‘What an unpleasant foreman that is,’ Ruriko muttered with an air of distaste. ‘Grandfather seems to think a lot of him, but I hate him. You know, he’s always teasing the maids in the kitchen.’ Even in the way they behaved to the employees and tradespeople there was a great difference between Ruriko and Miya, who had had the easygoing affability characteristic of her plebeian background.

Takao made no reply but walked rapidly on up the slope, this time by her side.

The Waiting Years

At the top of Kagura Hill two child geishas in kimonos of printed silk with long sleeves were playing New Year’s shuttlecock. The older geisha who stood looking on wore a multi-colored evening kimono, although it was still light, and was lifting the hem slightly as though deliberately to show off the fine-spotted undergarment beneath. Both kimono and sash were of unusually good quality for a geisha of this quarter, while the large battledore that hung from her hand, with its picture of the Kabuki actor Kichiemon in a well-known role, must have cost at least twenty yen at the Yagen-bori fair.

Thanks to the war in Europe that was already in its third or fourth year, shares in military supplies and ships had shown an astonishing rise. The geisha houses were flourishing as a result of the wartime boom, and it was even rumored that a certain shipbuilder who had made his fortune overnight had given a former Osaka geisha a kimono with the pattern at the hem studded with great diamonds. If even the geishas in a second- or third-rate quarter like this could get themselves up in this fashion, what must it be like in the first class districts? As she walked past, Tomo gazed at the geisha’s profile with its smartly swept up sidelocks and found herself calling to mind first one then another face from the past, faces of geishas of the Shimbashi quarter with which she had had no contact for some twenty years by now. At the time when Yukitomo had been a high-ranking official in the Metropolitan Police Department, geishas from Shimbashi had always been summoned to entertain guests at the parties he held at his official residence. Some of them were old acquaintances of Yukitomo’s and often one would come to pay her respects in the daytime, clothed in a respectable striped kimono and carrying some dainty, toylike present, accompanied by the proprietress and chief maid of the teahouse. It occurred to Tomo now that most of them, so mature in their sober kimonos in colors that firmly rejected any telltale suggestion of red, could have been little more than twenty years of age.