Is it possible for one to love a person they cannot accept as an equal?
Introduction by translator
If the hot-spring geisha is not a social outcast, she is perilously near being one. The city geisha may become a celebrated musician or dancer, a political intriguer, even a dispenser of patronage. The hot-spring geisha must go on entertaining week-end guests, and the pretense that she is an artist and not a prostitute is often a thin one indeed. It is true that she sometimes marries an old guest, or persuades him to open a restaurant for her; but the possibility that she will drift from one hot spring to another, more unwanted with each change, makes her a particularly poignant symbol of wasted, decaying beauty.
Part One
“An affair of the moment, no more. Nothing beautiful about it. You know that—it couldn’t last.”
“I understand that well enough.” She smiled, her voice falling, and a touch of the geisha’s playfulness came out. “I’d like that much better. It lasts longer if you’re just friends.”
“It’s always fun to read an old diary. But I don’t hide anything when I write in my diary, and sometimes I’m ashamed to look at it myself.”
The sky was still the color of night, but in the mountains it was already morning.
“I’ll come if you’ll let me read your diary.”
“I’m going to burn my diary before I die.”
“But when you don’t drink, you don’t know what it is really to enjoy yourself—to forget everything that happens.”
Part Two
Now that he knew Yoko was in the house, he felt strangely reluctant to call Komako. He was conscious of an emptiness that made him see Komako’s life as beautiful but wasted, even though he himself was the object of her love; and yet the woman’s existence, her straining to live, came touching him like naked skin. He pitied her, and he pitied himself.
He had stayed so long that one might wonder whether he had forgotten his wife and children. He stayed not because he could not leave Komako nor because he did not want to. He had simply fallen into the habit of waiting for those frequent visits. And the more continuous the assault became, the more he began to wonder what was lacking in him, what kept him from living as completely. He stood gazing at his own coldness, so to speak. He could not understand how she had so lost herself. All of Komako came to him, but it seemed that nothing went out from him to her. He heard in his chest, like snow piling up, the sound of Komako, an echo beating against empty walls. And he knew that he could not go on pampering himself forever.