The Teahouse Fire

by Ellis Avery

  Just two days after the new Shogun’s investiture, the old Emperor died in his bed, and all Japan mourned again. I remember my first winter in Miyako as a swirl of white snowflakes and black kimono. We cleaned house for days until the plum trees bloomed in the snow, and then New Year’s burst in with temple bells and fireworks heralding the new Emperor: a fifteen-year-old boy.

  I never learned the Emperor’s name until I left Japan; it wasn’t for the public to know. We called him the Emperor. But the following year he changed the name of the era from Keio, Great Joy, to Meiji, Enlightened Rule. Until Meiji, Japan had seen so much fire, famine, and cholera in such a short time that the court astrologers kept changing the era name every few years, in a vain attempt to dodge bad fortune. None of the past six eras had lasted more than six years. As part of his Enlightened Rule, the new Emperor silenced the court astrologers, announcing that henceforth the era name would change only with the Emperor. So today if you want to refer to him, you say the Meiji Emperor: the one who reigned from 1867, the year before Meiji One, until his death in Meiji Forty-five.

  YUKAKO SPENT THE six months between the Battle of Mori and the Meiji coronation in the same black kimono. She lay in bed, reading the poems in her pillow-box and asking for something to drink. I brought so much tea up her steep slick staircase, I made a rope banister for myself after falling down twice.

  I let her be. I learned Japanese with little Zoji. I brought her tea. I waited as long for her as I had traveled by ship, carrying my mother’s death under my ribs, and then when the year turned I bullied her back to life again. “Tie my obi like butterfly wings! I want to go out and see everybody dressed up for New Year’s! Sumie’s pregnant? Who cares? Do you want six kids like Sumie’s ma?”

  She tied it. She took me. She said no. “I’ll never marry,” she decided. She put on a fresh kimono—white stars in a blue night, a flash of persimmon at the sleeves and hem—slid open her windows, and did temae for the first time in six months, hesitantly, but with resolve. She hadn’t bought sweets since before Sumie’s engagement was announced; she knelt beside me in the snowy wind with a tray of summer fan-shaped wafers. I ate one; it had long ago surrendered its crunch to the moist months, but the tea washed it away in one green bolt. When I returned the tea bowl, she gave me a look, wan but firm, and a small nod, and I formally asked her, as much as I could remember, to join me and drink a bowl herself. “No, bow this way,” she said, correcting me.

  “I forgot,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “That’s why I’m here,” she said, just as her father would tell one of his students. Her own words seemed to surprise and please her. She poured water from the iron kettle, whisked the tea, then drank deeply, lifting the bowl to her mouth with both hands, her kimono sleeves stirring in the brisk air. A hard, clean shape against the sheets of falling snow, she finished her tea with a sharp intake of breath, the way she had taught me, but louder, as if sucking in this very day. And then, as teachers often do, she broke the rules, reaching over to sample the soggy August sweets. “Well, it was what I had,” she said, disgusted. She cleared away the tea and straightened the butterfly bow of my obi. “Let’s go out for a walk,” she proposed. “Let’s get ginger sweets.”

  IN THE MONTHS THAT FOLLOWED, the city filled with soldiers, both the Shogun’s troops and the southern rebels, samurai from Satsuma and Choshu, who were allied with the new Emperor’s maternal grandfather. Because of the uneasy times, the Mountain did not ask Yukako to consider marriage again that year. One night late in the Eleventh Month, after the first frost bleached the verandas, southern troops replaced all the Shogun’s samurai outside the Imperial Palace and poured onto the grounds. Once the Emperor’s Satsuma grandfather had gathered all the lords and nobles, the young Emperor appeared before them to read a scroll announcing that he was reclaiming the power and land his ancestors had entrusted to the Shogun’s clan.

  This was the Meiji Restoration: how the South used the Emperor to overthrow the Shogun. If the Shogun had been like a vigorous wife to a bedridden husband, I imagined the southern samurai rabble—pouring in with their cries of “Restore the Emperor! Expel the Barbarians!”—as the brazen young lass who supplanted her, to be just as quickly supplanted by the quiet and crafty older sister who had pushed her into his arms. The leaders of the ragtag samurai rebels gave way to an oligarchy of southern lords and merchants who thought Japan stood to gain, not by expelling the foreigners, but by learning from them. It was a brilliant move to stage a revolution and announce it as a restoration, but though the southern rebel samurai claimed power for the Emperor, they were not prepared for how he—counseled by their wealthier countrymen—would brush them aside to keep it.

  IN SOME PLACES the fighting lasted as long as a year and a half, but Edo was subdued by summer, and the Emperor went in person to see his newly claimed city. Our school lined the street with the rest of the city when he left with his train of nobles: we knelt with heads bowed to the dust as the imperial thousands passed in silence. I peeked. Bolt upon bolt of kimono brocade rode by; men sat mounted on slow horses simply so as not to let their robes trail on the ground. I had never seen anything so solemn, so kaleidoscopic, so magnificent. Yukako pushed my head back to the packed earth, but not before glancing up herself. On their return journey, just as splendid, we lined the streets again, and again peeped.

  A year later, in Meiji Two, I turned thirteen. The Emperor went to Edo again, and for a third time we lay prostrate in the street. When I looked, I gasped. Yukako kicked me, and gasped herself.

  In the year between these two processions, we had heard that Buddhism was illegal; all priests and nuns were to leave their temples and go back to lay life. All Buddhist images were ordered out of Shinto shrines; all Shinto images were ordered out of Buddhist temples. The priests and statues had scattered for a few months and reappeared, most of them as if nothing had changed. Similarly, two years later the eta, polluted descendants of butchers and leather workers, were declared full citizens. This meant nothing to me at the time: I neither understood the words nor saw new actions. On the rare occasions when the Mountain ordered pork for his guests, the same man came as always, and as always, Chio treated him charily, making her transactions outside the servants’ gate, sprinkling the threshold with water after he left.

  Just so, though I had heard the Emperor had modernized his court, I expected nothing new when hundreds of men processed down the street, some on horseback, most on foot. In the distance a palanquin, like a shrine carried through town on a festival day, floated over streets and crowds alike. There, however, the resemblance to last year’s progress ended: they were all wearing Western clothes. In the sweet May air of the Third Month, this company of men with hair oiled back in topknots marched in bright striped trousers and swallowtail coats, their shoulders built up with absurd epaulets, their chests made over into pincushions for sashes, medals, and braid. I had not seen trousers in three years and they seemed to me like stalks, like stems: travesties. Yukako and I could not speak of what we’d seen because we should not have looked up to see it.

  Between these two processions, the Emperor fought a last battle with his greatest enemies, the Matsudaira clan, from whom the Shogun’s ancestors—and the Mountain’s family of birth—had first sprung. The Mountain had been right to seek allies in the imperial house, but he had the tact not to say so to his parents. His brother and nephew—Sumie’s father and brother—as minor Matsudairas, were summoned to the clan fortress north of Miyako to fight the imperial troops that poured in. Not among those killed, they were marched to Edo for internment; whenever we visited in those dark weeks, we heard the Pipe Lady worriedly extolling the courage of the Matsudaira samurai who had committed suicide rather than be taken alive. Her addled ancient husband slipped away between one battle report and the next so quickly I later wondered if he had died by his own hand, convinced he was doing his part.

  AMID ALL THE UNREST of those years when I was ten, eleven, twelve, and thirteen, the
meaning of comfort became for me Yukako’s blended scents as we slept on her floor: the beeswax in her hair, the minerals from her bath, the cedar-and-geranium smell of the herbs she used to ward moths away from silk, and fainter smells, too, incense and powdered tea. Yu-ka-ko meant Evening Fragrance Child: her compounded smell was sweet and sharp, like fresh earth.

  BY THE TIME I was thirteen, in the second year of Meiji, I had a grasp of spoken Japanese that mirrored, I think, the way Yukako read and wrote: multiple strands of information spun toward us and we knotted together a meaning using what we knew and what we expected to hear. I understood what was said to me because it was said to me, and in due course I had heard many times over the few hundred things anyone—Yukako and little Zoji excepted—ever said to me. I could only understand what people said to each other if I listened very carefully; I could say much less than I could understand. Just so, Yukako read richly illustrated books written in both Japanese alphabets: the ideographic Chinese characters, or kanji, that men used, and the simpler phonetic kana used by women. Taking in pictures, kana, and kanji, Yukako came away with a story because she expected a story. She could read a sentence aloud and explain it in detail, but if I pointed to a kanji, she became flustered and irritable; she couldn’t tell me what it meant on its own, even though she had just used it in context to explain the sentence. She understood far more kanji than she could write.

  Perhaps because there were so many words in Japanese with the same sounds, and because words were written withoutspacebetween-them, kanji traveled alongside kana as a sort of silent archeology, the way our spelling gives clues to a word’s origin. An ordinary speaker of English knows what a conversation is, a literate person can spell the word, an educated person will know it comes from Latin through French, and a specialist will know that con means with and verse means turn. A poet will hear conversation as a turning together. All the layers are there in English too. The Japanese had a few proverbs that broke down kanji—Sumie’s demonstration of the woman and child in the word for to like; men in the bathhouse grumbling about their mates by noting the threefold repetition of the kanji for woman in the kanji for clamorous, kashi-mashi—but mostly I had to learn to see the clues in the kanji myself, my efforts by turns annoying and amusing Yukako. She never gave the matter much thought, except when new words came along, like jinrikisha.

  What was the new sound on the packed-earth streets in the summer of Meiji Two? Jinrikisha, jinrikisha. Two enormous wheels making such noise as even a crowd in wooden sandals could never achieve; two poles for a runner to pull, hollering in his straw bowl hat and loincloth; one black lacquered or brightly painted wooden shell to hold a passenger or two; an awning in case of rain: this new form of transportation swept Miyako with the same effervescence with which the bicycle would later conquer fin-de-siècle Paris. It quickly became the most ordinary thing in the world: even the old pointy-chinned tofu man threw off his yoke and tubs for a wheeled cart. But though we took it for granted within a few years, and though it leapt the sea to become the dusty Old World rickshaw of every traveler’s Indian diary, the jinrikisha came as a shock to us. It hailed from Edo, as did all things stylish.

  One autumn day we stood at the temple before solemn Kannon, the goddess of compassion, paying our morning call. Though Kannon was the Buddhist face of the Shinto goddess to whom I had prayed my first night in Miyako, I found the first stop on our daily pilgrimage—before Benten-sama, the golden goddess of the lute—more jolly. Yukako brought her hopes to the many-armed goddess; over time I heard her name her father, a tune she was practicing on the shamisen, a particular sequence in her temae. In emulation, I would pray to learn things better too: how to use three verbs in a sentence correctly, how to hold the tea bowl so it didn’t slip, how to deflect the taunts of Miss Hazu at the bathhouse.

  To the other goddess, Kannon-sama, my older sister brought her heavy heart. At first, after Akio’s wedding, Yukako’s jaw would tighten when she lit incense at the temple, but in the three years that followed, she began to offer a short prayer for the health of Sumie’s first, then second, then all three children. With time the bitterness of her disappointment, it seemed, reacted with the fascinated horror I heard in her voice—at living so far across Lake Biwa in Hikone, at having so many babies so quickly—so that it wasn’t long before her prayers took on a certain vindictive cheer. In the first year of Meiji, Akio was wounded in battle against the Emperor’s army and Sumie suffered a very difficult birth; by that fall morning in Meiji Two, Yukako’s prayers had settled into a wary sincerity. For me, the gray lady, Kannon, looked like Mary Dolorosa in her mantle. While Yukako prayed, I would try to call forth my mother’s face, experiencing a twinge of grief when I could see her wafting in the incense smoke, a twinge of guilt when I couldn’t.

  As Yukako’s incense burned that morning, we heard the exotic clatter and the runner’s cry: we turned and saw, through the heavy tiled temple gate, a Buddhist nun alighting in a jinrikisha. We gasped at each other; she looked so dashing, like a charioteer. Just outside the temple, we noticed as we left, there was a new bench with a painted sign: a wheel and three kanji. “Look!” said Yukako. “Jinrikisha.”

  Yukako showed me each character and explained how it added up to jin-riki-sha, man-powered cart. Two-stroke jin meant person. Riki looked like the letter h, like the bottom half of the character for man. “Strong,” said Yukako, miming a sumo wrestler. Then she told me that sha—a box cut into quarters with a cross above it and below it—was carriage.

  “Carriage?”

  “Remember Lady Murasaki’s book?” she prompted. “The jealous Rokujo Lady in the carriage?” Suddenly I remembered a storybook picture of a lady flirting by letting a long sleeve drape out her carriage window.

  I looked at the Chinese character a long time, and then I saw a clue in those crosses above and below the box. “I see a carriage!” I said, excited. “A box”—I pointed—“and two wheels!”

  Yukako looked at me, delighted, as if a pet dog had taught itself a new trick. “Little Foreigner,” she cooed. It was part of our secret language, the way I called her Older Sister in private and Young Mistress in public.

  Suddenly, a second jinrikisha flooded the street with noise. Yukako looked from the flashing wheels to me and a smile crept across her face. Until the nun, we had never seen a woman in a jinrikisha. But if she could—as the runner stopped beside our bench, Yukako’s eyes snapped with light—then why couldn’t we? “I have money, why not?” she whispered, and took my hand. The young runner who bowed to us wore a cotton scarf rolled thin as a shoelace tied around his head. “Take us to the Palace gates,” Yukako said.

  I had traveled to the wharf by carriage with my Uncle Charles. I had traveled three oceans by ship. I had taken a night train, the enormous animal of it hurtling down the route that would become the Suez Canal. As the jinrikisha man broke into a jouncing run, approaching with great urgency the speed of a gently trotting horse, Yukako squeezed my hand so hard that I asked, “Have you ever gone so fast?”

  “No!” she screamed, laughing, her loud voice masked by the runner’s cries: Abunai! Watch out! Abunai! Danger! Then the force of the man stopping threw us deep into our seat. Before us the northern wall of the Palace enclosure stretched in both directions. A brace of helmeted samurai stood by the gate. Yukako looked disappointed. Did we really live so close to the Palace after all? “Now Nijo Castle!” she cried.

  The jinrikisha man ran the length of the imperial preserve, then jogged west. During the mile from the north edge of the Palace grounds to the gates of Nijo Castle, Yukako kept my hand in hers, her eyes flung wide, trilling now and then in pleasure and terror.

  With the Shogun gone, the vast fortress was occupied by only a few dozen imperial guards. Nonetheless, it loomed impressively as we approached the wall made of massive stones, the louring tiled gate, the murky green moat. When the runner lurched to a stop again, Yukako sat breathless, her cheeks red as if with wine. Now what? The runner looked at h
er. I looked at her. She looked down, uncertain, and up again at the sheer stone walls. In the wooden cup of the jinrikisha, with its painted pattern of red leaves, she seemed to shrink a little. We didn’t belong there. “Well, I guess we’ll walk home now,” she said, counting out the fare. My eyes widened when I saw him run off with so much of our money, painted leaves flashing down the street. “Don’t fret,” said Yukako. “We’ll have sanma. This is the one good time of year for them, actually. Can you carry it?” She’d save money twice this way: once on the humble fish, and once again on delivery. Was it worth a few minutes of Yukako’s pleasure, this long clop back to the market street, then the blocks home walking behind her, a fish bucket heavy in my arms with its brick of ice?

  “Mochiron,” I said. Of course.

  We passed the low Imperial Palace wall again, tended by a flock of old women digging out the luxuriant moss—prized, until recently—from between the stones. After we passed them, I asked, “The Shogun’s never coming back, is he?”

  Yukako grunted: it was a silly question.

  “And the Emperor?”

  Behind the Palace wall rose red trees and bare trees, dusty-looking bamboo. The Emperor was still in Edo, newly named Eastern Capital, or Tokyo, just as Miyako had been newly renamed Kyoto, or Capital City. “I don’t know,” Yukako murmured.

  “Remember those clothes?” I used another newly coined word, like Tokyo, or Kyoto, or jinrikisha: yofuku, Western clothing.

  “You saw nothing!” Yukako said sternly, then held back a smirk.

  “I saw nothing,” I repeated solemnly. Yukako walked as if in a dream and I could see that procession floating before her eyes too: those long, exposed chicken legs in their striped trousers, all that garish gilt and braid. I stood on tiptoe and made my voice ghoulish. “I saw nothing,” I whispered in her ear.