Page:Modern Japanese Stories.pdf/69

 likely to call. Her house wasn’t good, she had no talent. You can guess what sort she was from the fact that even I was a little ashamed to be seen out with her. A person with an eye for it can tell at a glance how good a geisha is, after all.”

Across the street there was an old-style noodle shop, its garden as thick with shrubs as a nursery. We followed the flagstones to a little veranda-enclosed cottage. There I heard Sōkichi’s story.

“It must be fourteen or fifteen years ago now. I was just thirty. It wasn’t at Yoshi-chō that I first met her. She was in Shitaya, and she called herself Kimika. I used to see her sometimes after I’d been to your house and had a little to drink. You may remember, sir. I had a geisha in Shimbashi named Maruji. She was well along in years, and I was young and hot-blooded, not one to be satisfied with her and her big-sister ways. She just wasn’t the sort you gave up everything for. Well, I was living with her, and sometimes when I had a little extra money thanks to you or some other gentleman I would sneak out and buy myself a cheap geisha where I could find one. I had the one regular geisha you see, and I went round looking for others. You know how it is: there’s a special flavour, somehow, in having an occasional drink in a cheap stall. You see, sir?

“That’s how it was when I first had Kimika, at a little inn just down the hill from the Yushima Shrine. I couldn’t pick and choose, after all, when I came at ten and had to be home at twelve. Anyone would do provided she came in a hurry.

“I’d be looking at my watch. Sometimes I’d undress while I was waiting, and have a cigarette, and go at her the minute she came in the door. It was pretty much that way with her. I waited awhile, and the one who finally came in was better than I’d expected. I still remember everything. She had on a kimono with a small pattern, dyed over, I’d say. The stiffening at the neck and sleeves had buckled, and the neck band on the under-kimono was dirty. One of the unlucky ones who had to