The Geisha Who Could Feel No Pain (Secrets From The Hidden House Book 2) Read online

  The Geisha Who Could Feel No Pain

  Secrets From The Hidden House Book 2

  India Millar

  Contents

  Untitled

  Also by India Millar

  Untitled

  Foreword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Untitled

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  India Millar

  Copyright © India Millar 2017

  Cover by Cherith Vaughan

  www.EmpressAuthorSolutions.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recoding, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the author.

  Also by India Millar

  The Geisha with the Green Eyes

  This book is humbly dedicated to Benzaiten, the Japanese goddess of good luck for both writers and geisha. May both she and you enjoy the words herein!

  “Living only for the moment, giving all our time to the pleasures of the moon,

  the snow, cherry blossoms, and maple leaves. Singing songs, drinking

  sake, caressing each other, just drifting, drifting. Never giving a care

  if we had no money, never sad in our hearts. Only like a plant moving

  on the river’s current; this is what is called The Floating World.”

  Tales of the Floating World

  Asai Ryoi, 1661

  Foreword

  I was born in The Floating World, the famous place of pleasure in the center of Edo. I grew up there, spent my childhood learning its secrets. To me, it was home.

  When I ran away from my father’s house, I lived and worked in the kabuki theater for a while. At the time, I thought that was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me. But it wasn’t until I was betrayed by my father and he sold me to the Hidden House to be trained as a geisha—a special geisha—that I began to understand that my past life was nothing.

  Still, the river of time flows constantly. It was only when my friend Midori No Me, the woman who was more than a sister to me, vanished from the Floating World that I realized how much I had lost. I might be the geisha who could feel no pain, but I felt the pain of losing my dear Midori in the depths of my heart.

  And now, when I stand on the threshold of yet another new life, I tremble. This time not with fear, but wonder.

  1

  The moon has eaten

  The sun. The light is gone from

  My life once again.

  We expected things to be bad once Midori No Me suddenly disappeared from the Hidden House, the discreet house of pleasure for the very wealthiest men in Edo’s Floating world. We could do nothing of course; we were powerless. The Hidden House was not just our home, it was our prison.

  Midori had been Akira-san’s favorite of all the girls, but we knew instinctively that she was more than just favored, and that he loved her—as far as Akira was capable of love. Not, of course, that the greatest yakuza in Edo would ever admit to having any tender feelings for a mere woman. But we knew, and we trembled as we waited for him to take his revenge on those of us who remained. I shivered with misery as well. Midori had been as an elder sister to me. She had taken care of me for my mizuage—the paid for ceremonial deflowering that every maiko, every trainee geisha, must undergo before she can become a full-fledged geisha. And over time, she had truly become my sister. We had shared secrets. I knew all about her lover, Danjuro, the star of the kabuki theater. I knew she hated Akira body and soul. Knew about the complex cat-and-mouse game she played with him every day she was his captive, the game where she had to stay one step ahead or face his anger and die at his hand.

  When she vanished from the Floating World, I prayed that somehow she had escaped. Everybody else thought Akira had murdered her in a fit of anger, but I was convinced I could still feel her spirit in this world. I hoped I was right, and that she was not only alive, but happy.

  All of us girls in the Hidden House belonged to Akira. He was entitled to do what he liked with us. Nobody would either notice or care, whatever he chose to do. We were, after all, just geisha. But very special geisha.

  The Hidden House was the jewel of the Floating World, the unique place of pleasure that was available only to the wealthiest patrons. Those who had a taste for something a little different. Although we were all truly geisha—we could sing, dance, play the samisen, amuse our patrons with our wit, perform the tea ceremony with great elegance—all of us girls were flawed, in one way or another. That’s what made us so very special, so very sought after. So very expensive.

  Unlike other geisha outside the Hidden House, our talents were expected to go far beyond amusing the patrons with our wit and musical skills. We were expected to entrance them with our very bodies, to enthrall them with our strangeness. Why not? I can think of a lot worse ways to earn a living. And was it so very different from any respectable married woman in Japan, who was constantly at the command of her husband? Alert to his every whim and prepared to do anything he asked?

  Just like “normal” geisha, we were prisoners of our house. Just the same as any geisha, we were all protected by our Auntie, the woman who ruled the Hidden House with a rod of iron. Until Akira bought both the Hidden House and the nearby Green Tea House from Auntie, truth to tell she had owned all us geisha, body and soul. It was Auntie who fed us, bought our beautiful kimonos for us, and made sure we were safe. And in return, we pleased the patrons and paid her back for all she had given us. Not, of course, that we could ever hope to pay her back fully. That would never happen, unless some patron liked us enough to buy us out as a mistress, or—so exceptionally it was almost unheard of—a wife.

  That was what happened to our fellow geisha Kiku. She was bought out by Mori-san to become his wife, which was a surprise since Mori-san had hung around Midori No Me for months and had tried to buy her out time and time again, until Akira-san whisked her away from under his nose. Kiku had been one of the longest serving girls in the Hidden House. She was beautiful, but she was also monstrously, impossibly fat. So big that she couldn’t rise from the floor without help from a couple of the maids. She couldn’t even reach her own feet to put her tabi on.

  But we all had our oddities. That was why we had our place as geisha in the Hidden House. Masaki was tiny. Even in high geta she looked like a walking doll. And Naruko was Chinese, with bound feet that made her able only to take the smallest, most painful of steps. And my dear Midori No Me was half foreign barbarian and had hair that shone red in the sun and the greenest eyes. Strangest of all of us had been poor Carpi. She had been born with no arms—her hands grew straight out of her shoulders. Midori No Me and I helped Carpi kill herself when she was close to death with a terrible wasting disease.

  And me? Well, if I do say so myself, when Midori left I soon became the star of the Hidden House. I was the Geisha Who Could Feel No Pain, and didn’t the patrons just love to see if that was really true!

  You may find it amazing, but none of us geisha was in
the least bit shocked by our patrons’ demands. Naturally, we never let them know that. We all knew it was in our best interests to appear awed and a little worried by their requests. The truth was, no matter how bizarre their needs, we had seen it all before.

  In my case, I found it was always the same. As soon as we were alone, the man would begin by giving me a quick poke in the ribs. When I did nothing more than smile, they would follow it with a pinch or two. After a moment’s thought they might give me a slap or a punch. When that had no effect, they tried the effect of a kick. Very occasionally, one of them—more determined than most to get his money’s worth—would put his hands around my neck and try and strangle me, although a good loud scream would soon put a stop to that.

  In any event, the patrons would grow bored with trying to cause me pain. At that point most of them would give up and concentrate on shoving whatever they thought suitable into my black moss. Usually it was their tree of flesh, but occasionally those who were determined to get their money’s worth used their whole fist, or now and then an entire foot. None of it mattered to me; they couldn’t hurt me, no matter how they tried. When I got bored, I would mew and start to moan, which invariably gave my patron huge satisfaction. I often had to hide laughter as I watched them strutting out like proud samurai, heads held high as they rushed to tell their friends how they had put the Geisha Who Could Feel No Pain well and truly in her place, begging at their feet.

  I felt nothing but contempt for any of them. Yet at the same time I yearned for the impossible. I wanted to be made to feel. Not that it happened, no matter what the patron was like—and we had everybody who was anything visit us—all rich, of course. Young and old, handsome and ugly—all the same to me. Occasionally nice, but more often extremely nasty. It didn’t matter. To me their antics were like spoiled children, grabbing for attention. I was moved by them as much as the stone of the road felt my feet. I was, I knew, wishing for the moon.

  Which just goes to show that sometimes the gods smile on those who beg humbly enough.

  But that was all in the future. There is much to tell before then.

  2

  Grass withers in the

  Drought. I cannot see it but

  My feet feel it still

  There was so much turmoil going on around us in Japan at that time, it seems odd now that we were more concerned with our own affairs in the Hidden House than anything else. But we had been sheltered from the outside world—even from the Floating World—so carefully, we just didn’t understand the importance of what was happening.

  The foreign barbarians had sailed into Edo harbor in their great iron ship a couple of years before, demanding to see the shogun. Before their arrival, Japan had been a sealed casket for hundreds of years, with few either arriving on our shores or leaving them. True, there had been a handful of foreign barbarians trading in Japan for many years, mainly Dutch, but they kept themselves to themselves and nobody bothered about them greatly. When the Americans arrived, our patrons laughed at them. Told us not to bother our pretty heads about them, that they were bad mannered children who would soon be put in their place by the shogun and made to leave with their heads hung low.

  But that didn’t happen. They came back the next year, and suddenly the streets of Edo were full of them. And not just Edo. They even found their way into the Floating World. The shogun was no longer mighty. After so long that nobody could remember any different, there was an emperor on the throne who really was an emperor, not just the shogun’s creature.

  It was when the foreign barbarians started to be made welcome in the Green Tea House, the respectable tea house that shared a courtyard with the Hidden House, that our eyes were opened to the changes that were happening all around us.

  Akira had made Midori No Me learn English so she could translate for him. Anywhere there was a profit to be made, Akira would be there. Of course, that made the loss of Midori all the worse for him; he not only lost his lover, but when she vanished it hit him hard in his money chest as well. That was another reason why we all shivered in terror, waiting for his anger to lash us.

  Yet, at first nothing seemed to happen. Life in the Hidden House went on as usual. We entertained our patrons and were careful never to mention Midori’s name, especially when we knew the twins could hear us.

  The two girls—they did have names, but they were so much like the same person nobody bothered to differentiate between them—were Akira’s creatures. We all knew that anything and everything we said in front of them would get straight back to him. When they first arrived at the Hidden House, Kiku had been scornful of them.

  “Look at them,” she sneered. “They’re pretty enough, I suppose, but they haven’t got a shred of talent between them. They can’t sing, they can’t play an instrument. They can’t even perform the tea ceremony without making a mess of it. I suppose they can speak Japanese, but you’d never know it. There isn’t even anything different enough about them to attract our patrons. If you ask me, Auntie will have to offer them both for the price of one of us.”

  We smiled. She was right. The twins never spoke to any of us, and when they talked to each other it was in some strange language that sounded like Japanese, but wasn’t. None of us could understand a word of it. And we just knew that somehow they could hear each other’s thoughts. It was unsettling, but now and then one of us would catch one twin looking at the other, without speaking. Yet their expressions would change and they would nod or smile exactly as if they were carrying on a conversation. It was eerie.

  We all asked Auntie if she could get rid of them, but she shook her head. “Akira-san brought them to me,” she said simply. We understood immediately, and decided we would have to live with the twins, like it or not.

  But we were wrong about them having no talents.

  It was the night of the first party since Midori No Me had left us. I had been dreading it. I hated these gatherings, even more so since Akira had bought the Hidden House. When Auntie had owned the Hidden House, our patrons had been vetted carefully. Nobody was let in without a recommendation from an existing client, and it went without saying that they were all men of power and position. They might have unusual tastes, but at least they were high class. Not, you might think, that it would make much difference to us geisha, but it did.

  When the Hidden House was truly elite, we were also exclusive. We ranked high above the paid courtesans who had to accept anybody who could afford them. We all felt that we were special. We had to allow men access to our bodies, but we were still true geisha who were expected to entertain and enchant our patrons with our artistic skills. Now, Akira was happy to allow anybody in who could pay our price, which was even higher than it had been before. None of us was happy, but what option did we have?

  The party had been arranged and we had no choice but to entertain the patrons to the best of our ability. We hid behind the screens and used Auntie’s discreet peepholes to take a peek at our patrons for the night. There were five of us in the Hidden House that night, tiny Masaki, hobbled Naruko, the twins, and me. I thought that even the twins seemed nervous, and their jumpiness spread to the rest of us as we quickly realized that the men who were lounging on the tatami matting were clearly all friends of Akira. We had never seen any of them before, but they were all obviously at their ease. Comfortable. Their laughter was a little too loud, their robes expensive yet cut too fashionably. A couple of the men were even wearing something like Western clothes, with trousers beneath their robes and Western socks without a separate big toe. We bit our lips to stop ourselves giggling at them. If these were truly Akira’s friends, then they were not, under any circumstances, to be shown anything but the very greatest respect. Anything less and the guilty geisha was likely to find herself the next day behind the lattice of the lowest class brothel Akira could find.

  Auntie clapped her hands, beaming from ear to ear, and we filed in. We stood in a line in front of the patrons, bowing low and smiling behind our fans, waiting for the me
n to make their choice. I smiled even more widely—although truth to tell my teeth were chattering with apprehension—when Akira beckoned for me to sit next to him.

  At least he can’t hurt me, I thought, wondering why my heart was thumping so hard.

  “Mineko-chan,” he purred at me and gestured for the maid to pour sake for both of us. “How nice to see you again. I really must not leave it so long for the future.”

  I hid my face behind my fan and tittered politely. I knew I wasn’t fooling Akira for a single second, but the game had to be played.

  He lounged back on his elbows, watching me. I felt a bead of sweat run down my face and instantly worried that it would ruin my thick, white makeup. As if he read my thoughts, Akira leaned forward and wiped the sweat away delicately with his forefinger.

  “I see you’re wearing the kimono I bought for you for your mizuage.”

  Immediately, I wondered if I had made a terrible mistake in choosing this kimono. Akira had been my danna for my mizuage, and in addition to paying a huge price for the privilege of taking my virginity, he had gone a step further and paid for the delicious kimono and undergarments I was wearing tonight. I had found out later that it was all part of his plan to try and make Midori No Me his creature, but at the time I had been very flattered. Now, I was just plain terrified.