In travel magazines, one often saw photographs like this.
A young woman in a beautiful kimono, flowers pinned in her hair and white powder on her face, strolling through the streets and alleys of Kyoto.
The girl's profession was called geisha. Cio-Cio-san in Madame Butterfly was also a geisha, though in operas the role was usually played by European or American actresses.
Western features were more pronounced, as though a sculptor had carved them with a chisel, their angles sharp and distinct.
Eastern features were softer. Although she did not know why Xu Zhimo was so famous, one of his poems described it vividly: "The tenderest thing is the bowing of the head, like a water lily too shy to bear the cool breeze."
That was how she imagined Eastern girls. Cho Chang was gentle too, but she had truly been too young, thinking Dumbledore's Army was merely a tutoring class and that no one would disfigure a girl over leaking its secrets.
Neither inner nor outer qualities were worthless. This world demanded much of girls; everyone hoped they would always make the right choice—or rather, the choice that favored them.
But the soul often could not keep pace with the body's growth. There was a pleasure district in Kyoto called Shimabara. It had once been a paradise for men, but for the women living there, it was not necessarily fortunate.
Whether learning to dance or play the shamisen, everything was done to please customers.
The feeling of smiling when one clearly did not want to, simply to make someone else happy, was agonizing. In the East, this line of work was called "selling smiles."
It was miserable enough for an artist to be reduced to selling smiles, but if someone was too stingy even to pay for those smiles,