Read Online Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata - Free Book Online

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 ordinaryamateur—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 littlefrightened. 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