TOKYO -- Artist. Single woman. Flirt. Waitress. Slave. Prostitute.
There can be more to the life of a geisha than many people think.Outside Japan, geisha are seen as fragile, white-faced, silk-clad courtesans, a glimpse of the sybaritic Orient. The geisha look provokes enough of a naughty shiver for Madonna to have adopted it into one of her recent incarnations.
Here, they are considered precious and remote, clopping through Tokyo's concrete canyons on little wooden clogs, bearing the heavy weight of preserving Japan's cultural legacy on narrow, kimono-clad shoulders.
Geisha have been at the heart of Japan's nexus of sex, money and power for hundreds of years.
It was the one role a woman could take that permitted her to educate herself and to interact with men on an intellectual basis.
At the same time, the geisha was essentially a slave, delivered by her own family as a child into a serfdom that provided her with a life far more luxurious than any she would have found in the home of her birth.
Yachoko, a bird-boned woman in a mauve kimono, with baby-smooth skin and active hands, has a traditional story to tell.
Her mother placed her in a geisha house after World War II, when she was 13. They'd lost their home to fire, and her father was long dead. For two years Yachoko cleaned house, looked after the geisha's kimonos, did the laundry and studied. Then she became a geisha, too.
"It may sound like I had a really hard time, but it's almost like I grew up in a family with three girls, so it's like I had sisters," she says. "We are the last generation of those who had to do that sort of thing."
Kneeling on a golden cushion at a low table, looking out through sliding paper doors onto her rainy garden of dripping green, Keiko Akiyama, proprietress of the Meigetsu Ryotei, or the Bright Moon restaurant, speaks of her role in the world of geisha.
"This place is the last bastion of culture: The garden, the flower arrangements, the architecture, the food. Too bad this is all lost in the global shuffle. We want to safeguard it."
A silent woman serves tea and a seasonal sweet, pink with a hint of cherry. She kneels to slide the door open to enter, kneels again to close it behind her.
This is how Japan wants to see itself, honoring the traditional amid a rush to the future. Making sure the old ways remain part of daily life, housewives take classes in the arts of flower arranging, tea ceremony, the lute-like shamisen, dance.
But there's tough competition for the entertainment yen, and for ever-more-precious time in the lives of overworked Japanese. There are dance machines in suburban neighborhoods, and bars in posh Ginza and trendy Shinjuku, and golf courses.
The Bright Moon is doing all it can, training geisha as well as providing dinner and entertainment for clients.
There's little trouble finding geisha wannabes.
Some are attracted by the money, others are interested in wearing kimonos or, like Yachoko, performing Japanese dance. Some admire the freedom and glamour.
A top geisha earns $3,500-$4,300 a month, plus perhaps $1,700 in tips, but that varies significantly.
At the Bright Moon, a businessman can spend time with geisha for $260, though he won't have their company throughout dinner. A traditional geisha dinner party at the restaurant runs about $435 a person for a group of three; less for larger parties.
More often than not, customers pay on the company tab, an accepted tradition in Japan's business world.
But a decade-long slowing of the Japanese economy has hit the pleasure business especially hard. It's a fading business.
There were about 800 geisha in Asakusa in the mid-1950s. When Chiba took over in 1962, there were about 250. Now there are 60.
Geisha like 63-year-old Yachoko are concerned about the future of her trade, about finding a way to mix tradition with the need to broaden the audience if the geisha are to survive.
Only time will tell if Japan can hang on to the past while blazing off into the future.