Snow Country (3 page)

An odd story, Shimamura said to himself, and dismissed the matter. An hour or so later, however,
the woman from the music teacher’s came in with the maid. Shimamura brought himself up straight. The maid started to leave but was called back by the woman.

The impression the woman gave was a wonderfully clean and fresh one. It seemed to Shimamura that she must be clean to the hollows under her toes. So clean indeed did she seem that he wondered whether his eyes, back from looking at early summer in the mountains, might not be deceiving him.

There was something about her manner of dress that suggested the geisha, but she did not have the trailing geisha skirts. On the contrary, she wore her soft, unlined summer kimono with an emphasis on careful propriety. The
obi
^†
seemed expensive, out of keeping with the kimono, and struck him as a little sad.

The maid slipped out as they started talking about the mountains. The woman was not very sure of the names of the mountains that could be seen from the inn, and, since Shimamura did not feel the urge to drink that might have come to him in the company of an ordinary geisha, she began telling of her past in a surprisingly matter-of-fact way. She was born in this snow country, but she had been put under contract as a geisha in Tokyo. Presently
she found a patron who paid her debts for her and proposed to set her up as a dancing teacher, but unfortunately a year and a half later he died. When it came to the story of what had happened since, the story of what was nearest to her, she was less quick to tell her secrets. She said she was nineteen. Shimamura had taken her to be twenty-one or twenty-two, and, since he assumed that she was not lying, the knowledge that she had aged beyond her years gave him for the first time a little of the ease he expected to feel with a geisha. When they began talking of the Kabuki, he found that she knew more about actors and styles than he did. She talked on feverishly, as though she had been starved for someone who would listen to her, and presently began to show an ease and abandon that revealed her to be at heart a woman of the pleasure quarters after all. And she seemed in general to know what there was to know about men. Shimamura, however, had labeled her an amateur and, after a week in the mountains during which he had spoken to almost no one, he found himself longing for a companion. It was therefore friendship more than anything else that he felt for the woman. His response to the mountains had extended itself to cover her.

On her way to the bath the next afternoon, she left her towel and soap in the hall and came in to talk to him.

She had barely taken a seat when he asked her to call him a geisha.

“Call you a geisha?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I didn’t come to be asked that.” She stood up abruptly and went over to the window, her face reddening as she looked out at the mountains. “There are no women like that here.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“It’s the truth.” She turned sharply to face him, and sat down on the window sill. “No one forces a geisha to do what she doesn’t want to. It’s entirely up to the geisha herself. That’s one service the inn won’t provide for you. Go ahead, try calling someone and talking to her yourself, if you want to.”

“You call someone for me.”

“Why do you expect me to do that?”

“I’m thinking of you as a friend. That’s why I’ve behaved so well.”

“And this is what you call being a friend?” Led on by his manner, she had become engagingly childlike. But a moment later she burst out: “Isn’t it fine that you think you can ask me a thing like that!”

“What is there to be so excited about? I’m too healthy after a week in the mountains, that’s all. I keep having the wrong ideas. I can’t even sit here talking to you the way I would like to.”

The woman was silent, her eyes on the floor. Shimamura had come to a point where he knew he was only parading his masculine shamelessness, and yet it seemed likely enough that the woman was familiar with the failing and need not be shocked by it. He looked at her. Perhaps it was the rich lashes of the downcast eyes that made her face seem warm and sensuous. She shook her head very slightly, and again a faint blush spread over her face.

“Call any geisha you like.”

“But isn’t that exactly what I’m asking you to do? I’ve never been here before, and I’ve no idea which geisha are the best-looking.”

“What do you consider good-looking?”

“Someone young. You’re less apt to make mistakes when they’re young. And someone who doesn’t talk too much. Clean, and not too quick. When I want someone to talk to, I can talk to you.”

“I’ll not come again.”

“Don’t be foolish.”

“I said I’ll not come again. Why should I come again?”

“But haven’t I told you it’s exactly because I want to be friends with you that I’ve behaved so well?”

“You’ve said enough.”

“Suppose I were to go too far with you. Very
probably from tomorrow I wouldn’t want to talk to you. I couldn’t stand the sight of you. I’ve had to come into the mountains to want to talk to people again, and I’ve left you alone so that I can talk to you. And what about yourself? You can’t be too careful with travelers.”

“That’s true.”

“Of course it is. Think of yourself. If it were a woman you objected to, you wouldn’t want to see me afterwards. It would be much better for her to be a woman you picked out.”

“I don’t want to hear any more.” She turned sharply away, but presently she added: “I suppose there’s something in what you say.”

“An affair of the moment, no more. Nothing beautiful about it. You know that—it couldn’t last.”

“That’s true. It’s that way with everyone who comes here. This is a hot spring and people are here for a day or two and gone.” Her manner was remarkably open—the transition had been almost too abrupt. “The guests are mostly travelers. I’m still just a child myself, but I’ve listened to all the talk. The guest who doesn’t say he’s fond of you, and yet you somehow know is—he’s the one you have pleasant memories of. You don’t forget him, even long after he’s left you, they say. And he’s the one you get letters from.”

She stood up from the window sill and took a seat on the mat below it. She seemed to be living in the past, and yet she seemed to be very near Shimamura.

Her voice carried such a note of immediate feeling that he felt a little guilty, as though he had deceived her too easily.

He had not been lying, though. To him this woman was an amateur. His desire for a woman was not of a sort to make him want this particular woman—it was something to be taken care of lightly and with no sense of guilt. This woman was too clean. From the moment he saw her, he had separated this woman and the other in his mind.

Then too, he had been trying to decide where he would go to escape the summer heat, and it occurred to him that he could bring his family to this mountain hot spring. The woman, being fortunately an amateur, would be a good companion for his wife. He might even have his wife take dancing lessons to keep from getting bored. He was quite serious about it. He said he felt only friendship for the woman, but he had his reasons for thus stepping into shallow water without taking the final plunge.

And something like that evening mirror was no doubt at work here too. He disliked the thought of drawn-out complications from an affair with a
woman whose position was so ambiguous; but beyond that he saw her as somehow unreal, like the woman’s face in that evening mirror.

His taste for the western dance had much the same air of unreality about it. He had grown up in the merchants’ section of Tokyo, and he had been thoroughly familiar with the Kabuki theater from his childhood. As a student his interests had shifted to the Japanese dance and the dance-drama. Never satisfied until he learned everything about his subject, he had taken to searching through old documents and visiting the heads of various dance schools, and presently he had made friends with rising figures in the dance world and was writing what one might call research pieces and critical essays. It was but natural, then, that he should come to feel a keen dissatisfaction with the slumbering old tradition as well as with reformers who sought only to please themselves. Just as he had arrived at the conclusion that there was nothing for it but to throw himself actively into the dance movement, and as he was being persuaded to do so by certain of the younger figures in the dance world, he abruptly switched to the western dance. He stopped seeing the Japanese dance. He gathered pictures and descriptions of the western ballet, and began laboriously collecting programs and posters from abroad. This was more than simple fascination
with the exotic and the unknown. The pleasure he found in his new hobby came in fact from his inability to see with his own eyes occidentals in occidental ballets. There was proof of this in his deliberate refusal to study the ballet as performed by Japanese. Nothing could be more comfortable than writing about the ballet from books. A ballet he had never seen was an art in another world. It was an unrivaled armchair reverie, a lyric from some paradise. He called his work research, but it was actually free, uncontrolled fantasy. He preferred not to savor the ballet in the flesh; rather he savored the phantasms of his own dancing imagination, called up by Western books and pictures. It was like being in love with someone he had never seen. But it was also true that Shimamura, with no real occupation, took some satisfaction from the fact that his occasional introductions to the western dance put him on the edge of the literary world—even while he was laughing at himself and his work.

It might be said that his knowledge was now for the first time in a very great while being put to use, since talk of the dance helped bring the woman nearer to him; and yet it was also possible that, hardly knowing it, he was treating the woman exactly as he treated the western dance.

He felt a little guilty, as though he had deceived
her, when he saw how the frivolous words of the traveler who would be gone tomorrow seemed to have struck something deep and serious in the woman’s life.

But he went on: “I can bring my family here, and we can all be friends.”

“I understand that well enough.” She smiled, her voice falling, and a touch of the geisha’s playfulness came out. “I’d like that much better. It lasts longer if you’re just friends.”

“You’ll call someone, then?”

“Now?”

“Now.”

“But what can you say to a woman in broad daylight?”

“At night there’s too much danger of getting the dregs no one else wants.”

“You take this for a cheap hot-spring town like any other. I should think you could tell just from looking at the place.” Her tone was sober again, as though she felt thoroughly degraded. She repeated with the same emphasis as before that there were no girls here of the sort he wanted. When Shimamura expressed his doubts, she flared up, then retreated a step. It was up to the geisha whether she would stay the night or not. If she stayed without permission from her house, it was her own responsibility. If she
had permission the house took full responsibility, whatever happened. That was the difference.

“Full responsibility?”

“If there should happen to be a child, or some sort of disease.”

Shimamura smiled wryly at the foolishness of his question. In a mountain village, though, the arrangements between a geisha and her keeper might indeed still be so easygoing.…

Perhaps with the idler’s bent for protective coloring, Shimamura had an instinctive feeling for the spirit of the places he visited, and he had felt as he came down from the mountains that, for all its air of bare frugality, there was something comfortable and easy about the village. He heard at the inn that it was indeed one of the more comfortable villages in this harsh snow country. Until the railway was put through, only very recently, it had served mainly as a medicinal spring for farmers in the area. The house that kept geisha would generally have a faded shop curtain that advertised it as a restaurant or a tearoom, but a glance at the old-style sliding doors, their paper panels dark with age, made the passer-by suspect that guests were few. The shop that sold candy or everyday sundries might have its one geisha, and the owner would have his small farm besides the shop and the geisha.
Perhaps because she lived with the music teacher, there seemed to be no resentment at the fact that a woman not yet licensed as a geisha was now and then helping at parties.

“How many are there in all?”

“How many geisha? Twelve or thirteen, I suppose.”

“Which one do you recommend?” Shimamura stood up to ring for the maid.

“You won’t mind if I leave now.”

“I mind very much indeed.”

“I can’t stay.” She spoke as if trying to shake off the humiliation. “I’m going. It’s all right. I don’t mind. I’ll come again.”

When the maid came in, however, she sat down as though nothing were amiss. The maid asked several times which geisha she should call, but the woman refused to mention a name.

One look at the seventeen- or eighteen-year-old geisha who was presently led in, and Shimamura felt his need for a woman fall dully away. Her arms, with their underlying darkness, had not yet filled out, and something about her suggested an unformed, good-natured young girl. Shimamura, at pains not to show that his interest had left him, faced her dutifully, but he could not keep himself from looking less at her than at the new green on
the mountains behind her. It seemed almost too much of an effort to talk. She was the mountain geisha through and through. He lapsed into a glum silence. No doubt thinking to be tactful and adroit, the woman stood up and left the room, and the conversation became still heavier. Even so, he managed to pass perhaps an hour with the geisha. Looking for a pretext to be rid of her, he remembered that he had had money telegraphed from Tokyo. He had to go to the post office before it closed, he said, and the two of them left the room.

But at the door of the inn he was seduced by the mountain, strong with the smell of new leaves. He started climbing roughly up it.

He laughed on and on, not knowing himself what was funny.