Page:Modern Japanese Stories.pdf/71

 “I had been seeing her for about a month. I suppose we had met seven or eight times altogether. We knew each other thoroughly, we had told each other everything, and yet there was still a certain restraint between us. Neither wanted to put the other off, neither wanted to bore the other. For lovers, it was the best time of all. Though I hadn’t asked her, Kimika had told me all about herself, from when she was very young. Finally she told me how she had become friendly with the Shinnai singer Shimezō. He drank too much, she said, and he liked to gamble, and she hardly knew where it would end. She wanted to break with him. She wondered if she should go back to the country for a while.

“My infatuation was growing, and I couldn’t tell her to go. ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘Stay in Tokyo. Why not let me take care of you?’

“I couldn’t help myself, sir. I was no amateur, and I knew well enough how a geisha went about changing houses. She would do better to let me arrange things for her than to go through a broker and pay a fee for a low-grade house. I decided to have her run away to the country. She was to pretend she was going out to visit a shrine. If she had debts, I would arrange to have the master of her house settle for her earnings.

“Her home was in Kisarazu and her father was a janitor or something of the sort in a school or the town office. I don’t really remember. In any case he was apparently a decent enough person. I first had her go home and write a letter to the house saying that she was ill and would not be back for several days. Then I called her to Tokyo, so that I could see her every day until matters were settled. I wanted most of all to be able to see her, and I had not the slightest intention of using her. I gave her spending money and bought her a return ticket when she left, and after I called her back I rented a second storey from a person I knew in Honjō and bought her what clothes and bedding she had to have—she had left everything at the geisha house.