Snow Country Read Free Page B

and since most of the local geisha were at an age when they preferred not to have to dance, the services of the girl were much valued. She almost never came alone to entertain a guest at the inn, and yet she could not exactly be called an amateur—such in general was the maid’s story.
    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
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† 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. Presentlyshe 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