Snow Country (7 page)

She curled up like a little child, and grabbed at the neck of his kimono with her two fists.

The rich eyelashes again made him think that her eyes were half open.

Her elbow against the brazier, Komako was scribbling something on the back of an old magazine when Shimamura awoke the next morning.

“I can’t go home. I jumped up when the maid came to bring charcoal, but it was already broad daylight. The sun was shining in on the door. I was a little drunk last night, and I slept too well.”

“What time is it?”

“It’s already eight.”

“Let’s go have a bath.” Shimamura got out of bed.

“I can’t. Someone might see me in the hall.” She was completely tamed. When Shimamura came back from the bath, he found her industriously cleaning the room, a kerchief draped artistically over her head.

She had polished the legs of the table and the edge of the brazier almost too carefully, and she stirred up the charcoal with a practiced hand.

Shimamura sat idly smoking, his feet in the
kotatsu
. When the ashes dropped from his cigarette Komako took them up in a handkerchief and brought him an ashtray. He laughed, a bright morning laugh. Komako laughed too.

“If you had a husband, you’d spend all your time scolding him.”

“I would not. But I’d be laughed at for folding up even my dirty clothes. I can’t help it. That’s the way I am.”

“They say you can tell everything about a woman by looking inside her dresser drawers.”

“What a beautiful day.” They were having breakfast, and the morning sun flooded the room. “I should have gone home early to practice the samisen. The sound is different on a day like this.” She looked up at the crystal-clear sky.

The snow on the distant mountains was soft and creamy, as if veiled in a faint smoke.

Shimamura, remembering what the masseuse had said, suggested that she practice here instead. Immediately she telephoned her house to ask for music and a change of clothes.

So the house he had seen the day before had a telephone, thought Shimamura. The eyes of the other girl, Yoko, floated into his mind.

“That girl will bring your music?”

“She might.”

“You’re engaged to the son, are you?”

“Well! When did you hear that?”

“Yesterday.”

“Aren’t you strange? If you heard it yesterday, why didn’t you tell me?” But her tone showed none of the sharpness of the day before. Today there was only a clean smile on her face.

“That sort of thing would be easier to talk about if I had less respect for you.”

“What are you really thinking, I wonder? That’s why I don’t like Tokyo people.”

“You’re trying to change the subject. You haven’t answered my question, you know.”

“I’m not trying to change the subject. You really believed it?”

“I did.”

“You’re lying again. You didn’t really.”

“I couldn’t quite believe all of it, as a matter of fact. But they said you went to work as a geisha to help pay doctors’ bills.”

“It sounds like something out of a cheap magazine. But it’s not true. I was never engaged to him. People seem to think I was, though. It wasn’t to help anyone in particular that I became a geisha. But I owe a great deal to his mother, and I had to do what I could.”

“You’re talking in riddles.”

“I’ll tell you everything. Very clearly. There does seem to have been a time when his mother thought it would be a good idea for us to get married. But she only thought it. She never said a word. Both of us knew in a vague sort of way what was on her mind, but it went no farther. And that’s all there is to tell.”

“Childhood friends.”

“That’s right. But we’ve lived most of our lives apart. When they sent me to Tokyo to be a geisha, he was the only one who saw me off. I have that written down on the very first page of my very oldest diary.”

“If the two of you had stayed together, you’d probably be married by now.”

“I doubt it.”

“You would be, though.”

“You needn’t worry about him. He’ll be dead before long.”

“But is it right for you to be spending your nights away from home?”

“It’s not right for you to ask. How can a dying man keep me from doing as I like?”

Shimamura could think of no answer.

Why was it that Komako said not a word about the girl Yoko?

And Yoko, who had taken care of the sick man on the train, quite as his mother must have when he was very young—how would she feel coming to an inn with a change of kimono for Komako, who was something, Shimamura could not know what, to the man Yoko had come home with?

Shimamura found himself off in his usual distant fantasies.

“Komako, Komako.” Yoko’s beautiful voice was low but clear.

“Thank you very much.” Komako went out to the dressing-room. “You brought it yourself, did you? It must have been heavy.”

Yoko left immediately.

The top string snapped as Komako plucked tentatively at the samisen. Shimamura could tell even while she was changing the string and tuning the instrument that she had a firm, confident touch. She took up a bulky bundle and undid it on the
kotatsu
. Inside were an ordinary book of lyrics and some twenty scores. Shimamura glanced curiously at the latter.

“You practice from these?”

“I have to. There’s no one here who can teach me.”

“What about the woman you live with?”

“She’s paralyzed.”

“If she can talk she ought to be able to help you.”

“But she can’t talk. She can still use her left hand to correct mistakes in dancing, but it only annoys her to have to listen to the samisen and not be able to do anything about it.”

“Can you really understand the music from only a score?”

“I understand it very well.”

“The publishing gentleman would be happy if he knew he had a real geisha—not just an ordinary
amateur—practicing from his scores way off here in the mountains.”

“In Tokyo I was expected to dance, and they gave me dancing lessons. But I got only the faintest idea of how to play the samisen. If I were to lose that there would be no one here to teach me again. So I use scores.”

“And singing?”

“I don’t like to sing. I did learn a few songs from my dancing, and I manage to get through them, but newer things I’ve had to pick up from the radio. I’ve no idea how near right I am. My own private style—you’d laugh at it, I know. And then my voice gives out when I’m singing for someone I know well. It’s always loud and brave for strangers.” She looked a little bashful for a moment, then brought herself up and glanced at Shimamura as though signaling that she was ready for him to begin.

He was embarrassed. He was unfortunately no singer.

He was generally familiar with the Nagauta music of the Tokyo theater and dance, and he knew the words to most of the repertoire. He had had no formal training, however. Indeed he associated the Nagauta less with the parlor performance of the geisha than with the actor on the stage.

“The customer is being difficult.” Giving her lower lip a quick little bite, Komako brought the samisen to her knee, and, as if that made her a different person, turned earnestly to the lyrics before her.

“I’ve been practicing this one since last fall.”

A chill swept over Shimamura. The goose flesh seemed to rise even to his cheeks. The first notes opened a transparent emptiness deep in his entrails, and in the emptiness the sound of the samisen reverberated. He was startled—or, better, he fell back as under a well-aimed blow. Taken with a feeling almost of reverence, washed by waves of remorse, defenseless, quite deprived of strength—there was nothing for him to do but give himself up to the current, to the pleasure of being swept off wherever Komako would take him.

She was a mountain geisha, not yet twenty, and she could hardly be as good as all that, he told himself. And in spite of the fact that she was in a small room, was she not slamming away at the instrument as though she were on the stage? He was being carried away by his own mountain emotionalism. Komako purposely read the words in a monotone, now slowing down and now jumping over a passage that was too much trouble; but gradually she seemed to fall into a spell. As her voice rose higher, Shimamura began to feel a little
frightened. How far would that strong, sure touch take him? He rolled over and pillowed his head on an arm, as if in bored indifference.

The end of the song released him. Ah, this woman is in love with me—but he was annoyed with himself for the thought.

Komako looked up at the clear sky over the snow. “The tone is different on a day like this.” The tone had been as rich and vibrant as her remark suggested. The air was different. There were no theater walls, there was no audience, there was none of the city dust. The notes went out crystalline into the clean winter morning, to sound on the far, snowy peaks.

Practicing alone, not aware herself of what was happening, perhaps, but with all the wideness of nature in this mountain valley for her companion, she had come quite as a part of nature to take on this special power. Her very loneliness beat down sorrow and fostered a wild strength of will. There was no doubt that it had been a great victory of the will, even granted that she had had an amount of preparatory training, for her to learn complicated airs from only a score, and presently go through them from memory.

To Shimamura it was wasted effort, this way of living. He sensed in it too a longing that called out to him for sympathy. But the life and way of living
no doubt flowed thus grandly from the samisen with a new worth for Komako herself.

Shimamura, untrained in the niceties of samisen technique and conscious only of the emotion in the tone, was perhaps an ideal audience for Komako.

By the time she had begun her third song—the voluptuous softness of the music itself may have been responsible—the chill and the goose flesh had disappeared, and Shimamura, relaxed and warm, was gazing into Komako’s face. A feeling of intense physical nearness came over him.

The high, thin nose was usually a little lonely, a little sad, but today, with the healthy, vital flush on her cheeks, it was rather whispering: I am here too. The smooth lips seemed to reflect back a dancing light even when they were drawn into a tight bud; and when for a moment they were stretched wide, as the singing demanded, they were quick to contract again into that engaging little bud. Their charm was exactly like the charm of her body itself. Her eyes, moist and shining, made her look like a very young girl. She wore no powder, and the polish of the city geisha had over it a layer of mountain color. Her skin, suggesting the newness of a freshly peeled onion or perhaps a lily bulb, was flushed faintly, even to the throat. More than anything, it was clean.

Seated rigidly upright, she seemed more demure and maidenly than usual.

This time using a score, she sang a song she had not yet finished memorizing. At the end she silently pushed the plectrum under the strings and let herself fall into an easier posture.

Her manner quickly took on a touch of the seductive and alluring.

Shimamura could think of nothing to say. Komako did not seem to care particularly what he thought of her playing, however. She was quite unaffectedly pleased with herself.

“Can you always tell which geisha it is from the tone of the samisen?”

“That’s easy. There aren’t twenty of us all together. It depends a little on the style, though. The individual comes out more in some styles than in others.”

She took up the samisen again and shifted her weight so that her feet were a little to one side and the instrument rested on the calf of one leg.

“This is the way you hold it when you’re small.” She leaned toward the samisen as though it were too large for her. “Da-a-ark hair.…” Her voice was deliberately childish and she picked out the notes uncertainly.

“ ‘Dark Hair’ was the first one you learned?”

“Uh-uh.” She shook her head girlishly, as no
doubt she did in the days when she was still too small to hold the samisen properly.

Komako no longer tried to leave before daybreak when she stayed the night.

“Komako,” the two-year-old daughter of the innkeeper would call from far down the hall, her voice rising in the mountain-country lilt. The two of them would play happily in the
kotatsu
until nearly noon, when they would go for a bath.

Back from the bath, Komako was combing her hair. “Whenever the child sees a geisha, she calls out ‘Komako’ in that funny accent, and when she sees a picture of someone with her hair done in the old way, that’s ‘Komako’ too. Children can tell when you like them. Come, Kimi. Let’s go play at Komako’s.” She stood up to leave, then sat down lazily on the veranda. “Eager people from Tokyo already out skiing.”

The room looked from high ground directly south over the ski runs at the base of the mountain.

Shimamura glanced up from the
kotatsu
. There were patches of snow on the mountain, and five or six figures in black ski clothes were moving about in the terraced fields. It seemed a trifle silly. The slope was a gentle one, and the walls
between the fields were not yet covered with snow.

“They look like students. Is today Sunday? Do you suppose that’s fun?”

“They’re good, though,” Komako said, as if to herself. “Guests are always surprised when a geisha says hello to them on the ski grounds. They don’t recognize her for the snow-burn. At night the powder hides it.”

“You wear ski clothes?”

She wore “mountain trousers,” she said. “But what a nuisance the ski season is. It’s all coming again. You see them in the evening at the inn, and they say they’ll see you again the next day skiing. Maybe I should give up skiing this year. Good-by. Come along, Kimi. We’ll have snow this evening. It’s always cold the night before it snows.”

Shimamura went out to the veranda. Komako was leading Kimi down the steep road below the ski grounds.

The sky was clouding over. Mountains still in the sunlight stood out against shadowed mountains. The play of light and shade changed from moment to moment, sketching a chilly landscape. Presently the ski grounds too were in shadow. Below the window Shimamura could see little needles of frost like ising-glass among the withered chrysanthemums, though water was still dripping from the snow on the roof.