Page:Modern Japanese Stories.pdf/76

 autumn winds became colder, we could only lie shivering in bed. Because there was nothing to be gained by discussing matters with Kimika, a bedroom geisha quite without accomplishments, I made up my mind to pick up what I could as a wandering Gidayū player.

“ ‘You seem to have a bond with wandering musicians,’ I said. ‘You break with Shinnai and now it’s the fat Gidayū samisen. But don’t worry. Stay with me a little longer, and I’ll go to the maestro and somehow persuade him to take me back.’

“But as I wandered the uptown pleasure districts, I caught a bad cold and had to go to bed. We had at last come to the end. I wept, but there was nothing I could do but let her go. She arranged through her broker to become Kosono at the Fusahana in Yoshi-chō, and again put on the bright robes. She said that her debt covered only the clothes she had to have immediately, and that she was to get sixty per cent of her earnings; but when, out of bed, I went to see her, I found that the arrangements were far different: a debt of 700 yen, earnings to be evenly divided between her and the house. Her answer was vague when I asked where the money had gone. In my heart I knew that the time had come to give her up. There was no hope of making myself over, I knew, if I went on playing with a woman like her.

“Yet I held back. An apology had come from the woman in Shimbashi, but I had my perverse pride. I might have fallen in the world, but I was no kept man. After shaming me as much as a man can be shamed, she had her gall, coming at me now with this sort of pretence. She cared all that much for me, did she? Then she oughtn’t to mind if I had a flirtation or two on the side. I wanted no more of her and her big-sister ways. I would show her! I would somehow redeem Kimika and make her an ordinary woman again. Yet at other times I could not understand myself. What could have made me lose myself over such a cheap, fickle, untalented, useless woman?

“She was just nineteen. She had begun seeing men when