Page:Modern Japanese Stories.pdf/80

 wench was a sly one, I said to myself. She had managed to live beyond her time. I went into a bar, drank from sheer exasperation, and staggered toward home.

“It was on the Honjō strand, exactly where I had run into her after being evicted from Shimbashi. About the place where they put the approach to Kuramae Bridge after the earthquake. A crowd had gathered, and I wandered over to see what had happened. There were various rumours: a woman had jumped into the river; she had been stabbed and thrown in; no, it had been a try at double suicide, and the woman had been held back by the police after the man had jumped in. For no reason at all, my heart was racing. When I reached home I found a pencilled note on my samisen scores: ‘I wanted to talk to you, but you were out. I have to run. I will stop by on the evening of the thirteenth on my way from the hairdresser’s. Take care of yourself. Kimi.’

“My chest tight, I ran to the police station. I had not been wrong. The murdered woman was Kimi. Stabbed in the back, she had fallen into the river, and she was dead when the police pulled her out. I had a knife in my kimono and no alibi. I was about to be arrested when a man was brought in. He had given himself up at a police box: the Shinnai singer Shimezō. From his confession it was apparent that he had seen Kimi several times while she was living with me. He had been driven to murder by exactly what had infuriated me: he could not tolerate the idea of her having given herself to her keeper, of her planning to set herself up as mistress of a geisha house.

“Kimi is dead, and I cannot be sure that she had such ambitions when she gave herself to the master of the Fusahana. To judge from the note she left me, I can scarcely believe that she did. Her great weakness and her great charm was the way she had of accepting everything from the man who had for the time being won her. In the end it killed her.

“Be that as it may, she would probably not have been stabbed by Shimezō that night if she had not come by my rooms. And if I had been there to see her home she would