The Bride's Kimono

by Sujata Massey

  The Asian Division turned out to be a vast area containing all kinds of books relating to Asia, predominantly in Asian languages but also in English. Towering stacks surrounded a long, grand reading room where I saw just a couple of men reading Chinese-language newspapers at long mahogany tables that were lit by lamps with old-fashioned green reading shades.

  A librarian whose name badge made me guess she was from Thailand listened to my request, then checked the library’s computerized catalogue.

  “Yes, we have a book by Dunstan Lanning called The Setting Sun, as well as another book written twenty years earlier that is titled A London Lad in the Tokugawa Court. We also have a book written by a Japanese scholar in the 1950s that examines the life and death of Lanning.”

  I told her that I wanted to see all three books and settled myself down at one of the long tables, under the glow of an old-fashioned reading lamp’s emerald-green shade. As tired and miserable as I felt about the missing kimono, opening these books, and reading quietly for a few hours, was a bit of an escape. It was a gentle way of delaying the reality of my need to report the crime to the Morioka Museum.

  I had perfected a sort of speed-reading style in college, and this was the method I hoped to employ, given that I had such a short time to read The Setting Sun. The problem was that I had to be very careful turning its fragile tea-colored pages. After half an hour I realized that the book was a straightforward account of the brutality of the Japanese Shogun system; no wonder Dunstan Lanning had lost his life. At the same time there was an element of entertainment to the book, with references to the spending habits of some of the lords, especially on clothing. Ryohei Tokugawa’s name appeared once, and it was mentioned that he received the bulk of his income from rice grown by farmers in the Kansai region. If Ryohei Tokugawa was a daimyo, as feudal landowners were called, he probably had lived in western Japan instead of Tokyo. I read on, but there were no further references to his life, and certainly none to his wife’s.

  When I’d finished with The Setting Sun, I opened Lanning’s earlier book, which had a title that distinctly reminded me of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, although of course, this book had been written earlier than Twain’s—in 1830.

  In this book, Lanning seemed more positive about the Tokugawas than he’d been in The Setting Sun. I read glowing accounts of splendid banquets and gentlemen’s and ladies’ robes, including a paragraph that nicely validated my theory that courtesans were the greatest fashion leaders of the time. Lanning wrote:

  For the lass who has beautiful hair, complexion and composure, there is no greater fortune than to be in the Floating World entertainment quarter. While the gates are guarded, and the girls not allowed passage out, there is no real desire to leave—who would seek to leave the land of sweetmeats and delicious teas and silken garments? In the case of ladies who are the favorites of aristocrats, there is no limit to excesses allowed. A young lady in the Yoshiwara Pleasure Quarter whom I shall take the liberty of naming “Miss Love,” is known to be a favorite mistress of one of the most pleasure-loving Tokugawa cousins. Miss Love has such an enthusiasm for fashion that she has brought about the employment of two dozen weavers and embroidery experts solely responsible for her clothing.

  I paused, and then read the words over again. Love. The closest Japanese translation to that word was ai—could Dunstan Lanning have referred to a woman who was actually named Ai?

  I read on.

  On one memorable occasion, Miss Love had a finely embroidered length of silk inscribed with poetic verses by various aristocratic men of her acquaintance. After the fabric had been covered by calligraphy to her satisfaction, she had it sewn into a kimono for herself. The only person in the Tokugawa Court not charmed by this robe of words was the courtesan’s most special patron, who was said to have flown into a jealous rage at the thought of other nobles’ hands touching the silk of a garment worn by his beloved.

  I felt my heart begin to pound as I thought about Ai’s red-and-pink furisode that I’d brought to the Museum of Asian Arts. It was inscribed elegantly with several lines of calligraphy. I knew from the notes given to me by the Morioka Museum the name of each noble who had signed the robe.

  I stopped myself. I was stretching a guess into a theory—a risky thing to do. But I had to admit there were bits and pieces that matched up. Fact one: Ai-san was the possible name of a young woman who lived in Tokyo, where she created a fabulous kimono wardrobe that was bankrolled by a Tokugawa family member. Fact two: In 1830, a woman called Ai, who owned a kimono collection more appropriate for a courtesan than an upper-class virgin, married a tea-shop owner in Osaka, a city in the Kansai region—territory under the influence of Ryohei Tokugawa.

  “We’re closing soon,” a voice said in my ear. “Did you find what you needed?”

  “Is there a way I could borrow these books? I haven’t even gotten to the biography—”

  The woman shook her head. “I’m sorry. But I think you might be able to find the biography of Dunstan Lanning at a good bookstore, since it’s still in print.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and rapidly began copying down the terrific passage I’d read about Miss Love. Then I resumed my work, no longer speed-reading, because I was desperate to catch another reference to Miss Love.

  Dunstan Lanning was a great raconteur, but his stories certainly meandered. It wasn’t until a hundred pages later that I found a reference to the Tokugawa lord’s final gift of clothing to Ai—a splendid uchikake patterned with a tsujighana design of mandarin ducks, for her arranged wedding to a commoner in a distant town. “It was not that the Lord had tired of the lovely Miss Love, who was just entering her twenties—in this gentleman’s opinion, the most graceful time in a woman’s life. It was that the wife had grown tired of hearing admiring gossip about a lovely, younger lady who had more splendid robes.”

  This was it, I felt with a flush of excitement. Not only did I have a reliable account of Ryohei Tokugawa’s mistress wearing a calligraphy-inscribed robe, I now had the evidence of the wedding kimono patterned with mandarin ducks. Ai Otani was the character Dunstan Lanning called Miss Love. When I returned to Japan, I could tell Ai Otani’s great-great-great-grandson that he could be proud of his ancestor, indeed.

  But just as I’d received the answer, I’d been given a new set of questions.

  Why had Allison Powell selected a group of kimono belonging to two women who were rivals? If Allison actually knew the connection between Mrs. Ryohei Tokugawa and Ai-san, why hadn’t she made it clear to me? Was it some kind of test of my own research abilities? And finally, if the two women at the Museum of Asian Arts were harboring secret knowledge about the kimono, why had Jamie told me about the Library of Congress, thus leading me straight to the key?

  13

  In the gentlest way possible, the librarian urged me out of the reading room at two minutes to five. I didn’t mind. I had learned more than I expected about the lineage of the kimono I had been carrying. At this point I knew I should go back to rest at the Washington Suites, but I was too wound up.

  I took a short taxi ride to Dupont Circle, and once there, I went straight to a place I’d noticed when I’d gotten out of the Metro earlier: Kramerbooks. There, I found a tenth-edition copy of the biography of Dunstan Lanning. The bookstore had a pleasant café, so I sat down and ordered a caffe latte. After all, it was six A.M. Tokyo time—I was just starting to wake up. As I was thumbing through my backpack looking for a pen to use for underlining important passages, my fingers touched Hugh Glendinning’s business card.

  I really looked at it this time. Under Hugh Glendinning it read, Assistant Director, International Contracts. The firm was called Andrews, Ferguson and Cheyne and was located downtown on I Street.

  “Mr. Glendinning’s office, Rhiannon speaking.” A woman with a perfect BBC accent answered on the second ring. I wondered if the firm was the kind of place that thought British accents made good window dressing.

  �
�I’d like to just leave a message for Mr. Glendinning to call me sometime, if he has the chance.” I knew from experience that I could never speak to Hugh during the workday. He was always in meetings with bosses or clients.

  “Is this Miss Shimura?” Rhiannon asked, pronouncing my surname perfectly.

  “Yes,” I said, feeling spooked. Had he told the office about me? How bizarre—how different from our time in Tokyo, where our cohabitation had been something we’d tried, quite unsuccessfully, to conceal.

  “I’ve instructions to put you through immediately, madam. He’ll be with you shortly.”

  Before I could react to this, Hugh’s voice was on the line. “What’s happening?”

  What’s happening? He sounded like a 1970s American sitcom. Is this what a few months in a strange country could do to him? I wondered if he’d gotten into Casual Friday dressing as well.

  “Um, I’m calling because I decided I wanted to take you up on dinner.”

  “Great. I’m in conference right now, so let’s make a quick plan of where and when.”

  “I’m in Dupont Circle right now.”

  “I can be there in, um, forty minutes. Meet me at the fountain in the middle of the circle, we’ll go on from there.”

  I was left with some time to kill, during which I read a third of the biography of Dunstan Lanning. I was beginning to think Lanning was a bit like my friend Richard Randall—fawning when it came to matters of fashion, but at heart a genuine, honest person. Dunstan Lanning had been killed because he’d published an account of an aristocrat who beat an innocent peasant to death—a mention that could only have embarrassed the Shogunate.

  I concluded my reading session thinking that Dunstan Lanning had been a fairly reliable narrator—unfortunately, too honest to save his own head. It was a miracle that his books had made it into print in England, and were waiting for me to find in Washington, D.C., 150 years after their original publication.

  It was five thirty-five, and I needed to go off to meet Hugh. In the bookstore’s tiny bathroom, I tried to freshen up, but somehow I had misplaced my last MAC lipstick. There was nothing I could do to improve myself except run a comb through my hair. What would Miss Love have done? Pinch her cheeks, maybe. Blacken her teeth with coal, for a fashionable smile.

  I skipped both.

  The fountain where Hugh had asked me to meet him was smack in the middle of Dupont Circle—literally surrounded by lane upon lane of buzzing traffic. Fortunately, there were some pedestrian walkways and stop-lights, so I crossed, bit by bit, with the flood of humanity. Once I had entered the small park that surrounded a fountain, I marveled at this tiny, busy green space within the traffic maelstrom. Old men in shabby clothing were playing chess at tables, younger men were cruising each other close to the fountain, and there were a few toddlers jumping around under the supervision of rather hip-looking parents—the kind with tattoos and copies of the City Paper or The Gay Blade tucked under their arm. The scene was quite different from the park in Japan, where the old people performed tai chi, and the young families seemed to be dressed like department-store mannequins.

  Hugh was already sitting on the ledge of the fountain. He was wearing dark wraparound sunglasses and talking on a cell phone. In other words, he looked like a lot of the American yuppies I’d seen in the Starbucks on Connecticut Avenue. I wouldn’t have known him except for the gorgeously tailored suit in a soft, mushroomy color, and the fact that he was waving at me. I kept to an even pace, though a part of me wanted to sprint to him. By the time we were face-to-face, his phone was off and in his pocket.

  “Aren’t you a picture,” he said, taking off his sunglasses as he looked me over. I’d walked quickly enough from the bookstore to get warm, so I’d taken off my light coat.

  “What a strange thing to say,” I said, my eagerness turning to reserve.

  “No, I mean it. The dress. Isn’t there a photo of your mother in it?”

  While in Japan, Hugh had checked out my family photo albums. He’d thought that my mother looked a little like Catherine Deneuve and was canny enough to say it to her when she phoned me once, and he’d picked up. After that my mother had been very interested in Hugh, and when he left Japan, she had mourned along with me. But six months ago she’d decided Takeo Kayama was the next great hope. I suspected my aunt Norie had told her about his Fortune magazine ranking.

  “Of course it’s my mother’s,” I said, upset that Takeo had popped up in my head again, making me feel guilty.

  “There’s a good restaurant nearby called Obelisk, but it can be a bit chancy to get in at the last minute. We can try,” Hugh said, leading me to one of the many crosswalks radiating out of the park.

  “Could we do something…unfashionable?” I asked. “I mean, eat in a place that’s low-key? I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed. After losing that bridal kimono, I found out some things today that are…incredible. I need to talk without distraction.”

  “Well, then, if your shoes don’t bother you, how about walking a few more blocks to a little place in my neighborhood? It’s good for drinks and those little Spanish dishes—tapos or however you say it—”

  “Tapas!” I said. Hugh was always awkward when the language wasn’t English or legalese.

  As we walked along from Nineteenth onto Columbia Road, the atmosphere seemed to shift. The gracious old town houses were home to businesses with Spanish, African, and Asian names. I heard unidentifiable Spanish pop music spilling out of some doorways, and a band I liked, Cornershop, singing “Brim Full of Asha” from another. There were shops selling incense and newspapers and vintage electrical fixtures. I would have loved to explore, if I didn’t have so many problems.

  “You really live in this neighborhood? What is it called?” I asked Hugh. This was a significant change, since Hugh had chosen to live in one of the most expensive, foreigner-occupied apartment buildings in West Tokyo.

  “It’s called Adams Morgan. It used to be very posh at the turn of the last century, but then it fell off. In the 1980s, immigrants from Africa and Central America started a great restaurant and club scene going on Eighteenth Street. Then the yuppies moved in all around.” Hugh gave me a self-effacing grin. “I arrived too late to be able to afford to buy property, so I’m renting the second floor of a house on Biltmore Street. This neighborhood is like Notting Hill without Julia Roberts and Mexico City without the altitude problem. I quite like it.”

  “It’s not your style, though. I thought you’d live in The Watergate or somewhere else similarly fancy and convenient—”

  “No more cost-of-living allowance for me. Those glory ex-pat days are over, Rei. I shop for provisions at Price Club and buy my clothes at that all-American mall near your hotel.”

  “I never dreamed you’d join the rest of us plebes. After all, you’ve got such a nice title on your business card.”

  “It’s not ‘partner,’ which is all that really matters.” Hugh raised his left eyebrow, a neat trick of his. “Anyway, less pressure is nice. It gives me the chance to leave work before seven, which almost never happened in Japan.”

  Hugh waved me into a plain glass door labeled EL RINCON ESPAÑOL. The owner beamed at him when he walked in, and the waiter called him by his first name. Within a minute we were ensconced at a cozy table with a carafe of a zesty Rioja between us. A short while later the waiter brought a savory pancake of egg and potato, a bowl of mushrooms marinated in garlic and wine, and slivers of a salty hard white cheese with some crusty rolls.

  “This is so good,” I said, relaxing for the first time all day. “I was looking forward to coming to America to eat all the ethnic food I can’t find in Japan, but I’ve been so upset about things that I forgot to have dinner last night and lunch today. I’m behind schedule.”

  “That’s awful, because you’re even thinner than you used to be. We’re going to have to finish up with a chocolate mousse at the patisserie on the corner. It’s the best kind of chocolate with the essence of hazelnuts.”


  “Mmm. Well, it’s true I want to eat chocolate every day that I’m here. I’m trying to undo the dulling of my palate from all those lousy Lotte bars.”

  Hugh smiled at my reference to the most popular brand of Japanese chocolate, which was usually the only option in Japanese shops. He knew me so well—better than Takeo, I realized suddenly. Takeo and I had never shared a chocolate bar together, because he wasn’t fond of sweets.

  “So tell me what’s happening, Rei,” Hugh said, after we’d both eaten a dinner’s worth of snacks.

  “This is the thing. I knew four of the kimono that I brought over belonged to the wife and daughter of one of the ruling Tokugawa families. The other four kimono—including the bride’s kimono that was stolen—belonged to a woman called Ai Otani who was alive during the same time. Jamie—she’s the conservator at the museum—suggested that I look for a specific book that talked about life under late Tokugawa rule. It was a rare book, she said, but I might find it at the Library of Congress. I did find it there, as well as an earlier book by the same author with some really amazing information.” I saw I had Hugh’s rapt attention, so I went on. “Ai Otani, the one with the really fabulous kimono, was probably the mistress of Ryohei Tokugawa. And the other kimono that I brought—a very nice, but typically matronly kimono—belonged to Ryohei’s wife. She apparently forced Ryohei to drop the mistress, and I’m guessing he was the one who arranged the marriage between Ai and a tea merchant in Osaka.”

  Hugh was silent for a minute. Then he said, “You’re going to give a great lecture tomorrow evening. I’m sorry, but there’s no way in hell I’m staying away.”

  “Okay. Just don’t speak to me, and it should be fine.” I winked at him, then got serious again. “Don’t you see how strange things seem? If the Museum of Asian Arts had made it clear that they wanted me to bring the kimono belonging to a wife and the mistress of an important lord, and talk about their lives, that would have been easy to understand. But they never said the kimono belonged to a pair of romantic rivals. I don’t know if they were testing me, to see if I would find out. If Jamie hadn’t given me the tip, I would never have known the truth—and just how awful the loss of the bridal kimono is.”