Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 6.djvu/110

 their feasts. Thus, relegated to the places of public resort which she had hitherto eschewed, she lost caste and character, nor was it until the close of the eighteenth century that she again obtained admittance to aristocratic dwellings. In notifications issued thereafter from time to time the reader has already traced the vain efforts of officialdom to limit the range of her charms. The keeping of odori-ko now (1800) became a trade. Instead of living with her parents or guardians, a girl, still in her tender youth, was entrusted to a geisha-ya (a geisha house), and there, with three or four companions, received training in all the accomplishments necessary to the successful practice of her profession. There, also, she lived for a fixed term of years, somewhat after the manner of an apprentice, her family being paid at the outset a sum of money (minoshiro-kin) which greatly resembled a purchase-price, and her earnings, after she had made her début, being divided in exceedingly unequal proportions, between her employer and herself. From ten to twenty yen was—and is—the amount of compensation given to parents in consideration of their binding their child to a geisha-ya for a period of from seven to ten years, but that outlay represents only a fraction of the expenses subsequently incurred by the employer in training the girl and providing rich costumes for her use. From the age of about ten or eleven she begins to do duty as an o-shaku, or cup-bearer, and at sixteen or seventeen she