Geisha in Rivalry

by Kafū Nagai

  "It's certainly a nice quiet place. By the way, Segawa-san, there's something I've really been wanting to ask you for a long time. After all, you do intend to keep the villa as a country house, don't you?'"

  "Well, for the time being, I don't suppose there's anything we can do but leave it as it is, We don't have any prospective buyers just now. Besides, my mother says it would be awful to sell it carelessly or let ourselves be tricked by a scheming real-estate broker."

  "I should say so. Better leave it as it is for the present. If you do decide to sell it later on, you can always get a good price for it. It would be better in the long run to leave it as it is until you find a buyer who really takes a fancy to it and is willing to pay anything you ask. If it falls into the hands of the real-estate brokers, they won't consider anything but how much they can get for the land. To them a villa is just the same as a dilapidated old house. Nothing has any value for them, But in the eyes of a connoisseur everything has an artistic value—the fixtures, the pillar of the tokonoma, even the paper on the sliding doors. That's why I say by all means leave it as it is for the present. Its value will only increase as the years go by."

  "Sensei, if it isn't too much to ask, I'd really like to have you take care of it. In fact, my mother has told me several times that if I should happen to meet you at the theater or anywhere else, I should ask you to do this out of friendship for us. But I unintentionally forgot."

  "Really? Why, in that case please leave it in my hands. You can be sure that I won't mishandle it."

  Nanso had already forgotten all about the problem of Komayo and her affairs. Now he eagerly launched into a dissertation on the beauty of such things as the brushwood gate and the pine tree beside the pond in the garden.

  Segawa had intended to leave Nanso's house before dark and go home to Tsukiji for a good night's rest before beginning his engagement at the Shintomiza the next day. But there was so much to talk about after such a long time that he inadvertently stayed on. Surprised to discover that the Indian summer day was drawing to a close, he was on the point of leaving when the evening meal was announced. This made it impossible for him to leave immediately, and after the meal was over he stayed for a short while to continue the cozy chat of the afternoon. It was past eight o'clock when he finally emerged from the side gate of Nanso's bamboo-shaded house.

  The street was completely dark, and a cold wind was blowing. The moon hung over the woods of Ueno, and there was an almost unspeakable sadness in the sound of the passing trains and their lonely whistles. Until he stepped out of the doorway of Nanso's house, Segawa had been thinking that since it was really too far to go home to Tsukiji tonight, it might be more interesting to spend the night alone in the empty villa. Now, however, he suddenly changed his mind and hurried almost breathlessly toward the streetcar line. While he waited for the streetcar from Minowa, he found himself wondering how anyone could live in such a pitch-dark out-of-the-way place as this. It was one thing for literary people like Nanso or perhaps painters and people of that type to live here, but he couldn't help thinking that his father Kikujo was an eccentric man indeed to have purposely moved out to such an inconvenient place just to spend his time practicing the tea ceremony and similar diversions. Without quite realizing it, Isshi began to make comparisons between his own temperament and acting techniques and those of his foster father Kikujo and between his own world and the utterly different world in which Kikujo had lived.

  As an actor who had been brought up in the Segawa family, Isshi still played female roles. For a while, however, when newspapers and magazines were full of arguments that women's roles in the Kabuki should be played by women and that the playing of such roles by men had only resulted from the ban on actresses during the Edo era and was therefore nothing more than a barbarous survival, he had for no good reason at all found it distasteful to be a female impersonator. This had led to repeated clashes with his traditionalist foster father and had even brought him to the point of thinking that he had better give up the acting profession altogether. He had also thought he might like to try joining a modern theatrical troupe or perhaps even to go abroad. In a word, however, all of these had been transient ambitions with no foundation—nothing more than caprices inspired by the newspapers. So, when the public controversy about the theater died down, Isshi instantly and quite unconsciously forgot about all such ideas. After all, he was an actor who had learned from childhood to play female roles. Every month, as new programs were scheduled, he was busy with engagements here and there. With no particular exertion on his own part, he had accumulated enough years of experience on the stage to be treated by the public as a competent actor. Moreover, just at the time when he too was arriving at this opinion of himself, the popular but fleeting mania for actresses finally declined, and one now began to hear frequent arguments to the effect that, after all, women's roles in the Kabuki should be played by men. It took no more than this to give Isshi new encouragement, and once again, quite suddenly, he reversed his thinking, so that he now gave more importance to his playing of women's roles than it actually deserved. This naturally made him dissatisfied with the parts assigned to him and gradually led to his making difficulties for the theater officials.

  "Well, if it isn't Segawa-san! Where have you come from?"

  As he boarded the streetcar, Isshi was greeted by a man sitting near the door, a Bohemian-looking person of about thirty or so who wore glasses and was dressed in Japanese-style hakama trousers. He lifted his brown velour hat slightly as he spoke.

  "Why, it's Yamai-san. Are you on your way back from the Yoshiwara?" Segawa laughed as he sat down in the empty seat next to Yamai.

  Yamai also laughed. "If it looks that way, that's just fine.... Tomorrow's opening day at the Shintomi, isn't it?"

  "Yes. I hope you'll come around."

  "I'm planning to." As he said this, Yamai extracted a magazine from among the four or five that he was carrying in the sleeve of his inverness. "I haven't sent you a copy yet, but this is the... you know, the magazine you were talking about that time." He pulled a notebook out of his coat and wrote down Segawa's address.

  Yamai was one of those so-called new artists on the literary scene, and thus he used no nom de plume. He was known only by his real name of Yamai Kaname. Originally he was no more than a high school graduate who had specialized in nothing at all. But he had a versatile temperament, and during the time since his high school days, while he was contributing both new-style and tanka poems to young people's magazines, he had imperceptibly acquired the jargon of philosophy and aesthetics, so that now he could chatter as glibly as any competent scholar about the problems of humanity and the arts.

  Soon after leaving high school, he and two or three of his friends had swindled the stupid son of a titled family into putting up the money for a new art magazine that he was editing. Then, one after another, he had published plays, novels, and the like, until within the short space of three or four years he had made himself into a fairly respectable literary artist. Yamai also had unlimited ambitions in the theatrical world. Capitalizing on his fame in the literary market place, he had assembled a group of actresses, turned himself into an actor, and given frequent performances of foreign plays in Japanese. Quite suddenly, however, the newspapers had exposed a scandal involving him and one of his actresses. This, coupled with his failure to pay not only the owner of the theater but also the wigmaker, the costume designer, the stage carpenters, and all the others, had made him an unwelcome guest in such society, and since the theatrical world would have nothing more to do with him, he naturally gave up and returned to his former specialty of literature.

  Even though he was now past thirty, Yamai still lived like a twenty-year-old student. He had no home and no wife, and he went around sponging on one boardinghouse after another. He was that kind of artist, and for this reason, while bystanders might ask themselves what would become of him in the future, he himself tossed such thoughts aside with complete indifference. It wasn't onl
y boardinghouses that Yamai cheated. When he received advances from publishers for books that he had not yet written, he either left the books unwritten or, if he did write one and get it published, in the meantime he took the manuscript to another publisher and sold it all over again. From time to time, in order to add to the length of a manuscript that he was selling, he even inserted pages from the writings of his friends and then disposed of the whole manuscript as his own. This misuse of friendship was naturally made without a single word of apology. He cheated foreign-style restaurants; he cheated tobacco shops; he cheated tailors. From Shimbashi, Akasaka, Yo-shicho, and Yanagibashi as far as the Yamanote district, he cheated the machiai to the limit of his ability. Because of this, whenever the geisha and the teahouse maids that he had once swindled caught sight of him among the audience at the theater or at some such gathering, they didn't dare to ask him to pay his debts. Fearful that if they spoke to him they would be cajoled into letting him cheat them again, they did their best to keep away from him. Nobody knew who had invented the nickname, but behind his back people spoke of Yamai as Izumo Toshu-san. This parody of an actor's name was a play upon the words "he always cheats everybody."

  But if the world sometimes appears small, it is still broad. And if it appears to be heartless, it still shows touches of great magnanimity. Even among actors and geisha there were some who had not yet discovered that Yamai was a particularly untrustworthy and dangerous person. There were also a few painters and writers who, even though they had been cheated once or twice, took it without resentment. Thinking that it really couldn't be helped, they pitied Yamai all the more. Then again there were those who, knowing everything about him and remaining secretly alert, were moved purely by curiosity to cultivate the acquaintance of a low-grade character like Yamai. They found it exciting to listen to his dirty stories—always, of course, with the piquant feeling that they couldn't possibly tell such stories themselves. For such reasons as these, there were still people who more or less toadied to him and bought him drinks. One of these people was Segawa Isshi.

  No sooner had he set eyes on Yamai than he was forced to buy a copy of the magazine Venus with a picture of a naked woman on the cover. Chuckling over this, Isshi asked: "Yamai-san, there haven't been any interesting films at all lately, have there?" By interesting, Isshi meant erotic. "Don't they have any more private showings of films the way they used to do? I mean for membership clubs."

  "Of course they do. Only this time I'm not the manager." As if he had suddenly thought of something, Yamai looked at Segawa's face. "You probably know the son of the Obanaya house in Shimbashi. He's the manager."

  "The son of the Obanaya house?... No, I don't know him. If you mean Ichikawa Raishichi, the one that died a few years ago, I knew him. Is there another son besides him?"

  "It's Raishichi's younger brother. He's the real son of the Obanaya. For some time, though, it seems that his father has practically disowned him. He's still young— maybe twenty-two or twenty-three—but when it comes to vice, he's a real genius. People like me can't hold a candle to him."

  And with this, Yamai began a long and detailed account of old Gozan's second son.

  ASAKUSA

  THE PLACE where Yamai Kaname had become acquainted with the son of the Obanaya was a sake bar in Sen-zoku-machi, Asakusa. After a party or an evening at the theater or even after he had visited someone on serious business, if the hour seemed to have grown a bit late it was a matter of course with Yamai that he could on no account return directly to his boardinghouse. Instead, he went for aimless rambles here and there in the gay quarters. But when he found himself politely turned away from the machiai because of previous debts still unpaid, or when he fruitlessly turned his pockets inside out to find the jinrikisha fare to the Yoshiwara or to Susaki—at such times, drunk as he was, he made no bones at all about spending the night in the most miserable of brothels. On awakening, he sometimes suffered remorse for having disgraced himself in this way, but his body, after years of exhausting the possibilities of dissolute living, was utterly beyond the control of his will power. As for his successive emotions toward this defect, Yamai put them down in tanka poems, giving them such newfangled labels as "the sadness of the flesh" and "the bitterness of kisses" and publishing them without any embarrassment whatever in his so-called True Revelation of My Life. To his great good fortune, these confessions were welcomed with open arms in literary circles where novelty was relentlessly pursued, and featherbrained critics proclaimed that the genuine new poet of the new epoch was Yamai Kaname. In fact, he was even dubbed as beyond doubt the Ver-laine of Japan, and he himself, when he had become drunk and somewhat expansive, was inclined to think that this must be true. At length, because of artistic aspirations like these, Yamai forcibly undertook to plunge himself into the midst of decadent passions. Since his scholarship was of the sort that had barely enabled him to finish middle school, his knowledge of foreign languages was extremely questionable, but in his own mind at least—and this was neither a lie nor a pose—he had gradually come to believe that he was something like an Occidental writer. He had already contracted syphilis several years before, and at the time when the first and second lesions had appeared, he learned from some book or other that the famous French author Maupassant had become insane from the same disease. At the thought of this, even in his profound fear and shame at having become a victim of this foul ailment, he could not suppress the excitement of the fierce artistic fervor that it inspired in him. The product of this elation was an assortment of several scores of tanka to which he gave the title of Iodoform. This, too, achieved a high reputation among the literati, and Yamai, for once not cheating his creditors, used the income from it to pay for his treatment at the hospital.

  In Asakusa Park, behind the Hanayashiki amusement establishment and on the edge of a stinking drainage ditch, there was a sake bar whose lantern carried the name of Tsurubishi. Occasionally when Yamai was unable to pay for a geisha at a machiai, or when he was too listless for an expedition to the Yoshiwara or to Susaki, he came to spend the night at this bar. The woman who ran it—a person of twenty-four or twenty-five—was named Osai. For someone who followed such a mean occupation, she had a remarkably good complexion and attractive hair. She was a tall woman with large bright eyes and thick eyebrows shaped like distant mountains. These features somehow compensated for the defects of her low nose, her weak mouth, and her flat face—to the extent that they made people look at her a second time.

  One morning when Yamai came sauntering up to Osai's place on his way home from the Yoshiwara, he found her grilling dried horse mackerel over an oblong brazier and having a drink with a young man who sat opposite her at a low serving table. Osai was negligently dressed in her sleeping kimono, which she had tied up with a narrow obi. The young man, who was perhaps twenty-two on twenty-three, was a good-looking fellow with a pale complexion. He wore a padded kimono of some common silk stuff in a brown-checkered pattern. `When she saw Yamai, Osai came clattering up on her geta to embrace him.

  "You bad danna," she said. "What do you mean, staying away for such a long time? Come on and sit down. It's all right. I'll pour you a drink." She all but pushed him down to sit across from her at the low table, and when he looked, he saw that the young man had already vanished without a trace.

  Some time later, having managed to scrape together enough copper and silver coins to make up one yen, Yamai gave this to the woman. Then, as if escaping from something, he went furtively out into the street. Outside, where the sun shone and a breeze was blowing, he experienced a complete change of feeling. As though filling his belly had made him forget the hunger of a little while ago, he walked under the trees in the park with an air of absolute composure, his cane under his arm. Presently he stopped and, smoking a cigarette, stood regarding the architecture of the Kannon Temple that soared before him. His manner was altogether like that of an artist, but this was by no means a deliberate pose or anything else of the sort. Yamai was completely serious
. Not long ago he had read in some magazine or other a review of The Cathedral, the novel in which Blasco Ibdnez—he who was called the Zola of Spain—made the cathedral of Toledo a central point for his depiction of the life of the people who lived around it. This had immediately given him the idea of transferring the scene to the Asakusa Kannon Temple and writing a long novel to be published as a serial. Yamai was always getting ideas from the articles in various magazines that introduced him to Occidental literature, and he had a nimble talent for turning these to his own account. But he had never once read any of the original works. In a word, he lacked the learning to do so, and this was the reason for his good fortune: the reason why he escaped the charge of plagiarism and why he felt no need to restrict his own flights of imagination out of deference to the original work.

  While he was standing there dreamily staring at the Kannon Temple and about to finish his cigarette, he suddenly heard someone call him from behind.

  "Yamai-sensei."

  Surprised at being addressed, he turned around. When he saw the face of the speaker, he was all the more astonished, and at that moment he was struck with a kind of unpleasant fear. The man who had called to him was the pale-complexioned young man who only a little while ago had been sitting beside the oblong brazier at the Tsurubishi bar with Osai and having breakfast with her.

  "What do you want? Do you have some business with me?" As he said this, Yamai looked intently around him in all directions.

  "Sensei, it's really rude of me to have called to you so suddenly." The young man bowed repeatedly. "I am that... I mean I am the one that submitted the winning manuscript last year when you were judge." He named a magazine. "I have always been hoping for a chance to meet you."

  Looking somewhat relieved, Yamai sat down on a nearby bench. That this young man was no other than Takijiro, the son of the Obanaya, Yamai was soon to learn in detail from the young man himself.