The Teahouse Fire

by Ellis Avery

  Usually people said “No” to say “You’re welcome,” the way we say “It’s nothing.” But Akio bowed, put his swords away, and said it formally: What have I done?

  That evening I wanted to tell Yukako, but I fretted as I hung her mosquito gauze, recently brought in from the storeroom tower. Would she be angry or happy? And if Akio found out, would he cut me with those sharp swords? “Older Sister,” I said when she came up from the bath.

  “Yes?”

  My mouth went dry. “It’s a warm night,” I said.

  THE MOUNTAIN HAD PLANNED the household’s shift from winter to summer to coincide with the imperial visit: we put away our lined kimono and began wearing unlined ones; the season’s new jars of tea arrived from the packers by oxcart. All the square sunken hearths—the feature by which I knew a tearoom for a tearoom—vanished, replaced by fresh green-gold tatami. The afternoon I talked with Akio, I lingered with little Zoji near Baishian until the students shooed me away: they were carrying a long board wrapped in cloth toward the small house, and carrying two smaller boards away. When I looked later, the square hole in the floor was gone; the satiny wooden floorboard stretched unbroken between the two mats. The sunken hearth was for winter use only, I learned; in the warm months tea people used a brazier in order to keep the heat away from the guests.

  On the day of the imperial visit, even the great brown and red jars for water disappeared from the kitchen, the tea preparation rooms, and Yukako’s veranda; when we came home from Sumie’s house we were startled by the sight of a black-robed student tottering down Yukako’s stairs with a heavy load. I looked up at Yukako, alarmed, when I recognized him: it was the younger of the Mountain’s two merchant-caste apprentices, the Stickboy. While the samurai boys left the other merchant apprentice alone—the Bear was older, thick-bodied and jolly, and not above a little bullying of his own—they singled out the Stickboy for mockery and extra chores, especially after the lesson when the tea bowl fell apart in his hands. Fortunately, Yukako’s water jar remained in one piece all the way down the stairs, though he flashed us an embarrassed glance. In its place, we discovered, he had left a new vessel, blue and white, cool colors for summer.

  TO MARK THIS DAY, every single one of us received a new kimono, unlined, each in a solid color, the men in black and gray and blue, the women in shades of red. My kimono was bright salmon orange, Sumie’s a muted peony pink, Yukako’s a dark wine. Each kimono was printed with the Shin crest—a crane—in five places, like five white coins: one on the back, one on each shoulder, and one on each sleeve.

  Before we put on our new robes, however, we all had work to do. While Miss Miki and her mother sculpted Yukako’s and Sumie’s locks into the waxed and pinned conventions an imperial visit required, I helped the seamstresses wipe every surface clean, then we all followed Chio’s direction in the kitchen, preparing the exquisite nine-course meals. Yukako helped her father as he bustled about with tea implements, and she also walked Sumie through the formal gestures of serving rice wine to imperial retainers. (Part of her task seemed to be calming Sumie’s jitters: “So many strangers watching,” the girl would fret, chewing at the knuckle of her thumb.) I wiped and chopped and kept Chio’s grandson out of trouble. The students and gardeners raked the gardens clean of debris, swept the gravel into subtle waves, and cut off every iris blossom in the garden. During the intermission between the Minister’s ritual meal and the tea temae that followed, the Mountain planned to exchange the scroll in the Baishian alcove for a vase holding one perfect blue flower. I was sad to see the irises disappear, I told Yukako in the kitchen. She was counting out twelve red saucer-shaped cups for sake, inspecting each for scratches. “They’ll grow again,” she assured me. “Today, he’ll see leaves, leaves, leaves, but no flowers. But then at last, inside Baishian: the flower.” It was a tease for the eyes.

  No one seemed concerned about the overcast sky, the muggy weight of the air. “Clouds,” I worried, pointing outside.

  “Gray sky, bright colors,” she assured me.

  “Rain?”

  Yukako inhaled, to answer seriously, and then she smiled with anticipated pleasure as, very slowly, she made a pun for me. “If it rains, our guest will remember these clouds forever.”

  I repeated her, as I often repeated her longer sentences, and when I reached clouds I grinned with her, because the word was so close to Cloud House, the oldest of the Mountain’s teahouses, built by Shinso, the founding ancestor of the Shin tradition of tea, great-grandson of Rikyu, the founder of tea ceremony itself. Because tiny Cloud House was the most important of the Shin teahouses, sometimes the name was used to mean the whole Shin compound, or the Mountain’s tea school, or the Mountain himself. “Cloud House,” I whispered, savoring the word and Yukako’s good humor, rare since the night she came back late.

  When there was no wood left to polish, no radish left to grate, and we had changed into our new robes, the Mountain gathered us all into the fourteen-mat hall made ready for the imperial entourage. As Yukako promised, every colored thing—from our new robes to the moss in the garden behind us—seemed to vibrate against the gray-white sky. The Mountain spoke to all of us and showed us one of the earthenware jars that had arrived by oxcart. Shoulder-height on me, it was made of blackened clay splashed with green. The Mountain cut the seal, lifted the stopper, and beckoned us each forward. “New tea,” whispered Chio in her rust-colored robe. The Mountain would open a different jar for the imperial guest, and bid him take it home: this was the tea for Cloud House. Each person in the household approached the jar, scooping the air with one hand the way Yukako and Sumie did in their incense-guessing games. I smelled it myself: green and bright like new grass.

  6

  1866

  I DIDN’T SEE the imperial procession, but I saw the palanquin outside. I didn’t see the August Nephew, but I saw the bobbing top of his black lacquer cap as he rounded the bamboo hedge. I didn’t see the tea ceremony in Baishian but I did hear a sound, sharp and near against the distant dull thunder, couisse-eh, couisse-eh, couisse-eh: the Mountain grinding tea leaves in a stone mortar. I didn’t see the dozen members of the imperial retinue, but I formed part of a human chain passing dishes to the students and apprentices as they served each one. I didn’t see them, but I heard the three singing-girls brought in to entertain the August Nephew’s men, the slow drum and banjo-like shamisen they played, their caterwauling tunes. Yukako and Sumie poured each man a first round of sake, then went upstairs and let the singing-girls take over as I ran hot kettles to the doorway with Chio’s daughter Kuga, vivid, for once, in rose. When I had a moment, I paused to run up and spread Yukako’s futon. “Thank you,” she said, waving a hand to fan Sumie, who drooped against her. “See? You didn’t drop anything,” she told her cousin.

  “How long could they possibly stay, do you think?” Sumie murmured, dabbing at her forehead with a cloth.

  “When they go, we’ll come say good-bye,” Yukako informed me, her speech a blunt foil to Sumie’s.

  When I went downstairs, baby Zoji—a jewel in his tiny aquamarine kimono—was fussing on his mother Kuga’s back. It wasn’t raining yet, but with every clap of thunder he reached up and tried to pull off the rosy cloth tented over Kuga’s hair. Taking a kasa—a waxed paper umbrella that looked like a parasol—I carried him out for a walk to calm him, avoiding the teahouses, bouncing as I went. “Auprès de ma blonde,” I sang softly in the twilight. I thought I might start to cry, thinking of my mother, so I tried a Japanese song instead. Chio had sung it the month I arrived, when the cherry trees—the sakura—burst into bloom. “Sakura, sakura…”

  I felt Zoji go limp against my back as I sang. When I reached the Bent-Tree Annex, I rested for a moment on the bench outside Akio’s shoji-paper door. At my feet I saw a second pair of men’s sandals next to Akio’s: one of the other students was visiting him. It must have been hard for him, missing the whole affair; he probably would have been chosen for some prestigious task. Even the Stickboy had l
ooked so pleased with himself, neatly arranging the retinue’s bags and umbrellas in the entrance hall. It was kind of the other students to visit Akio; they all must have resented him for not doing any work and still getting to marry Yukako. I could hear the twanging shamisen from the imperial party deep within the house, the women’s wailing songs, the men’s laughter. No, that was Akio’s laughter, so soft it sounded distant. And the singing voice belonged to his guest.

  In my head, outside Akio’s door, I formed a sentence, very proud of myself for coming up with such a long one. I found I could make long sentences when I was alone, mumbling to myself in Japanese; whenever I was around other people, my beautiful clauses evaporated in the panic of trying to understand what I heard. In any case, it seemed doubtful that I would get to use my new sentence very often: The woman has men’s sandals.

  My attention leaped to a sound beyond the gate, rumbling too near and for too long to be thunder. A large animal? I rarely saw horses in Japan, and the hooves seemed to thud instead of ring. Could it be an elephant? I didn’t care if I never met the Emperor’s nephew—I probably wouldn’t be able to understand his Japanese anyway—but an elephant? My heart beat fast as I hauled Zoji to the gate. It was a horse.

  I missed what the man with the lamp was saying as the animal moved from hoof to hoof, transfixed as I was by what those hooves were wearing: straw baskets. The horses that had carried me away from the fire had no doubt had straw shoes, too, but I’d had no time to notice. Why would you do that? I could understand eating seaweed and taking off my shoes in the house, but why would you tie baskets to a horse’s feet? The little animal kicked one of them off entirely as the man swung from his queer high saddle and completed his rapid speech, giving me a slender wooden scroll-box. In the first falling drops of rain, I stared at him, trying to repeat what I’d heard. His face changed, as Akio’s had when he called me into his room. Oh, she’s slow, he registered. “Master Teacher,” he repeated.

  “Yes!” I barked. “Please wait.”

  The man seemed as if he’d ridden a long way that night, but I didn’t think I should interrupt the Mountain in the teahouse. Because of the imperial guest, I wasn’t even sure I should bring the horseman into the kitchen, so I pointed to the shelter of the thatched gate and ran the box up to Yukako’s room, Zoji still on my back. Sumie seemed to have recovered her spirits: the two of them whispered together over the notes in Yukako’s pillow-box. Yukako glared up at me. “Where is it?” she asked, eyes hot with accusation.

  Where was what? I stared at her openmouthed, then followed her gaze to the shelf where she kept her tea things, the whisk beside the bowl beside the teascoop. I gasped: there should have been a second teascoop just where she’d left it, wrapped in white paper and stamped with Akio’s seal. It was missing.

  The night before he had asked me to keep a secret, and now his teascoop was gone. I did not know what had happened, but it was probably my fault. Before Yukako could press me, however, she was stopped by the sight of my rain-freckled sleeves, the long box I carried. “What’s this?” she asked, opening it.

  “Rain. A man. An animal,” I spluttered. “Four legs. Like an ox, not an ox. Feet in baskets!” They stared at me, smiling weakly. Sumie cooed at the baby on my back, then stopped; we watched alarm spread across Yukako’s face as she read the brief contents of the scroll in the box. Panicked, she leapt up and swept downstairs, Sumie, Zoji, and me in confused pursuit. Sumie seized up umbrellas for Yukako and herself, and I paused in the kitchen for a bucket of water and a cup of tea for the horseman, who seemed affronted by the parade of women and children. Our solid-colored kimono, I realized, looked like servants’ uniforms to him.

  “I am Master Teacher’s only child,” Yukako began, speaking to the man proudly and carefully as rain darkened the stones around us.

  Beside me, Sumie asked the messenger about a man who shared her family name, Matsudaira. Her father? My gaze drifting out to the street as the man gave his long reply, I could see the outline of a palanquin some thirty paces away, smaller than the Nephew’s or the singing-girls’, the tiny lights of its bearers’ pipes sheltered by their paper umbrellas. Who were they waiting for? When I looked up again at the horseman, Sumie seemed to have been reassured by his response, Yukako made more upset. She asked him to stay in the thatched gateway, her face taut with anxiety as she turned to Sumie. What had the messenger told her? “Should we tell Lord Ii’s son?” she asked. I had noticed it before, the way she avoided saying Akio’s name in front of anyone but me.

  “I wonder, is he awake?” asked Sumie.

  “Yes,” I said. “There is a woman visitor.”

  Yukako wheeled on me. “What kind of woman?” she asked sharply.

  “A woman with men’s shoes,” I said, delighted with myself.

  My pleasure at my burgeoning language skills was not shared. Yukako said nothing, but made straight for Akio’s annex. “Wait!” said Sumie helplessly, holding out both their umbrellas. I took one and followed, panting, Zoji yowling on my back, while Sumie brought up the rear, the sound of her shuffling trot lost in the loud hash of rain.

  We pressed in close to the house, sheltering under the eaves. I watched Yukako at Akio’s door for a moment, her face lit by a lamp glowing through the shoji paper from inside. Through the rain, we heard a woman’s singing voice waft toward us, followed by laughter. Yukako’s eyes were wide, her mouth a thin line. We heard Akio chuckle, “Little Koito.”

  Yukako did not look back at us. She took a deep breath and called into the room, loud but shaky. “Who is Little Koito?”

  I gasped as the voices fell silent. Sumie hid her face with her sleeve. We heard rustling from inside the room, then feet approaching the entrance, and then a female voice, low and firm. “I am,” a woman said, and slid open the door.

  When he said her name, Akio had used a tag for babies and younger sisters, bo. I could not imagine calling this woman Little anyone. Perhaps nineteen to Yukako’s sixteen, the woman looked down at her challenger with queenly self-assurance. All three of us stared at her white-painted face, coy and imperious, the feline moue of her brilliant red mouth. She was even more beautiful than Yukako.

  I had never before thought of Yukako as anything but grown up, but at that moment, locking eyes with the smaller woman on the step above her, she seemed coltish, green. Where everything about Yukako seemed hard and bright and seeking, everything about this woman, Koito, seemed subtle and knowing. She shone, too, albeit with a steely shimmer, the black orchid of her hair fierce with pins. Where Yukako’s sash looked crisp and formal, Koito’s dark brocade obi, dotted with violet and tied with a silver cord, looked soft and lustrous, a flash of red silk peeping where the sash met the robe, blue-green in the rainy night. When I saw that color, I gasped, and looked again: she was wearing Yukako’s kimono.

  7

  1866

  THEN EVERYTHING HAPPENED very quickly: Yukako’s hands on Koito’s shoulders, Koito’s coiffured head bouncing like a pincushion as Yukako shook her, livid, words repeated in the rain: “Mine! Mine!” Koito bending for her sandals, Yukako snatching them away. Koito a series of flashes lit by the shoji-paper wall of the house: black, red, blue-green, brown branch and white blossom, rain riddling her white face paint. Yukako’s voice a knife. Koito’s wet red split-toed socks as she turned away, defiantly not running. The white stripes of her ankles. One hand holding up her skirts, the other cupped over her eyes. Yukako staring at Akio, Koito’s sandals falling from her hand; his face frozen as he took us all in, not in panic, but with disdain. At some point Sumie had taken Zoji, screaming, off my back: for a moment, as Koito rounded the house and Sumie bounced the baby, the only sound was the loud rain. Then Yukako turned her back on the lit room, composed her face, and pointed to my umbrella, then to Koito’s wake. I stared at her, stunned, until I realized she wanted to protect the kimono Koito was wearing. “That was my mother’s,” Yukako said. She had never spoken to me so coldly before. I ran.

  Koi
to bowed when I caught up to her, a tiny bow, as if her sodden robe and shoeless feet, her melting face paint, were nothing to her. She took the umbrella nonetheless, serene as a dancer, and swept past the staring horseman at the gate. He looked to me for explanation, then remembered I was soft in the head and looked away. As I paused in the shelter of the gate for a break in the storm, I spotted the pipe-lights of the two men I’d seen before: their palanquin was for her.

  I looked at the patient little horse, its fringed dark eyes reflecting the horseman’s lamp. It was wearing new straw shoes, the old ones stacked neatly by the gate. The horseman gave a small cough and asked me slowly and clearly, “Is he coming?”

  I didn’t know, but then Akio approached, his swords at his sides, handsome wasted body all but twined around the stem of an umbrella as he approached the gate, shivering. He spoke with the horseman briefly and they mounted, one of Akio’s arms wrapped around the messenger, the other holding his umbrella over both of them. Neither man glanced at me as they rode away.

  I ran back to Akio’s room: it was empty, the lamp still lit, the futon spread, the mosquito gauze stirring in the wet breeze. I sat quietly for a moment, rubbing the gooseflesh inside my soaked sleeves. I remembered the accusation in Yukako’s face when I came up to her room: the teascoop he had carved was gone, and I was the obvious culprit. Of course she would think I took the kimono. Again I heard the ice in her voice, not simply shock, but rage: It was my mother’s. If I did not act, what would become of me?

  When I was older, I would wonder why Akio had dressed Koito in Yukako’s kimono. Was he smitten with the woman—had he simply wanted to give her the loveliest thing to hand? Or did he chafe at his lot—did it give him a rush, to court the ruin of his soon-to-be marriage under his soon-to-be adoptive father’s roof? Perhaps he was responding to his quarrel with Yukako: did he want the idea of her without the trouble of the real thing?