by Ellis Avery
Yukako ritually thanked Koito and drank. She’d brought this tea bowl especially for summer lessons; it was shallow, so the tea cooled quickly, and its thick green glaze formed bumpy translucent ridges, as if it were dripping with cold water. When she finished, Yukako set the bowl in front of herself to offer formal appreciation, but Koito spoke. “Mukashi mukashi, there was a woman of the floating world who loved a man of tea.”
I felt Yukako cloud over, thinking this was a story about Akio. Koito’s phrase floating world, like Inko’s more matter-of-fact phrase water trade, described the nighttime world of men’s pleasures—gambling, singing-girls, prostitutes—but it was a pun on the Buddhist idea of the world of human grief. This world of suffering is a transitory illusion, teaches Buddhism, so we should detach from it. This world of sin is an evanescent dream, the pleasure seekers counsel—replacing the kanji for suffering with one of its homonyms, the kanji for floating—so we should enjoy it to the hilt. Water trade, floating world. The silk merchants’ money floated Koito and her neighborhood along: without it they’d be left high and dry like Pontocho. But at the same time, I thought, Koito and her neighborhood were the ones doing the work of water, while their customers were the ones being floated through the dreamy night.
Who had floated whom last night? I wondered, thinking of Inko until Koito continued, “The man of tea was married to a girl who bore him six sons and a daughter. He had so many sons, he taught his wife temae so she could teach them too. Then every single one of their boys died young.”
“Is that so,” Yukako murmured. Six sons and a daughter. I had heard the phrase before. I remembered: Gensai, the Mountain’s adoptive father, had lost six sons before taking in a samurai boy to marry his daughter Eiko, Yukako’s mother.
Koito continued. “The woman of the floating world who loved the man of tea, she bore him a daughter too. Though his wife’s girl filled him with nothing but despair over her dead brothers, his lover’s girl gave him delight. For the Seven-Five-Three festival”—she named the holiday for blessing young children—“when the girl received her first grown-up kimono, he did temae in her honor here in this house. She had never seen a dance so graceful, and she loved dancing best of all. Teach me! the little girl begged. Let me do it too! He refused and she begged; she begged and he refused. You taught your wife tea, the little girl’s mother said. It was the only word of reproach she ever gave him, in all her years of loneliness and longing. My wife, yes, he said, looking at them both, but not you. The woman told him to go and never come back, and the little girl never saw him again.” Koito’s voice was brisk and restrained, but her story was so sad. Perhaps she had said floating world instead of water trade because the woman in the story had forgotten her watery work: instead of floating her patron on a dream of love, she’d succumbed to the dream herself.
“What is it you want to tell me?” ukako asked, wary of the story and yet compelled, as I was, by the calm way Koito told it, making heavy things light.
“That I did not understand my mother’s disappointment, or my grandmother’s rage, until the young lord refused to teach me Shin temae,” Koito said. I noticed the way she, like Yukako, avoided using Akio’s name in public. “Just as your grandfather refused to teach my mother.”
“Your mother,” ukako murmured. And then she seemed to absent herself. Her hands had remained in front of her throughout Koito’s story, in the bow held before formally inspecting the tea bowl. She straightened her back now, and lifted her hands, turning each one over slowly, looking carefully at each of her palms.
“She wanted so much to see you today,” Koito said, and bowed in deep gratitude. “She—” Koito’s voice caught. “She said she wouldn’t mind if I stayed home with her now. Would you mind teaching without me today?”
YUKAKO PAUSED on the path out of the geisha quarter, gazing at the shrine grove. “So, is Miss Koito your cousin?” I asked.
Yukako raised an arm as if to slap me, and then stopped, looked at her hand again, baffled. “I don’t know,” she said.
JUST BEFORE WE LEFT, Inko and I had exchanged a grin, and she’d slipped a small white packet into my sleeve. Finally alone in the cloakroom while Yukako gave her music lesson, I took it out. Inside a sheet of paper tied like a letter, I found a few black pearls of neriko incense rolled in a scrap of mosquito gauze. I inhaled deeply, my body pulsing inside. Yukako would have kept the incense in her pillow-box, but having no coiffure to lift off the ground with a wooden stand, I slept on a bag of buckwheat hulls. Where could I hide Inko’s gift? When would I ever have the privacy to burn a ball of incense undisturbed? It would be as impossible as trying to make love again, when I slept beside Yukako each night and Inko slept beside the cook. Inko couldn’t read or write, I mused, and yet her gift captured both the floating world of our night together and the difficulty of repeating it. And it offered a solution: though incense smells more faintly when it isn’t burned, it can keep for years, fragrant and intact. I rolled the incense back into its scrap of fabric, tied it back into its knot of paper, and tucked it back into my kimono. I would have had the best poem, she’d said.
Yukako was shaken all afternoon as I followed her to the fish market, the grocery stands, and home. She sat behind the lattice while her father worked with his new students, facing into the classroom without watching the lesson. That evening on my way back from the bathhouse—the ordinary gloom of embarrassment there lit with a ray of pleasure at my own floating breasts, how Inko had touched them—I saw a figure with a lantern crossing the little stream toward the storeroom tower. Yukako came to bed late that night, but she let me fold tight around her when she slept.
Were Yukako and Koito really cousins? Had Yukako’s grandfather Gensai really had an affair with Akaito’s mother? Over the next few days, Yukako helped her father at a series of tea offerings for the Obon festival, first to her own ancestors, then at the household shrines of the merchant Okura Chugo and his friends. When she wasn’t working, I couldn’t find her—but sometimes she appeared, dusty and distracted, for a midday meal. She was in the dim plaster fireproof tower, it seemed, looking through the family treasures.
During the Obon festival, we would dance in circles with the ancestors each night, then light fires to send them home to rest, from the neighborhood temple bonfires at the beginning of the week to the great mountain fires at the end. On the faces of the mountains that cupped the city—including Daimonji, the hill I saw my first day in Miyako, its flank carved with the character dai—ten enormous kanji were shaped out of wood and straw and lit on the last night of Obon, so that the city was ringed with a poem calligraphed in fire. The morning of the smallest bonfires, Yukako seemed resolute again, changed. She sighed often, as if beating back a wave of disbelief. That evening, she had me carry a box behind her on the way to our neighborhood temple, where she danced a brief circle, and then I followed her when she slipped out of the crowd, walking the long dark way to the geisha quarter.
When we passed through a temple near Kitano Shrine, we paused: the circle of Obon dancers looked like a fairyland. I saw Mizushi there, lifting one hand at a time as if the world were watching, and Inko, too, her narrow eyes drained of merriment. I wished she could see me. And then we saw Koito, her movements stark and lovely as a tree in winter, tears rolling freely off her face. What had happened was clear: the three of them wore black.
On the walk home, I remembered dabbing at the water as the women drank from sake cups. I had drunk farewell with Koito’s mother, too, even if she didn’t know it. I remembered the way she sailed in to look at my mother’s dress, her beautiful body bent in curiosity, her flowing russet train. And then I remembered—my heart caught in my throat a little—a sleeping woman in bright sunlight, a red-and-white quilt of Irish Chain. Did you get to say good-bye to her—to Fumi? I’d asked Inko.
No, she’d said. I think it’s better that way.
I waited for Yukako to tell me what she’d sought and what she’d found. I asked her baldly that night
why we’d gone to the geisha quarter. She turned her back to me and traced characters on the tatami with her finger; I couldn’t read them. The next few days she was restive as she helped her father, itchy as we gathered on one of the Kamo bridges with her family, watching the Daimonji fires. Sumie’s father and brother were still being held in Edo, I thought, looking up from the rice ball Chio had packed for me to the Pipe Lady bent over her lacquered picnic box. Her silk robes were threadbare, but she still had fine rice for her sushi. Carp, I noted. From her own pond?
At night I spread out Yukako’s futon and waited up for her. Tell me, tell me. My desire to know mixed up with my desire for Inko—my desire to feel my own body alive again—and I remembered another impatient evening not long after I first came to the Shins, when I waited for Yukako on the stairs and she came up at last, weeping that Akio had rejected her temae. She and Akio had made love, I realized.
In the corner of Yukako’s room I found the box I’d carried for her to the geisha quarter and back. Raw wood brushed with a black coiled river of kanji, it was wrapped in silk and tied with violet cords. I didn’t want to be a sneak, I just wanted to know; inside the box lay two scrolls. Hanging each on a mosquito netting post, I lit another lamp and waited for Yukako.
I could barely read or write words that were block-printed or brushed very clearly, and Japanese calligraphy favors expression over clarity. In the bronze light of the lanterns, lying inside the luminous cube of mosquito gauze and drinking cold barley tea, I stared at the white panels within their silk borders, their brushed lines like the tracks of birds. The left-hand scroll I recognized: it was the child’s character for Shin that Yukako had hung in Baishian the night she declared me her sister. The right-hand scroll was similar: a large childish center mark, surrounded by elderly wisps of kanji. The central character, however, was not Shin. A cross here, a sword there, two marks for motion, like a little pair of flippers at the base of the kanji—I had no idea. I traced it on my hand, to no avail. As for the smaller characters surrounding the crude center marks, I didn’t venture a guess. They made me think of miso constellations, swirling in soup, or—on a hot night, I tried to think of cool things—smoke rising through snow.
“Miss Urako.”
I all but jumped out of my skin. “I didn’t hear you!”
“I suppose not.” ukako was sitting behind me, hands folded as if she’d been there for quite some time. “Are these yours?” she said coldly.
“Older Sister, I’m sorry.”
Yukako entered the gauze enclosure. “I just—” I told her the truth. “I worried for you.” ukako looked at me and sighed, weary and fond. “What are they?” I asked.
“Proof,” she said, taking down a scroll.
I didn’t understand. “It’s by your mother, right?” I persisted. “Shin Eiko.”
“Un,” Yukako said, nodding. “I wanted to show both to Koito, but this one is enough,” she said, indicating the other scroll.
“What does it say?”
Yukako smiled grimly. “At the center there’s the kanji for aka: red.”
“Ara!” Didn’t Koito’s mother’s name, Akaito, mean red thread?
Yukako paused. “At the sides, there’s a poem by Lady Murasaki,” she said slowly. Then she gave me a long look, and decided to tell me. “Two poems,” she said. “Copied by two different people.”
Leaning in, I saw she was right: the characters on one side of the page matched the spidery writing on the other scroll, while the characters on the other were firmer and clearer, as if writer did not take it for granted that he or she would be understood. “Gensai, Akaito, Akaito’s mother?” I asked, pointing at the calligraphy in three different hands.
Yukako made a harsh noncommittal sound. Then she rolled the Red scroll, fitted it into the box, and tied the violet cords tight. I meekly helped her roll up the other one. She said nothing as she knelt before our shelves, putting away the clean folded kimono she’d brought up from the sewing room. I saw her pause at my shelf. “Don’t touch my things anymore,” she said, tossing something my way. I caught it: my tied paper packet from Inko.
I LAY BESIDE YUKAKO, listening to her breathe. I tried to imagine Koito’s mother as a little girl learning her calligraphy, proudly brushing her name. Why wasn’t it Shin? I remembered the Mountain when we first met, speaking without defensiveness or anger, simply declaring me not Shin. With his voice in my mind, matter-of-fact, I could see a man looking at his lover and his daughter, hear his dispassionate choice: not you. I winced in the dark. Bernard was just as makeshift a last name as Migawa. If there was some living man in Paris with my face, I knew he’d never claim me. Inko wrote no note with her gift: even if the wrong person unwrapped it, there’d be nothing to betray her. “What were the Murasaki poems on the scroll?” I asked.
Yukako recited something in the dark. “The prince learns he has a daughter by a woman who is not his wife,” she explained, “in faraway Akashi. In the first poem he promises to protect the baby. And in the second, the baby’s mother sends her thanks. Do you understand?”
“Ah,” I said. Aka-shi. Aka-ito. Shi, ito: the Chinese character for thread was pronounced using either sound. “Is the ito in Akaito the same as the shi in Baishian?”
“It is,” ukako said curtly.
“Didn’t your grandfather want to build a teahouse called Baishian? Wasn’t that where your father got the idea?”
“Could you please stop talking?” ukako said, her voice thick with feeling. I knew how much she loved the teahouse—how much, though she knew her father had built it to make a name for himself in the Emperor’s court, she thought of it as hers.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I laid my hand on my chest, soft and newly dear. I breathed Inko’s incense through my sleeve.
WITH THE OBON HOLIDAY behind us, we walked the next day to the Northern Seven-House Quarter, to collect Yukako’s shamisen for her lesson with the Mitsuba girl and to offer condolences. “I don’t imagine Koito will come with us to teach,” ukako said, “but I want to give her this.” She gestured toward the box in my arms. She lingered at Kitano Shrine that day, praying until her candle guttered.
Passing out of the shrine gate, I thought of how in just minutes I’d wait in the cloakroom while Koito and Yukako talked, how Inko would appear, dressed in black, bringing me a cup of cold barley tea. I felt breathless. I imagined her sitting on the bench beside me, lifting her foot out of her sandal again, this time touching my calf. I wanted to trace her soft mouth with my finger. When we left the shrine grove, I almost didn’t see Mizushi on the path.
“Shin Yukako-sama?” said the little girl. She was dressed for work in her whiteface and trailing sash, her absurdly high clogs.
“Yes?”
“My Older Sister asked me to wait here for you. You see, she left for Edo at dawn.”
“Miss Koito?”
“Everybody was surprised. But after the funeral, she turned the house over to Madam Suisho and she packed up her kimono to go. Another geiko from her Pontocho days moved to Edo recently, you see.”
“Did the cook leave too?” I asked. I couldn’t say Inko’s name out loud; I cared too much.
“Just Older Sister and Miss Inko and all those kimono. They had to take four carts!”
“Is that so?” said Yukako, dumbfounded.
“She left your shamisen in the cloakroom.”
“Is that so.”
“She wanted me to tell you that she left, and thank you, and good-bye,” Mizushi recited.
Yukako shook her head in disbelief. “Thank you.”
“I’m glad you got here because I’ve kept somebody waiting,” the maiko said, smiling, then blurted out her news. “A famous artist wants to paint me!”
“Congratulations,” Yukako said, the standard phrase hollow in the air.
“Miss Inko asked me to say good-bye to you especially,” Mizushi added as an afterthought, giving me a tiny bow. She turned to go and, remembering something, bowed to Yukako agai
n. “I’m sorry, that man who was going to meet you? I told him”—and when she said this she looked youngest of all—“there were no men allowed in the house, so he said he’d wait for you outside.”
“Thank you,” murmured Yukako, still dazed.
Mizushi bowed a last deep farewell and clopped down the path, the ends of her stiff gauze obi flapping like flags. Yukako and I looked at each other, stunned. “She went to Edo,” she repeated.
“She’s on a boat right now.”
“Or on the mountain road.” ukako shook her head again.
“With her four carts?”
Yukako gave a humorless bark of laughter. “Oh, she’ll go by boat, I’m sure.” I was still holding the scroll box, tied in its silk wrapper. Yukako looked at it as if it were a bowl of blackened rice. “I can’t believe I was going to give her anything.”