Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

the distance.
    “Who would that be, I wonder.”
    “You can always tell which geisha it is by the tone?”
    “I can tell some of them. Some I can’t. You must not have to work. Feel how nice and soft you are.”
    “No stiff muscles on me.”
    “A little stiff here at the base of the neck. But you’re just right, not too fat and not too thin. And you don’t drink, do you?”
    “You can tell that?”
    “I have three other customers with physiques exactly like yours.”
    “A common sort of physique.”
    “But when you don’t drink, you don’t know what it is really to enjoy yourself—to forget everything that happens.”
    “Your husband drinks, does he?”
    “Much too much.”
    “But whoever it is, she’s not much of a musician.”
    “Very poor indeed.”
    “Do you play yourself?”
    “I did when I was young. From the time I waseight till I was nineteen. I haven’t played in fifteen years now. Not since I was married.”
    Did all blind people look younger than they were? Shimamura wondered.
    “But if you learn when you’re young, you never forget.”
    “My hands have changed from doing this sort of work, but my ear is still good. It makes me very impatient to hear them playing. But then I suppose I felt impatient at my own playing when I was young.” She listened for a time. “Fumi at the Izutsuya, maybe. The best ones and the worst are the easiest to tell.”
    “There are good ones?”
    “Komako is very good. She’s young, but she’s improved a great deal lately.”
    “Really?”
    “You know her, don’t you? I say she’s good, but you have to remember that our standards here in the mountains are not very high.”
    “I don’t really know her. I was on the train with the music teacher’s son last night, though.”
    “He’s well again?”
    “Apparently not.”
    “Oh? He’s been sick for a long time in Tokyo, and they say it was to help pay the doctors’ bills that Komako became a geisha last summer. I wonder if it did any good.”
    “Komako, you say?”
    “They were only engaged. But I suppose you feel better afterwards if you’ve done everything you can.”
    “She was engaged to him?”
    “So they say. I don’t really know, but that’s the rumor.”
    It was almost too ordinary a thing to hear gossip about geisha from the hot-spring masseuse, and that fact had the perverse effect of making the news the more startling; and Komako’s having become a geisha to help her fiancé was so ordinary a bit of melodrama that he found himself almost refusing to accept it. Perhaps certain moral considerations—questions of the propriety of selling oneself as a geisha—helped the refusal.
    Shimamura was beginning to think he would like to go deeper into the story, but the masseuse was silent.
    If Komako was the man’s fiancée, and Yoko was his new lover, and the man was going to die—the expression “wasted effort” again came into Shimamura’s mind. For Komako thus to guard her promise to the end, for her even to sell herself to pay doctors’ bills—what was it if not wasted effort?
    He would accost her with this fact, he would drive it home, when he saw her again, he said to himself; and yet her existence seemed to have becomepurer and cleaner for this new bit of knowledge.
    Aware of a shameful danger lurking in his numbed sense of the false and empty, he lay concentrating on it, trying to feel it, for some time after the masseuse left. He was chilled to the pit of his stomach—but someone had left the windows wide open.
    The color of evening had already fallen on the mountain valley, early buried in shadows. Out of the dusk the distant mountains, still reflecting the light of the evening sun, seemed to have come much nearer.
    Presently, as the mountain chasms were far and near, high and low, the shadows in them began to deepen, and the sky was red over the snowy mountains, bathed now in but a wan light.
    Cedar groves stood out darkly by the river bank, at the ski ground, around