The Teahouse Fire

by Ellis Avery

  When I was older still, I learned that the very act of substitution generates its own erotic glamour. That night, however, scared of the fate I’d cheated thus far—of its nunlike fingers on the scruff of my neck—I was concerned, not with why he’d taken the kimono, but how. I’d been so stupid, so drunk on myself, telling Akio exactly what he needed to know. How easy it would be for him, while Yukako and I were at Sumie’s house, to take back the scoop he’d made when he took the robe. However, I thought, if Akio had been able to walk about, he would have been pressed into service that morning like the rest of us, and he’d barely been able to stagger out to meet the horseman. He would have needed an ally, someone who would draw no comment entering Yukako’s room, and I had turned him down.

  I knew who did it. Perhaps Akio had simply asked for his teascoop when he asked for Yukako’s robe, but there was a fair chance he hadn’t. I would risk it, I decided, and blew out the light.

  On the path to the thatched front gate, I saw Yukako standing with Sumie, waiting to bow her good-byes to the imperial party. Beneath her umbrella, her face was a cold mask. Stealing past her, I circled the house to the kitchen door. Gliding silently on the polished boards and tatami mats I wiped each day (looking, daily, for my Saint Claire medal), I passed through the kitchen to the nearby garden study where the Mountain slept and took his meals, down the hall to the Long Room, where the students slept, each on a wooden pillow painted with his name: I knew this because I sometimes helped Chio serve the morning meal. That night, my eyes adjusting to the bare expanse of dark tatami in the Long Room, I slid open the paper door that concealed the students’ bedding. I guessed correctly: the pillow on the humblest shelf was the same one that stood in the draftiest spot in the cold months, the stuffiest during hot ones. It belonged to the Mountain’s lowest-ranked student, the boy of the broken bowl. I could feel his painted name with my fingertips, its first syllable one of the few characters I could read, the same one I had seen carved on the hillside my first day in Miyako: great, pronounced oh or dai. What I was looking for in the drawer of the wooden pillow, I found by touch.

  In Yukako’s room again, I looked at Akio’s teascoop, still wrapped in white paper stamped with his seal, the package still tied with red thread. Since the theft, however, a black line of calligraphy had appeared beside the stamped red seal: Akio’s name, I later learned, and his samurai title. Yukako looked at me hard when she and Sumie came upstairs; the betrayed disgust in her face thawed when she saw what I held. She knew right away that the writing was not Akio’s, nor could it have been mine; she nodded when I told her where I’d found it. “Older Sister?” I said. She stared at me as I told her about Akio asking me for the kimono, about promising not to tell. Stumbling, I tried to explain how the Stickboy must have smuggled it out of her room inside the water barrel (clever Akio!), how he must have taken Akio’s teascoop then too. I could tell she was taking nothing in: not my distress, not my guilt, not my innocence. The despair she’d kept at bay by hating me flooded over her; she could not hear me.

  “ Ura-bo,” she said numbly, and I took from the name what small comfort I could. Tucking the teascoop into her sleeve, she left to sit the night in Baishian alone.

  AS WE LAY in Yukako’s room, listening to the rain on the rooftiles, Sumie answered my questions, flustered as she cropped her elegant soft language into the crude phrases I could understand. With Yukako’s brother dead, the Mountain needed Yukako to marry a man he could adopt as an heir. (Once I understood the word heir, Sumie told me how Hiroshi had made her a kite the summer—that summer, I thought—before he died. How he had loved ginger. How his flute had sounded, achingly sweet.)

  Akio’s father was Lord Ii of Hikone, on the far side of Lake Biwa, whose kinsman had been murdered, I later learned, for signing a treaty with the foreign barbarians. Lord Ii had two sons, Sumie told me, Akio and his older brother, Tadao, the heir. The horseman at the gate had ridden for two days from a battle in the South to say Tadao was dead, and Akio had left with the messenger for the house his father kept in Miyako. Now that Akio, the only son, was his father’s heir, he could no longer marry Yukako.

  “And Koito?”

  “It’s good, maybe. It can’t be helped.”

  As clear as she was on points of inheritance, Sumie was vague, though visibly fretful, on the subject of Yukako’s distress. I prompted her, dredging my mind for the word I wanted: jealousy. “He has another fiancée,” another promised person, I attempted. “She didn’t know?”

  You really are slow, Sumie’s expression said. “Miss Koito is a geiko,” she said patiently. A singing-girl, what my grammar had called a geisha. “Nobody marries a geiko.”

  But he loves her, I wanted to say, maybe more than Yukako. But the construction was hard for me, and—to my shock—I didn’t know the word for love. “But he likes Miss Koito,” I said.

  “So?”

  “So he should marry her.”

  “Liking and marriage are bad together.”

  “Really?”

  I had thought someone who spoke so gently and vaguely would be wistful and romantic, but Sumie said, “All husbands like geiko. It is bad for a woman to like her husband. Liking is jealousy.” There it was! I’d heard the word in stories she and Yukako read aloud to each other.

  “Who is it good to like?” I tried to ask.

  “Babies!” Sumie replied, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. She brought the candle over to the ash-filled brazier where Yukako practiced her temae. Man, she drew in the ashes with one tong: a crosshatched box over a character resembling the letter h. Woman: I could make out a big-bellied stick figure when Sumie showed me the head, trunk, and feet. Baby: a shape curved like the number 3, or, if I squinted, like little Zoji, with a long ribbon for me to tie him to my back. “See?” she said, drawing a new character composed of the previous two, “To like is woman and baby, not woman and man.” We lay down on the futon again. I would never be able to read Japanese.

  “Yukako likes Mr. Akio,” I ventured.

  “That’s a problem,” said Sumie.

  JERKING AWAKE AT first light, I remembered something I’d seen in Akio’s room: the tiny round body and long slender neck of a singing-girl’s three-stringed shamisen. When I hurried down to the sickroom, I found it on the floor. A large fan-shaped plectrum lay beside it, painted in a pattern of swirling water. I packed both into a box and bag I found in the corner, painted with the same watery swirls; maybe they’d help me get Yukako’s kimono back.

  Later that morning, after Sumie went home, a narrow-eyed servant girl came to our kitchen door to beg a word with my mistress, swirling water printed on her kimono, a letter in her hand.

  I READ KOITO’S LETTER many years later, the only other time I ever searched through someone’s pillow-box without asking. I didn’t find what I was looking for in Yukako’s pillow, but I saw a life’s worth of worried-at things. All her poems from Akio, folded into origami drums. A pressed spray of snow willow. A cut of yellowed white silk. And a note on flecked blue paper in a woman’s hand, practiced and fluid, yet employed as if she were uncertain of her reader’s degree of literacy. The words were clear and firm, almost block-printed, in the Japanese phonetic script, with none of the Chinese characters men used:

  She knew not she wore

  the wings of a crane. Can the

  mute thrush atone?

  It was a less flat-footed poem in Japanese, the hard k’s and a’s of to not know and mute smarting with humility, shirazu, kikenai; the sinuous character for tsu—a single curved stroke—snaking humbly through the words for crane, thrush, and to atone: tsuru, tsugumi, tsugunau. In a city without street addresses, Koito put teeth into her apology by having me learn the way to her house: if I followed the maid, then Yukako could call on the mistress anytime, so long as I remembered the long walk to Pontocho, the geisha quarter near the Fourth Bridge.

  When we arrived, I knew I’d been right: the package waiting for me in the cloakroom of the narr
ow house we entered was the size and shape of a kimono, but bulkier, as if the girl’s employer had added some other tribute too. I felt very pleased with myself indeed. “Would you like some tea?” asked the girl.

  She was my age, her eyes close-set and merry. I’d followed the knot of her yellow plaid obi from my house to hers, watching her posture straighten from hunched trepidation to buoyant confidence. When we first started walking, I couldn’t make sense of the flat, loud voice offering me something—what? I began to understand her, however, by the time she led me through Pontocho, greeting people on the narrow street by name. “Good morning, Aunt! How’s the little girl? Do you have kittens yet? Think it’ll rain again?” Her bow was deeper than anyone else’s in the singing-girls’ quarter—where shamisen scales jangled from every window and hairdressers shuttled from house to house, their wooden workboxes almost taller than the servant girls who carried them—but her voice rang out as lustily as any street peddler’s in New York. I missed most of what she said, especially to the old ladies, all called Aunt—from the sound of it, they were discussing ailments I wouldn’t have even known in French—but I was pleased I understood so much. Clearest of all, I understood when they greeted her in return: Miss Inko, they sang back. Even though I hated this girl, Miss Inko, on principle—as the servant of Yukako’s enemy—I envied the jaunty indifference with which she set the tray beside me on the cloakroom bench.

  “Did you like your sweet?” said a voice. Looking down from the tatami interior of the house, her face unpainted, stood Koito. I tried to concentrate on the ghoulish vanity of her blackened teeth and missing eyebrows, but I had seen them so often on women at the bathhouse that I found myself dazzled instead by the silver in her gray gauze robe, by the red of her little bud mouth.

  What had she said? I couldn’t remember. “Thank you very much,” I tried to reply, more warmly than I’d meant to. When she heard my accent, she gave me a closer look. I saw in her face at that moment the same suppressed blend of curiosity, amusement, pity, and disgust I often provoked, usually before the looker concluded that I was an accident of nature, but I also saw something else, a flicker of recognition, or compassion. While Yukako forged her own kind of radiance, I had seen enough pictures in books to see that Koito was a living bijin, a Japanese ideal of beauty. What could she see in me to recognize?

  “You haven’t tasted it yet,” she teased, gesturing toward the tea and the lidded ceramic box Inko had set beside me.

  Oh, right—she’d asked about a sweet! I lifted the lid to expose a fluffy globe of dyed bean paste, green on one side, violet on the other, topped with a dab of gold leaf. For me? I bowed low in thanks.

  “Ayame,” she said, before she vanished: iris. Gold for the splash of yellow on each petal, I realized, delighted.

  Koito’s livelihood depended on charming others, even young girls who loved sweets as much as I. This didn’t occur to me, though, as I carried home my heavy parcel, eager in spite of myself to see Yukako open it. Above me, women had flopped their mattresses over their balcony railings to air; the Pontocho street was so narrow that the draped bedding almost formed a futon arch. It would take a revolution and a civil war before I saw this quarter again, before the changes that wracked Japan nearly broke Yukako as well. That day the women came to their windows often: I saw bamboo blinds moved aside, faces tipped up to the sun among the thick clouds, hands extended, testing the heavy air.

  AT THE TIME, I did not know why Koito had taken such pains with the two kimono she sent home with me. That night, after her bath, Yukako unfolded them, nodding cold approval as she spread the singing-girl’s gift in the lamplight. What looked at first glance like broad black and white stripes, flecked here and there with gold, proved to be raw silk gauze woven subtly in a pattern of fish in a stream, their backs golden where they rose from the water. Yukako folded the robe calmly and then turned to her own kimono, inspecting every spotless inch. Before, the kimono, like most, had been lined in two fabrics. Any area that might be visible—the sleeves, hem, and collar—was lined in soft red silk, a rich and feminine contrast to the deep twilight color outside. Hidden areas were lined in coarser fabric, often white, in this case yellowed and spotted with age. Koito, however, had relined the entire kimono in fine silk, the color a precise match to the old fabric but the texture as lush and supple as suede. She had included the former lining, a ghost kimono, which Yukako spread in the air: her eyes widened when she saw that the fabric was strained and ripped at the shoulders where she’d shaken the geisha. When she cried in her bed, I curled around her: I could feel her back expand as she gulped in air.

  THAT MORNING Akio’s father, old Lord Ii, had come to speak with the Mountain while his servants emptied the sickroom. Lord Ii wore black for his older son, and Yukako’s vacant pallor matched his as she brought him rice wine. The Stickboy was missing from that day’s lesson: I found him by the stream near the storeroom tower. Hidden from the house, he was hunching over something, scrawny and naked except for a loincloth. Padding closer, I saw he was scrubbing one of his kimono in the stream. The smell of human excrement drifted toward me and I understood the shape of Yukako’s revenge. I was so glad she’d believed me: we had both seen him panting down the stairs with her big water jar, after all. I wondered why he had done it. I knew the Mountain’s students, just as status-conscious as the Pipe Lady, kept up a kind of wall between the merchants’ sons—the Stickboy and the Bear—and the samurai boys—Akio, the Button, and the others. Perhaps—I could imagine it—the Stickboy was flattered when Akio asked him for the help I’d refused to give. Perhaps he wanted to be someone like Akio. Enough to steal the teascoop? Maybe.

  Yukako stopped crying. She lay on her side by the two kimono, motionless except for one foot rubbing an obsessive circle into her futon. “I can’t wear these,” she whispered, staring into the darkness. She hadn’t eaten all day. She gripped the old lining in her fists and called out quietly, and for the first time I will not write what she said in italics because the word went right in without pausing to tell me it was in Japanese. Forlorn, unadorned: “Mother—”

  8

  1866–1869

  WHEN I FIRST LIVED in Miyako, now called Kyoto, brides were carried down the street in sumptuous palanquins, as they had been for centuries. The very rich rode this way all the time, in ham-mocklike sedan chairs borne by pairs of stout young men, or in elegant boxes like the one by which I was first smuggled into the city. How could any of us have known that in a few short years, only the dead would be carried this way, or that the streets would fill with noisy machines whose name no one had yet imagined?

  AKIO AND SUMIE’S WEDDING was a quiet affair, I heard, a glint of color after the mourning black we all wore for Lord Ii’s son Tadao, killed fighting southern rebels in the Battle of Mori.

  Shaken by his firstborn’s death, the old horse-breeding lord determined to marry off his younger son as quickly as possible, turning to the Mountain for advice to show that there was no ill will between them. I sat in the doorway the morning of his visit, ferrying courses for Yukako to serve the two men. I was there when the Mountain mentioned Sumie’s name: I saw Yukako stop breathing for a moment. The flask on the tray she held wobbled; she sat very still. After Lord Ii left, she went to the storeroom tower, buried her head in a stack of winter quilts, and screamed. From the window where I spied, I could barely hear her: she was so muffled—so private—that I held back from going to comfort her. That was the day she took to her bed.

  When Yukako missed their standing date with the hairdressers, Sumie came by with a gift of silk. “Make her go away,” Yukako begged me in the upstairs room. I remember the way Sumie lowered her eyes when I passed on the message, the soft look on her face, both guilty and hurt.

  Though the family no longer dressed in mourning, on the day of the wedding Yukako put on the same black kimono and obi she’d worn for a month. I felt disloyal for wanting to see Sumie’s trip down the street in a palanquin, but I still asked, “Isn’t t
oday the wedding?”

  “Oh, is it? Oh, well, I’m already dressed, aren’t I? Please tell my father I can’t go; I’m sick.” She wasn’t.

  YUKAKO’S PROTEST LASTED not a handful of days before the Shogun died and all Japan wore black for him. An ailing boy of twenty, he’d gone to Osaka Castle to lead his thousands against the southern rebels, only to die inside the castle walls of beriberi, the city sickness, a disease no one knew came from living on fine white rice. For a year, thousands of samurai, Akio’s brother and Sumie’s father among them, had waited at Osaka Castle to strike the rebels, and each day Chio had chosen carrots and eggplants from her husband’s little plot for a peddler who could buy them, pay passage to Osaka, and still turn a profit selling food to soldiers. During the weeks of mourning, we heard, Edo and Osaka rioted for rice.

  The young former Shogun had been easily led by the Matsudaira, the most warlike among his relations. (Sumie’s family was a minor branch of the vast Matsudaira clan.) By contrast, his replacement, a distant cousin, installed himself close to the Emperor in Miyako to ask His Highness to back an end to the former Shogun’s doomed thrust south. For some two hundred fifty years, relations between the Shogun and the Emperor had been like those between the Pipe Lady and her bedridden husband: although she abased herself before him and acted only in his name, he was entirely dependent on her. With the arrival of the foreigners, however, the power of the Shoguns had begun to unravel, and they needed all the more to clothe themselves in the Emperors’ authority. While the previous Shoguns had lived in Edo, two weeks’ journey from Miyako by foot, the new one spent almost all of his short reign at Nijo Castle, some forty minutes’ walk from the Shin house. For a year we had both the Emperor and the Shogun in Miyako, and Chio and Matsu’s produce did very well indeed.