Free Women of the Pleasure Quarters by Lesley Downer

the value of his or her investment by making her as exclusive as possible.
    If the man wanted to spend the night with the courtesan, he would have to engage in a long and very expensive courtship. The earliest that one could hope to experience her luxurious silk bedding was at the third visit. And even then, if the
tayu
was not satisfied with the man’s performance, she could decline to sleep with him. If she did agree to spend the night with him, the cost was 90 silver nuggets
(momme)
which equaled one and a half gold nuggets
(ryo),
in modern currency about $675. It was costly but, for a wealthy man, the only sort of person whom a
tayu
would consider, hardly prohibitive. 9
    The
koshi,
the second rank courtesans, charged sixty silver nuggets, and the
sancha
(teahouse waitresses-
cum
-courtesans) charged thirty. At the Shimabara even the lowest class of prostitutes, the
hashi,
whom one could buy for just one silver nugget, were said to be elegant.
    But no matter how famous the courtesans became, they were still slaves of debt, constrained to work out their ten-year contract. In fact the system ensured that, no matter how hard they worked, their debts only increased. There were always new costs being incurred—the purchasing of the splendid kimonos necessary to carry on their trade, the costs of bedding and of clothing and supporting their retinue of retainers, the tips that had to be paid to the bordello staff. They had just three days off a year. If they missed a day’s work for any reason at all they had to pay the bordello out of their own pocket the sum they would have earned. Most carried on working until they were twenty-seven, the usual retirement age. Those who were successful would have plenty of supplicants begging to marry them after that.
    They probably accepted the hardships with stoicism. That was the way it was in the floating world and, in any case, any other life would have had its hardships too. Within the narrow confines of their gilded cage they were queens. The one chance of escape—if they wanted it—was to find someone prepared to buy out their contract and make them his wife or mistress. As the old saying went, the courtesan’s favorite lie was “I love you,” the customer’s “I will marry you.”
    The names and rankings changed over the centuries but everyone agreed that the greatest courtesans of all time were the
tayu
of seventeenth-century Shimabara.
    The Courtesan and the Swordsman
    In the early days of the Shimabara quarter, there were seven celebrated
tayu
courtesans in Kyoto. Of these, Yoshino was the most adored. Many legends have gathered around her, not least that she was the lover of Miyamoto Musashi, the greatest swordsman of all time and author of
The Book of Five Rings
(a bible for practitioners of the martial arts and more recently for businessmen). He learned his secrets, so the story goes, from the gentle but insightful Yoshino.
    Yoshino was entertaining him and his friends in the pleasure quarter one snowy night when he slipped quietly out of the room. She was the only one to notice him leave. He returned a few minutes later. But there was a splash of red on the hem of his kimono.
    “What is that?” asked one of his friends.
    “Just a peony petal,” said Yoshino and quickly wiped it away with a napkin.
    When the party came to an end, she suggested lightly that he had better stay there with her. With her unerring instinct she had guessed that he had been engaged in a duel to the death in the few minutes he had been away. The retainers of the two men whom he had killed, several dozen of them, were waiting right outside to ambush him and exact revenge.
    Sitting in her chamber he was silent, tense in anticipation of the hopeless battle that lay ahead. Suddenly Yoshino picked up her
biwa,
a priceless lute, took a knife, and smashed the curved sound box to pieces. From the ruined instrument she picked out the crosspiece, a single piece of wood, and showed it to him.
    This, she