The status of a benshi...

[Maria Jose Gonzalez]

Yesterday I was reading "Quiet Rain",one of Kafu Nagai's delightful  
stories from 1918 and wanted to share it.
The narrator,an insatiable reader of Chinese poetry,writer,critic and  
lover of Edo lyricism,has a rich friend who is a businessman and who  
also loves the old way
of the arts.
This friend decides to keep a geisha mistress and builds a house for  
her,but he is "forced to send her back to her old nest" :

"...I must for a time bear the shame of having people learn my  
folly...Actors and geisha being in a sort of symbiotic relationship,I  
was quite ready,had the man been an actor,to pretend that nothing was  
amiss...I found the situation impossible to tolerate,however,when I  
learned that the object of her affections was not actor but-a  
narrator for the movies! Though I would have found him distasteful,I  
would have tolerated,I think,even an actor in the new style,or an  
Osaka comedian;but however much one may wish
to conduct an affair in the grand Edo manner,...one is not likely to  
succeed when a chauffeur or a movie narrator thrusts himself upon the  
scene.Perhaps I may take the liberty of assuming that my aesthetic  
theories accord with your own,and that I may count upon your  
sympathy.I do not know whether O-han chose to become a geisha again  
or whether she married the movie yawper."