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| A door in San Francisco |
Only one person had responded to my request seeking interviews of former geishas. With the large Japanese population in San Francisco, I’d expected a better response, but this was it. The geisha on the door looked promising. I gathered my notebooks and rang the doorbell. A young Japanese-American woman answered.
“Mrs. Toyota?”
She shook her head and bit her lip as though she were trying not to smile. She asked me to follow her and she lead me to a startlingly pink living room. I stopped in my tracks as I tried to take in the rose-colored hues that pitched the sunlight from the bay windows directly into my eyes. I shielded my eyes from the glare and then I spotted her: Mrs. Toyota. I sucked in my breath.
There before me was a vision of Japanese costume beyond imagination. Mrs. Toyota was a large bulldog of a woman dressed in a bright blue silk bathrobe, bath slippers, and an ill-fitting black wig formed into a traditional geisha hairstyle adorned with dozens of fake silk butterflies. Mrs. Toyota’s own frizzy fried red hair poked out at the edges, as well as beneath the heavily penciled-in arches she’d drawn over her own bushy red eyebrows.
Her face was thick with white powder. It caked along the creases of her nostrils and chin. She wore bright blue eye shadow drawn into an oriental cat’s eye corner, and bright red lipstick that she applied like quotation marks on her upper lip only.
She rested her cigarette on top of an overflowing ashtray and pulled her bathrobe around her as she gestured for me to sit down.
“Mrs. Toyota?” I inquired, because really, I couldn’t be sure.
“That’s me,” she answered with her deep smoker’s voice.
I glanced down at my list of questions and felt a sweat break out on my forehead. This wasn’t going as planned.
“Thank you for agreeing to meet with me,” I began. I cleared my throat and plastered on a smile. I had to know. “You were formerly a geisha in Japan?”
Mrs. Toyota coughed and shook her head. Her wig twisted slightly as wet coughs racked her chest. When she raised her fist to cover her mouth, I saw that she had tattoos on her wrist. I couldn’t be sure, but they looked like tattooed handcuffs.
“No. I was a geisha in a former life,” she finally choked out. “Just like you said in your ad.”
“I --,” my mind was racing. I couldn’t even formulate a sentence. This situation was too bizarre.
“Hey, you want some tea?” Mrs. Toyota barked out loudly. “Ando! Bring us some tea!”
At this point, I had to bite my lip to keep from letting my nervous energy turn to laughter. The “geisha” was having someone else serve tea? I had planned so many of my interview questions about this very traditional ceremony. I studied my papers again and tried to collect myself as the young Japanese woman who’d greeted me at the door returned with coffee mugs full of hot water and Lipton tea bags. I thanked her and sipped my tea as I turned my attention back to my host.
“So, you weren’t actually a geisha back in Japan?”
She shook her head and slurped her tea.
“No. I’ve never been to Japan. But I found out I was a geisha in a former life, which makes sense. My granddad went to Japan in the war.”
“Oh! Did he meet your grandmother there?”
Mrs. Toyota sat back on her couch and wrinkled her lip. She cocked her head and looked at me like I was crazy.
“No. She’s from Arizona.”
I took a deep breath.
“So, where does the name Toyota come from?”
“I made that up! My real name’s Vicks. But after I talked to that psychic in Chinatown and she told me I was like the Japanese, I changed it to Toyota. Sounds more realistic, ya know?”
I nodded.
“And she told you that you were a geisha in a former life?”
“Yeah, something like that. So I asked my boyfriend at the time what a geisha was and he told me and said it’d be real neat if I dressed up like one, and now, here we are. Everybody around here calls me the geisha lady. That’s why I got the door.”
“It’s a beautiful door.” I closed my notebook.
“Well, I think that’s all the questions I have. Thank you for your time. I appreciate you letting me talk with you.”
She stubbed out her cigarette and mercifully tugged her bathrobe closed as she rose to her feet.
“Anytime. If you ever wanna bring your friends over to meet a real live geisha, just give me a holler.”
I nodded and bit the inside of my cheeks. “Oh, I will. I will.”
Then I bowed, and left.
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