Geisha in Rivalry by Kafu Nagai

Author:Kafu Nagai [Nagai, Kafu]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781462900756
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
Published: 2011-08-30T04:30:00+00:00

RAIN ON AN AUTUMN NIGHT

IN NEGISHI, Kurayama Nanso lived an idle life in a kind of watery world whose loneliness he relished. It was a place where one passed the days in intimacy with the changing seasons. When the wagtail and the bush warbler appeared, it was they who took over from the striped-trousered mosquitoes that had concealed themselves in the shadows of the thick shrubbery. Here in summer, where the water of the garden pond had been brought with casual elegance to flow like a little brook past the sliding windows of his study, the rush flowers bloomed, and at night Nanso watched the fireflies striking like raindrops against the rattan blinds. In autumn, resting his cheek on his arm, he listened to the rustling of the reeds. Having already crossed the boundary into middle age, Nanso liked to spend his mornings and evenings looking at the flowers and trees in his garden. Only one thing dismayed him: the speed with which the days and months went by.

If at one moment he was observing how the evening showers of late summer caused the leaves of the lotus to drip with jewels and then suddenly to break, in the very next, it seemed, he was hearing the dry sound of the reeds trembling in the wind, and it was already well into autumn, when the amaranths gave way to the chrysanthemums and the last of the maple leaves came down in the drizzling rain. Then, almost too soon for belief, it was the end of the year, and the time had come to count the buds of the plum that bloomed at the winter solstice. In the season of greatest cold, when one had long since taken care of the old trees by placing winter fertilizer around them, holding one's nose all the while, it was time to admire the berries of the nanten and the yabukoji, glowing more beautifully than flowers against the background of snow. It was then that one knew the true pleasure of winter confinement: the cup of tea brewed at midnight, the arrangement of narcissus and adonis on the bookshelf. But hardly had they faded before it was the vernal equinox, the time for separating the roots of the chrysanthemums and sowing grass seed, and a man who loved his garden found the days slipping away more quickly than ever. Busy as he was with welcoming and bidding farewell to a hundred kinds of flowers as they bloomed and faded, even though he stopped for a moment to look up at the new green of the treetops, the garden was before long darkened by the approach of the rainy season, and the morning after the still unripe plums began to fall turned swiftly into the evening when the leaves of the pink mimosa folded themselves in sleep. Under the blazing sun of noon, the pomegranate flared with blossoms, and the petals of the great trumpet flowers colored the ground. In the dead of night, the

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