The Teahouse Fire

by Ellis Avery

  Inko left! I could not parse it. I’d been about to see her and now I wasn’t. How could that happen? “Who were you going to meet?” I attempted.

  “I have no idea. Nobody.”

  How could she go? I could still feel the hard stem of her wrist where I’d been about to touch it. “Is it Mr. Mitsuba, about his girl’s lesson?” I tried again.

  “I wonder,” she mused. “There must be many men who want to tell her good-bye.” I heard a little of the old acid back in her voice. “But to see me?” She paused suddenly. “Akio?”

  Could Akio know that Koito was leaving and have come, too late, from Hikone, to see both women who’d loved him? This seemed highly unlikely, if highly romantic, to me, but Yukako bore down the path as if a hard wind drove her. I trotted after, and all but smashed my face on her obi when she stopped in horror.

  “Did you have a good prayer at Kitano Shrine?” he Mountain asked.

  Yukako gasped. I gasped. He was sitting in the shade on the bench outside Koito’s house. “Father—” she began.

  He stood. “I admired your piety. I admired your forbearance. I admired your frugality,” he said.

  “Father.”

  “Those are the very virtues on which I based my plea to the Emperor to help the Way of Tea survive.”

  “Father, I—”

  “But did you know there’s a geiko in vogue these days who does Shin temae? Okura said she claims to be a descendent of Rikyu himself. He said one night, when she’d drunk too much, she bragged that underneath all the Western This and bunmei kaika That, the city was full of men who would pay dearly for the illusion that they were still the center of the civilized world.”

  “Ara!”

  “Well, that’s what geiko sell, my dear: illusion. And when that pretty young thing goes to the Eastern Capital and makes her gold at being The Geisha Who Does Shin Temae,” he said, sneering as he used the flashy Tokyo word instead of the soft Kyoto one, geiko, “she’ll do very well indeed. What a charming pastime.”

  His voice broke a little then, and I saw Yukako start toward him.

  “How do you think the Meiji officials will consider my plea when they hear of this? They’ve set aside a fortune to build a foreigners’ dance hall, but they’ve dismissed tea as a pastime. That was what they called it. When I wrote my formal letter of protest, I entreated them to support it as a discipline.”

  He cut off Yukako’s words of encouragement with a bitter sigh. “If a few merchants like Okura want to play at being samurai and pass the time with tea, I’ll thank them for their patronage. They’re nostalgic for what they never had. But surely tea is more than illusion and nostalgia, Daughter?”

  “Yes, Father,” Yukako said, her head bowed low. Hearing illusion and nostalgia made me think of the phrase the floating world. I suddenly understood the Mountain’s fury: for him, tea was not the floating world, it was the world.

  “Surely tea deserves the Emperor’s support?” he pressed on.

  “Yes, Father,” ukako whispered.

  “How much did you bargain away his support for, Daughter?” he said.

  Yukako breathed deeply, unable to speak.

  “Do you understand what you sold when you sold our temae?”

  I saw Yukako’s back tremble.

  “I thought you were husbanding our money and you were burning up our last hope on a laundress and a bowl of white rice.”

  He struck Yukako across the face. I took hold of his arm. “Get out of the way, Urako,” she said.

  He struck her again and again until she sobbed, and then he stopped, watching her.

  “I wanted—” ukako gasped, her face red and puffy. She drew her packet of tea-papers out from the breast of her kimono and pressed them to her bleeding mouth. “I wanted to be like you.”

  I saw the Mountain echo Yukako’s gesture of futility and disbelief. He held up his hands and stared at them, surprised at his own passion. “When Okura told me, I thought of that,” he said slowly. “And so I have determined to award you permission to teach tea to the wives and daughters of my students. Okura wants his mother to look after his collection of tea things. You’ll teach her temae, and you’ll meet with me once a week for your own lesson.”

  Yukako looked up at him, surprised.

  “When I wrote the Emperor, I said tea instilled filial piety, didn’t I? I will decide who and where you’ll teach, but you’ll teach,” he said.

  “I humbly understand,” Yukako said, using a servant’s phrase. “I humbly thank you.”

  “Or your husband will decide.”

  “You said I might not marry for a long time.”

  “I hoped when the Meiji court replied, it would turn the tide in our favor. Now they may not reply at all. After I learned the depth of our misfortune, I received a request for a Sighting. I’ve discussed the matter with my mother, who was as appalled at the low birth of the suitor’s family as she was impressed by its wealth.” hat, and the way the Mountain had looked at his hands, gave me pause: of all his family, birth and adopted, the only person he had left to consult was the Pipe Lady.

  Many years ago Yukako had said she would never marry, and I had believed her. Now she carefully folded her bloodied paper into eighths and tucked it into her sleeve. “Yes, Father,” she said.

  “She berated me soundly and said this latest blow was due directly to my own neglect, letting you stray all over town with only a half-wit for chaperone.”

  I blanched, and Yukako flashed him a look in my defense.

  “My mother has agreed to accompany you should you leave our home, until pregnancy precludes any further adventures in the floating world. Miss Urako, you’ll work in the sewing house.”

  Pained, I stared at Yukako as she tried to keep her face composed.

  “This is not my first choice,” her father said. “But we are very fortunate that, having discovered what you’ve done, Okura offers us a choice at all.”

  “Mr. Okura?” Yukako breathed. Was she going to marry Okura Chugo, that fat, soft merchant, that giant mollusk?

  “Are you half-witted too? He’s the head of a household with a wife and son.” But I’d seen the man; surely he was in his twenties. Was she to marry his infant son? “Tonight we’ll hold a Sighting for you and Okura’s brother.”

  I UNDERSTOOD ONLY PATCHES of what the Mountain said, and I have braided them in with what Yukako explained to me later as she dressed in the kimono he chose for her Sighting. But I understood Yukako’s shame and contrition as she walked home behind her father, hobbling her long steps to keep pace behind his short ones. And I understood when she sent me out to collect her shamisen and tell the Mitsubas, the Tsutamons, and all her other students that Sensei had gone back to Edo for Obon and stayed, due to a family emergency. So sorry, but she might not return for a very long time.

  At Yukako’s first Sighting, when she wore the dark blue-green robe with the flowering painted tree, she had dressed older than her sixteen years, contrasting those sober colors with the dewy youth of her skin. The effect she achieved was the reticence of a flower in bud, a seductive modesty. Yukako grimaced when Chio brought the Mountain’s choice upstairs. At twenty-one, Yukako was old for an unmarried woman, and very old indeed for a confection as girlish as this. The entire gauze kimono was a sunset seascape: turquoise water, puffy pink ribs of cloud. A troupe of fat babies tumbled across the golden sand, dressed in a rainbow of candy tints. “Can’t you tell him it’s the wrong season?” I groaned. During Obon she’d begun wearing a gauze robe patterned with hagi, one of the seven grasses of autumn.

  “No, this is good until Jizo-bon,” she said, naming the festival honoring the god of children, some ten days hence. “See?” She pointed glumly at the dumpling babies.

  “Oh, no,” I said, embarrassed on her behalf.

  “The sleeves are as long as the ones on that maiko,” Yukako complained. The sleeves she wore since burning her kimono were not so short as a married woman’s, but shorter than these: to advertis
e her fading youth would reek of desperation. Assuming a cheer edged with hysteria, Yukako imitated Mizushi, coyly raising a hand to her mouth. “Will you marry me?” she simpered at the mirror.

  “Tell him you won’t do it!” I said. “Tell him you want to be a Buddhist nun!”

  “Ura-bo, I’ve hurt him so much already.” ukako looked suddenly as serious as she had when she’d made her choice by the river, that day we watched the darting birds. And matter-of-fact as Inko, she said, “Besides, how else will he get an heir?”

  “So you’re going to marry just anyone?”

  “He’s not just anyone. My father chose him.” ukako said it firmly, with a tiny wobble at the end. Her father had chosen Akio first, after all.

  The obi that the Mountain had set out for her was just as loud as the kimono: a vivid swirl of white and bright green, with a salmon undersash and a flashy red cord. “If you go to a Sighting, does the girl have to marry the boy?” I tried again.

  “Well, either person can say no. But look at what a mess I’ve made of things on my own,” ukako said, shrugging.

  “So you’re just going to walk down that staircase and marry whoever’s at the bottom of it?”

  I was standing behind Yukako at the mirror. She fingered the red cord around her waist and spoke to my reflection. “Do you know what Akaito means?”

  How couldn’t I? “Miss Koito’s mother. Red thread.”

  “But what it means,” she insisted. “There’s a red thread that ties you to the person you’re going to marry. I thought Akio was at the other end of mine, but he wasn’t. It’s not up to me. Do you understand? So it doesn’t matter.” There were tears on her face. She took my cotton sleeve and blotted her eyes without rubbing them.

  And so I sat with a tray in the doorway again, five years after my first day at the Shins’, when Yukako saw the face of her intended. I was supposed to clear the dish away and bring another while Yukako brought sake for the Okura brothers, but I sat unseen, transfixed, as Yukako poured for the gelatinous young man, and then for the boy in the shadows. He wasn’t enormous—that was a mercy—but he was hard to see until he bowed his thanks into the lamplight. I saw his eager, hopeful face and I saw Yukako, a resolute woman in a girlish robe. I saw a bolt of lightning strike the blank night of her face, an appalled flash of recognition. It was the Stickboy.

  IN BED AS I WAITED for my older sister, I wondered fiercely, how could he be at the other end of Yukako’s red thread? That nobody, that knobby-kneed fumbler? How could I not have known he was Okura’s brother? How could Yukako not have known? He was just always there, in his clumsy way: we’d never bothered to know. And once Yukako had taken revenge on him for stealing her kimono, he’d become invisible to her, to both of us: present on the grounds of our awareness, the way a privy is, but beneath notice.

  I HELD INKO’S GIFT of incense to my face. I wondered if she was on a ship bound for Edo at that very moment. She must be happy, I thought, feeling, even amidst my greedy longing, a flash of hope on her behalf. If Koito was going to find the other geisha who moved to Edo to try her luck, wouldn’t Inko find Fumi? Was Fumi at the other end of Inko’s red thread?

  But Fumi would likely be married, and Inko would likely come back to Kyoto in a year and a half and marry the boy her father chose. It all seemed so unfair. I knew Yukako had been sure Akio was at the other end of her red thread. How humiliating to be wrong, to follow the red line and find oneself tied to Okura Jiro, of all people. It’s karma from another life, Inko had said. I’d once asked Yukako what karma meant, and she’d explained valiantly before giving up. But I understood now why Inko said it, why seducers said it in stories, why people said it all the time. It was a way to make the truth of the red thread less cruel. If Akio wasn’t at the end of Yukako’s thread this time, maybe he had been in another life.

  Inhaling the rolled black knots of incense Inko gave me, I thought of her and my body quaked a little. I missed her, but I did not feel jealous of Fumi. I heard the splashing of Yukako’s ablutions stop below, heard her climb up into the hot bath to soak. I felt a sparkle of contentment, knowing she’d be upstairs soon, and a splinter of despair: she could marry anytime, and then these would be lost to me, my nights in this room, inhaling beeswax and powdered tea, her curved back my horizon. At that moment it was Yukako I longed for most of all, my brisk and stormy older sister, my teacher, my brushstroke, my prow, my heart. I wished she were at the end of my red thread.

  YUKAKO WAS IN NO MOOD for talk when she lay down. “I’m going to sleep now,” she said. I felt her wide awake beside me, and I held her, my body rapt. I took her wrist and touched it gently with my thumb. “Stop that,” she said. I pressed my ear to her back and felt her breath quiver, like slowly ripping paper.

  “Are you crying?” I asked softly.

  “No,” she lied.

  12

  1871

  DURING YUKAKO’S BRIEF ENGAGEMENT to the Stickboy, the Pipe Lady came to announce the imperial court’s latest outrage. “They’re rounding us up and marching us to Edo,” she told the Mountain over tea.

  “Tokyo, Mother,” he corrected blandly. “Surely that can’t be.” Only the stillness of his face conveyed alarm.

  “Bad enough that they took your brother,” she lamented. “Now they want us, the Tsutamons, the Mitsubas, all of us.” She went on to name other feudal lords throughout Japan who had fought on the Shogun’s side, including Akio’s father, Lord Ii. “I’m eighty years old,” she said, sucking on her pipe in disgust.

  MISS MIKI AND HER MOTHER were working on Yukako’s hair upstairs when I came in with the news. I had expected Yukako to shake off her depressive torpor long enough to ask about Akio, but it was Miki, passing a comb to her mother, who showed most interest. “The whole family?” she asked, her little mouth falling open.

  Miki’s uncle, also a barber, had moved to Tokyo, where he learned to meet the new demand for Western hairstyles: the random crop, the chestnut burr. On a visit home, he taught Miki’s father the new cuts, and now her family was starting to see wealth they’d never known before. Lovely, fourteen, and solvent, with no brother to head the household, I like to think Miki whispered to her mother that she’d never forgotten the boy who’d once tugged her sleeve, Sumie’s youngest brother. Perhaps a match would keep his family from having to leave Canal Street.

  A week later, after a go-between brought forward an extremely deferential and tentative request for a meeting between the two children, I overheard the Pipe Lady tell her son that Miki’s father—that climber!—was a poisonous schemer who thought he could buy his way into a samurai family. “We don’t need them,” she scoffed. “Besides, we’re not the only ones who plan to stay.” Akio’s father, she heard from her granddaughter Sumie, had left Hikone and gone to Tokyo alone to beg the court not to uproot his family. He had seen enough politics for one lifetime: just as Yukako’s father had pleaded for Imperial support for tea, Lord Ii claimed that he could best serve the nation through breeding horses on the mild shores of Lake Biwa.

  After receiving this news from her granddaughter, the Pipe Lady made inquiries, and within days Sumie’s two youngest brothers—almost fourteen and fifteen by Japanese reckoning—were engaged to a pair of samurai sisters from Hikone, distant relatives of Akio, just as poor as the boys themselves.

  With two new mouths to feed, the Pipe Lady pressed one of her maids on us, Chio’s doughy niece Ryu, whom we took on as another laundress. Kuga was glad for the company and worried aloud to her cousin about little Zoji. “Lord Horse has no more money, either. He’s sold my boy’s contract to some man called Noda.” By Sumie’s report, the Hikone rice merchant Noda was an uncouth upstart. “Noda, hm? His family name’s no older than ours,” Kuga grumped.

  “He could still be a good man,” counseled Ryu. She was the sort of person who had nothing but compassion for people she didn’t know, and nothing but mockery for those she did. When the Tsutamon family left Kyoto on the Emperor’s orders, they left the Mount
ain with a pair of their servants as acknowledgment of tuition unpaid: a grandfather in his forties and a grandson under two, the boy’s parents lost to cholera. Although he recognized neither Yukako nor myself, I remembered the crop-headed man right away: it was Bozu, whom Inko had regaled with tales of an Edo she’d never seen. He called his little grandson Toru. “After the queen of England!” marveled Ryu. “What a fool!” Chio and Matsu’s tiny cottage could not sleep six now, she insisted, and Kuga was grateful to be bullied into decamping with her cousin to the three-mat room by the kitchen door.

  THE NEXT TIME MISS MIKI came to do Yukako’s hair, both young women were engaged. Kuga’s estranged husband, Goto, never one to leave money untouched, took advantage of Miki’s embarrassed rejection and quickly got her promised to his son Zoji; they would marry when the boy finished out his contract with Noda. “Congratulations,” Yukako said, her voice consoling.

  “Some girls have to leave their parents,” Miki said, resisting her own disappointment. “We’re the lucky ones.”

  A BRIDE’S FAMILY would have sent silk and lacquer, all the kimono and furnishings a woman would need in her married life. Okura Jiro, the Stickboy, was to marry into his wife’s family instead of the other way around, so his brother sent cash alone. On Yukako’s wedding day I saw, ceremonially laid out in brocade wrappings in the display alcove of her father’s study, my first koban, gold coins of the old style, more like small saucers than coins.

  Yukako and I sat together in front of the koban. Looking at the money made my skin crawl. “The worst thing is, a year from now this gold will still be worth something, and all the money I saved for Father won’t matter a bit.”

  She was right: not only had the Meiji authorities taken back the lords’ rice fields, they had announced a new currency, controlled from Tokyo. In place of the familiar disks of thin blackened silver, each pierced with a square hole, heavier coins of grosser metal had just begun to appear, their Japanese and Roman letters circling a central imperial chrysanthemum. Within months the old coins’ worth would vanish, sure as the power of the lords who had circulated them. Suddenly bereft of even their patrons’ unwisely spent savings, we heard, the downtown geisha had announced that for the first time ever they would hold public dances each year.