by Ellis Avery
“Stop it!” she insisted, giggling.
AS I COPIED OUT the character for jinrikisha under Yukako’s watchful eye when we returned, the smell of grilling fish climbed toward us. Then Chio climbed the stairs herself: “Your father wants you to eat with him in Baishian,” she told Yukako.
We looked at each other, surprised. “And I?” I asked.
“You can bring the lunches.”
“PLEASE MAY SHE STAY IN HERE?” asked Yukako as I set the stacked bento boxes before the Mountain. Father and daughter faced each other across the polished floorboard of the little teahouse.
“She can wait in the mizuya in case we need anything,” he said, no small concession considering how rarely an in case comes up in tea ceremony. I retreated to the mizuya, the little one-mat preparation area backstage from the tearoom. All the tea implements stood ready by the sliding door, while at the far end of the mat, shelves of utensils sat above a wet area: a barrel of water for cleaning tea things, a bamboo grille set over a drain. As I knelt on the polished wooden floor between the tatami and the drain, I heard a hollow metallic pop beneath me: in a teahouse, extra charcoal was stored in a metal-lined bin under the wooden mizuya floor. A tightly latticed window by the drain offered a look into the tearoom; I could see Yukako’s face and the back of the Mountain’s head. When she glanced at the doorway as if waiting for me, the Mountain, more sad than angry, chided, “You are not a little girl on Dolls’ Day.”
“Hai,” Yukako assented. She bowed, visibly stung. As she and her father ate silently, I gnawed on the rice ball Chio had tucked into my sleeve. The season for the sunken hearth had not yet come; instead, a cauldron of water sang over a brazier on the Mountain’s mat: the charcoal glowed red in a carefully finished bed of scooped ash. The room was brightest by the crawl-through entrance, the square door left open to the warmish day. When they had finished, the Mountain cleared away the lacquer food boxes and began to carry in the tea implements, his face registering neither annoyance nor thanks when I moved the bento boxes out of his way.
Today he set before Yukako a single sugared rice cracker shaped like a leaf; I noted its meagerness with admiration: I had been with the Shins long enough to know the tearoom was no place to pile on sweets. In the sweltering summer, the Mountain had used a squat dark vessel filled with water drawn so deep from the cold well that the jar sweat dew. Now, in mid-autumn, the water jar he carried out was tall and narrow, brightly painted with gourds. Yukako had not yet let me learn the temae her father performed, but I followed as best I could his practiced, modest gestures.
My eyes were accustomed to the lurching, start-and-stop lessons of the new students, the almost angry vigor of the apprentices as they suppressed the desire to show the one-year students, There, once and for all, this is how it’s done! And of course I was used to Yukako’s crisp waterbird motions, the way her long body took all the space it needed on the host’s mat. But I saw the Mountain make tea only when the whole household gathered for holidays, his temae quiet as spilt water spreading on a wood floor, natural as Chio cooking rice. Not effortless like sleeping, but effortless like walking, both awkwardness and fanfare long forgotten. How beautiful, to see something done simply and well.
Yukako drank deep and formally invited her father to join her. He bowed assent, cleaned the bowl, and spooned in powdered tea. Before adding the dipper of boiling water, he turned his kneeling body to face her. Her eyes widened at this break in form. “The teahouse and the world are separate,” he began. “But…” could not understand what he told her next. I leaned in closer, hoping he would repeat himself, wondering what could light her face with such grim comprehension.
“You still have your students,” she assured him.
“I suppose,” he said. I heard him say the word marry. “I am sorry you will have to wait.”
Yukako bowed, expressionless. “You’re a young man, Father.” He was not a young man.
“I will write a letter,” he said, and told her what he hoped a letter would yield. Yukako nodded. I didn’t understand.
“It was good you bought that fish,” he said. She flinched. I never heard a Japanese parent say, I am proud of you, but Yukako’s father added, “Your mother was good with money too.”
Yukako bowed deeply to cover her face. A yellow ginkgo leaf blew in through the open door. The Mountain made his bowl of tea and drank, less mournful, more hopeful. “This really is the one good time of year for sanma,” he said.
After the last or only guest drinks, the host rinses the bowl with clean water, then pours that water out into a waste bowl. In that moment of pouring, if the honored guest is silent, it’s a sign to the host to make another bowl of tea. Otherwise the guest says, as Yukako said now, quietly, “Please finish.”
“No second cup?” the Mountain asked.
“WHAT DID YOUR FATHER SAY?” I asked that night.
Yukako sighed. She opened her mouth to tell me, then closed it. “You’ll see soon enough, won’t you?” she said at last.
“Did he hear about the jinrikisha ride? Was he upset?”
“No,” she said, ashamed.
9
1870
YUKAKO’S FATHER had told her what the Meiji Restoration would mean for the Shins. It explained why we had sanma more than once that winter, as Meiji Two became Meiji Three, even when it wasn’t the best time of year for them. It explained why, instead of kimono fabric, all we servants received for New Year’s were imperially mandated last names: I became Migawa Urako. And it explained why, when the cherry blossoms fell, no new students joined us, and those who remained were shepherded home by their fathers, newly destitute since the revolution.
With the students of the Long Room left the women of the sewing house, and even Chio’s daughter Kuga took little Zoji away to go work for what was left of the Pipe Lady’s family. Only women and children remained in the sprawling Canal Street house with the moon-viewing pond: Sumie was in Hikone; her father and older brother were interned in Edo.
When Kuga moved into the Pipe Lady’s house, her husband Goto claimed their son. His new wife had a boy of her own, so he hired Zoji out for cash to pay off a gambling debt. Zoji’s new master, Lord Ii of Hikone, Akio’s father, was a man known for his fine bay horses: small as Zoji was, he could still fetch water and curry what steeds His Lordship hadn’t yet sold. I missed the boy terribly; Kuga must have missed him more.
Without students, gardeners, or sewing-girls, without Kuga and Zoji, the five of us—Yukako, the Mountain, Chio, Matsu, and myself—sealed all the unused furniture away into the storage tower, the quicker to clean the floors of the deserted house. Under Chio’s instruction, Yukako and I struggled to sew up our own kimono, which required taking apart with each washing. We packed our showy robes in herbs and cedar and wore only dull, practical garb, while all around us merchants’ daughters wore brighter colors than we’d ever seen, thanks both to the end of the Shogun’s sumptuary laws and the influx of new British dyes.
I never knew when May second fell for sure, but I always knew my birthday came sometime in the Third or Fourth Month, when the peonies bloomed, both in the gardens and on the lavish gilt screen the Pipe Lady had bought from an impoverished courtier, a man of the kuge nobility she scorned. In the display alcove on Canal Street that year, however, I saw only a peony in a vase and a scroll with a pen-and-ink butterfly, standard fare for early summer. “Where’s the screen?” I asked.
“You might as well give a gold coin to a cat,” Yukako’s grandmother snapped. “This is an antique.” She gave me a hard rap on the side of the head with the metal bowl of her tobacco pipe, and Yukako repeatedly apologized for my rudeness. The Pipe Lady muttered a number of angry words, among them kuge.
“But—” I whispered.
“But what?” the Pipe Lady wheeled on me.
“Nothing, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. The butterfly is very beautiful.”
I was spared more of her attention by the arrival of an older woman attended by a y
oung girl carrying a shamisen case. The new guest was homely, her face constellated with moles, but she had a kind of threadbare elegance. She chatted stiffly with the Pipe Lady, and Yukako and I slipped away.
Later, at home in the abandoned sewing room, Yukako probed my temple with a fingertip. “Better?”
I nodded.
“I’m sorry she did that, Ura-bo. This has been hard for all of us.”
I nodded again.
“You see, they hadn’t finished paying off the screen. They had to sell it.”
“Oh,” I said, my voice very small.
“And the only buyer they could find was from the Emperor’s court.”
“The kuge?”
“Exactly.” Until just recently, the kuge, nobility from the age before the Shoguns came to power, had subsisted on slender handouts from the Shogun, while samurai families like the Pipe Lady’s took home ample stipends of rice.
When I nodded again my eyes were big with tears. I couldn’t say why I missed that gilt screen so much. I’m too old for this nonsense, I thought, but again I whispered, “But—”
“But what?” said Yukako, more kindly than her grandmother had.
“But it’s my birthday—” I tried to explain.
“Ura-bo,” she soothed, pushing back a wisp of my hair. “How old are you?”
“Fourteen,” I said.
“So grown up! We should find a husband for you soon.”
“No!” I said. Did she want me to marry and leave her? “I’m too young.”
“Well, then,” she said fondly, “we’ll tell the hairdresser to leave you alone another year.” At the bathhouse, one or two girls my age had already shown up with their hair slicked hard with wax and combs, and even Miss Hazu had begun wearing ladies’ leather shoes, changing her stylish clog-thongs every two weeks. I still wore my hair in a soft bun like a young girl and clomped around in wooden sandals. “Hm?” said Yukako, when I did not reply.
“Thank you,” I said, and my heart flopped with relief.
The air was cool and misty, so we kept a pot of ordinary green tea on a brazier and drank it to keep warm; it was more pleasant to sit with the shoji-paper doors slid open to the day than to huddle inside with our lamps. Except for our bathhouse kimono and the robes we had on—and the lovely silks we’d packed away—all our clothes (and the Mountain’s, and Chio’s, and Matsu’s) lay around us in various states of unreadiness: strips of picked-apart kimono and their linings, like fabric bundled with like. Tubs stood filled for washing, whether ready with clean water or already soaking out the worst dirt. Boards leaned against the wall with kimono fabric stretched over them for flat drying. All kimono fabric was woven to a width one-third the short side of a tatami mat—about a foot across—so the drying boards were long and narrow. We would peel the dried panels off the boards, then sew our long dull seams, fretting over how to set the neck strip right, how to make the curved corners match on both sleeves. Our necks hurt. Our eyes hurt. We kept strips of cotton ready to wrap our fingers, so as not to bleed on our handiwork.
All day I’d felt forlorn and achy. I was always a little melancholy this season, having to remind Yukako it was my birthday again. Though she indulged me if I pestered her, a birthday just wasn’t something people fussed over: every year, no matter what month we were born, we all ate toasted soybeans on New Year’s Eve, a number equal to our age plus one—and suddenly we were all a year older. I knew vaguely that little Zoji had been born in the winter, but there was no way I could have missed Boys’ Day, with its irises and carp-shaped streamers, considering the little god Chio and Kuga would make of him each year in early summer. And both Yukako and I were cosseted and plied with emperor and empress dolls on Girls’ Day, fed sweets in our very best silks. It was a fair enough trade, I supposed, but what I wouldn’t give that day for dinner at a table, a new ribbon tied in my hair, my mother, yes, even my uncle singing to me, what I wouldn’t give for potatoes and garlic baked in wine and cream. For a cake, a candle, a wish. I touched my throat, longing again for my Saint Claire medal.
Perhaps that’s what the gold screen had meant to me, some birthday ritual: my stomach hurt with missing it, with my May melancholy, with indignation at being struck on the head, with the panic I’d felt when Yukako talked of marrying me off. Or maybe it was just something I ate. I set my sewing aside and rubbed my belly gently. I felt oozy inside. Did I need to go use the toilet? When I stood, I heard a soft tap and Yukako gasped. “Ura-bo,” she said sharply, and swiftly slid the shoji door closed.
“What? What?”
“Very carefully, take off your sash,” she said. I took a step back from a second soft tap on the floor and saw two round spots of blood on the tatami matting.
Yukako helped me unknot the cord and two scarves holding my obi in place. I turned slowly and she gathered the ten-foot sash into her arms. She peeled the kimono off me and held it in the air. “See?”
My kimono was mouse-blue striped with pale gray, a murky, forgiving color combination that approximated City Dust plus House Dust. It forgave nothing, however, of the blood that spread across the seat and tapped once again on the floor. “Do you have any others upstairs?”
“Just my bathhouse one, and—” I pointed at the half-sewn robe I’d been working on. “They’re all here.”
Yukako sighed. She put my stained robe in a tub to soak, then tugged my cotton underrobe so that I was bleeding snugly into it instead of onto the floor. “Stay where you are,” she said, and wiped down the tatami with a rag.
“Am I dying?” I asked.
Yukako had broken down the crisis into tasks and was performing them as efficiently as possible. Her face softened at my question. “No,” she said, careful not to laugh at me. I believed her. “I’ll be right back.”
WHAT HAD HAPPENED to change everything for the Shins—and what Yukako’s father had told her on the day of the jinrikisha ride—was this: at the end of the second year of Meiji, the Emperor decreed an end to the feudal aristocracy. On the night of his restoration, he had announced that he was taking back all the land he had entrusted to the Shogun and his lords, and all the rice money that the land yielded. In place of a hereditary warrior caste, each man loyal to his liege, the Emperor now announced that in a few years’ time he would establish an army conscripted from boys of all origins, loyal to himself alone. To do this, and to fund the new government, he cut loose all the lords and samurai who had benefited from the Shogun’s largesse for two hundred fifty years. For the Mountain, this meant no more tuition from the students, whose fathers had paid him from their rice stipends, and no more income from the three lords he served as tea master, who until now had paid him enough rice to feed three thousand men a year. Worse still, the Emperor announced a program of Bunmei Kaika, Civilization and Enlightenment, dismissing tea, like falconry or incense-guessing games, as an archaic “pastime,” better abandoned than subsidized. That spring the samurai fathers, with no money for tea, had taken their sons home from the Shins’, while the merchants, amid the tumult, had cautiously followed suit. It had been very quiet at our house since the students left.
While news came that the Emperor was having all his lords and soldiers cut off their topknots, the Mountain waited fruitlessly for a response to the appeal he’d made for help. Every day he made extra offerings to the ancestors, setting a bowl of tea before the statue of his adopted forefather, Rikyu, then making one for himself in Cloud House.
Rikyu, the founding ancestor of tea ceremony and tea teacher to Hideyoshi, the most important warlord of his day, was forced to commit suicide once he’d ceased to please his master. The tearoom Cloud House was built in the style favored by Rikyu’s grandson, Sotan, a man so beggared by his grandfather’s disgrace that his favorite teascoop was the one worn on the side from years of use. When his luck changed for the better, Sotan had a one-and-a-half-mat hut built to keep himself honest, to honor the years he’d spent in his own company. A generation later, his oldest son Shinso built a copy o
f the tiny house on his own property, to memorialize his family’s hardship: this was our Cloud House, where the Mountain drank his dwindling store of tea.
“Every rich man talks about escaping the world and living a monk’s life,” I remembered Matsu saying one night on the way to the bathhouse. “But it’s so forlorn, his look when he sits alone in that little room. There used to be so many of us,” he sighed.
“He’ll be fine,” Chio said almost harshly.
YUKAKO RETURNED with my bathhouse kimono and some packets of soft paper, which she taught me how to use and where to burn. She also brought a second iron kettle for the brazier. “O-Chio made this for you,” she said, giving me a bitter-smelling cup when I rubbed my belly again. “It’ll help.” hen she set my underrobe to soak as well. “You can wash at the bathhouse tonight, but don’t soak in the tub with the others when the blood’s heavy.”
“When will it stop?”
“In about five days,” she assured me. That seemed manageable, if unpleasant. “And then you’ll bleed every month until your first granddaughter does.” I laughed. “No, I mean it.” Sumie had borne her first child at sixteen, but that still seemed like an awfully long time. I remembered then that sometimes Chio or Kuga didn’t soak at the bathhouse; I hadn’t thought about it before. I wrapped both arms around myself and groaned a little when the cramp came again. Like little Zoji, like a spoiled baby girl, I pillowed my head on Yukako’s leg and kept sewing my dim seam where I lay.
“You miss your mother,” she said. I nodded. She nodded. “I remember the feeling.” I felt her awareness drift away—perhaps toward her own first monthlies, perhaps toward the little she knew of her own mother—and then felt her flinch as she cut her finger on the sharp seam-ripping blade, catching blood in her lap. “Ara!” she cried.