question! If you made love with every man you liked, you would wear yourself out and head straight for an early grave. Connecting like that is a matter of rhythm and timing—it just happens. That’s how it was with even Monnosuke. He came to the tea-house by himself two or three times. Coming out all this way alone suggests a certain naïveté, but at the time I myself had no experience of this sort of thing, so Monnosuke became my first man.”
“You mean you were a virgin?”
“You do say awful things, don’t you! No, of course I wasn’t.”
“Well, but I suppose you’d been alone those ten years since the man who’d brought you to the Silver Flower died.”
“Right, I was the madam, so I sat in the back room all day long and couldn’t take my eye off the business for a moment. The last thing I could do was to get involved in some fuss with a man!”
“Since you thought life was over for you, Monnosuke must have been a second youth, so to speak.”
“Yes, I suppose you could put it that way. I might not have had any affairs at all if I hadn’t had that one with him, so I wouldn’t have known anything about love—what I did with the proprietor of the Silver Flower was just duty, after all. My heart would never have known those moments of anguish. Monnosuke was a seasoned warrior who’d already been through a hundred such wars, and he had me, at forty, in the palm of his hand.”
“I see. So your first real experience of a man came after you turned forty.”
“Come to think of it, they say the pleasures you taste first in middle age are like rain that starts late in the day—they just go on and on; and it’s true, for a while I was really swept away. Basically, though, I’m no fool, and I knew that if the rumor of what was going on ever got about, it would do the business I’d worked so hard to set up no good at all. That thought really shook me awake. So I backed away from him and put out the fire before it got out of control.”
“I have to hand it to you there.”
“Well, you know, it’s the business that was at stake.”
She lost her head over Monnosuke, yes, but that was the last time. Never again did she
