Geisha in Rivalry

by Kafū Nagai

  To see such tears of vexation, to see the touching sight of women gnashing their teeth in frustration, was exactly what the proprietor of the Chomondo found almost unbearably interesting. The sea monster was well acquainted with his own swarthiness, and from the days of his youth he had succeeded in everything with women by inspiring them with fear. Since there were both machiai and geisha houses in Yokohama that he was helping to finance, there was no particular reason for him to be in want of women. Nevertheless, having been accustomed for years to a life of revelry, whenever he came to Tokyo he could not rest until he had dropped in at a teahouse for a party. He did this with the full knowledge that he was not making the girls at the place happy, and for this reason it had become his special pleasure to embarrass and torment women whenever he liked. The sea monster had turned into the troublesome type of rascal who enjoys nothing more than forcibly seducing a reluctant woman. Inquiring of the teahouse mistresses, he would always try to find out if they didn't know of a suitable girl who was in urgent need of money because she had involved herself with an actor or one who was up to her neck in debt for one reason or another. Consequently Komayo was a geisha uniquely suited for his purposes. As long as she carried on her affair with Segawa, it was apparently impossible for her to shake off the sea monster, no matter how much she wanted to be rid of him.

  In December, the season when people suddenly realize that the year end is near and begin a frantic search for money to pay their debts—even to the point of looking for coins dropped in the street—the sea monster, thinking that the time was just right, set out in his hulking fashion for the Taigetsu. Once there, he sent for Komayo.

  Despite the shortness of the winter day, it had not yet grown dark. Komayo, on her way to the notion shop that she patronized, was passing through the street called Ita-shimmichi when she happened to notice a house with the name Kikuobana written on its electric sign. It occurred to her that she had not even once visited Kikuchiyo since she had set herself up independently. Stopping at the door, she called out a few words of greeting.

  From inside came the reply: "Please come in."

  "I'm on my way to the Tamasen for some shopping. I'll stop in on the way back." With this, Komayo walked away.

  As she did so, a covered jinrikisha came from the opposite direction, and when it passed her she caught a glimpse, through the hood, of the person inside. It looked like Yoshioka! Komayo hardly had time to stop and look back before the jinrikisha pulled up at the door of the Kikuobana. Then she recognized the color of the trousers that emerged from the hood.

  "Isn't that strange?" she thought. But at the same moment she told herself that it was impossible. Still doubting, she decided that it was best to reconnoiter. As she turned cautiously back toward the Kikuobana, its lattice door clattered open, and a young girl of fourteen or fifteen came out. It was apparently the maid, probably out to run an errand or do some shopping. Taking advantage of this lucky chance, Komayo stopped her and asked: "Was that a guest?"

  "Yes."

  "Your neisan's master?"

  "Yes."

  "Then I'd better come back some other time. Please give the neisan my regards."

  "Yes." With this, the young girl ran to the sake shop two or three doors down and called out in a shrill voice: "A large bottle of sake—the best kind, as usual!" Komayo, on the verge of fainting, heard her quite distinctly.

  Komayo reached home too overwhelmed for tears. Until today she had known nothing at all. And then, of all things, she had nonchalantly stopped by to say hello when she happened to pass Kikuchiyo's place. No doubt the two of them were sitting there right now holding their sides with laughter at having made such a fool of her. At the thought of it, her feelings were beyond description.

  Just then the hakoya Osada came in to tell her that she had been called to the Taigetsu. If it was the Taigetsu, it could only be the sea monster, she thought, and she was instantly seized with a new fit of rage. She instructed Osada to call back and say she wasn't feeling well and was going to stay home this evening and rest. Then she went upstairs. About half an hour later, however, apparently having changed her mind, she called the hakoya and left for her teahouse engagement.

  Soon after that, about the time when the lamps were being lighted, Komayo telephoned and asked for Hanasuke. "I'm going to Mito," she informed her. "Please make it all right with Osada-san and the neisan, won't you? I'm asking this as a favor."

  Since she seemed about to hang up, Hanasuke spoke to her excitedly: "Koma-chan! Where are you? Are you at the Taigetsu?"

  "No. I stopped at the Taigetsu for a little while, but just now I'm at the Gishun. I've explained everything to the mistress of the Gishun because it would be too annoying to have explain it all on the telephone. I'll be back tomorrow or the next day. Something has come up that I have to talk over with Segawa-san. For heaven's sake, please do me a favor!"

  For no particular reason at all, Komayo had suddenly become possessed of a reckless desire to see the niisan. Even though she was boiling inside with resentment and chagrin, there was no one at all to whom she could turn, no one who could console her, unhappy and forlorn as she was. With no thought of the consequences, she had decided to rush off to Mito, where Segawa was on tour with his company.

  RAIN ON AN AUTUMN NIGHT

  IN NEGISHI, Kurayama Nanso lived an idle life in a kind of watery world whose loneliness he relished. It was a place where one passed the days in intimacy with the changing seasons. When the wagtail and the bush warbler appeared, it was they who took over from the striped-trousered mosquitoes that had concealed themselves in the shadows of the thick shrubbery. Here in summer, where the water of the garden pond had been brought with casual elegance to flow like a little brook past the sliding windows of his study, the rush flowers bloomed, and at night Nanso watched the fireflies striking like raindrops against the rattan blinds. In autumn, resting his cheek on his arm, he listened to the rustling of the reeds. Having already crossed the boundary into middle age, Nanso liked to spend his mornings and evenings looking at the flowers and trees in his garden. Only one thing dismayed him: the speed with which the days and months went by.

  If at one moment he was observing how the evening showers of late summer caused the leaves of the lotus to drip with jewels and then suddenly to break, in the very next, it seemed, he was hearing the dry sound of the reeds trembling in the wind, and it was already well into autumn, when the amaranths gave way to the chrysanthemums and the last of the maple leaves came down in the drizzling rain. Then, almost too soon for belief, it was the end of the year, and the time had come to count the buds of the plum that bloomed at the winter solstice. In the season of greatest cold, when one had long since taken care of the old trees by placing winter fertilizer around them, holding one's nose all the while, it was time to admire the berries of the nanten and the yabukoji, glowing more beautifully than flowers against the background of snow. It was then that one knew the true pleasure of winter confinement: the cup of tea brewed at midnight, the arrangement of narcissus and adonis on the bookshelf. But hardly had they faded before it was the vernal equinox, the time for separating the roots of the chrysanthemums and sowing grass seed, and a man who loved his garden found the days slipping away more quickly than ever. Busy as he was with welcoming and bidding farewell to a hundred kinds of flowers as they bloomed and faded, even though he stopped for a moment to look up at the new green of the treetops, the garden was before long darkened by the approach of the rainy season, and the morning after the still unripe plums began to fall turned swiftly into the evening when the leaves of the pink mimosa folded themselves in sleep. Under the blazing sun of noon, the pomegranate flared with blossoms, and the petals of the great trumpet flowers colored the ground. In the dead of night, the voices of insects, already foretelling autumn, seemed to be drawn out one after another like threads in the shadows of the dew-drenched water plants.

  Spring, summer, autumn, winter—truly it was no different from looking into a h
aiku anthology with its seasonal arrangement of poems. This year, like last, had brought in its time the sound of the young bush warblers in the depths of the shrubbery, and Nanso had once again become familiar with the sight of the wagtails flirting about in their characteristic walk. In a world of constantly changing manners and customs, it warmed his heart to think that every year, never failing in their punctuality to the season, the small birds arrived to visit his garden.

  Once, attracted by the sound of pruning shears cutting away dead branches in the neighboring garden, he had pushed his way through the heavy shrubbery and come out at the boundary of the property. It was marked by a tall hedge hung here and there with snake gourds. Through a broken place in the hedge he could see the whole expanse of the garden lying in brilliant sunlight and, beyond it, the veranda of the main house with its adjoining pond. After that, whenever he stepped up to the boundary line to peek through the shrubbery at the house next door, he was invariably captivated by the structure of the main building, the rustic brushwood gate, and the graceful shapes of the pine trees that leaned over the pond—all of it like an illustration from a storybook. It was usually only when his cheeks were fiercely stung by the striped mosquitoes that he came back to himself.

  This house had once been the villa of a Yoshiwara brothel, but now it had been standing empty for a long time. Nanso's place had been in the family for three generations, and since he had always lived in this old house, from childhood he had naturally acquired a thorough knowledge of the neighborhood and its history, both from the stories of his elders and from hearsay. What he remembered about the house next to his was an incident that took place when he was actually still small enough to be carried in his mother's arms. The house had been a rest home since before the beginning of the Meiji era. One year, on a night of heavy snow, a girl died in that house, a Yoshiwara prostitute of the highest class who had been staying there to recover her health. Nanso recalled quite well the unexplainable feeling of sadness that came over him when he heard about it, even though he was only a child when it happened. And now, no matter how much older he had become, the more he looked at that one old pine tree that stretched its branches so splendidly from the edge of the pond almost to the veranda, the more impossible he found it to dismiss the old joruri ballads like "Urazato" and "Michi-tose" as nothing but the flowery concoctions of poets. Regardless of how Westernized manners and customs might become, he thought, as long as one could still hear the voices of bells in the brief summer night, as long as one could still look up and see the stream of the Milky Way on an evening in autumn, as long as trees and flowers remained unchanged, even now—as in the past —grief must lie at the heart of relationships between men and women: the same old grief that the ballads sang of.

  Nanso was born to become a writer. This temperament of his, together with his environment, made it inevitable that be should do so. His great-grandfather, a doctor by profession, had been a connoisseur of Japanese classical literature. His grandfather, also a doctor, had made a name for himself as a master of satirical tanka poems. When his father Shuan succeeded to the inheritance, a more or less solid property had been built up, and if the world had remained as it was, the family, now in its third generation of doctors, would have become more and more prosperous. With the arrival of the Meiji era, however, the old Chinese school of medicine went completely into discard, and his father, without actually intending to do so, gradually gave up his profession. Then, almost before he knew it, he found himself making a business of engraving inscriptions on seals and stone monuments, an art that he had learned in his leisure time, and he changed his professional name from Shuan to Shusai. Since he was accomplished both as poet and as calligrapher, he had become well acquainted among the elite of Tokyo society, and at one time his name was widely known in the literary world of the capital. With one thing and another, his income was unexpectedly greater than it had been while he was a doctor, so that he had no particular difficulty in finding ways to accumulate money— enough of it, in fact, to save his heirs from knowing the hardships of life for a long time to come. Having done this, he died contented.

  At that time Nanso had just turned twenty-five. He had already published several novels in the style of Bakin as newspaper serials. Since there had been no lack of newspaper publishers and editors-in-chief among Shusai's acquaintances, it was natural that Nanso should become a journalist after his father's death. But he had no particular relations with the literary groups that centered around such writers as Koyo and Bizan or with "new literature" coteries of the sort that surrounded Tokoku, Shukotsu, Kocho, and others. Nor had there been any opportunity at all for him to become friendly with the former Waseda group led by writers like Shoyo and Futo. Instead, he found his inspiration in the volumes of old Japanese and Chinese classics and the various books of the Edo period that were kept in the fireproof storehouse of his ancestral home at Negishi. At one time Chikamatsu was his model; at another, Saikaku; and at still others, Kyoden and Samba. Working persistently in the novelist's traditional spirit of self-depreciation, he spent some twenty years in the sedate and careful writing of his stories without once becoming bored.

  But the times were changing more rapidly than ever. Particularly after the beginning of the Taisho era, the drift of literature and painting, the trends in drama and popular music, together with the changes in everyday manners and customs, gave Nanso more and more occasions for indignation. It was not his nature to be enthusiastic about new things, and there was nothing strange in his resentment. For the first time, apparently, all this made him realize that he could not go on as before. There was no reason for him to spend his entire life writing novels to delight women and children. Just as Kyoden and Tanehiko had done in their later years, he now turned to searching the past to study its customs, its habits of daily life, its articles of everyday use. As far as the writing of novels was concerned, he produced only enough to fulfill his responsibilities toward newspapers and bookstores to which he was under previous obligation.

  So, for Nanso, the old house and the old garden in Negishi had become a treasure that he would have found it hard to exchange for anything else. Little by little, the neighborhood had turned modern, and the old-fashioned elegance of Negishi was about to disappear forever. By this time, worms had eaten into the veranda here and there, but wasn't this the place where his greatgrandfather had sat in the long-ago Temmei era, admiring the plum blossoms around the pond and reciting classical poetry? And wasn't it here that his grandfather, in turn, had composed his satirical verses while he watched the mid-autumn moon shining on the already sagging tiled roof? It was thoughts like these that filled Nanso with the desire to preserve this old house and its garden as they had been in former times, regardless of how wasteful an expense might be required or how difficult a place it might be to live in. Every time the carpenter came to repair the leaks that appeared now and then in the roof or to do other odd jobs, he advised Nanso that it would be more profitable in the long run to build a new house. But Nanso only laughed. Some three years ago, when the underpinning of the foundation was being replaced, he had supervised the work without once taking his eye off it, just as if he had been a carpenter himself.

  So it was with every tree and every plant in the garden. Because all of these were keepsakes that had inspired his forefathers to poetry, he looked upon them as treasures no less valuable than the books, the household utensils, and the other mementos of the past that were locked away in the storehouse. Fearing the heartless shears of the gardener, Nanso never failed to do the cutting and trimming himself every spring and autumn.

  This sentiment of affection was not limited to his own garden. It extended beyond the fence to the garden of the neighboring house. For a long time after the Yoshiwara brothel went bankrupt, this house had stood vacant, and no one had offered to buy it. Soon, nobody knew from where, rumors about it began to spread: stories that the ghost of the dead courtesan had returned to haunt the place or that foxes and badgers were u
p to to their traditional tricks of bewitching people and creating mischief; and buyers stayed away altogether. Since long ago, however, no one in the adjoining Kurayama homestead, not even the women and children, had had any feeling of strangeness about the place.

  On beautiful moonlight nights Nanso's aged father Shusai, having had his fill of walking in his own garden, would nonchalantly make his way through a break in the fence into the empty garden next door, where he would stroll around the pond and recite old Chinese odes to the moon in a loud voice. At times like those when he had no ready answer for customers who came to press him for the work they had requested of him, he slipped stealthily out of his own house and concealed himself in that same garden. Then when his wife and the servant girl, both at a loss for an explanation to the customer, had searched the whole house for him, sooner or later they too ended up in the garden next door.

  At last Nanso's father could no longer bear to watch the great old pine tree at the edge of the pond go to ruin because of neglect. It would be a pity, he thought, to see those graceful branches spoiled for lack of care. Even though he knew he was doing it for someone else who would eventually buy the house, whenever his gardener came, he instructed him to pluck the old needles and to do whatever else was necessary at the same time that he was taking care of the Kurayama garden. Again, when the brushwood gate was about to collapse after a storm, he could not endure leaving it as it was. After all, no matter how much money one might offer, there was no craftsman nowadays who could construct a gate like that. So he secretly repaired it himself. It was not long before he was opening the sliding shutters of the guest room and walking into the house. Was it in this room, he asked himself, that the courtesan had nursed her illness so long ago? Was it here that she wrote her letters and burned incense? Perhaps it was mere fancy, but when thoughts like these came to him inside that deserted house, he experienced a sense of enchantment with its architecture —a solitary delight that led him, time and again, to have sake brought over from his own house so that he could drink it there alone. In fact, the still unsold rest home of the brothel appeared to have become Shusai's private villa. Although rumors that it was a haunted house continued to be passed around as always, guests of the Kurayama family again and again found themselves conducted there by the master. Once they became accustomed to it, they no longer thought it strange. Meanwhile, among those guests there even appeared one who was eager to buy the house. This was the Kabuki actor Segawa Kikujo, foster father of the present Segawa Isshi. His friendship with the well-known writer Kurayama Shusai showed his deep taste for the literary profession—a quality unusual in an actor. Taking up his residence in the former rest home of the brothel, he spent his last years there in tranquillity, diverting himself from the cares of his profession by writing poetry and practicing the elegances of the tea ceremony. After Kikujo's death, his second wife stayed on for a year. Then, since she was much younger than he and preferred to live in the more convenient downtown area, she moved away to Tsukiji. Now, for the second time, the house became vacant. The Segawa family, however, seeing no reason to dispose of it, installed a gardener as watchman and kept the place as a kind of countryseat where they came for recreation in spring and autumn.