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 marry her. I won’t complain and I won’t interfere. You must excuse me for saying so, but I’m not as hard up for a man as all that. I may have my bad times, but Maruji of Shimbashi is fairly well known and she’s not one to be stepped on. I’ll send you away all done up in ribbons, Sōkichi, so just sign a statement that there won’t be trouble afterwards. And here is a last little token of my esteem.’

“I counted it later, and there were five 100-yen notes. Even if he is a broken-down musician, a man doesn’t take separation money from a woman. I wanted to push it back and take a kick at the arrogant profile as I turned to stalk from the room. But a thought came to me: this would be enough to settle Kimika’s debts. My hand trembling, tears of chagrin in my eyes, I wrote out the statement. I finally gave up playing the samisen because I could not forget the ignominy of that moment. I would not have been subjected to it if I had not been a samisen player.

“But as I left Maruji’s with the 500 yen in my pocket, the shame and the chagrin disappeared. I was quite beside myself at the thought of how pleased Kimika would be. The streetcar was intolerably slow. I took a cab to that house by the filled-in Honjo canal. Though it was a summer night, the breeze from the river was cool; and though it was not yet midnight the strand and the back streets were quiet, and Kimika’s windows upstairs and the glass doors downstairs were behind shutters. I knocked and someone switched on the light.

“ ‘What? All alone?’ It was the woman downstairs.

“ ‘Where is Kimi?’

“ ‘I would have thought she was with you,’ the woman laughed. There was something evasive about her manner.

“So Kimika had seen me to the streetcar and not come back. She did not expect me until noon the next day. Probably she would not be back that night at all. Where the devil had she gone? She did have her old customers. The most suspicious was Shimezō, that Shinnai singer. I went upstairs, but I could