夫婦善哉 English

All year round, debt collectors came and went.

Not only at the turn of the season, of course, but nearly every single day — the soy sauce dealer, the oil dealer, the greengrocer, the sardine seller, the dried-goods dealer, the charcoal dealer, the rice dealer, the landlord, and the rest, every one of them pressing his demands without mercy.

At the mouth of the alley, Tanekichi, who fried and sold penny tempura — burdock root, lotus root, sweet potato, mitsuba, konnyaku, red pickled ginger, dried squid, sardines, and the like — would duck his head the moment he spotted a debt collector and suddenly pretend to be kneading udon flour.

The neighborhood children, too, would say, "Hey, mister, hurry up and fry the gonbo already, will ya?"

unable to wait even a moment, and he'd call back, "Right y'are — fryin' 'em up right now!"

but for all that he only went on scraping away at the bottom of the mortar bowl, so lost in the motion that he never even noticed his nose running.

Since there was no doing business with Tanekichi, the collectors would pass him by and go on down the alley to deal with his wife instead. His wife, Otatsu, was quite unlike her husband — she watched the collectors' every move with a sharp eye.

If, carried away by the force of his demands, a collector so much as rapped his knuckles on the wooden floor he sat on, Otatsu would fire back at once, "Rappin' on another body's floorboards like that — you call that decent, mister?"

her face changing color as she said it.

"That there's where the house god lives, that is."

It was meant as an act, but she'd still get so worked up that her voice cracked with something near to tears, and the collector, startled, would protest, "Don't talk foolish — I never laid a hand on the thing!"

and turn defiant himself, and after two or three rounds of wrangling back and forth, Otatsu would end up losing the argument and, unable to send the man off empty-handed, have to hand over fifty sen or a yen as though it were being cut from her own flesh.

Still, there was one time — just the once — when a collector, caught in the act the instant he struck the floor, was left so utterly without excuse that he dropped into a deep bow of apology on the spot and fled in a fluster; and it was always her daughter Choko who ended up hearing Otatsu grumble about it afterward.

Choko found her mother's behavior both shameful and pitiable.

It made her feel a twinge of regret, too, for all the times she had tricked her mother out of spending money, or filched coins from the tempura cash box.

Tanekichi's tempura sold on its flavor and had quite a reputation, but it seemed to be costing him money all the same.

Whether lotus root or konnyaku, the slices were cut thick, and even to Otatsu's eye it looked like it couldn't possibly pay, but Tanekichi would work it out on his abacus and say, "Seven rin's worth of stock sold for a sen — there's no way that comes out a loss."

Tanekichi's argument — that no money ever stayed in the house because the day's takings kept getting swallowed up by old debts — was reasonable enough, but even twelve-year-old Choko could tell that her father's abacus never accounted for the cost of the charcoal or the soy sauce.

Tempura alone wasn't enough to live on, so whenever there was a funeral in the neighborhood, he hired himself out as a palanquin bearer.

At the summer festival of the local guardian shrine, he'd put on a swimsuit and carry the great shrine lantern through the streets, earning ninety sen a day for it.

Putting on a suit of armor brought in thirty sen more.

When Tanekichi was away, Otatsu did the frying.

Otatsu economized on the ingredients to her heart's content, so that when Tanekichi passed by and caught sight of the stall on festival days, he felt so ashamed that sweat ran down under his armor.

They were so thoroughly poor that as soon as Choko finished primary school, they hastily sent her out into service as a maid.

There was talk, as it happened, of a remarkably good offer from the master of the timber shop in Gataro Yokocho, and the color rose unexpectedly in Otatsu's face at the thought — but her father could read the man's real intention, which was to make Choko his mistress down the line, and he wouldn't hear of it, sending her instead to work as a maid, on absurdly poor terms, at a secondhand-clothes shop in Nihonbashi Sanchome.

Gataro Yokocho — Kappa Alley — was said to have once been home to a kappa, a water goblin, and the land there, shunned and going for next to nothing, had been bought up by the timber dealer's late father, who built rental houses on it; now, charging harsh, high rents, the family had made its money, and people whispered behind their backs that the real kappa was the timber dealer himself — meaning, it seemed, not only that, but that he kept several mistresses and drained the young blood out of them too.

Choko was fast growing into womanhood, her features settling into a neat, compact prettiness, and the timber dealer's eye for such things had proved sharp indeed.

She endured more than half a year at the secondhand-clothes shop in Nihonbashi.

One winter morning, Tanekichi, taking a roundabout way to the Kuromon Market to buy his stock, happened to pass by the secondhand-clothes shop and saw Choko sweeping the front of it, her hands so chapped and cracked that blood was oozing out; he went straight in, argued the matter out, and brought her home.

Then, at their request, he sent her off to a teahouse in Sonezaki Shinchi to become an ochobo — a geisha girl still in training.

Fifty yen came into Tanekichi's hands, and it vanished before his eyes into paying off debts, but that was the one and only time he ever received a lump sum like it, before or since.

He had never had the least notion of living easy off her, and so when he heard, at seventeen, that Choko meant to become a full geisha, the father was thrown suddenly into a panic.

For her debut he could hardly go around handing out tempura, and the gift money, the costumes, the tips — it all added up to a tremendous expense; it was well enough for the geisha house to swallow the cost and pay it out for her, but that would only come as an advance against her earnings, which meant, in effect, tying Choko down, and so he objected.

But in the end, when Choko — her naturally lighthearted temperament having taken the color of the world around her — wheedled and insisted she absolutely had to become a geisha, he gave in, and scraped the money together with considerable effort.

So the old saying that a hard trade is all borne for one's parents' sake didn't really apply to Choko.

When some tactless customer asked her, "There must be some real reason you became a geisha — just what is it your father does, anyway...," Choko, given where she came from and the kind of person she was, could never bring herself to spin some pitiful tale about a father who was a gambler, or who'd been swindled out of the family fields; and yet neither could she tell the truth — that she had wept and carried on, crying that no father who wouldn't let her become a geisha could be anything but heartless, until it very nearly ended in her being disowned.

"My old man's as handsome as you are, mister."

she'd say, dodging the question in the worst possible taste — and yet somehow it only made her the more charming.——

Choko was proud of her voice, and no matter what party she was at, she'd throw everything into belting it out, veins standing out on her throat and forehead, singing in a manner so unrestrained the paper on the sliding doors seemed to tremble; she was a girl no lively party could do without, and it was on that account that she made her name as a hassai — a tomboy.——

And yet there was one person, just the one — the son of a cut-rate cosmetics wholesaler, a regular of hers — to whom she told the whole truth.

His name was Koreyasu Ryukichi, a man of thirty-one who already had a wife and a child now four years old — yet within three months of meeting Choko he was already carrying on with her like this; word got around, and once she made her debut as a full geisha, he cost her the patron who was to have taken her on.

In place of his father, who lay bedridden with palsy, Ryukichi ran the family business — a wholesale supplier of soap, cream, hair oil, pomade, face lotion, dandruff remedies, and the like, sold to barbershops — and once Choko learned this, even when she went to have her face shaved at some barbershop, she found herself noticing the brand marks on the cosmetics the shop used.

One day, passing by Ryukichi's shop on Umeda Shinmichi, she saw him in a thick cotton jacket, overseeing an apprentice as they packed goods for shipment out to the country.

He'd take the brush he kept tucked behind his ear and send it flying briskly across the ledger, then hold it in his teeth while he clicked away at the abacus — and the sight of him looked thoroughly capable, every bit the businessman.

When their eyes chanced to meet, Choko went crimson to the roots of her ears, but Ryukichi kept a face of perfect indifference, only sneaking the odd sidelong glance.

Somehow that made him seem all the more the steady, conscientious type.

Ryukichi had a slight stammer, and when he spoke he'd tip his face upward and work his mouth a little before the words came — and that habit of his had always struck Choko as the look of a man deep in thought.

Choko took Ryukichi for a solid, dependable man, and went around saying so to everyone — which was why people gossiped that if the affair was one-sided, with her the one who'd lost her head over him, she'd have no grounds to complain of it.

People had, in fact, sized up Ryukichi's face correctly enough already, from the way he'd get drunk and moan out the sad passages of joruri in that maudlin voice of his.

He was fond of the two-sen dote-yaki sold at the night stalls — pork skin simmered down in miso — so much so that people had taken to calling him Dote-yaki-san.

When it came to good food, Ryukichi had an unfailing eye for it — off to "places that serve real food,"

he'd often take Choko.

According to him, there wasn't a place in Kita worth eating at — say what you like, real food meant going south, and even then none of the first-class places would do; it sounds crude of him to put it this way, but that's just throwing your money away, and if you really wanted to eat something good, "come along behind me sometime and..."

go — and once she went, it was of course never into a first-class establishment, but at best the boiled-tofu shop in Kozu, at worst the night-stall dote-yaki and kasu manju, or, beside the Sogo department store on Ebisubashi-suji, "Shiruichi,"

for its loach soup and whale-skin soup; at "Izumoya," on the east end of Aioibashi in Dotonbori,

for its eel; at "Takoume" in Nihonbashi,

for its octopus; at "Shoben Tango-tei" in the precincts of Hozenji,

for its kanto-daki; at "Sushisute," beside the Tokiwaza theater in Sennichimae,

for its tekka-maki and sea bream skin in vinegared miso; and, just across from it, at "Darumaya,"

for its seasoned rice and lees soup, and the like — every one of them cheap and, in a word, low-class cooking.

None of them were the kind of place a man ought to take a geisha to, so at first Choko thought, of all places, why here — but then, listening to him go on, "W-w-w-well, ain't it good, y-y-you won't find anythin' this good anywhere else, no matter where you go,"

and eating while he ran on like that, it really was good, she had to admit.

She'd get her white tabi trodden on roughly in the crush and let out a little shriek, and even that somehow only sharpened her appetite; going around eating this low-class food together became, in its own small way, a real pleasure.

Even squeezing herself into a seat among the crowded customers wasn't quite enough to damage the standing of a top geisha of Kita Shinchi.

After all, cheap as the food he kept feeding her was, he'd spent generously enough on her — obi, kimono, nagajuban, obijime, koshisage, zori — that she had no real grounds to call him stingy.

She wasn't sure at first what to make of the cream and dandruff remedy, but she took to using those in secret too.

And besides, her own father was, even now, struggling along selling penny tempura.

Something in it felt like a young lord slumming it in disguise, and something else called up, quietly, the memory of her father's oil-stained hands — and trailing along after Ryukichi from place to place, she gradually found herself falling for him in earnest.

Of the five Izumoya branches — two in Shinsekai, one in Sennichimae, one across from the Naka-za in Dotonbori, and one at the east end of Aioibashi — it was the one at Aioibashi east that did the best eel, the broth soaked deep into the rice so rich that "say what you like, the sake's really worked its way in there";

she'd eat it puffing at her lips to cool it, and once their stomachs were pleasantly full together, they'd go off to "Kagetsu" in Hozenji

to hear Harudanji's rakugo, laughing themselves silly, their clasped hands growing damp with sweat.

The affair deepened, and Ryukichi's visits grew ever more frequent.

There were trips out of town together too, and before long Choko could tell that Ryukichi was running short of money.

When his father had first taken to his bed with the palsy, he had not forgotten to hide the bankbook and the personal seal under his own futon, so that Ryukichi had no way of getting at them.

In the end, the money he could freely lay hands on amounted to little — only what he scraped together making the rounds collecting from the barbershops that were his customers — and he had to juggle it so carefully that his unpaid debts mounted up before his eyes, until his face had gone pale with it.

It was to a Ryukichi in such straits that Choko sent, as a gift, a pair of men's zori.

The letter that came with them said that it had been a long while since he'd come to see her, and she was worried.

and that everyone wished to lick tongues together....

"I want to talk with you once" (rendered, in her rough hand, as something closer to "lick tongues together") was how only Ryukichi could make sense of the letter — but somehow it found its way, before long, to the sickbed of his father, who had long since given up on the repeated lectures he'd deliver, calling his son to his pillow, as having any effect at all; this time, though, even he lost his temper, tears rising in his eyes at the sheer regret of no longer having the free use of his body to strike the boy, to beat him.

His young wife, deliberately drawing their five-year-old daughter onto her lap, sat with her face turned upward.

She had already made up her mind to go back to her parents' house, and seemed only barely able to hold back a cry.

Head bowed, Ryukichi muttered to himself that she was a meddling thing, always pushing in — but even so he couldn't quite take her feelings badly.

The zori had clearly cost her more than she could afford; they bore the mark of "Tengu" on Ebisubashi,

and the thongs were snakeskin.

"Don't you go thinking even the ashes under the pot are yours now — I'm cutting you off, disowning you outright..."

His father's stubbornness in pronouncing this sentence was the same stubbornness that had made even his late mother weep more than once, so that for the time being, leaving the house was the only way to settle things.

The moment he stepped outside, it occurred to Ryukichi that there was still money owed to him, uncollected, in Tokyo.

Working it out roughly, he found it came to four or five hundred yen, and the cloud over his heart lifted at once.

He went straight up to his usual teahouse, called for Choko, and said he had a proposal — why not run off together.

The next day, with Ryukichi waiting at Umeda Station, Choko came striding with long steps across the plaza in front of the station, blazing hot under the sun.

She had her hair done up in a megane style, which gave her a strangely raw, unguarded look, and something about it struck Ryukichi with a sudden distaste.

They boarded the train for Tokyo at once.

It was the end of August, and in the stifling, sweltering heat of the Tokyo streets they went dashing about; there were still two or three days left before the end of the month, but he begged and pleaded his way to collecting some three hundred yen anyway, and from there went straight on to Atami.

When Ryukichi talked of calling in a hot-spring geisha, Choko scolded him for it — it was only reasonable to say that, with their whole future together still to think of, this was no time to be so carefree — but Ryukichi, who all along intended to apologize and slip back home before long despite the disowning, only said, never mind, never mind.

He seemed to pay no mind at all to what was weighing on Choko — the fact that she had bolted from her okiya without a word to anyone.

When the geisha arrived, though, Choko threw herself into it, pulling out every trick of her trade until she had swept the whole room, and the local geisha said, "There's no matching the geisha of Osaka,"

which was some small comfort to her.

Two days passed like that, and then, around noon, there came a strange rumbling roar, and the next instant the ground was shaking violently.

"It's an earthquake!"

"An earthquake!"

They cried out at the same instant, and Choko did manage to grab hold of the sliding door, but her legs gave out under her all the same, and she sank down with a shriek.

Ryukichi clung to the wall on the opposite side and wouldn't let go, unable even to speak.

In that moment, both of them felt, for one flash of a second, the sheer regret of having run off together at all.

On the evacuation train they hardly said a word to each other.

When they finally reached Umeda Station, they went straight to Tanekichi's house in Kamishio-machi.

Along the way, extra editions about the Great Kanto Earthquake hung fresh and raw on the telegraph poles.

Tanekichi, frying tempura where the evening sun struck him full in the face, was so startled at the sight of the two of them that for a while he couldn't get a word out.

Down his sun-browned face fell tears, plainly distinct from sweat.

Standing there talking, they gradually learned that word of Choko's disappearance had reached him at once from the okiya, and that he had lain awake night after night with worry, wondering where on earth she was and how she was faring, whether some worthless man had led her astray and sold her off somewhere, whether she was even still alive.

Catching the words "worthless man," Choko, brushing that all aside for the moment, gestured at Ryukichi — who stood there snapping his fan open and shut — and said, "So what do you make this fella to me?"

— that was how she introduced him.

"Well now — welcome, welcome."

Tanekichi couldn't manage another word of greeting beyond that, and fidgeted so much he could hardly bring himself to look Ryukichi in the face.

The instant Otatsu saw her daughter's face, she pressed the sleeve of her yukata to her own.

Once she had finished crying, she at last set both hands on the floor and bowed, saying to Ryukichi, "This time our daughter has caused all sorts of..."

and went on, "Our younger boy Shinichi's in the fourth year at the ordinary school now, but he's not back from lessons yet today, so..."

and things of that sort.

With no way left to fill the silence, Ryukichi fell to talking, stammering, about the weather and the like.

Tanekichi went off to order shaved ice for them.

In the four-mat room, where silver flies buzzed about and not a breath of air moved, the heat pressed down thick enough to hum in the ears.

Tanekichi brought back shaved ice with strawberry syrup in a box he carried by hand, and the four of them sat in silence, slurping it down.

After a while, when Choko mentioned that they had been up to Tokyo, Tanekichi said, "That's terrible — Tokyo's had a huge earthquake!"

so startled that this, in the end, was what finally broke the ice and got the story going.

Hearing that they had barely escaped with their lives on the evacuation train, both parents were full of sympathy, saying over and over what an awful time they must have had.

That put the young pair, Ryukichi especially, greatly at ease.

"I don't know how to even begin apologizing,"

the words came out of him smoothly enough, and Tanekichi and Otatsu were thoroughly overwhelmed by his manners.

Once she had borrowed her mother's yukata and changed into it, Choko's mind was made up.

Having run off the way she had, she could hardly go crawling back to her okiya with a straight face; she would share the hardship with Ryukichi, who likewise could not show his face at home. "I'm quitting the geisha business,"

she said, and to that Tanekichi answered, "Do as you please, then,"

showing, in his way, a father's soft spot for his child.

Choko's advance debt came to a little under three hundred yen, and Tanekichi had already made up his mind to pay it off in monthly installments.

"I'll ask my old man for the money and pay it off myself,"

Ryukichi felt he couldn't very well stay silent and offered as much, but Tanekichi said, "I couldn't have you doing that, it'd put me in a bad spot,"

waving a hand as he said it.

"It'd go badly for me with your father, and I couldn't very well show my face to him afterward."

Ryukichi raised no particular objection to that.

Otatsu turned to Ryukichi and told him that Choko had never once caught cold in her life apart from the measles, that there wasn't a scratch to be found anywhere on her body if you searched, and that raising her to be that way had taken no end of trouble... and by the time she'd said this much, tears had started, so that Ryukichi felt his ears burning with the truth of it.

They lazed about for a couple of days in Tanekichi's cramped house, but before long they rented the upstairs room of a place down an alley inside the Kuromon Market and set up house together, free at last of anyone's watchful eye.

Downstairs lived a craftsman who made the wooden boxes used for boxed lunches and sushi, and the six-mat room upstairs, which had mostly served as storage for his box lumber, they rented for seven yen a month, paid in advance.

They were soon hard up for money to live on.

Since Ryukichi had no income to speak of, it naturally fell to Choko to earn their keep, and since she had no intention of going back into full-time service as a geisha, the only path left, as things were reckoned, was yatona work.

A middle-aged former geisha named Okin, who had once worked the Kita Shinchi district herself, now kept a house in Kozu and ran something like a yatona brokerage.

A yatona, in short, was a temporary hire — a skilled serving-woman sent out to banquets and weddings — and since she came far cheaper than a proper geisha's fee, the demand was heaviest from the stingier sort of banquet; Okin kept a network of several such former geisha on call, dispatched them out as needed, and skimmed her cut as go-between, which added up to a tidy profit — enough by now that she'd even had a telephone put in.

A single banquet, from evening on into the small hours, brought in six yen, of which the yatona's own share after Okin's cut was three yen fifty sen; for a wedding, though, there was a fee for serving as ceremony attendant on top of that, bringing it to six yen, and with tips mixed in it wasn't at all a bad income — so Okin told her — and Choko lost no time joining the ranks.

Carrying a small trunk with a shamisen packed inside, she'd take the streetcar to whatever address she'd been given, and the moment she arrived she'd be set to work carrying trays and warming sake.

Just pouring a round of drinks for thirty or forty guests with only three yatona to go around was hard enough work in itself, but what came after was far worse.

Playing to tactless guests bent on wringing every last bit of enjoyment out of their fixed banquet fee, she'd be made to play the shamisen and sing without a moment's rest, from accompanying naniwabushi chanting to backing up voice impressions, and just as she was worn ragged from all that, they'd have her dance the Yasugi-bushi on top of it.

Even so, being naturally fond of a lively time, she didn't much mind and threw herself into the work — only to have some guest say she was better than any geisha.

and that, somehow, still stung.

When one of her fellow yatona — a woman old enough, once you learned her real age, to give you a start — would suddenly, just before the party broke up, start putting on girlish airs in hopes of an extra tip, Choko couldn't dismiss it as none of her business, being a yatona herself.

Late at night she'd ride home on the red streetcar.

Getting off at Nihonbashi Itchome, with no one about but stray dogs and scavengers picking through the trash bins, she'd walk through the hush of the Kuromon Market, the raw smell of fish hanging in the air, and then, stepping into the alley, catch a sudden good smell drifting toward her.

It was the smell of sansho kombu simmering — the finest kelp, cut lavishly into pieces about five bu square, put into a pot with sansho peppercorns, doused generously with Kikkoman dark soy sauce, and simmered down slowly over two full days and nights on a low pine-charcoal fire; done that way, Ryukichi claimed, it came out just as good as the sansho kombu sold at "Oguraya" on Ebisubashi,

and, bored out of his mind, he had taken to making it himself since the day before.

The important thing was never to let the fire go out and to stir it now and then, and because of that he hadn't set foot outside all day — so that the one yen in pocket money he always spent without fail was, for once, sitting there entirely untouched.

At the sight of Choko, Ryukichi said, "Look at this — comin' along nice, ain't it,"

stirring the pot with a long pair of bamboo chopsticks as he spoke.

Choko felt, watching him like that, a faint, indefinable stirring of tenderness toward him, but old habit kept her from letting anything so sweet show on the outside, and instead, plopping herself down with her kimono skirt falling open over the knees of her nagajuban, she said, "What, still cookin' that? Takin' forever — what're you even doin'?"

— that was the sort of thing she'd say.

Ryukichi took to calling twenty-year-old Choko "obahan" — the old missus —

and the name stuck.

"Obahan, I'm short on pocket money,"

he'd say, and once he had three yen or so in hand, he'd spend the daytime killing time over a game of shogi, and at night head off to a cheap cafe near Futatsu Ido called "Onii-chan,"

where he'd take hold of some waitress's hand and murmur, "Won't you and I strike up a little something together?"

He carried on like that so much that Otatsu kept telling Tanekichi how sorry she felt for Choko, having to put up with it — but Tanekichi only said, "He's a rich man's boy, that's just how it is with his sort,"

and never had a word of blame for Ryukichi.

If anything, he'd say, "Him having to give up wife and child and live cooped up upstairs — well, say what you like, it's Choko's own fault, when it comes down to it,"

and sympathized with Ryukichi all the more for it.

Choko was glad, for Ryukichi's sake, to have a father like that, and felt it made all her hardship worth bearing.

"My old man's got his good points, don't he?"

Whether Ryukichi actually thought so or not, all he gave back was a listless "Yeah,"

his face giving no clue at all as to what was going on behind it.

That year drew on toward its close.

One day, with everyone caught up in that vaguely frantic mood of the year's end, Ryukichi announced he was going to fetch his New Year's crested kimono and the like, and set off for the house on Umeda Shinmichi.

Choko felt as though she'd been doused with cold water, but somehow the words "don't go" wouldn't come out of her mouth.

That night a banquet job came in, so she set off as usual with her trunk and shamisen in hand, but her heart was heavy.

She couldn't bring herself to take it lightly, as though it were nothing at all, this business of Ryukichi going back to his parents' house to fetch his crested kimono.

His wife was there, after all, and so was his child.

The tone of her shamisen had none of its usual brightness.

Even so, she sang, as always, in a voice loud enough to set the sliding-door paper trembling, and when the party finally broke up she ran home through the snowy streets to find that Ryukichi had come back.

Crouched half-upright before the hibachi, his face flushed with drink, all but burying it in the coals, he sat there so dejected that his lack of spirit was plain at a single glance.

Choko felt herself relax at once.——

The moment his father caught sight of Ryukichi, he was said to have bellowed from his sickbed, demanding to know what he'd come for.

His wife had already had her name struck from the family register and gone back to her own family, and his little girl was being looked after, in place of a mother, by Ryukichi's eighteen-year-old sister Fudeko — but he hadn't even been allowed to see the child.

On hearing that Ryukichi had set up house with Choko, his father, rather than growing angry, had only sneered at him, and was said to have said some fairly harsh things about Choko besides.——

"Him sayin' bad things about me — well, that's only natural, ain't it,"

Choko said quietly, taking it to heart.

But in her mind, she found herself silently murmuring toward Ryukichi's father — don't you worry, I'll make a proper man out of him myself, just you watch.

and telling herself the same thing: "I'm not out to sit myself down in his first wife's place — if I can just make something of Koreyasu, make a real man of him, that's all I'd ever ask."

Thinking it through like that brought on a kind of pleasure that stung her to tears.

Between that swell of resolve and the sheer relief of having Ryukichi back, she lay awake that whole night, too worked up to sleep, eyes shining as she stared up at the low ceiling.

For some time now, Choko had been keeping a household ledger stitched together out of scrap paper, jotting down the day's expenses — spinach, three sen; the bathhouse, three sen; tissue paper, four sen — pinching every corner of their household budget, denying herself anything beyond what Ryukichi's daily pocket money called for, and putting away roughly half her yatona earnings as savings; but after that business with the crested kimono, the care she took over her savings changed as well.

She grudged spending even a sen or two, and let her collar grow grimy with wear rather than replace it.

When Tanekichi came around asking to borrow money for stock, saying he wanted to lay in plenty ahead of the New Year rush, Choko told him, "I ain't got anything you could call money."

Otatsu came in Tanekichi's place and said, "Not even enough to send Koreyasu off to that cafe place of his, then?"

but Choko still wouldn't budge.

The new year came, and the pine decorations came down.

Once it was made unmistakably clear that he'd been disowned, Ryukichi's despondency was a genuinely pitiful thing to see.

There was, in it, something of a father's love as well.

Even when Choko urged him to, Ryukichi never felt any real drive to go and claim his daughter — the truth was he was privately banking on being taken back into the family sooner or later — but even so, being apart from his child left him genuinely lonely, and that much, at least, wasn't lost on Choko either.

One day he ran into an old drinking companion, and being invited out, and having always had a weakness for that road anyway, he got thoroughly, hopelessly drunk for the first time in a long while.

He didn't stay out that particular night, but the next day he cleaned out the savings passbook Choko had kept hidden away, called up his friend to return the favor from the night before, plunged headlong into Namba Shinchi, spent two days burning through every last sen of it, and came trudging back like a man with the soul knocked out of him to the tenement down the alley behind Kuromon Market.

"Well, ain't that somethin' — you managed not to forget the way home, at least."

So Choko said, grabbing him by the scruff of the neck and shoving him down, then rapping her knuckles on his head with the same motion she'd use to slap someone's shoulder.

"Obahan, what're you doin', quit it, don't be crazy."

But he didn't even seem to have the spirit left to fight back.

With his hangover splitting his skull, he lay curled in the futon groaning; she gave his face one sharp slap and, for no particular reason, went out.

At the Aishinkan theater in Sennichimae she listened to Kyoyama Koen's naniwabushi, but alone it didn't strike her as much fun at all, and once she came out, feeling suddenly ravenous after two or three days when food had barely gone down her throat, she went to Jiyuken beside Rakutenchi and ate a rice curry with an egg on top.

"The r-r-rice curry here at Jiyuken's good 'cause they mix it r-r-real well into the rice,"

she thought, remembering the words Ryukichi had once said, and as she drank her coffee after the curry, a sudden wave of tenderness welled up in her chest.

Slipping back home quietly, she found Ryukichi snoring away.

Without warning she shook him roughly, and when he opened his sleepy eyes, she said, "You idiot,"

and, puckering her lips, brought them down against his face.

The next day the two of them went back to Jiyuken together, and on the way home dropped in on Okin in Kozu, putting on the faces of a happily married couple.

Okin, who knew perfectly well what had gone on, gave Ryukichi something close to a lecture.

Okin's own husband had once cut a fine figure in Kitahama, had bought out her contract and set her up in his dead wife's place, only to fall on hard times the moment he did — but now Okin ran her yatona brokerage, and her husband, swallowing his pride, had taken work as a clerk at the Kitahama exchange, so that between the two of them earning a living, no one could point a finger and say it was Okin's fault he'd fallen so low, and she brought all this up as an example.

"Koreyasu, you can't just go on loafing about doing nothing — you ought to find yourself some kind of work..."

Whether he actually meant to look for anything or not, Ryukichi listened without so much as a flicker on his face.

Okin later told Choko she couldn't for the life of her tell what was going on in Koreyasu's head, and hearing that left Choko feeling small.

But before long he did find work, and Choko wasted no time reporting the news to Okin.

It wasn't as though it made her feel much less small after all, but it pleased her all the same.

It was a razor shop next door to the Iroha beef restaurant in Sennichimae,

and he took the job as its live-in clerk — work from ten in the morning until eleven at night, packed lunch on his own account, for a monthly wage of twenty-five yen — a friend had recommended him for it, saying it might do if he wasn't too particular.

Ryukichi couldn't very well say no to it.

There was also the fact that the friend had gone to some trouble on his behalf, reasoning that since the shop dealt in safety razors, straight razors, knives, jacks, and other barbering-related goods, it was surely the best fit for a man like Ryukichi, who had once sold cosmetics to barbershops himself.

The shop had a narrow storefront but ran absurdly deep, so that even in the daytime not enough sunlight reached inside; sitting there in the dim, economized daytime lamplight poking at the ashes in the hibachi and watching the passersby outside, the brightness of the street out there felt almost unreal.

Right across the way stood a public toilet, and the smell of it was unbearable.

Next to that was Chikurinji temple, and in front of its gate, on the right, someone sold iron-cold mineral water, while on the left — the side nearer the public toilet — someone else grilled and sold mochi.

The mochi, slathered thick with soy sauce and puffing up as it toasted to a fox-brown color, looked genuinely delicious, but he never once felt like buying any.

Ryukichi came home and said it was because he was fairly sure the mochi seller's wife never washed her hands after coming out of that public toilet.

He also said the work itself was easy — that a doll advertising safety razors kept moving in the shop window, endlessly stropping a razor, and it was funny watching customers get drawn in and glued to the glass staring at it, and all he had to do was step outside and say, come right in.

and that trick alone was enough to do the whole job.

"Well now, ain't that nice,"

Choko said, cheering him on.

He held out at the razor shop for about three months, but before long he started skipping work here and there, claiming he'd had a falling-out with the owner and it rankled him, and Choko, taking the excuse at face value, stopped waking him in the mornings, and little by little, without any clean break, he simply drifted out of the job.

Choko threw herself into her yatona work all the more for it.

She grew popular enough that banquet organizers came to feel they had to slip her a special tip all her own, over and above the rest.

Since tips were split evenly among her fellow yatona, though, it made for a distinctly poor bargain on her part — but that very fact only made her more well-liked among them.

Being fussed over and called Choko-han, Choko-han by everyone went a bit to her head, and she took to lending her fellow yatona small sums, two yen here, three yen there — only to regret it the moment the money left her hand, and since she could never quite bring herself to demand it back outright, she'd flatter and cajole them instead, letting them see, without quite saying so, just how much she wished they'd pay her back soon.

Even fifty sen made her heart ache with a prickling pain, but when it came to Ryukichi alone, if he wheedled her for pocket money she handed it over freely.

Ryukichi seemed thoroughly bored with every passing day, and on days when he'd apparently slipped off to Umeda Shindo in secret, the sulking he did once he got home was especially noticeable, so Choko fussed over him in all sorts of ways.

The cause of his gloom seemed to be that his father's anger still hadn't lifted, and for her, the weight of that on her mind outstripped whatever secret relief she might have felt over it.

So even when she learned that Ryukichi was going to cafes often, she took care not to let jealousy get the better of her, as much as she could help it.

When she handed over the money without a word, her feelings weren't nearly so composed as people might have imagined.

When she heard the rumor that Ryukichi's wife, who was said to have gone back to her family home, had died of consumption, Choko went secretly to pray at Hozenji's "Enmusubi"

shrine, and made an unstintingly generous offering of candles and the like.

In exchange, though, she felt a nagging unease that kept her from sleeping easy, so she found out the woman's posthumous Buddhist name and set up an altar for her on a shelf.

Seeing his first wife's memorial tablet sitting there above his head gave Ryukichi a strange feeling he couldn't quite place, but he didn't tell her to stop meddling either.

Clever as ever, Ryukichi reasoned that saying anything would only tangle things up into a nuisance, so he never so much as pressed his hands together before the tablet in front of Choko.

Choko changed the flowers every morning and conducted herself without the slightest lapse.

Two years on, her savings had crept a little past three hundred yen.

Remembering her days as a geisha, Choko asked Tanekichi whether that debt had all been paid off by now, and he said, "Sure has — you can quit your worryin' now, see for yourself,"

and brought out the bond to show her.

Choko already knew that her mother Otatsu had been doing piecework making celluloid dolls, and her younger brother Shinichi had been selling evening papers, but even so, wondering just how they'd scraped the money together to pay it off, her eyes grew hot.

So, for the first time, she felt moved to give her brother fifty sen, Otatsu three yen, and Tanekichi five yen.

With that, her savings came out to exactly three hundred yen.

Before long, though, Ryukichi spent about a hundred yen on geisha pleasures, and it dropped to two hundred.

Choko couldn't even bring herself to cry.

In the evening, without switching on the light, she sat herself flat down in the middle of the dark six-mat room, arms crossed, shoulders heaving with each breath, glaring fixedly at a torn spot in the shoji paper.

Ryukichi lay sprawled about, not even bothering to nurse the welt where she'd struck him with the shamisen plectrum.

There was no more slack left to economize on, but even so she racked her brains over every kind of scheme, determined to make that hundred yen back as quickly as she could.

As for the costumes that were her tools of trade, she'd have them redyed only when truly desperate, and otherwise she managed by pawning and redeeming them with each change of season, until she'd grown too embarrassed even to speak to the kimono dealer — but thanks to all that, before half a year was out she'd finally gotten back to the original sum, and taking that as her cue, she reasoned that going on forever renting just an upstairs room would only invite people's contempt, so they ought to rent a place of their own and go into some trade, a roasted-sweet-potato stand or whatever it might be, and when she put this to Ryukichi at once, he said, "S'pose so,"

in a tone that showed no real enthusiasm; and yet from the very next day he set to work in silence, took a lease on a small shopfront at the foot of the slope by Kozu Shrine — one ken wide and three and a half ken deep — hired a carpenter for two days, pitched in with the renovation himself, and using the experience and connections from his old job got a razor wholesaler to consign him goods, so that in no time at all a brand-new razor shop had sprung into being.

From small items like safety-razor replacement blades, ear picks, head scratchers, nose-hair tweezers, and nail clippers to razor strops, jackknives, and Western straight razors — given the nature of the trade, Ryukichi had the sense to reckon that catching customers on their way back from the public bathhouse was the first order of business, and took care to rent the shop directly across from one, all of which left Choko full of admiration; and when, on the day before the opening, her fellow yatona came round bearing a wall clock as a congratulatory gift, she called out, "Welcome, welcome,"

her voice carrying a different ring to it than before.

And then, "My man's real diligent about it all, y'see,"

she said, meaning it as praise for Ryukichi.

Seen a certain way, the sight of Ryukichi with his sleeves tied back, quietly wiping down the display shelves, wasn't exactly manly, but the women were all impressed by it, and thought that Koreyasu turned out to be quite the hard worker once he'd got some ambition in him.

On the morning of the opening, Choko sat in the front of the shop feeling as though she could have tied on a headband for the occasion.

Around noon, Ryukichi let out a plaintive voice about how they weren't getting a single customer, but she didn't answer, only kept her eyes peeled like saucers, glaring at the people passing outside.

Past noon, a customer finally came, and they made a sale of one safety-razor replacement blade at six sen.

"Much obliged, come again,"

"Do favor us again, please,"

The two of them, husband and wife together, gave such eerily thorough service, but whether it was poor luck or simply being a new shop, that day only fifteen customers came in, and almost all of it was replacement blades, so that the day's take came to less than two yen all told.

Customers stayed thin on the ground, and it was a good day if even one Gillette sold; for days on end the wretched takings ran to little more than ear picks and replacement blades.

They ran out of things to talk about, and as the two of them, bored, exchanged pitiful looks while minding the store, it felt downright shameful.

To pass the time, Ryukichi started saying he wanted to go for an hour or two during the day to take joruri lessons, and she found she hadn't the heart to stop him.

He could have gone anytime before, back when he was just loafing about, but he'd held off out of some sense of restraint, and only now that they'd gone into business did he say he wanted to take up lessons.

Others might not have understood that feeling, but Choko found it rather touching.

Ryukichi apprenticed himself to Takemoto Sosho, over in nearby Shimoderamachi, for a monthly fee of five yen, and took to scouring the used bookshop Tengyu Shoten in Futatsuido for old practice scripts, wandering off there every day.

For all his talk of throwing himself into the business, he wore the face of a man who couldn't help it if no customers came, and even while minding the shop he'd open his practice book and drone away under his breath, his voice sounding so pitiful that praising him for having gotten better felt somehow beside the point.

Every month they were eating into their capital, so she decided to go back to yatona work.

On the night she went out as a yatona for the second time, she found herself sobered by the thought that this, surely, was what real hardship meant — but once at the banquet, that streak in her that treated the trade as sacred and couldn't rest until she'd swept the whole room off its feet single-handedly was not a thing so easily lost.

In the evenings, once Choko had gone out, Ryukichi would fidget his way through closing the shop early, and go eat kayaku rice and stonefish red miso soup at a food stall in the Futatsuido market, drink sake with mussels in vinegared miso, pay a bill of sixty-five sen thinking what a bargain, and then head to the cafe "Ichiban"

where he'd order beer and fruit, and hand out lavish tips to the waitress he'd taken a shine to, until ten days' worth of the shop's earnings had gone up in smoke.

They were managing to scrape by on her yatona earnings, but Ryukichi's spending was so reckless that their debt to the wholesaler kept mounting, and after enduring a year of it, when a buyer turned up for the lease, she seized the chance and resolved to close the shop for good.

Between the just over a hundred yen they made off two days of a wildly slashed closing-down sale and the hundred and twenty yen from selling the lease, they had a little over two hundred and twenty yen in all, but once they'd settled with the wholesaler and paid off debts here and there, not even ten yen was left.

Renting even an upstairs room posed a problem if payment had to be up front, and while she was hunting around for something, a peddling kimono dealer who came in and out of Okin's place and knew her by sight said, "We got the upstairs room empty at our place — seein' as it's you, Choko-han, the rent can wait whenever's fine,"

and taking that stroke of luck, she arranged to rent the upstairs room of his place, down a back alley off the street in front of the Tobita pleasure quarter gate.

Ryukichi, as ever, went on with his joruri lessons or wasted hours on end at the five-sen tearoom with the red curtain nearby, harmless as ever.

Choko, whenever a job came calling, went out to work whether it rained or snowed, determined not to let the chance slip by.

By now she'd become one of the old hands among the yatona.

If they'd ever formed a proper guild, she'd have been made secretary straight off; even yatona older than her called her Choko-neesan now, but she could hardly afford to let it go to her head.

The hems of her costumes had frayed to an embarrassing degree, and she wanted new ones so badly it was almost a physical ache.

On top of that, with the kimono peddler living right downstairs, it would only have been proper to buy at least one meisen kimono off him, but she held herself back and put all her effort into saving instead.

She was consumed by the feeling that she absolutely had to open a shop of her own once more, with all the fierce urgency of avenging a parent's death, and even she found the intensity of it a bit shameful.

Three years on, she'd finally saved up two hundred yen.

Ryukichi kept complaining of stomach pains and going to the doctor now and then, and the expense of it mounted up so much that the money refused to accumulate, to her maddening frustration.

With two hundred yen in hand, she consulted Ryukichi, saying, "Ain't there some good business we could start up?"

but this time he answered, "Chicken feed like that ain't gonna get us anywhere,"

showing no enthusiasm for it, and one day he went and blew fifty yen of it in the blink of an eye at the Tobita pleasure quarter.

Four or five days earlier, word had reached Ryukichi's ears that his sister was soon to take an adopted husband and would be running the Umeda Shindo household herself, so this outburst was something she'd more or less expected all along — but even so, that he'd gone and spent fifty yen in a single day on a prostitute left her nothing short of stunned.

The moment he came home, poking his dazed-looking face in through the door, she seized him by the collar without warning, knocked him flat, straddled him, and choked his throat with all her strength.

"C-c-can't... breathe, can't breathe — old woman, what're you doin'?"

Ryukichi flailed his legs about.

Choko, feeling that nothing short of a thorough beating would satisfy her, kept choking and choking, striking and pounding, until at last Ryukichi cried, "Please, have mercy on me,"

in a shriek.

Choko wouldn't loosen her grip so easily.

That Ryukichi should fly into such despair merely over hearing his sister was taking an adopted husband struck her less as infuriating than as pitiful, and there was something almost like the violence of love in the way Choko punished him.

Seizing his chance, Ryukichi went yelping down the stairs and, after running about trying to escape, ended up hiding himself inside the toilet.

Even she didn't chase him quite that far.

The landlady downstairs scolded her for behaving so unlike a woman, but Choko said nothing at all, only pressed her sleeve to her face, her shoulders trembling, and the landlady thought that, unexpectedly, this was the first time Choko had ever struck her as truly womanly.

The landlady, who had a husband younger than herself, had never had a good word to say about Choko.

Every morning, watching Ryukichi tie back his sleeves to shave the bonito flakes for the miso soup, the words had very nearly slipped out of her — was it really right to make a husband do such a thing?

She had no idea that it was simply Ryukichi's own gluttonous fussiness that made him insist on shaving the bonito flakes himself, all to get the flavor exactly to his liking.

The kimono peddler felt the same way, and once, when the three of them had gone together to Sennichimae to hear a naniwabushi recitation, in the packed hall someone had done something untoward to Choko, and she'd let out a great shriek and made a whole commotion over it; seeing that, he'd thought what a formidable woman she was, and had felt nothing but sympathy for Ryukichi, sitting there blinking with an embarrassed look on his face — or so he told his wife once he got home.

"Carryin' on like that, she'll end up gettin' Koreyasu sick of her before long."

The husband and wife murmured this back and forth between themselves, and sure enough, one day Ryukichi wandered off and didn't come home for days on end.

When seven days had passed with no sign of Ryukichi, she went to Tanekichi's house half in tears and begged him to go quietly and see how things stood, certain he must be back at the Umeda Shindo house.

Tanekichi didn't exactly refuse his daughter's request outright, but he turned her down, saying that if he clumsily let himself be seen going to a household bent on ending things, there was no telling how they might look at him for it.

"Best for you not to go draggin' your feet over it and just let him go clean, for your own sake,"

— that a parent should say such a thing left Choko so worked up she got into an outright shouting match with him, and from there went straight to a fortune-teller's stall in Shinsekai.

"That devotion of yours, all you do for that man — it'll come back to bite you. Generally speaking, folks born under this star..."

Once he'd asked her age and learned she was born in the Year of the Fire Horse, the fortune-teller launched into a torrent of talk flowing like water off a board, and every last thing pointed to bad fortune.

"That man's heart is leanin' north."

Hearing that sent a chill through her.

North meant Umeda Shindo.

She paid and stepped outside, and with nowhere in particular to go, walked briskly through the entertainment district under the blazing midsummer sun.

The earthquake she'd lived through at the inn in Atami came back to her.

That, too, had been a hot day.

On the tenth day, it happened to be the Jizo Bon festival, and there was Bon dancing even out in the alley; dragged out against her will, she played the same monotonous tune over and over, though every so often working in some little variation, when all at once, beneath a painted lantern, she caught sight of Ryukichi's face, ambling along with that bobbing gait of his.

His face stood out in the lantern light, and he blinked as though dazzled by it.

At that instant, a shamisen string snapped and whipped back.

She hauled him straight upstairs, and before any of the pent-up talk could come out, threw herself at him.

Two hours later, saying the streetcars would stop running soon, he went home.

In that short stretch of time, this was everything Ryukichi told her.

These ten days holed up at the Umeda house, that weren't for nothin' — 'course he'd had somethin' in mind.

If his sister was takin' an adopted husband, that meant he was as good as disowned already, sure — but to just swallow it and cry himself to sleep over it, that was askin' too much. So the minute he'd rushed to the Umeda house he'd gone at it every day, knee to knee, arguin' it out — and it hadn't done a lick of good.

A man who'd thrown over his wife and child to live with some woman he fancied didn't have much of a leg to stand on, sure — but disowned or not, he weren't budgin' till he got what was comin' to him, dug his heels in like a mule. And you know what his old man had to say?

Choko, now don't you go lettin' this get to you.

"Givin' money to a man livin' with a woman like that is money down the drain — he'll only get swindled out of it in the end. If he wants it, he can leave the woman."

That's all he said, and after that the old man wouldn't say another word.

So here's the thing, Choko — what they gotta do now is put on a bit of an act.

They tell him it's over, that the woman's agreed to it too, fool the old man good and proper, and once he'd got what was owed him, disowned or whatever else the old man wanted to call it, didn't matter — they'd take that money, start up some easy little business, and live out their days together, side by side, gray hair and all.

Can't keep havin' you out doin' yatona work forever, it ain't right.

So, Choko, when someone from the house comes round tomorrow, he needed her to say it straight out — that it was over between them.

Now, she weren't sayin' it 'cause she meant it, understand.

It's — it's just an act.

An act.

Soon as he got the money, he'd come straight back. ——

In Choko's heart, sweetness and unease lingered side by side.

The next morning, she went to see Okin in Kozu.

Hearing the story, Okin said, "Choko-han, you're bein' taken for a fool by Koreyasu,"

— a woman who'd seen her share of hardship, and it showed.

Okin, hearing that Koreyasu had first gone off to Umeda without telling Choko a word of it, decided this wasn't something she could carelessly go along with as mere playacting.

What Ryukichi really had in mind, she suspected, might well be this: once Choko said the word "separated," he'd slip neatly back into his father's good graces and simply plant himself in the Umeda house for good.

She didn't go quite so far as to think the very worst of him — and besides, cosmetics wholesaler or not, if the father refused to stock him with goods, then even should things go badly there'd still be money to be had out of it, so he might, in a manner of speaking, be playing both sides at once, or else simply not be clear in his own mind about what he wanted; after all, Ryukichi did have a child of his own. She didn't say any of that outright, but in any case, since Ryukichi couldn't stay on at his father's house unless Choko said they'd separated, if in the end she wanted him back, "you mustn't go sayin' you're separated,"

Choko did just as Okin told her.

Lie or not, that was easier to say than the words for parting ways.

Besides, the messenger who showed his face before long seemed to have a settlement payment ready, and once it was accepted, that would be that — the tie would be cut for good.

Three days later, Ryukichi came home.

The moment he saw Choko bustling about eagerly, he said, "You idiot — one word outta you and the whole thing's gone to hell,"

in a foul temper beyond all reckoning.

When she mentioned the matter of the settlement money, he said, "If they give it to you, take it — no harm doublin' up with what I'm gettin'. Show a little greed for once, will ya."

That made sense to her, she supposed.

But Okin's words still lingered in her chest all the same.

He'd failed to get anything out of his father, but this time it was Ryukichi himself who proposed that they take the three hundred yen he'd wheedled out of his sister, add it to Choko's savings, and start up some business with the combined sum.

Having the bitter experience of the razor shop behind them, she racked her brains over this and that in search of some line of business that might catch Ryukichi's interest, and was on the point of despairing that a roasted-sweet-potato stand was about the only thing left, when it suddenly struck her that a kanto-daki stall would do nicely; when she put it to Ryukichi, he said, "Th-th-that's a fine idea — I'll put my skill to it and feed folks somethin' with real flavor,"

utterly taken with it.

Searching for some suitable shop up for sale, she found a small kanto-daki stall on the street in front of the Tobita gate nearby, going for sale.

An elderly couple was running it at present, but the neighborhood being what it was, the customers tended to be a coarse, rough lot, so a gentle sort of woman never lasted, while a woman with too strong a temper only got the shop treated with contempt — they'd been genuinely at their wit's end for help, which was why they'd put it up for sale; when Choko negotiated with them, they let her have it, fixtures and every last tool included, for a surprisingly cheap three hundred and fifty yen.

The entire ground floor was plastered over for the business, leaving only a single four-and-a-half-mat room upstairs for them to sleep in, and on top of that the ceiling was so low it nearly grazed their heads, giving the place a gloomy feel — but it stood on a corner with heavy foot traffic from people going to and from the pleasure quarter, and the layout of the shop and the placement of its entrance were both excellent, so the moment she heard the price she'd jumped at it and struck the deal.

Before the new shop opened, they went around haphazardly ducking under the curtains of kanto-daki shops, starting with Shoben Tango-tei in the Hozenji precincts and Takoume in Dotonbori, investigating the seasoning, the makeup of what went into the sake flasks, and the general way the trade was run.

Hearing that they were going into the kanto-daki trade, Tanekichi said, "Shrimp, squid, whatever it is — leave the tempura to me,"

offering to lend a hand, but Ryukichi said, "We'll do small side dishes, but we won't be servin' tempura,"

turning him down as tactfully as he could.

Tanekichi was disappointed.

Otatsu mocked him for it, as if to say she'd told him so.

"They figure it's a loss to have the likes of us helpin' out. As if either of us would ever come beggin' 'em for so much as a single copper."

Taking one character from each of their names, they called the shop "Choryu"

and at last the day came for it to open.

Since the heat hadn't yet let up, they'd boldly stocked in a cask of draft beer, worrying that unless they sold through it fast it would go flat and be ruined — but it turned out they needn't have fretted so much, since it sold well.

With no hired help, the two of them ran the shop by themselves, so during the busiest stretch, from around ten at night until midnight, they were rushed off their feet — dizzyingly busy, without even a moment to step away and relieve themselves.

Ryukichi, cutting a dashing figure in a white cook's coat and high geta, peeked into the cash box now and then.

When he saw the take had grown, he'd call out, "Welcome, welcome!"

his voice ringing out with a vigor quite unlike his days at the razor shop.

A performer of the sort commonly called "okama"

— street musicians of ambiguous gender — would come round busking and play a lively rendition of "Aoyagi," and business boomed.

On the other hand, given the rough neighborhood, ill-tempered drinkers would sometimes start brawling with one another, leaving Ryukichi on edge, but Choko, drawing on old skills from her geisha days, handled such customers deftly without ever needing to resort to flirtatious glances.

With the pleasure quarter so close by, customers kept coming late into the night, and by the time they brought in the sign, the eastern sky had already turned a shade of purple.

Exhausted, they'd barely doze off for a moment in the four-and-a-half-mat room upstairs before the alarm clock was already buzzing.

Still in their nightclothes, they'd go down to the ground floor, and before even washing their faces, put out a standing sign that read, "Breakfast served, four dishes for eighteen sen"

— that very sign.

Counting on customers heading home in the morning, they offered miso soup, simmered beans, pickles, and rice — four dishes in all for eighteen sen — and though they'd figured it for small change of a business, some customers even ordered beer with it, so it turned a decent profit, and that made the drowsiness a bit easier to bear.

As autumn set in and the wind before long turned chilly, it became just the season, tailor-made

for a kanto-daki shop, and sake began selling well in place of beer.

They paid the sake dealer promptly in cash every single time, until the maker of a fine brand offered to donate them a sign of their own, and all the while Choko's shamisen sat forgotten, shut away uselessly in the closet.

It probably wasn't only because more than half the capital this time had come out of his own pocket, but Ryukichi's dedication to the work left nothing to be desired.

They set aside no days off at all, working diligently away every single day, and with no wasted spending to speak of, the money naturally just kept piling up.

Ryukichi went to the post office every day.

It was grueling work on the body, so whenever Ryukichi tired, he'd fortify himself with sake.

Choko knew all too well Ryukichi's tendency, once he'd been drinking, to grow expansive and carelessly blow through large sums of money, and it kept her on edge — but since this was sake meant for sale, even Ryukichi kept himself in check about how much he drank.

Even that restrained way of drinking, though, gave Choko one more thing to worry over, and however she looked at it, there was no end to her worries.

When he drank heavily he turned absurdly high-spirited, but when he sipped away slowly, Ryukichi — already a man of few words, perhaps on account of his stammer — grew even more silent, and whenever there were no customers, seeing him sit slumped in his chair, apparently lost in thought, Choko couldn't help thinking he must be brooding over the Umeda household after all, and it left her sick with worry.

Sure enough, having been refused when he asked to attend his sister's wedding, Ryukichi sank into a foul mood, took out about two hundred yen and went off, and didn't come home for three days.

It happened to be cherry-blossom viewing season, and on top of that Sundays, holidays, and festival days kept falling one after another, so she couldn't very well close the shop; she ran it in a mad scramble for two days, but Choko no longer had any heart left for greed over profit, and what with the exhaustion and the worry, her body simply refused to obey her, so on the third day she finally shut the shop down.

Late that night, he came home.

"Where, and in what state, might Hanshichi-san be passing his time this very hour? It cannot be helped now to wish it undone, but were there no such person as myself, surely Hanbei-sama, moved by consideration for Otsu, would long since have called back the lady Sankatsu, who even bore him a child — and then Hanshichi-san's conduct would have mended itself, and he need never have been disowned at all..."

— it was unmistakably Ryukichi, coming along chanting this most affecting passage from Sankatsu and Hanshichi.

Choko sighed with relief even as she thought what a poor look it made for the neighbors, him chanting bad joruri in the dead of night like that.

"...though I know full well I am not wanted, still bound by this lingering attachment of mine, the wheel of karma turning — though I could never lie beside you, I endured only to stay near you, and it is that very endurance which has proven your ruin..."

and Choko, half of a mind to pick up the next line herself and give it right back to him, went down to the ground floor.

Ryukichi's footsteps stopped in front of the house.

He'd stopped chanting now, and seemed to be rattling the door hesitantly, with the air of a man ill at ease.

"Who's there?"

she said, on purpose, and he answered, "It's me."

"'Me' don't tell me a thing."

she said, playing dumb again, and he said, "It's Koreyasu here,"

his voice trembling from outside.

"There's plenty of folks called Koreyasu."

she said, without so much as a hint of a smile.

"Koreyasu Ryukichi."

He already seemed resigned to whatever punishment Choko had in store.

"A man called Koreyasu Ryukichi has no business here. He's off somewhere squanderin' money right about now, I'd imagine."

she pressed on, tormenting him further, but with the neighbors' sake in mind she left it at that, and the moment she opened the door, he said, "C-c-come on now, old woman, that's cruel,"

and she dragged him inside, Ryukichi standing there with his face all screwed up.

She hauled him bodily up the stairs, and Ryukichi cracked his head on the ceiling.

"Ow!"

— pain be damned, she thought, and punished him to her heart's content.

Ryukichi swore he'd never stray again, but Choko's punishments never did him a bit of good.

Before long, he went off carousing again.

And each time he came home, he'd turn pale, dreading the punishment all over again.

Choko, who had begun putting on some weight by now, found herself out of breath every time she meted out a beating.

The sums Ryukichi spent on his dissipations ran fairly high, so on the day after one of his sprees he too would turn pale, refusing so much as a cup of sake, and stir the pot in silence.

But four or five days later, he'd start up again, saying that warming sake for customers all day wasn't the whole of what a man was good for, and he'd fill a flask generously with the good, unwatered sake and set it warming in the copper boiler.

He had plainly grown tired of the business, and once drunk he'd turn expansive, his feet naturally carrying him off toward pleasure.

It was worse than the dyer going about in an undyed apron — at this rate, Choko came to feel with growing regret, it was as if they were running the shop purely to fuel Ryukichi's pleasures.

While she was thinking to herself what a terrible business they'd gone and started, payments to the sake dealer, too, began to fall behind, and in the end she decided there was nothing for it but to close up shop; when she told Ryukichi as much, he agreed at once.

"This shop for sale."

With that notice posted up, they left the shop closed, gloomy and shut tight, for a good long while.

Ryukichi took to going to his joruri lessons again.

Their savings kept dwindling little by little, yet still no buyer turned up for the shop.

In her heart, Choko had begun to consider going out as a yatona for a third time.

One day, gazing down at the passersby out front from the upstairs window, every last one of them looked like a customer to her, and it struck her as a terrible waste that they weren't doing business.

A fruit shop five or six doors down on the opposite side burst with reds and yellows and greens, brimming with life.

Customers came and went in a steady stream.

It suddenly struck her what a fine business a fruit shop must be, and she could no longer sit still; the moment Ryukichi got back from his joruri lesson, she said at once, "Why don't we do a fruit shop?"

Ryukichi showed no enthusiasm for it.

If it ever truly came down to going hungry, he figured, he could always go to Umeda and wheedle some money out of them.

One day, it seemed he'd gone off to Umeda after all.

By his account when he came home, he'd tried to get money out of them, but his sister's husband had come out to deal with him instead — a stubborn man who couldn't be reasoned with, and a tightwad on top of it, so that in the end he hadn't gotten so much as a single copper out of him, and he ranted on and on about it, worked up.

And then he said, "Let's do a fruit shop, why don't we."

His face was twisted with bitterness.

They renovated the shop with the money from selling off all the old kanto-daki equipment.

They were still well short of funds for stock and this and that, so she pawned her costumes and hair ornaments, and went further still to borrow money from Okin.

Okin spent a good hour badmouthing Ryukichi, but in the end said, "Choko-han, it's only 'cause I feel sorry for you,"

and lent her a hundred yen.

From there she went straight to Tanekichi's place in Kamishiomachi and asked him to lend a hand for a couple of days, since they were starting up a fruit shop.

Ryukichi didn't know the trick of cutting watermelon and the like, and finding himself forced to learn from the experienced Tanekichi, it was Ryukichi himself, this time, who said, "Why don't we ask the old man for help."

— those were his very words.

In his younger days, Tanekichi had once bought a whole cartload of watermelons from Otatsu's home province of Yamato and sold them by the slice at a night stall in Kamishiomachi.

Choko had been only two at the time, carried on Otatsu's back, so the whole family — parents and child, all three of them — had turned out together, and they'd sold a hundred melons in a single night, Tanekichi recalled fondly, and he readily agreed to lend his help.

He held no grudge at all over having been turned down by Ryukichi when he'd offered to help at the kanto-daki shop.

Quite the opposite — on the day the shop opened, hearing there was another fruit shop diagonally across the way, he broke into the Tankai-bushi lyric, "A watermelon shop springs up across from a watermelon shop, and the watermelons (sweethearts, that is) sit face to face,"

— he was in that fine a mood.

The fruit shop across the way had the advantage of running half its storefront as an ice shop, drawing customers in with shaved-ice watermelon, so naturally Choko and the others had to compete on the thickness of their slices instead.

But even without being told, Tanekichi's way of cutting was extraordinarily generous.

With Ryukichi fretting and doing the mental arithmetic of how many ten-sen slices could come out of an eighty-sen melon, Tanekichi said, "You use the slices to reel 'em in and make your profit on the whole melons. Take the loss to get the gain,"

he said.

And then he'd call out, "Ah, watermelon, watermelon, a grand sale on delicious watermelon!"

in a flashy, booming voice.

The calls from the shop across the way gave nothing away either.

Choko couldn't stay quiet either, and cried, "Cheap watermelon here!"

in a shrill voice.

There was a charm to it, and customers came.

Choko hung a bag-like purse around her neck, dropping in the takings and making change out of it.

In the mornings, Choko went into the pleasure quarter and sold watermelon door to door, house by house.

"Fine watermelon here!"

— the surprising beauty of her voice calling that out, the charm of her smiling face, and her sharp, breezy temperament besides, were simply irresistible, and the prostitutes there took a real liking to her.

"Bring more again tomorrow, won't you?"

At times like that, when Ryukichi carried the load on his back to deliver it, they'd ask, "Where's your missus...?"

and praise him for having such a fine wife, but Ryukichi let it wash over him as though it had nothing to do with him, wearing a sour face.

If anything, he looked so sullen that no one would have guessed he was a man who, once out on the town, threw all restraint to the wind.

He'd applied himself fairly diligently, so within four or five days Ryukichi had picked up the knack of cutting watermelon and the rest.

Tanekichi, taking as his cue the fact that, as every year, he'd been hired on as one of the porters for the local shrine's festival procession, withdrew his help.

As he left, he made sure to remind them: rub the apples well with a cloth to bring out their shine, never touch the honey peaches with bare hands, and dust the fruit constantly, since fruit hates nothing so much as dirt.

They took his advice to heart, but somehow the fruit spoiled quickly all the same, and the honey peaches in particular rotted in no time.

They couldn't leave them out on display, so they threw them away with a heavy heart.

Every day, a good deal had to be thrown out.

But cutting back on stock would make the shop look shabby, so that wasn't an option either, and whenever they couldn't move the goods fast enough, a sense of panic set in.

There was good money to be made, but the losses had to be reckoned in too, and little by little they came to understand that a fruit shop was no easy trade either.

Ryukichi's spirits began to flag before long, and Choko grew worried that he'd already tired of it.

But before that worry could go any further, Ryukichi fell ill.

He'd long been going back and forth to the low-cost clinic in Futatsuido complaining of a bad stomach, but this time blood mixed in with his urine, and it took him a full twenty minutes to relieve himself — a thing he couldn't bring himself to tell anyone.

He'd once before come down with a suspicious ailment, and at the time Choko had said, "What kind of man is this,"

furious with him, but as a folk cure she'd secretly made him drink a decoction of cat droppings scraped off the roof tiles and alum, and it had actually worked, so this time too she assumed the same remedy would do, and slipped it silently into his miso soup; Ryukichi, tasting a sip, made a strange face, but never suspected a thing, apparently putting the odd flavor down to his illness.

Believing that the charm only worked if he never caught on, she waited quietly for it to take effect, but this time it did no good at all.

He took to crying out in pain each time he urinated, and since Kayodo Hospital in Shimanouchi specialized in urology, they had him examined there; after inserting a tube into his urethra to look inside, the doctor pronounced, "It's his bladder."

He went there for about ten days, but showed no real improvement.

He grew visibly thinner by the day.

Thinking there was always the chance of a misdiagnosis, they had him examined at the municipal hospital in Tennoji, and sure enough, the earlier diagnosis had been wrong.

Once an X-ray confirmed it was renal tuberculosis, she found herself feeling something closer to fond nostalgia for Kayodo Hospital than resentment.

They were told that if he valued his life, he should be admitted to the hospital.

In a panic, they had him admitted at once.

With her needed at his bedside, there was no way to look after the shop, so Choko had no choice but to close it.

It pained her to see the fruit going to rot, so she thought to ask Tanekichi to mind the shop, but when your luck turns bad there's nothing to be done about it — her mother Otatsu had taken to her bed four or five days earlier.

It was uterine cancer, they said.

She had grown devoted to the Konkokyo faith and had been taking its blessed water, but her strength had failed so badly that by the time she took to her bed, the local doctor judged there was no longer any saving her.

The doctor, pitying her, said that even an operation was out of the question given the state of her body, but Otatsu herself refused both surgery and hospitalization outright.

There was also the matter of money.

She'd disliked injections at first too, but once she learned the sweetness of how the pain — as though her body were splitting in two — would vanish with a shot and let her drift off into a warm, pleasant sleep, she'd cry "Give me the shot, give me the shot," before the pain had even fully set in,

wailing and crying out no matter the hour, waking Tanekichi in the middle of the night.

Tanekichi rubbed his sleepy eyes and ran to fetch the doctor.

"It's morphine — repeated injections like this are dangerous,"

the doctor would refuse, but she'd only say, "It's a body that's going to die anyway,"

blinking her eyes.

Her younger brother Shinichi was off serving out a term of apprenticeship at a pawnshop in Shimogamo, Kyoto, but they'd agreed not to call him back until the very last moment came.

So Tanekichi could hardly have had enough hands even if he'd had several bodies to spare, and Choko gave up on the shop; with hospital bills to cover on top of everything else, she put it up for sale.

This alone, luckily, found a buyer at once, bringing in two hundred and fifty yen — but it was gone again just as quickly.

An operation had already been decided on, but before it could be done he first needed to be built back up, so they administered two vials of an imported medicine every day.

Each vial cost as much as five yen, so the hospital bills mounted at a frighteningly fast pace.

Choko hired a nurse-for-hire to look after Ryukichi through the night, and went back out to yatona work.

But it was like pouring water on a burning stone.

With the operation looming just a day or two off, it was plain to see how much money would be needed.

Even Choko's singing, this time, lost every trace of its old charm.

On the streetcar home, she slipped a hand into the fold of her obi and turned the problem over and over in her mind.

The hundred yen she'd borrowed from Okin still stood unpaid.

With heavy footsteps, she went to call on Ryukichi's family at Umeda Shindo.

Only the adopted son-in-law agreed to see her.

She pressed her forehead to the tatami, saying she wasn't asking for much, but it was no use talking to him at all.

He even spat out the words "you brought it on yourselves."

"The family fortune here is in my keeping now. I won't let so much as a finger of it..."

It's you people who ought to keep your fingers off it — she flung the retort at him and stormed out with a flounce, but before long her steps had gone slack and lifeless.

She went to Tanekichi's place to look in on Otatsu, lying sick in bed, and Otatsu said, "Never mind me, go on and get yourself back to Koreyasu's side quick."

And then, saying that with him sick she must be having trouble even cooking rice, Otatsu told her to take home some rice gruel and simmered spinach made there in the house — her spirit had turned as gentle as a bodhisattva's by now, and she looked like a woman with death drawing near.

Unlike Otatsu, Ryukichi went on scolding her mercilessly for coming home late, which was proof enough that he hadn't yet become a man resigned to dying.

That probably wasn't the real reason, but in any case, even after the major operation two days later that removed one of his kidneys entirely, he came through it very much alive and kicking, wailing, "Water, water, give me water,"

crying out over and over.

She'd been warned not to let him drink any water, so Choko steeled herself and listened to Ryukichi's wailing with gritted teeth.

The next day, a young woman came to visit, bringing along a girl of twelve or thirteen.

One glance at her face and features was enough to tell Choko this was Ryukichi's sister.

She tensed up at once, and said, "So good of you to come,"

by way of a greeting for their first meeting.

The girl she'd brought along was Ryukichi's daughter.

She had entered girls' school that past April, and wore a sailor uniform.

When Choko stroked her head, the girl scowled.

After about an hour, they went home.

She said she'd come without telling her husband.

"Wh-wh-why would anyone bother deferrin' to a son-in-law like that?"

Ryukichi flung those words at his sister's retreating back.

Seeing her off into the corridor, his sister said, "Father's come to understand all your hardship lately too, sis. He says you've done so much for him, he does."

and quietly pressed some money into Choko's hand.

Choko was without a trace of powder on her face, her hair a tangled mess, her kimono worn thin.

It might only have been pity at the sight of her that prompted those words, but Choko wanted so badly to believe they were sincere.

It had taken ten years to get Ryukichi's father to understand her at all.

Being called "sis" made her happy too.

So at first she thought to give the money back.

But it had been forced into her hand, and when she looked later, there was a hundred yen there.

She was grateful for it.

She was restless, unable to settle.

That evening, a phone call came in.

It was her brother's voice, and it gave her a start.

Hearing that Otatsu was on the brink of death, she went back from the phone room to the hospital room to tell Ryukichi she'd be rushing over at once, only to find him crying, "Water, gimme water,"

over and over.

And then, "Wh-wh-what matters more, your mother or me?"

he groaned out, in a voice that seemed to say he himself didn't know when he might die either.

Choko sat down in a chair and crossed her arms tightly.

Quite some time passed before the tears finally fell there.

It was autumn, and the chirping of insects drifted up from the hospital garden.

However much time had passed, a draft had turned chilly against her skin, and it was fully night by now.

Suddenly, "Koreyasu-san, telephone for you!"

Her heart pounding, she went to the phone, and this time an unfamiliar woman's voice told her, "She's passed away."

— that was the news.

She left the hospital just as she was and rushed over.

"Choko-han, she was worryin' about you right to the end — 'poor Choko,' she said, 'poor Choko' — and that's how she passed."

The neighborhood women's reddened eyes made a show of it, plain for anyone to see.

Tanekichi wept openly like a man, saying that even at thirty, Choko was still a child in her mother's eyes.

Feeling the eyes of everyone who took her for an undutiful daughter boring into her back, Choko did all she could — taking up the white cloth to touch a last, belated drop of water to her mother's lips — and carried herself as best she was able.

"My husband's sick too."

She used that as an excuse to herself, and cut the wake short.

Walking the late-night streets back to the hospital, she cried and cried after all, unable to stop herself.

The moment she stepped into the hospital room, Ryukichi fixed her with a frightening look and said, "Where the hell were you?"

Choko answered with just one word: "Dead."

And then the two of them fell silent, glaring at each other for a while.

Ryukichi's cold stare weighed on Choko for some reason, pressing down on her.

Determined not to be beaten down by it, her innate combative streak reared its head like a snake.

She had all but made up her mind to put the hundred yen Ryukichi's sister had given her — if not all of it, then at least half — toward her mother's funeral expenses.

Come what may, it would be the least she could do as a dutiful daughter, and she tried to bring it up with Ryukichi, but seeing his gaunt face, the words wouldn't come.

But as it turned out, there was no need to worry over it at all.

The undertaker who had long employed Tanekichi as a palanquin-bearer took the whole funeral on free of charge, treating him as family, and they were able to give her a fairly grand send-off.

On top of that, it turned out Otatsu had, at some point without anyone noticing, secretly taken out a one-yen post office endowment insurance policy, and five hundred yen in insurance money came flowing in.

Having lived in Kamishiomachi for thirty years, Otatsu had known a great many people, so mourners turned out in considerable numbers; they handed out streetcar transfer tickets and heaps of sweets to them, settled the obligatory return gifts for the condolence money, and still had about two hundred yen left over.

With that, Tanekichi visited the hospital and gave Choko a hundred yen of it, calling it a get-well gift.

The gratitude she felt toward her parent sank deep into her bones.

When she told him she'd heard from Ryukichi's sister that his father had been praising all the hardship she'd endured, Tanekichi said, "Well, ain't that somethin',"

and showed the first smiling face he'd worn since Otatsu's death.

Before long, Ryukichi was discharged from the hospital and went off to recuperate at the Yuzaki hot springs.

Choko earned the money for it through yatona work and sent it to him.

Renting an upstairs room by herself would have been wasteful, so Choko took to sleeping and staying at Tanekichi's place.

She'd meant to give Tanekichi money for meals, but he wouldn't take it, saying that was much too formal between them.

He knew full well she was hard-pressed sending money off as it was.

Learning that Choko had moved back in with her father, a wealthy man in the neighborhood came right out and propositioned her to become his mistress.

The owner of that lumber shop from before had died, but his son, now forty-one, the same age as Ryukichi, made the same sort of proposal too.

Choko wore the face of someone merely taking it under advisement.

That she never gave a flat refusal was partly out of wanting to avoid awkwardness among the neighbors, but partly, too, it was a lingering habit of maneuvering left over from her geisha days.

Each time such a proposal came up, she found herself reassessing herself all over again, telling herself she was still young yet.

But her heart was hardly ever moved by it.

Every night she dreamed of Ryukichi off in Yuzaki.

One day, troubled by an ominous dream, she finally set off all the way to Yuzaki.

He was supposed to be "living a lonely life, fishing every day"

but Ryukichi, of all things, had geisha up and was squandering his money on them.

And of course he was drinking too.

She cornered a maid and pressed her for every detail, and learned this had been going on every single day for over a week now.

She couldn't fathom where he was getting such money — she'd been feeling guilty, thinking her remittances barely covered his lodging bill and that he must even be short of cigarette money, and here was this to make her suspicious.

When it came out from the maid's own mouth that Ryukichi had been repeatedly wheedling money out of his sister, everything went black before her eyes.

She had long told herself that it was precisely because she alone, on her own two hands, was keeping Ryukichi in his recuperation, that all her hardship was worth enduring — reckoning, too, on how it would look in the eyes of Ryukichi's father.

That he'd gone and begged money off his sister of all people meant all her hardship had come to nothing, and she wept over it.

But whenever anything came up, Choko would plant herself firmly on the strength of her own competence, and Ryukichi, precisely because he lacked any of his own, found that side of her thoroughly hard to stomach.

Still, having relied on that competence of hers so thoroughly all this while, Ryukichi had no words to throw back at her to her face.

With a sulking, deflated look, he listened meekly to her interrogation.

According to the maid, moreover, Ryukichi had secretly summoned his daughter to Yuzaki and taken her sightseeing to spots like Senjojiki and Sandanbeki.

That fatherly affection was understandable enough, given his age, but Choko felt betrayed all the same.

She had long been pressing Ryukichi to take his daughter in and live the three of them together, but Ryukichi had never once agreed to it.

He'd always worn a face as though his own daughter didn't much matter to him, and so, secretly, she had let herself feel rather proud of that.

Between one thing and another, Choko flew into a blind rage.

She hurled a sake cup at the glass sliding door of the room.

The geisha fled the room in a hurry.

But before long, Choko called back for those very same geisha by name.

Having once been a geisha herself, she couldn't bear the thought of putting a stain — through some tactless scene — on women in a trade built on their popularity, and that feeling, whether it was consideration for others or plain vanity she couldn't quite tell, managed to surface in her at the last.

There was also, in it, something like a cruel pleasure turned against herself.

She returned to Osaka together with Ryukichi, and they rented an upstairs room behind Mikura-ato Park in Nihonbashi.

She went on with her yatona work as before.

If, this time, they could give up renting an upstairs room and set up a proper household with a shop of their own, Ryukichi's father would surely praise her as a formidable woman, and they could become husband and wife in the full light of day at last — with that thought, she threw herself into it with renewed determination.

That father of his had already been bedridden with a stroke for more than ten years, holding on past the point when he would ordinarily have died long since, so there was no telling when he might go, and Choko grew anxious to get it all done while he still had his eyes open.

But Ryukichi's body was still recovering, and between the tonics he drank and the injections he had to take, the expenses ran severe, so that even after half a year had passed, they hadn't managed to save up so much as thirty yen.

One evening, as she stood at the intersection of Nihonbashi 1-chome, shamisen case in hand, waiting to change streetcars, someone said, "Ain't you Choko-han?"

— someone spoke to her.

It was a geisha named Kinpachi, who had once eaten out of the same pot with her under the same okiya keeper up in Kita Shinchi.

Even her shawl alone was enough to show she'd risen in the world.

Invited along, they had sukiyaki at Maruman on Ebisubashi.

It bothered her to have to forfeit that day's earnings, but in front of a friend who'd risen so far in the world, she felt too embarrassed to come out and say as much and decline.

Their old okiya keeper had been such a miser that meals had come down to one pitiful salted sardine apiece, and when the old talk turned to how the two of them had once vowed to make something of themselves and show that keeper up, Choko felt ashamed of her present circumstances.

Kinpachi, not long after Choko's elopement, had been bought out of her contract and became the mistress of a mining prospector, and just recently, when his wife had died, she'd been installed in her place; nowadays she even had a say in the buying and selling of mines, and, "not to brag or anything, but..."

— she was living a life with nothing left to wish for by way of further success.

Even so, whenever she thought back, "it's you I always end up thinkin' of, Choko-han."

Kinpachi said that to make good on the old dream they'd vowed together — of showing up their okiya keeper — Choko simply had to rise in the world too.

A thousand yen, two thousand, whatever Choko needed, she'd lend it interest-free with no deadline for repayment — did she have any mind to go into some business? — Kinpachi asked about her circumstances and made the offer right on the spot.

This was exactly what people meant by finding a buddha in hell, and Choko's eyes welled up with tears as she went on praising every single thing Kinpachi was wearing, one item after another.

"What kind of business d'ya think'd be good, then?"

Even her way of speaking had turned polite.

"Hmm, now let's see..."

When they left Maruman, they had their fortunes told by a diviner beside the Kabuki-za.

They were told the nightlife trade would suit her well.

"You in the water trade and me in the mountain trade — water and mountain, ain't there some little ditty about that?"

And with that, the matter was settled once and for all.

When she went home and told Ryukichi, he said, "You got yourself a fine friend there,"

in a way that carried just a hint of sarcasm, though deep down he seemed none too displeased by it either.

They settled on running a café, and the very next day she went straight around to the brokers, hunting for a café up for sale.

She'd expected it might be hard to find one, but there turned out to be no end of them for sale, with even thriving cafés being put up on the market one after another, and this gave her pause, thinking the inside workings of the café trade couldn't be all that easy — but in the end her own confidence won out.

With just the madam's own skill, she reasoned with mounting enthusiasm, even a middling lineup of waitresses could be made to draw a crowd well enough.

She went around to every shop on offer, one by one, and settled at last on one in front of the streetcar stop in Shimoderamachi, since it wasn't too far from the entertainment districts stretching from Futatsuido through Dotonbori to Sennichimae, the price was reasonable, and the shop itself was compact and suited her taste.

They struck the deal at eight hundred yen, fixtures included, and cheap at that, being nothing like the run-down shop the kanto-daki place in Tobita had been.

Just to be sure, she had Kinpachi come look it over, and Kinpachi said, "A place like this, even I'd wanna come play here myself sometime,"

finding nothing to complain of.

And she urged Choko, since the shop was changing hands anyway, to renovate the whole place inside and out without holding back, put up neon lights, and open with a real splash — she'd supply as much money as it took — throwing herself into the plan with great enthusiasm.

For the name, they kept the old "Choryu"

and simply added "Salon" in front, making it "Salon Choryu,"

and on the gramophone they played shinnai ballads, hauta songs, and other tasteful, refined pieces; every one of the waitresses wore either traditional Japanese hairstyles or dressed in a modest, understated modern fashion, and they took on no woman in clumsy Western dress or with permed hair.

The place suited a kitchen more than a bar counter, where Ryukichi prepared little starter dishes like vinegared sea cucumber, while Choko poured on the teahouse-style charm without letup.

Everything about it leaned this way toward Japanese taste, and customers found that all the more interesting for it, so that the clientele was a good sort, and anyone who'd come merely for a cup of coffee felt distinctly out of place.

Before half a year was out, it had become an unshakably established establishment.

Choko's manner as a madam had grown into something entirely natural to her by now.

When a new waitress came in for a "showing"

— asking to be taken on — Choko could size her up from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes in a single swift glance and read her background and skill straight off.

One woman came in who somehow struck her as suspicious.

There was something in her build and the way she carried herself that seemed calculated, in a distasteful way, to stir up men's hearts, and her eyes had a hard, settled look to them; Choko wasn't at all inclined to take her on, but her looks (her "label") were good, so she hired her anyway.

The way she clung sticky-close to the customers and murmured her seductions in low, whispering tones somehow rubbed Choko the wrong way, but all their best customers had ended up attached to her, so there was no throwing her out.

Every so often she'd ask for two or three hours off and go out with a customer.

This went on happening again and again, and customers gradually stopped coming.

It was plain she was luring customers off somewhere on the side, so that once a man became a regular, he no longer even needed to bother coming out to the shop.

Choko later found out she'd even rented a house set up for that very purpose.

She had, in effect, been using the café as cover for that strange business.

When Choko threw her out, the other waitresses grew visibly unsettled.

Questioning them one by one, it turned out that every single waitress had taken that woman as her model and dipped a foot into that same trade more than once.

Perhaps they'd had no choice, since otherwise that woman would have stolen all their customers away and left them unable to make a living — but in any case, Choko was overcome with a chilling disgust.

Fearing what would happen if the authorities got wind of it, she let every last waitress go and hired on only quiet, well-behaved women in their place.

That was how she finally weathered the crisis.

She was told afterward, with examples to back it up, that if a shop knowingly condoned such a thing that was one matter, but once the waitresses started carrying on like that entirely on their own, a café was as good as finished.

With the waitresses changed, the clientele changed too, and people connected to the newspapers began coming often.

She'd expected newspapermen to have shifty, unpleasant eyes, but they turned out cheerful and almost childlike, and instead of calling her "Madam" they called her "Auntie"

which put Choko in an exceptionally good mood.

As for the "Master," whom they called "Old Man"

— Ryukichi would get pulled over to their booth to join in the fun, and the shop took on a thoroughly homey, family sort of atmosphere.

Once drunk, Ryukichi would call out things like, "Hey, you there, Rakkyo,"

using the reporters' nicknames like that, and in the end would tag along with the whole crowd for a second round, tearing off by car to Imazato Shinchi.

Choko, for the customers' sake, would laugh it off with a knowing, worldly air, but if he stayed out overnight, she never eased up on her punishments all the same.

Around the neighborhood, people whispered behind her back, calling Choko a demon hag.

For the waitresses it made for fine entertainment, and on the surface they'd side with Choko as fellow women, saying it was the Master's fault, but there was no telling what they truly thought deep down.

Choko said, "Let's take your daughter in, why don't we,"

broaching the subject with Ryukichi little by little.

Ryukichi answered, "Just wait a little longer,"

in a way that sounded like a mere dodge.

"Ain't you fond of your own child?"

There was no way he wasn't, but it was his daughter herself who had no wish to come.

It was only natural that a girl at school would feel ashamed of a family running a café, but the reason went deeper than anything so simple.

Her late mother had told her, every chance she got, that her father had been stolen away by a wicked woman.

Since Choko kept pressing so insistently, once or twice the girl did show her face at "Salon Choryu"

in her sailor uniform, but she never so much as cracked a smile.

Choko fussed over her almost comically, trying to win her favor, saying things like, "That English stuff must be awful hard, I bet,"

but the girl only gave a scornful little snort.

One day, without anyone having asked her to, she suddenly showed her pale face at the shop.

Choko broke into a face full of wrinkled smiles and said, "Welcome, welcome,"

rushing over, but the girl only gave her a curt, stiff nod, went straight over to Ryukichi, and said in a low voice, "Grandfather's taken a turn for the worse — please come at once."

Choko had every intention of rushing over there together with Ryukichi.

But Ryukichi said, "You stay put here. It won't do to have you comin' along with me right now."

Choko stood there deflated and dazed for a moment, but she made sure to press this much upon Ryukichi, again and again:—

While his father still drew breath, he was to beg him, at his very bedside, to let them become husband and wife openly at last.

The moment his father agreed, he was to send word right away.

She'd come flying the instant he did.

Choko rushed to the kimono shop and asked them to rush-order crested formal kimono for both herself and Ryukichi.

She waited for the good news, but it was long in coming.

Ryukichi didn't even show his face.

Two days passed, and the crested kimono were finished.

On the evening of the fourth day, a call came summoning her to the phone.

Her face flushed, certain it must be word that things were settled and she should come at once, and she said, "Hello, hello, this is Koreyasu,"

and Ryukichi's voice came back, "Ah, i-i-is that you, old woman? The old man just died."

"Oh — hello, hello?"

Choko's voice came out shrill and trembling.

"Then I'll come right over — I've had the crested kimono made up for both of us."

Her legs shaking beneath her, she still managed to say that much clearly.

But Ryukichi's voice said, "Better you don't come. It'll cause trouble if you do. Th-th-the son-in-law..."

She didn't hear the rest.

Not even allowed to attend the funeral — what kind of talk was that? — fire seemed to race through her head.

Whether the words Ryukichi's sister had spoken in the hospital corridor had been a lie, or whether Ryukichi had simply been talked around by that stubborn son-in-law, she had no room left in her mind to consider.

The crested kimono clung stubbornly to her thoughts.

She went back to the shop and shut herself up in the room upstairs.

Before long, she'd sealed the door shut and pulled up the rubber gas tube.

"Madam, sukiyaki again tonight?"

a waitress called up from downstairs.

She turned the valve open.

That night, when Ryukichi came home to fetch the crested kimono, the gas meter was ticking away with a shrill, high-pitched sound.

There was a strange, foul smell in the air.

Startled, he went up the stairs and threw the door open.

He fanned the room frantically with a paper fan.

He called for a doctor.

And so Choko was saved.

It made the papers.

Even in peaceful times, the newspapermen never forgot to watch for trouble.

They wrote it up sympathetically, something to the effect of "kept woman attempts suicide."

Ryukichi fled, saying there was a funeral to see to, and never came back after that.

When Tanekichi went to Umeda to ask after him, it seemed he wasn't even there.

Once she was well enough to get up and go back to the shop, customers offered her comfort, and business boomed.

The customers, sure enough, didn't let the opportunity slip to press her again to become someone's mistress.

Every morning she went out somewhere with her makeup laid on rather thick, and word went round unkindly that she must have become a mistress after all.

But in truth, she'd been going to the Konkokyo hall to pray for Ryukichi's swift return.

A little over twenty days later, a letter from Ryukichi arrived at Tanekichi's place.

He was already forty-three, it said, and a man who had once suffered so grave an illness couldn't expect to live all that much longer.

He found himself drawn, too, by his daughter's love for him.

He wanted to support himself in Kyushu, even as a factory hand if it came to that, take his daughter in, and live out his remaining years with her.

He was truly, deeply sorry toward Choko, and asked Tanekichi to convey that to her properly.

Choko was still young yet, he wrote, so from here on...

Fearing what would happen if he showed it to her, Tanekichi burned the letter.

Ten days later, Ryukichi turned up out of nowhere at "Salon Choryu"

— he'd come back.

He said that disappearing like that had all been a strategy — his plan had been to make the son-in-law believe he and Choko had split up, so as to get money out of him; once his father died, it stood to reason he ought to claim his share of the inheritance, and it was with that in mind that he'd deliberately kept her from being called to the funeral.

Choko believed every word of it.

Ryukichi said, "So, how about it — wanna go g-g-get somethin' good to eat?"

and invited her along.

They went to "Meoto Zenzai"

in the Hozenji precincts.

At the corner where the passage from Dotonbori met the passage from Sennichimae stood a weathered Otafuku doll, and in front of it hung a great red lantern reading "Meoto Zenzai"

— seeing it there, it struck her as, in the deepest sense, just the kind of place a married couple would come together.

On top of that, when they ordered the zenzai, in keeping with the shop's name — meaning "husband and wife" — they brought out two bowls apiece, one for each of them.

Sitting on the checkerboard-patterned floor mats, slurping away with a loud, high-pitched sound, Ryukichi said,

"D-d-do ya know why this place brings the zenzai out t-t-two bowls at a time? Bet you don't. This here shop, way back, was opened up by some joruri chanter, a master of some school or other — and he figured out that servin' it up in two small bowls instead of one great heapin' pile makes it look like there's more of it. That's the clever bit he thought up."

Choko said, "I'd say it's more that a husband and wife's better than bein' alone, wouldn't you?"

and gave a little tug up at her collar, her shoulders shaking with a big laugh.

Choko had put on a great deal of weight by now, enough that the floor cushion beneath her was all but hidden from view.

Before long, both Choko and Ryukichi grew absorbed in joruri.

At an amateur recital held in the upstairs hall of Tengyu Shoten in Futatsuido, Ryukichi chanted "Taiju" to Choko's shamisen accompaniment,

and won second prize.

Choko used the large floor cushion that came as the prize every single day after that.

(August, Showa 15 [1940])