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Our Japanese friend Noriko and her husband, Masato, were as apprehensive as Charlie and I. They had lived most of their lives within a stone’s throw of Kyoto and never before met a geisha. Like us, they had assumed that the legendary ‘flower and willow world’, that twilight zone where geisha entertained their clients, was beyond reach of foreigners and ordinary Japanese. It was closed, they had thought, to all but the cognoscenti – Japanese businessmen with deep wallets, the right entree and a penchant for the rarified, exotic attractions of a bygone age.

But a few simple inquiries had proved them wrong. “I found this restaurant in a magazine”, Noriko said, as we hurried down the famous ‘Flower-viewing Alley’ in Gion, one of Kyoto’s five geisha districts. On either side, Gion’s famous tea-houses where the geisha lived and worked were dark and forbidding, their doorways hung with heavy curtains and red paper lanterns painted with the characteristic five balls of Gion.

“The restaurant owner said he could call us a ‘maiko’ – a trainee geisha – for an hour”, Noriko continued, “but when you said you’d like to see a dance performance too, we had to hire another geisha to accompany her on the shamisen.” I felt myself blanche. “I know”, laughed Noriko, “It’s going to be expensive. That’s £400 and we haven’t started eating yet.”

We made several turns down twisting side streets before Noriko recognised the restaurant Hanasaki, or ‘Blossoming Flower’. There was nothing – no sign or menu – to distinguish it from all the other houses with their wood-shingle roofs and bamboo shutters and histories of hidden assignations.

We were shown upstairs to a private room with tatami mats and a low wooden table. “Even Japanese find this hard nowadays”, groaned Masato, as he lowered himself to the floor, “Too much time spent sitting at computers.”

But this was no place for compromise. The hostelries of Gion prescribe to a code of behaviour and aestheticism that have all but vanished from present-day Japan. “Geisha are difficult to explain”, said Noriko, trying to put her excitement into words, “There’s no equivalent anywhere else, I think. But they are an important aspect of Japan. They embody a sense of longing, of mystery, something elusive. It goes beyond their physical attractions. They remind us of a time when our culture was sophisticated and full of elegance and beauty. That’s something we have to treasure now that life has become so fast and noisy.”

In their heyday, before the Second World War, there were more than 80,000 geisha in Japan. Now there are barely 2,000 – the core of them in Kyoto. Here, geisha live and entertain much as they have for centuries, except that now sex, despite western notions to the contrary, is no longer on the menu. The days of Arthur Golden’s ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ - when little girls from poor families were sold into the profession, treated like slaves and deflowered by some loathsome old lothario – are long gone. Today’s geisha are mistresses of their own bodies and are here of their own free will.

Only the fantasy lives on. But in a sense it is fantasy that is, and always has been, the essence of this ‘Floating World’. Geishas are sorceresses, creators of illusion. This is where Japanese men have always come to forget themselves, to find another self, to live out their dreams, to be treated like kings. And Japan is still, despite its uber-modernity, entirely male-orientated; wives are treated like doormats and there is still no natural way of saying ‘I love you’ in Japanese. This must be the only country in the world where viagra arrived on the scene before the contraceptive pill. Male kudos is measured . Which is why men who can afford it still come here, forsaking the sleezy ‘soaplands’, hostess bars and ‘happy zones’, to pay an exorbitant fee – ‘flower money’ – for a massage of nothing other than their egos.

There was an almost imperceptible shuffle on the stairs. No-one had heard the maiko arrive. Moments later the door slid aside and Toshiaya glided into the room, taking tiny, bent-kneed steps beneath a spectacular trailing sky-blue kimono, a draping swallow-tail bow in contrasting yellow falling from the small of her back. Her face was chalk white – the image of every Japanese tourist poster; her hair lacquered into the glossy black wings of the trainee geisha and transfixed with ornaments like some exotic cocktail. We bowed awkwardly from our hip-wrenched positions on the floor and her face broke into a smile. “Shall I sit here?” she trilled in Japanese, gesturing to the space between Charlie and me.

Behind her followed the geisha Chikafuku, her face unpainted, wearing an elegant, ankle-length kimono of subdued greys and browns. She was the falcon to Toshiaya’s showy bird of paradise and exuded an air of subtle expertise. But this lunch was the younger woman’s engagement and Chikafuku took her place unassumingly between Noriko and Masato, watching with matronly amusement as the young trainee began to practice her charms.

I’m not sure what kind of person I had expected a geisha – or a maiko – to be. I suppose there was the inevitable, uncharitable flicker of hostility towards a woman who could, in this day and age, devote herself with such sycophantic subservience to men. But as I watched Toshiaya pouring sake and striking coquettish poses - hands to her face in mock horror, eyebrows raised in quizzical surprise - it was impossible not to be seduced, to be beguiled by her playfulness, by every perfect gesture or turn of the head, by the sheer elegance and subtle flirtatiousness of everything she did.

Masato looked like a man who had been struck by lightening. “It’s the way she talks”, he explained, not utterly convincingly, “She speaks in an antiquated Kyoto dialect, the kind that used to be spoken at the imperial court. It’s soft and beautiful – not vulgar like modern Japanese - and sort of suggestive. It’s very clever. What she says can mean many things. You have to read between the lines.”

Toshiaya and Chikafuku were not eating – geisha only dine with clients of long association - but they gently orchestrated the sequence of courses, pouring thimblefuls of sake and glasses of Saporo beer as we picked at morsels of sashimi, pickled seaweed and sea-urchin, or roasted slivers of chanterelle and abalone on a searing hot river-stone; now and then giggling when Charlie or I committed some clumsy faux pas.

“You handle your chopsticks well”, Toshiaya observed, only faintly mischievously, as Charlie tackled a slippery raw scallop. He swelled with pride like a puffer-fish. It was hard – obviously harder for him – to remember she was being paid to give compliments and that, for all her worldly self-confidence, Toshiaya was still only eighteen.

“English have good manners, like the Japanese”, she added. What about other nationalities? “Oh, Italians are the worst”, she burst out, and when she laughed her white lips cracked a little and the crimson pout of lipstick stretched into an ellipse. Against the starched-apron white of her face, the row of little, uneven teeth looked disconcertingly yellow - but by now even this seemed alluring. “Italians refuse to believe we are not like prostitutes. They get annoyed when we tell them this is not the way of the geisha.” She raised her chin in distaste. “And they wear too much perfume!”

Twenty years or so ago it would have been impossible for any foreigner to meet a geisha. Even a Japanese would have needed personal introductions. In those days a geisha could take lovers but her crucial aim was to secure a ‘danna’ or patron – a sugar daddy – who could keep her in her exclusive lifestyle of private cars, expensive coiffures and kimonos for every occasion. But now there are few businessmen who are able to pay for this extravagance. Keeping a geisha in kimono alone can cost a considerable amount.

And herein lies the paradox, and possibly the geishas’ demise. In order to fund themselves, to keep the tradition alive, geisha are having to cast a wider net for clients, entertaining not only strangers but foreigners and now - bizarrely - even other women.

Yet without categorical chauvinism, without the rituals of introduction and exclusion, geisha run the risk of becoming little more than a tourist attraction. Open the doors on this shadowy world, let the light in, and the mystery, the ambience, the whole sophisticated tapestry unravels; the magic vanishes. Lunches like ours must surely be numbered.

As Toshiaya poured yet more sake, her long sleeves slipped along her wrists, revealing a tantalising extra centimetre of skin. Downtown Kyoto, just a stone’s throw across the river, with its tacky shopping malls, video arcades and screaming pachinko machines, seemed suddenly threateningly close. I thought of Kawaramachi Street where gangs of pigeon-toed teenagers traipsed up and down in Doc Martins and tartan mini-skirts. How utterly they missed the point with their torn T-shirts and fish-net fingerless gloves and racks of knobbly knees. But the thumbnail glimpse of white undergarment just there, at Toshiaya’s neckline, beneath multiple layers of kimono, with that sensuous fork of flesh left unpainted at the nape – provocatively pudenda-like - now that was girl power.

Being a geisha, though, is not all sake and chrysanthemums – even now. The training alone takes five years. Many maiko drop out, unable or unwilling to stay the course. From 6pm to midnight Toshiaya could be entertaining clients, attending long business dinners in a banqueting hall in some big Kyoto hotel. The rest of the day is taken up with lessons in dancing, singing and playing the shamisen. Toshiaya’s hair is laboriously made up once a week at one of Kyoto’s traditional wig-makers, which means she has to sleep with her neck on a hard wooden lift. She can’t take public transport, go to the cinema, or pop concerts or karaoke bars. A geisha must protect her image. She can’t step foot inside a MacDonald’s – though knowing her penchant for fast food, Toshiaya’s clients sometimes bring her a take-away.

But Toshiaya had no regrets. Once she’d paid off the loans for her kimonos she would start to make good money. How many of the friends from school could ever have hoped for this experience? Being a geisha was, she said, an art in itself. And it was no longer a dead-end street. One day Toshiaya hoped to meet a man she could marry.

As bowls of rich green tea arrived, Toshiaya stood up to dance. Standing in front of a golden screen, the long folds of her kimono around her, Chikafuku kneeling to one side, striking chords on the shamisen, Toshiaya began the autumn sequence of the Cherry Dance, each exquisite gesture flowing into another, weaving the course of love into the seasons - the pouring of sake like the falling of leaves; the call of winter snow, the promise of consummation. As she danced, Toshiaya cast her gaze beyond us, somewhere above our heads, into another world, and for precious minutes we were utterly spellbound.

When she finished we broke into applause. “Okini”, she bowed, thanking us in the Kyoto dialect. Charlie, his face flushed with Saporo, enthusiastically raised his glass. “Oh, how beautiful!” she beamed, pressing her fingertips together and tilting her head coquettishly, “Your cheeks have turned the colour of autumn maple leaves!” And with that the two geisha bowed out of the room leaving us £600 poorer but Charlie and Masato, at least, feeling like a million dollars.

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