Page:Modern Japanese Stories.pdf/77

 she was no more than thirteen or fourteen, and after leaving home and making the rounds of the provincial tea-houses, she had emerged at Shitaya towards the end of her seventeenth year. Suited by nature for the trade she had chosen, she was fairly much in demand, and had decent enough customers; but she was not one to worry about the future. Quite without ambition, she cared nothing about the appearance she made. She simply let the days and months go by—something, you felt, was wanting in her. Yet that very fact made her seem genuine and unpretentious, and somehow sad. I could not see my way towards leaving her. It was, in a word, a ruinous match. I knew how worthless she was. As I lived with her, however, I too became insensitive to the jeers of the world and my duties to the world. I too came to care less than nothing about work and appearances. Absently, half in a dream, half immobile, I would lie in bed the whole day, not washing my face and not eating. I thought how pleasant it would be if the two of us could become beggars together.

“After Kimi moved to Yoshi-chō, memories of the slovenly life we had lived together became a nostalgic dream, and my one pleasure in the world was waiting for the day or two a month when she would stop by, as she had promised, on her way to or from the shrine. Since I had made the gesture of giving her up, I was able to approach my old teacher through an intermediary, and I was again allowed to give lessons.

“She did in fact come by two or three times. Although I was far from sure it was proper, she even stayed the night once, and went back towards noon the next day. That was the end. A month passed, two months, the last of the O-tori festivals was over, in Asakusa the New Year markets were opening. I heard nothing.

“I shall not forget that night. It was the twentieth of December, there was a heavy snow, and I was on my way home in the evening from a lesson in the stock-market district. I