u shobai sense commonly is assessed by three criteria: (1) age - the younger, the more beautiful; (2) dress - the more expensive and refined the clothing, the classier and more attractive the woman; and (3) so-called natural beauty - pretty face, lovely hair, petite or busty figure" (p. 62). She is nineteen, and therefore young enough to be attractive to clients; Kawabata (1996) writes, "Shimamura had taken her to be twenty-one or twenty-two, and, since he assumed she was not lying, the knowledge that she had aged beyond her years gave him for the first time a little of the ease he expected to feel with a geisha" (p. 19). She understands the requirements of dress (though she is often drunk at the parties she works for and becomes careless in her dress); when Shimamura first meets her, she does not wear the trailing skirts of a geisha: "On the contrary, she wore her soft, unlined summer kimono with an emphasis on propriety. The obi seemed expensive, out of keeping with the kimono, and struck him as a little sad" (Kawabata, 1996, p. 18). She is physically attractive, though his first impression of her is primarily that she is extremely clean, and she later shows a tendency to turns very red from cold, embarrassment, or drink. She is also skilled as a samisen player, though she is largely self-taught.
Shimamura has come to the hot-spring village to get back in touch with himself, and he wants to spend time with a geisha in order to make his vacation from his family complete. Elise K. Tipton (2000) notes, "Geishas were expensive . . . and . . . complicated to arrange. One had to go through prescribed procedures at an introductory meeting (machiai) and follow certain etiquette to be entertained by a geisha" (p. 128). Shimamura tries at first to get Komako to select a professional for him, arguing that he likes her too much to use her for his purposes, but eventually he relents and they become lovers.
The translation of Kawa...