This is the seventh and last in a series of Lafcadio Hearn stories set in Kyoto. ‘Kimiko’ first appeared in Kokoro (1896). For an introduction to Hearn’s Kyoto stories, please click here.
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Synopsis
The story is set in the ‘Street of the Geisha’, which at night ‘is one of the queerest in the world’. Narrow like a gangway, with tightly packed houses several storeys high and lit by paper-lanterns of differing shapes. On them are beautifully written Japanese characters giving the names of the geisha who live there. In one of the houses are Kimika and Kimiko No. 2.
Kimiko No. 1 was beautiful, clever and accomplished. Kimika acted as ‘older sister’ and took a protective role since the younger sister attracted men like moths to a flame. One tried to buy her out, another sought to get her drunk, and a foreign prince sent her diamonds. Such was Kimiko’s fame she became one of Kyoto’s sights, yet she managed to evade all amorous entanglements.
One day came the startling news that she had parted with Kimika and gone off with a suitor ‘willing to die for her ten times over’. According to Kimika, a fool had tried to kill himself, and Kimiko had taken pity and ‘nursed him back to foolishness’. However, things were more complicated.
As a child, Kimiko was known as Ai, which when written with different characters can mean ‘love’ or ‘grief’. She was well brought up and attended a school run by an old samurai, then went to one of the new elementary public schools with the first modern textbooks. However, the Meiji reforms meant that families of rank such as that of Ai were reduced to obscurity. Family misfortune followed, and she was left with just a destitute mother and younger sister.
The family sold off all their possessions, and in desperation even opened the grave of Ai’s grandfather to reclaim the sword with which he was buried. His features were still recognizable after his long entombment, and he seemed to nod assent to what they were doing. They took the sheaf and mountings made of gold, but left the sword.
When her mother became ill and weak, Ai asked to be sold to the ‘dancing girls’. She remembered a geisha named Kimika, who had appeared at banquets in her father’s house. An agreement was made whereby Kimika would support the mother in return for Ai staying with her till the age of twenty four, or until such time as she could pay back the debt.
[Flash forward] The man with whom Kimiko had run off was the only son in a well-to-do family, but happily they were willing to accept his choice of lover. He prepared a palace-like home for her, but she turned down his offer of marriage three times, confessing that she had been through hell and that ‘the scorch of the fire is upon me’. Ashamed of her past, she told him he would be better off with a true sweet lady.
Not long afterwards Kimiko vanished completely, leaving her clothes and possessions behind. No one could locate her. As the years passed by the young man ‘became wiser’ and found another woman, married and had a son.
One day a travelling nun came begging to the house. The young son went to the door and donated some rice. For her part she asked him to give his father a message. ‘Tell him that one whom he will never see again said that she was glad, because she had seen his son.’ With that, she disappeared.
[The following is the last paragraph in Hearn’s own words.]
‘… it were vain to ask in what remote city, in what fantastic riddle of narrow nameless streets, in what obscure little temple known only to the poorest poor, she waits for the darkness before the Dawn of the Immeasurable Light – when the Face of the Teacher will smile upon her – when the Voice of the Teacher will say to her, in tones of sweetness deeper than ever came from a human lover’s lips: “Oh my daughter in the Law, thou hast practiced the perfect way; thou hast believed and understood the highest truth; therefore come I now to meet and to welcome thee!”‘
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Commentary
Lafcadio Hearn’s interest in the macabre and the mysterious is clearly reflected in the story, as is his sentimental attitude to women. Like Charlie Chaplin, Hearn’s idealisation of the female sex was shaped by attachment to a mother who was vulnerable and frail. In both cases they were separated from the mother they adored while young. For Hearn self-sacrifice was the greatest of virtues (he advocated dying for the emperor to his Kumamoto students), and the florid language of the final paragraph justifies Kimiko’s choices in life in the most emphatic of terms.
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For Hearn’s other Kyoto stories, click here for ‘Common Sense’; here for ‘The Sympathy of Benten’; here for ‘Screen Maiden’; here for ‘The Ditty of O-Kichi and Seiza’; here for ‘Story of a Fly; and here for ‘The Reconciliation’.