by Ellis Avery
The night Yukako came back late, when I looked for her brocade bag, it was gone. Had someone taken it? Should I tell Yukako in her bath? I had to use the toilet anyway. I walked downstairs. Most evenings a little light seeped from the family bathhouse lamp into the toilet-room window, but tonight the narrow room was dark, except for the moon. So where was she?
At the top of the kitchen stairs, I sat resting my elbows on my knees. I cast a line from inside me out to the darkness—Yukako!—and caught nothing. I could hear the mice in the ceiling, just like in New York, the sluff-sluff of the bamboo hedge outside, and the sound of water in the nearby Migawa stream. I listened. At a distance from the other buildings of the compound, the Migawa meandered past a two-storied white tower with fireproof plaster walls instead of paper: the Shins kept their treasures there. Passing the storeroom tower over a tiny burbling drop, the stream eased through the garden, then found the straight line of Migawa Street and flowed in a gutter past the Shin gate. As I listened to the stream, a regular soft rattle, almost imperceptible, came from Chio’s hut off the kitchen: her husband Matsu snoring.
Chio and Matsu had a son, Nao, whom I knew from Yukako’s stories and from the daguerreotype Chio kept in the kitchen, where she also kept a packet of his letters, one sent each New Year, always bearing the same good wishes. They also had a gloomy daughter named Kuga. She had recently been married to a man named Goto: when he took a pretty mistress, she sulked, and he divorced her for it. Kuga arrived at the Shin house not long after I did, bringing her little son Zoji, whom I petted and carried and trailed after as he learned to speak, repeating the Japanese words as he did. That very night, while waiting for Yukako’s return, I had scrubbed one of Zoji’s milky stains off my cotton kimono, kneeling by the water jar on the veranda.
Since Kuga’s arrival, her family slept four to a bed in the hut by the kitchen. I saw them lined up one night when I lingered after our bathhouse walk: Matsu by the wall, already drifting off, then Chio, then Zoji, and, last, skinny Kuga, closest to the damp night air. I wondered if Matsu had always been so loud, or if he did it on purpose to punish Kuga for shaming them by coming home. He did seem to dote on the boy, though. As the head gardener, Matsu also served as charcoal-cutter, sawing each carbonized branch to the precise lengths required by the Mountain’s art, washing each stick of charcoal and drying it in the sun to reduce sparking in the tearoom. I remembered Matsu teaching Zoji how to make pellets of household fuel from charcoal dust and stubs, spheres held together with wet seaweed. He looked as happy as a boy himself, building up an arsenal of black snowballs, while Zoji preferred to eat or wear the wet dark paste. Matsu was so careful and thorough afterward, washing his grandson’s sooty little hands and face.
Suddenly, I snapped alert at a sound: a sniffle, too close to be the baby’s. And then, because I knew to listen for it, I heard the soft tread of a shoeless woman.
I saw a figure moving through the kitchen, pausing at the step up into the tatami part of the house, saw her quick bunchy movements as she shucked off her split-toed socks, saw her kimono, whitish in the moon as she moved toward me, the rectangle of its front panel angling into a diamond shape as she gained each stair. It wasn’t her bath kimono. “Little Ura,” Yukako whispered.
“Older Sister,” I said, rising to let her pass into her room.
“Why are you awake?”
“Why are you awake?”
Instead of answering me, Yukako thrust her brocade bag into my hands, threw herself facedown on the futon, and sobbed.
I had seen her cry once before, when she unwrapped Akio’s teascoop, or rather felt her crying, her silent wet breath. But tonight she wept openly, rubbing her face into her quilt, smearing her eyebrow paint into the pale cotton as she gulped and sobbed. I had never seen her with her eyebrows on after a bath. It scared me: the alien moans, the contorted streaky face under her lacquer-perfect coiffure. “What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Did you go see Mr. Akio?” At this she wailed afresh, pushing me away when I gingerly reached for her arm.
I wanted to help her somehow, or maybe I was afraid she wouldn’t want me around. I brought a soft cloth to the water jar on her veranda and moistened it. “Your eyebrows,” I said, pointing.
“Thank you.” She took a deep breath. She went silently to the mirror with the candle and cleaned off the paint in two slow, practiced strokes. Then, pulling down her stained quilt, she lay on the futon in her good kimono, fitted her wooden pillow under her neck, and began talking, her words punctuated with sighs.
Usually when Yukako told me things she paused first, isolated an essential word or two, and spoke in short clear bursts. Usually I understood her. That night her words spilled out like water, rapid, without pauses. These were her words as she thought them to herself, not the semaphore flags she flew for me. She was telling another story about Akio. I heard searching and hesitation in her sentences, repeated phrases, as if she were clarifying for herself what had happened. And toward the end, I understood more: the words my wife, not, host.
Yukako had gone to perform tea ceremony for Akio, I understood, putting the words together with the brocade bag—and he had rejected her. You are not an entertainer, he’d told her. It was another word I had to learn later. Women in the water trade did temae, I eventually discovered, a flashy and facile variant of the Mountain’s art. But here at the Shins’, I realized that night, there were no women students. And though Yukako was expected to watch tea lessons whenever she could, sitting behind a lattice in the classroom wall, I had never seen her take a lesson with her father.
Then why had Akio made her a teascoop? I tried to ask.
“My question too,” she said, nodding. “‘For our son,’” he’d said.
Yukako cried; I listened. I touched her shoulder and she let me. She wrapped the speckled teascoop back in the white paper handkerchief stamped with Akio’s seal, tied the red thread he had used back around the package, and grimly set it on the shelf with her other tea things. Something else must have happened, too, that made her cry so bitterly, but I didn’t understand. “Go to sleep,” she said. So I did. I drifted off to the sound of her on the balcony, scrubbing her kimono as I had scrubbed mine.
I wondered if that night would mark the end of my duties as courier. The next morning, however, we stopped all the same for a cut of pink salmon. I wanted to see what would happen when Akio discovered it in his bento that afternoon, but I saw a second pair of men’s sandals by his door and heard him talking inside with one of the other students.
After we watched that day’s lesson, after she practiced in her room and cleaned her utensils, pouring the tea powder out of its lacquer temae box and into an airtight one for storage, Yukako fixed me with a long look. “Watch.”
She took the cylindrical lacquer box used in temae, set aside the lid, and showed me the inside, cloudy with a film of green powder. She wiped off the tea powder with a square of soft paper until the inside of the box shone as bright as its mirror-smooth outside. “Can I put the teabox away now? Is it clean?”
“Yes,” I nodded.
“Truly?”
What was wrong? “Yes?” I asked, nervous. She set aside the box, took up the lid, and turned it over. “Ara!” She hadn’t cleaned the inside of the lid yet; of course it was still dirty. Just as I had doubtless left it when I played with her tea things. I blushed.
“Ara,” she said dryly. “Next time don’t forget.”
I hung my head. “I’m sorry.”
“You want to learn temae, don’t you.” It wasn’t a question. I nodded, guilty as charged. In the long silence that followed, I looked up to see Yukako smiling, proud and spiteful. It scared me. “Good,” she said, “because I’m going to teach you.” And then she said something I understood later, when I reflected that her father had married into the family line, and Akio would too: “I’m the real Shin.”
I hunched, uncertain, and her face softened toward me. “I’m happy,” she s
aid. “You’re a good student.” That was when I realized her spite was for Akio. If he said no wife of his would do temae, she’d do temae—and teach it, too! I smiled.
“Wipe the lid,” she said. “Now you will remember.”
IN THE SHORT WEEK that followed, the household continued to prepare for the imperial visit and I continued to leave treats for Akio at his sickroom door, and to bring secret notes—in tighter, more controlled handwriting than before—to Yukako upstairs. Yukako came home each night promptly after her bath, added Akio’s note to the stash in the hollow base of her pillow, and anxiously read through the whole cycle of his correspondence. I would often fall asleep before she could blow out the candle, but I’d just as often wake in the darkness to feel her turning restlessly beside me, sighing like some long-ago lady from the illustrated Heian classics she showed me: Lady Murasaki’s Tale of Genji, or Lady Shonagon’s Pillow Book. One night as I lay watching, Yukako opened her eyes and looked back at me. “Feel my face,” she said. “It’s so hot.” It was as cool as wax.
THE DAY BEFORE the August Nephew’s visit, Akio called to me from the bent-tree sickroom. “Miss Ura!”
“Yes?”
He talked and I bowed and smiled. There was a rumpled elegance to his sleeping kimono: the muted blue suited him, and I liked the daring checkerboard pattern of his narrow sash, gold and green. “Did you understand?” he said.
“No. I’m sorry.”
He repeated himself more loudly and I smiled weakly. “Baka,” he muttered. Stupid. After two months in a new language, I was used to it.
He tried again. “Young Mistress lonely,” he said, speaking bluntly of Yukako.
“Young Mistress is lonely?” I repeated nervously, not certain how much to say about her. He hadn’t really spoken to me before; I was unprepared.
“No,” he said, exasperated. “I am lonely.”
“Mr. Akio is lonely.”
“Yes.” He started to say something about Yukako and broke off, collapsing into another cough. In Japanese you don’t say, I miss you, you say, I’m lonely for not seeing you, but I didn’t know that.
“Tomorrow,” he said, apparently changing the subject.
I didn’t hear the rest of what he said, but it was a question. “Tomorrow, important guest?” I assumed.
He sighed impatiently. “Tomorrow. Young Mistress. Doing what?”
Oh. He was lonely; he wanted to imagine her day. Since the night Yukako had come home late, I had worried that he might not think of her as much as he ought. “First, cousin’s house,” I explained, as well as I could. “Then bring cousin here. Then hairdresser comes. Then help o-Chio. Then kimono. Then help important guest.” Custom required, I was beginning to learn, that a wellborn guest in one’s house be served, at least a token amount, by the host and his family, not by servants alone. While the Mountain planned to do temae for the August Nephew with his own hands in Baishian teahouse, the Imperial Guest would travel with a large retinue, who would receive a ritual meal separately in the Mountain’s largest tearoom, a fourteen-mat hall, then be entertained by a troupe of hired singing-girls. While the students and apprentices had spent days preparing and rehearsing the temae for the imperial retainers’ meal, it would still be seemly for Yukako to appear where her father could not, pouring a first cup of sake. There would be some dozen guests, so Yukako had enlisted the help of her cousin Matsudaira Sumie.
I had seen Sumie often: every few nights, when Yukako washed all the oil and wax out of her hair, I knew that the next day we’d go to Sumie’s house, where a pair of hairdressers, husband and wife, came once a week to look after the men and women of the household respectively. Sumie, tender and breathless, was sixteen like Yukako. Her face was full and round, her feet small and vulnerable, her teeth tiny and white. She and her family had spent much of her girlhood in Edo, so she spoke more quickly than most people I met. Moreover, her language was elaborately feminine: when they chatted while the hairdressers plied their wax and combs, I could understand Sumie even less than I could Yukako.
“Cousin’s house far?” Akio asked.
“Twenty-minute walk,” I explained. It was nice to imagine him picturing Yukako’s walk. “Canal Street.” A grand but weathered compound, complete with a moon-viewing pond stocked with fat red carp, housed Sumie and her large samurai family: a severe and vigorous grandmother I dubbed the Pipe Lady for her hobby and weapon of choice, an ancient, papery grandfather, a long-suffering mother, and a brood of rowdy siblings, including a pair of little brothers who lived to torment me and tiny Miss Miki, the hairdressers’ daughter. Though the Mountain had joined the Shin family through adoption and marriage, the Pipe Lady and her frail husband were his blood parents; his older brother, Sumie’s father, was part of the Shogun’s army, marching south this very month to punish a rebellious lord. Sumie was the second child of six; the oldest was a slouching prince who lolled about the house demanding cups of tea; I knew he wished he could go south and fight as well.
Distantly related to the Shogun, Sumie’s grandparents thought well of neither the upstart merchant caste—including the tea family who had all but bought their younger son using Japan’s unofficial currency, gold—nor of the kuge, the parasitic old aristocracy of the Emperor’s court, whom the Shogun supported with bushels of Japan’s official currency, rice. While the Mountain had for years seen signs of weakness in the Shogun that made him want to seek allies in the imperial family, his parents treated his efforts with indulgent derision. When Yukako had asked for Sumie’s help with the August Nephew’s visit, the Pipe Lady had taken pains to point out a lavish gold screen she’d bought for a song from a penniless imperial courtier. “Kuge,” she sneered, before granting permission in her ailing husband’s name.
IN THE SICKROOM, Akio’s voice came clear and slow. “Miss Ura and Young Mistress, walk together to cousin’s house?” he pressed.
“Yes,” I said proudly. The character for sun in Japanese is a rectangle with a horizontal line in the center: when I followed her on errands, the rectangle of Yukako’s flat obi knot was like the sun to me. All the other servant girls had to spend the day at home, washing kimono and wiping tatami. Since each time a kimono was soiled it required unsewing and resewing, the Mountain’s household kept a small army of sewing-girls busy: I looked down on them.
“Young Mistress’s room, upstairs, only Young Mistress and Miss Ura?”
I made Akio repeat himself before I understood. “Yes,” I preened. I alone did the work of attending Yukako. I dragged out the futon where we lay each night and folded it up each morning; I brought up each tray of the food we ate together, fine white rice for Yukako, rice mixed with coarse servant’s barley for me. Every morning I slid wide her wooden shutters; every afternoon I refilled the brown ceramic washing jar on her veranda and wiped down her room and stairs; every evening I brought up a lamp and slid her heavy shutters closed. The tasks comforted me as much as my prayers once had. After I answered Akio, I thought of something. “Tomorrow night, cousin too,” I corrected, before wondering why he’d asked.
“Here,” he said, producing a sheet of paper. On it was an outline of what looked like a fancy New York lady’s bell-shaped dress with kimono sleeves—no, it was a drawing of a kimono spread flat. Across it, in careful black ink, spread the trunk and branches of a tree tipped with white blossomy puffs. Yukako’s kimono! I had seen her wear it only once, the night of the Sighting, when she served Akio and his father.
“Young Mistress’s,” I gasped in recognition.
“Yes,” he said. “I am very lonely.”
I imagined Yukako walking toward him in her splendid kimono, blue-green with its flowering tree, the long ends of her silver sash left untied, a shimmering train down her back, her hair streaming loose like my mother’s. The very sight of her would mend him. And then they could get married and Yukako would be happy and sleep well again. She could sleep between us; I wouldn’t mind the drafty side of the futon. Akio might not like it, but, like Mats
u, he would have to live with it. “I will ask,” I said.
“Please don’t ask,” he said. “Just bring it. Just to borrow.”
“I don’t know,” I said. I knew the shelf where she kept it folded; I knew its white silk lining, yellowed and spotted with age. Would she want his eyes on that? And why did he not want me to ask?
“Just to see,” he insisted.
I felt confused, and strangely ashamed. “I don’t know,” I said.
“Fine,” he said, relenting. “I’m a sick fool. It’s too much, I understand.” Was this the famed Japanese indirection? To treat I don’t know as if it meant Absolutely not? On reflection, that’s exactly what I did mean. “But please don’t tell,” he added.
Unease pricked at the back of my neck. I looked up, away from Akio, and saw his pair of samurai swords hanging on the bent-treetrunk post that gave the room its name. “Can I see—” I wasn’t sure what the word was, and pointed.
I clearly had him at a disadvantage; he took them down. “Tachi,” he said. The long bright steel slid from its lacquer scabbard without a sound. “Wakizashi,” he said, showing me the shorter sword.
They were more beautiful and frightening than I had imagined. “Thank you,” I said.