The early summer of 1892 brought a heavy rainy season that year in Japan. Plum rain, the Japanese call it, because it comes when the fruit bulges with ripeness and promise. Like a young girl reaching womanhood.

      A girl like me.

      The air was warm and damp, but as in all things Japanese, a uniqueness about the rain awakened my senses and stirred my desires. I was struggling with grief while a wild joy surged within me, a sensual discovery of my changing body that filled me with concupiscence. An unsettling combination of emotions for any young girl. I yearned to yield to my desires, to awaken my female soul, to love, and be loved.

      I was fifteen years old.

      And I wanted to be a geisha.

      I so admired the spirit of these women, their daring and their beauty. They were purveyors of dreams and lived in a fairy-tale world of misty romance. Every day on my way to missionary school, I’d stare at the young apprentice geisha, scurrying along the street on their high sandals with a small bell fixed inside, their white-painted faces peeking out from under their pink paper parasols.

      At night en route to the Kabuki theater with my father, I ogled the geisha riding in a jinrikisha, wearing their formal black kimono embroidered with flowers and birds. On late afternoons, I giggled when I passed by the okâsan, mama-san, sitting on her polished veranda and smoking her ivory pipe.

      Filled with inspiration, shaking more with anticipation than with fear, I felt compelled, driven, to follow my desire to enter into this ever-fascinating—sexually liberated—world of geisha. I wanted to know how this world of flowers and willows coexisted in a land where girl babies were put upon the cold ground for the first three days after they were born so they may know their place in society.

      Under men.

      I didn’t understand why the women in this land of shoguns and samurai kept their eyes lowered, their hearts hidden, their tears to themselves. Polka-dotted tears on a hard, wooden pillow. As durable as their souls, if they were to survive.

      If they were to prosper.

      If they were to love.

      I was so impressionable, so hungry to indulge in my erotic fantasies, if I didn’t find a way to release my pent-up emotions, I was convinced I would spend the rest of my life concealing the sensuality hidden within me. Instead, I prayed to the gods I’d find the courage to embrace my sexual desires and release my soul from this anguish.

      I hadn’t yet tasted the sweetness of a man’s caress nor experienced the torment of lost love. My young breasts were budding with the ripeness of hard red cherries, my hips slim like a boy’s. I could only guess what sense of discovery awaited me in a land where pleasure was a woman’s misfortune. And duty was her only pleasure.

      Or so it appeared.

      It wasn’t always true.

      According to Japanese folklore, the women in the geisha quarters possessed a secret, a mystique so closely guarded for more than two hundred years, they shared it with no one but their geisha sisters. Secrets to keep their skin forever young. Potions to make men fall madly in love with them. Strange toys to bring wave after wave of sexual enjoyment to them and their lovers.

      Motivated by this vivid tale, I sneaked down to the geisha quarters of Shinbashi where I could hear their laughter and their restless sighs coming from inside the high walls surrounding the geisha house. I imagined what earthly delights lasted throughout the night. Could I, an outsider, penetrate their mask of civility and learn their exquisite ways to pleasure a man?

      Or to pleasure myself?

       Could I?

      Through the strange workings of the gods that brought much grief and anguish to my young self, I had the opportunity to enter the geisha house that summer. Although I had hair long and golden like bursts of sunbeams exploding into the dawn, and eyes as green and rich as the silk brocade lining of a merchant’s coat, I became a maiko, apprentice geisha, in Kyoto. After three years of training, like the slow unfurling of the rose-pink lotus blossom, I became a geisha.

      So many years later, I have reached an age when I can break my silence without violating the geisha code of secrecy. I can share with the outside world my life in the geisha house, the beauty and grace, the sexual and erotic fantasies, and the hidden secrets.

      As I sit here in the garden of the teahouse with the butterflies settling on my shoulders and the chime of the wind-bells in my ears, I will write it all down as I remember it on the finest rice paper as translucent as the wings of a moth and dusted with silver and gold: the men I’ve loved, the geisha sister who risked her life for me, the mama-san who reared me as a daughter; their touch, their laughter and their most intimate moments.

      And now, as I take into my hand the brush and dip it into the ink, I will tell you the extraordinary and sensual story of the blond geisha.

      Kathlene Mallory

      —Kyoto, Japan 1931

      PART ONE

      KATHLENE, 1892

      I remember the first time I saw the lights in the geisha quarter of Gion, all pale and yellow, like the moon overhead. Red lanterns with black Japanese characters swayed back and forth in the evening breeze, beckoning me into the teahouse. But it was the sound of the Gion bell ringing in the distance I remember most, making me wonder if everything in life was fleeting. Even love.

       —Diary of an American girl in Kioto, 1892