Modern Japanese Stories/Hydrangea

Ajisai

Hydrangea

by Nagai Kafū

Walking through Komagome one day, I stepped inside a temple gate and came upon him quite by chance: a samisen player, Tsurusawa Sōkichi by name, from whom I had once taken lessons. It must have been twenty years before. Tsurukidayū was still alive, I remember, and appearing occasionally on the variety stage.

“An odd place to meet you,” I said. “I see you’ve managed to keep well.”

“Very well, thank you, sir. I’ve often thought how kind you were in the old days, and I’ve been meaning to stop by.”

“Is it true that you’ve given up the samisen?”

“Yes, sir. I saw that the end was in sight, and decided to quit while I could.”

“Good. And what are you doing now?”

“Oh, I have a shabby little geisha house out on the edge of Yotsuya.”

“That’s much better than trying to make your way as a musician. People don’t get ahead by talent these days. Very far-sighted of you.”

“It’s good of you to say so. There were all sorts of reasons. At first I hardly knew what to do next, but now I can see that I was right to make the change.”

“You’re visiting someone’s grave?”

“Yes, sir. And is this your family temple?”

“Oh, no. No, it’s just that I’m getting old, and things are expensive—and worthless when you’ve paid the price. I get bored, and sometimes I go round looking for graves.”

“I see. Your companions have all gone on, have they?”

“You sound like a poet, Sōkichi. Do I remember that you wrote haiku?”

“No, sir. The hike from bottle to bed is about all I’m good for.”

We had walked round the main hall to the cemetery. The old flower woman was waiting, incense in hand, for Sōkichi. She had sprinkled a tombstone with ritual water and changed the flowers in the bamboo pail. The stone, which carried a woman’s posthumous name, was not particularly old.

“Your mother’s grave?” I asked casually.

“No, sir.” Sōkichi took a rosary from his kimono sleeve. “I wouldn’t tell most people, but since it’s you, sir—a geisha I was once fond of is buried here.”

“You must be getting old yourself, Sōkichi.”

“I am indeed, sir. I’m a doddering old man. But you mustn’t laugh at me.” Sōkichi knelt down, rattled his beads, and muttered a passage from a sutra. “The truth is,” he said, as he got to his feet, “that I put this stone up without telling my wife.”

“It sounds like an interesting story.”

“I can’t deny that it is, sir. I haven’t put up stones for my own mother and father, after all these years. And to put one up at my age for a woman who didn’t even ask me to—I’m almost shocked at myself. It cost me a good twenty yen, too. Ten for the stone, five to the temple, a little here and a little there.”

“What house was she in?”

“The Fusahana in Yoshi-chō. Her name was Kosono.”

“I think I’ve heard of her.”

“Most unlikely, sir. She wasn’t a geisha you’d have been likely to call. Her house wasn’t good, she had no talent. You can guess what sort she was from the fact that even I was a little ashamed to be seen out with her. A person with an eye for it can tell at a glance how good a geisha is, after all.”

Across the street there was an old-style noodle shop, its garden as thick with shrubs as a nursery. We followed the flagstones to a little veranda-enclosed cottage. There I heard Sōkichi’s story.

“It must be fourteen or fifteen years ago now. I was just thirty. It wasn’t at Yoshi-chō that I first met her. She was in Shitaya, and she called herself Kimika. I used to see her sometimes after I’d been to your house and had a little to drink. You may remember, sir. I had a geisha in Shimbashi named Maruji. She was well along in years, and I was young and hot-blooded, not one to be satisfied with her and her big-sister ways. She just wasn’t the sort you gave up everything for. Well, I was living with her, and sometimes when I had a little extra money thanks to you or some other gentleman I would sneak out and buy myself a cheap geisha where I could find one. I had the one regular geisha you see, and I went round looking for others. You know how it is: there’s a special flavour, somehow, in having an occasional drink in a cheap stall. You see, sir?

“That’s how it was when I first had Kimika, at a little inn just down the hill from the Yushima Shrine. I couldn’t pick and choose, after all, when I came at ten and had to be home at twelve. Anyone would do provided she came in a hurry.

“I’d be looking at my watch. Sometimes I’d undress while I was waiting, and have a cigarette, and go at her the minute she came in the door. It was pretty much that way with her. I waited awhile, and the one who finally came in was better than I’d expected. I still remember everything. She had on a kimono with a small pattern, dyed over, I’d say. The stiffening at the neck and sleeves had buckled, and the neck band on the under-kimono was dirty. One of the unlucky ones who had to go out any hour of the day or night, you knew right away—sold body and soul to her house. Her chignon was held up in front by wires, and that only made it more obvious how thin her hair was. But her eyelashes were long, her eyes were big and round, and her face was thin and white and somehow a little sad. Her long neck, her sloping shoulders, in a kimono twice as loose at the throat as an ordinary woman would wear it—a fragile, delicate thing, sir, if anyone ever was. She said very little, she was always looking at the floor, she didn’t seem quite used to the work. A shy, retiring girl, you’d have said yourself. I began to feel sorry for her. She didn’t have the look of a person who could stay in the business long.

“Well, that was the beginning of my mistake. You can’t tell about people by their looks, sir, but there haven’t been many you could tell less about than her.”

“That doesn’t sound like you. You let her get the better of you?”

“I believe you could say that I did. I don’t think she meant to deceive me, but she was not one you could shake off. She almost made a murderer of me. It gives me a good fright even now to think how near I came. I was saved because someone else murdered her first. My name was not involved, but the murder of the geisha in Yoshi-chō did get into the papers. You may have seen it, sir. She had me help her move from Shitaya to Yoshi-chō so that she could get rid of the man she had at the time, a wandering Shinnai singer named Shimezō.

“I didn’t know then how much she liked men, how quick she was to move from one to another. She was like a hydrangea, sir, that will change colour half a dozen times in a day.

“Well, when the business was finished, I had nothing to talk to her about and I was in a hurry to go. But she turned those melancholy eyes on me from under the tangled hair and asked me to call her again. She hung on my sleeve and pleaded with me, and there was nothing I could do. It’s the ones who have little to say at the table that turn on you when you have them in bed.

“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.

“It all took considerable arranging. Because I was being kept at Maruji’s, I couldn’t spend my nights away. I had to sneak out at odd hours, and I began to neglect lessons and to lose pupils. There were warnings from my old teacher. My relations with the world narrowed, and I was pressed for money. But the infatuation only grew deeper—that is the way with infatuations. I began to think that I did not want to send her out again as a geisha. It had been decided, true enough, that she would move, and yet I wanted to keep her even a day longer as an ordinary woman. I strained my credit to the breaking. I was sure that if she were to find out she would insist on moving to a new house immediately. To forestall the possibility, I pretended that I had all the money in the world. One day I would bring her a length of Akashi crape, since it happened to be summer, the next I would bring a bottle of perfume. Thinking that it must depress her to be shut up on that second storey all day long, I would take her to the movies in parts of town where we were not likely to be seen, and on the way back we would go to some restaurant for dinner.

“Not knowing the real facts, she was deliriously happy. ‘If only I could go on like this!’ she would say, almost in tears. I could no longer be satisfied with seeing her just in the daytime. I would tell Maruji that my mother was ill, or I would say that the weather was warm and a rich patron had invited me to his country villa. After three days or so I would put on a sober face and come back to Shimbashi.

“But secrets will out. The world is a small place, sir. The family of the old woman who cooked for Maruji had a house a few doors away from the place I had taken for Kimika. I hadn’t the faintest idea that my dirty linen was out in public, and I only made matters worse when I tried to give a sweet answer: ‘Leave you now? You must be joking. Surely we’ve gone beyond any talk of separating.’

“ ‘Sōkichi. There’s a limit to making a fool of a person.’ Maruji gave the straw mat a sharp rap with her pipe. ‘I’m a geisha too. If you’re so much in love with her, go ahead and 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 not sit still. I hunted for clues. All her things were at the geisha house, however, and there was not even a dresser in the room. I found only a dirty cloth bundle in the closet. Without a clue, I ran outside, more upset than ever.

“The street on the reclaimed strand was black and lonely, and quiet except for the soft, sad lap of the waves against the stone wall. It was too late for the streetcar across Ommaya Bridge, evidently. Only the car lights on Ryōgoku Bridge were moving. The wind from the river was chilly, already an autumn wind. Absently I watched three or four shooting stars skim the high chimneys across the river. And where should I go now? I had nothing at Shimbashi. The money—I had been shamed for it, and could do nothing by way of revenge. It had been pushed upon me. For whose sake? So she had done it to me, a little whore so fresh that the egg shell was still clinging to her rump. Staring down at the water, I walked almost to the Kuramae ferry. I would feel better if I were to throw the damned money into the river.

“A figure ran up and passed me, hurrying along in short little steps. It was Kimika.

“ ‘Wait. It’s me. Where are you going?’ My voice must have been trembling.

“ ‘Oh, hello.’

“I pushed her off as she came up to me. ‘What do you mean, “Oh, hello”,’ I said. ‘You didn’t expect to see me here, did you? Look at you. If you have to cheat, you might do a better job of it.’

“She had fallen with one knee in the gravel and she did not try to get up. She hid her face in her sleeves, breathing so heavily that her shoulders shook.

“ ‘Oh, get off it.’ She said nothing and I tried to pull her up. She knelt clinging to my hand as though she expected me to hit her.

“ ‘Please. Do whatever you like with me. Hit me till you’re satisfied. That’s what I want, more than anything else in the world. Kill me. I’d be happy to be killed by you. I have nothing to live for anyway.’ Kneeling in the gravel again, she pressed her face to my sleeve and wept quite without regard for where she was.

“I was somewhat confused. ‘That will do, that will do,’ I said, pulling her to her feet and patting her on the back. Her body shook and she was choked with tears.

“ ‘I was wrong. Hit me. Kick me. I won’t blame you. Do what you like with me. Nothing can be too bad. Please.’ She pushed herself tight against me. I was a little embarrassed by the sobbing, so loud now that it seemed to echo over the river. My anger disappeared, and I actually found myself apologizing to her, asking her to forgive me. Finally we made our way back.

“That almost lunatic frenzy began to leave her, and she was such a small, abject figure as she touched a hand to her tangled hair, blinked her swollen eyes, looked at the floor as if ashamed to be seen in the full light, that the pity of it was too much for me. I was responsible, and I wanted only to console her. In her happiness she began sniffling again as if she remembered what she ought to have been doing all along. No, no, I’m only boring you with these ruminations about my love affairs. But I’m not lying: the more we quarrelled the deeper we went.

“She had heard that the talks with her geisha house were not going well, she said, and that a lawyer was to be sent after her father. She had therefore gone for help to a broker across the river.

“ ‘Why didn’t you say so in the first place?’ I spread out the five bank notes. Since she had been indentured for 800, a compromise at 500 ought to be possible; and so we lay the whole night in each other’s arms, working out the smallest details of the future. Since I had nothing to fear in the world now that my relations with Shimbashi were at an end, I started out boldly the next morning and reached agreement with the house in Shitaya.

“We lived in a dream for a month or two; but I had alienated everyone, we had sold the last of our clothes, and, as the 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 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^[1] 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 had a drink against the cold, and meant to take a boat across the river. But as I looked out at the snow I felt less like going, and instead stopped by the Fusahana on the strand. All three girls, including Kosono, had been called out, it seemed. The master too was away, as well as the elderly geisha who served as his wife. The man smoking by the brazier, still in his cloak, was Yamazaki the broker. He was in his forties, and he it was who had brought Kosono to this house. I knew him by sight. I asked how he had been.

“He dislodged a cat from a cushion that seemed to be the master’s, and offered it to me. ‘You must be very busy. What a shame that there had to be snow just at the busiest time of the year.’ His thin lip curled in an obsequious smile to show an array of gold teeth. ‘As a matter of fact, sir, there’s something I’ve been thinking I must talk to you about. I would have gone to see you this evening if the snow hadn’t frozen me up.’

“ ‘I’ve come at the right time, then. What’s the problem?’

“ ‘It’s about Kosono, sir. There seems to be no one at home, so perhaps we can have our talk now.’

“It was hard to know which of them had taken the initiative, but shortly after Kimi had come to the Fusahana she had become the master’s woman, and, after some squabbling, the old geisha who had functioned as lady of the establishment had been evicted. Yamazaki had therefore been asked to see me about giving Kimi up. The master would pay whatever I wanted.

“I sat staring at the man.

“ ‘I quite understand, sir,’ he went on, ‘but unless I make a rather embarrassing confession you won’t see why. The truth is that I once had a bit of trouble with her myself.’

“ ‘Oh? You’re one of us, are you?’

“ ‘It was before she came to Tokyo. I’ve had little to do with her since, but I’ve known her for a long time—she couldn’t have been more than fifteen—and I don’t think I’m completely without information about the sort of person she is. It won’t last in any case, sir, so why don’t you just take whatever money he has to offer and let her go? He’ll be lucky if it lasts till the cherries bloom.’

“ ‘Whatever happened to that Shinnai man, Shimezō?’

“ ‘The master here is only worried about you, sir, and has said nothing about Shimezō. I haven’t gone to look for him. I suppose he’s the same as ever.’

“ ‘Has she been called out to a party?’

“ ‘She’s been away on a trip for several days, I’m told. The other two girls say that before they’ll let her be their mistress they’ll move away. I found a place for one of them yesterday in this same district, and I think I’ll have a spot for the other at Omori before the end of the year.’

“ ‘I see,’ I said. ‘I had thought I’d have a talk with her before I decided what to do, but what you say makes it clear that I’ll only lose face the more time I let go by. Suppose I just withdraw and leave you to do what you can. Come and see me in Honjō when you find the time.’

“I spoke quietly, and went out into the snow. In the course of the conversation I had made up my mind. I had of course known what to expect when I let her become a geisha again. If a patron had ransomed her I would have had nothing to say, though I might very well have been annoyed. But to give herself to her master and, without a thought for her debts, to take her place by the brazier and play the grand lady—that I could not allow. I bought a knife as I came out on the main Ningyō-chō street. Meaning to take advantage of the snow and hunt her down in the course of the night, I walked the district until my hands and feet were frozen. I found no trace of her. I went back to Honjō to rest, started out again in the morning, and spent the next days and nights on her trail. All in vain. Maybe she had sensed what was happening. To throw her off guard, I withdrew for several days.

“It was the twenty-eighth, three nights from the end of the year. Tonight I would surely find her. I started out as if to have a look at the street stalls, and when the lights were on I did every alley and every lane in all Yoshi-chō. Not a trace of her. The 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 probably have been safe. Or perhaps I would have played Sashichi^[2] in Shimezō’s place. One person has the good luck, another the bad. You never know.

“Honjō has changed completely. There is no trace left of that filled-in canal or of Mikura Bridge. I’d like to tell you how I married my present wife and moved to Yotsuya, sir, but I’ve talked too much already. You must be bored. Possibly I can save that story until I see you again.”

Nagai Kafū (b. 1879)
This story was first published in 1931
Translated by Edward Seidensticker

1. Twice or three times in November.
2. The hero of a Kabuki play by Mokuami.