by Ellis Avery
“It’s like we never spent that year at Koito’s,” I sighed, missing Inko.
“All that work,” Yukako agreed. “Father said he doesn’t want the money, so I have to spend it on something while I can. O-Chio’s been grousing about sharing quarters with Bozu and Toru. I’ll get the old shed by the storeroom tower fixed up for them.”
“That’s generous,” I said.
“The money was for the Cloud House, not for me. I might as well help someone with it.” She was looking at the display alcove as she spoke. She held her breath. I saw her close her wet eyes and shut out Okura’s gold.
I FOLLOWED YUKAKO upstairs to her room and sat with her, surrounded on three sides by clothing stands hung with the robes she’d wear that night: first an all-white kimono with long girlish sleeves, the robe, she said, without a breath of morbidity, she’d be cremated in someday. “I’ll wear it for the first part of the wedding, when we drink three cups of sake three times.”
“Oh,” I breathed, remembering the night we drank sake together in Baishian. Many years later I learned that in the geisha world, older and younger sisters bound themselves to one another with sake as well, but at that moment I was too stunned and hurt to ask.
“After that, I’ll wear this one,” Yukako said, pointing to the last long-sleeved kimono she’d ever wear: a crane-flooded riot of colors even louder than the tumbling beach-baby robe she’d worn for the Sighting. “And this one last.” After the wedding feast, she would change once more, into her married life’s first short-sleeved robe: a formal five-crested kimono, black with a morning-glory pattern climbing almost to her shoulders. The pattern on the formal robes sank lower with a woman’s age, such that on formal occasions the Pipe Lady wore a black robe with a pattern of forest mushrooms that climbed barely past her ankles.
Surrounded by those robes, Yukako had Miss Miki and her mother wax, comb, sculpt, and pin her first married woman’s coiffure. And then, for the first time, she blackened her teeth with a solution of iron filings and oak gall while the hairdressers applied themselves to me. First they shaved off my mother’s sleek black brows with a thin blade and painted on new ones. Then, with hot wax and scalp-cutting combs, they tortured my hair into its first unmarried girl’s shimada. Miss Miki gave me a wrapped package to open later, and then they went downstairs to work on Chio, Ryu, and Kuga. My head burned. My scalp burned. My face felt peeled and raw. Okura Jiro, of all people, I kept thinking. The Stickboy. “You could still say no,” I told Yukako as she put on her white robe.
Since the day the Mountain struck her, a certain vacant, steely expression had made its way into Yukako’s repertoire. Favoring me with it, she said, “Now you look like a grown-up young lady.”
THAT NIGHT I SPREAD out bedding for Yukako and Jiro upstairs, and then went downstairs to sleep by the kitchen entrance with Kuga and Ryu. I spent the night listening against my better judgment for sounds from the upstairs room, revolted on Yukako’s behalf, bereaved on my own. The one thing that saved me from despair was the packet Miss Miki had given me, sent from her cousin in Tokyo.
Kyoto transplants in Tokyo, it seemed, were quick to find each other. Besides Koito, only one person in Tokyo knew me, a girl who, like me, had once recognized Miss Miki when she stepped out of a comb shop in the geisha quarter. When I could bear the night no longer, I opened Inko’s gift. Unspooling a puff of white tissue, I found a water-lily–shaped wafer of pressed sugar. I had not been forgotten; my eyes stung from gratitude. The sweetness dissolved on my tongue, and I smiled in spite of my exile, cupping my full breasts in the dark. Yes. You would have had the best poem.
Inko’s sweet had been tucked into the hollow of another wrapped object. I peeled back the paper: it was a sake cup, white as bone. I dipped it in one of the kitchen barrels and drank. Did you get to tell Fumi good-bye?
No. I think it’s better that way. “Good-bye,” I whispered aloud.
FOR THE NEXT FEW MONTHS I saw Yukako alone only when I joined her in Baishian, playing host or guest to her one student, the Stickboy’s mother. At first, I lurched around after the wedding in a sleep-deprived fog, the lullaby of Yukako’s breath beside me replaced by the effort of trying to keep my head from rolling off my new wooden pillow as I slept, so as not to crush my grown-up-girl’s coiffure. After those filmy, wretched days had passed, I realized that a change had come over Yukako, one I’d been too selfish to witness. Her steely bleakness seemed to have dissipated. I cannot say she seemed to like her husband more, but she seemed to have set her dislike of him aside, as if she had better things on her mind. A month or so after Jiro came to the Shin house, when Yukako and I had a moment alone in Baishian, I summoned up Inko’s gumption and asked her, “So, what did he say to you on your wedding night?”
She gave me an arch smile, and I realized that she took fierce satisfaction from the fact that Akio, not Jiro, had been her first man. And that she was pregnant, and glad of it. “‘Well, we have to do this now,’” she said.
13
1872
THE DOOR WAS OPEN when I brought Young Master’s tea, so I didn’t close it.
A raw wood box, an ink brush, a young man kneeling at a low desk. At the end of the First Month in Meiji Five, Jiro, the man I’d once called the Stickboy, seemed happy. “You enjoy calligraphy,” I said with a nod to his brush when I set down the tray.
He thanked me with a curt dip of the chin. “Now I do,” he said. To warm his fingers and preserve his fine wet writing-point, he tucked the brush in his mouth and took the cup with both hands. Poised for a moment like a bird with a twig, he looked past me through the doorway to the snow silvering the thatched roof of his favorite teahouse: the dim humble four-and-a-half-mat hut called Houseless House, Muin.
He was lucky indeed. Spared a ledger boy’s life bent over the inkbrush, he was free to indulge in its pleasures. After a childhood spent catering to his tyrannical father and brother—the very name Jiro meant Second Son—and a youth spent year upon year as the lowest-ranked apprentice, he was suddenly the Young Master, the heir to the house, second only to his father-in-law, Master Teacher. He had also—like Yukako’s grandfather Gensai and her father, sometimes called Yosai—received an art name, Insai, that announced his new status to the world. All the teahouses would be his when the Mountain was gone, and already he had been named special protector of Rikyu’s own One Pine teahouse at Sesshu-ji, the Shin family temple south of the city. Young Master’s conjugal duties dispensed with for the moment, he was free to spend as many nights as he pleased at Sesshu-ji, as he claimed, or trawling the floating world, as seemed more likely.
Jiro had wanted a study of his own in the Shin house and received it: the Bent-Tree Annex, where Akio had lain sick years before. He had summoned the queer-faced servant girl for tea, and she had come. He had just asked his adoptive father for permission to orchestrate, single-handed, an informal tea ceremony gathering of his own every new moon, and permission had been granted. That night he would host the Master Teacher alone, and from then on once a month the Mountain would be, not a teacher, choosing the scroll for each lesson, interrupting with corrections at any time, but one ordinary guest among a handful, offering private counsel after the event. It was for this first tea gathering—this first chakai—that Jiro now prepared, brushing letters on the lid of a wooden box.
He plucked the brush from his mouth, sipped his tea, and set to work again. “What are you writing?” I said. Jiro didn’t abuse me when I spoke to him, or dismiss me outright. I wouldn’t have dared to ask the Mountain questions, but sometimes Jiro even answered mine, showing me how pine-based black ink had a blue cast to it, while the undertone of bamboo-based black ink was brown. The things Jiro taught me didn’t make up for how much I missed my place at Yukako’s side, but they made me hate him less than I wanted to.
The pale raw pine was the brightest thing in Jiro’s room: a box for a tea bowl, it stood some eight inches square, with slots cut in the base for a woven strap. The lid couldn’t have b
een simpler: a flat square panel with two wood strips tacked in back for a snug fit. In his old black student robe, Jiro, brush in hand, seemed somehow apart from his scarecrow body, his dark-browed, long-nosed, cheese-wedge face. All his awareness was gathered in his soft eyes, in the ink-soaked tip of the brush, rising and arcing, touching down with a wet flicker and rising again, like a bird on a current of air. He brushed two large characters on the box and sat back from his work, content.
His head, from the side, looked like an upside-down flatiron: high temples, cheeks that tapered to the chin, his pinned-up queue a handle. “Did you say something?” he blinked.
“What did you write?”
“Inazuma,” he said.
I’d asked Yukako once why the word for lightning sounded like the word for rice plant and the word for wife. For once, she didn’t say Different kanji: “When the lightning hits the paddies it makes the rice grow big,” holding her arms out in a hoop as if swollen, as she was now, with child.
“Then why isn’t it the rice’s husband?”
“Why why why?” she’d teased. “Ura-bo, I don’t know.”
“Can I see it?” I asked Jiro, gesturing toward the form in the box, something tied in red silk.
The Mountain would have struck me. Yukako would have shot me a glance I called The Look. Jiro looked up in genuine puzzlement and explained, “Father needs to see it first.”
“It was rude of me,” I apologized. “Should I close the door when I go?”
“No. But bring in another brazier, won’t you?” he said. Holding the brush in his mouth again he crossed his arms against the cold, looking dreamily outside. “Tonight I’ll make tea from a kettle of snow.”
THAT NIGHT, after the Mountain watched Jiro lay charcoal and brush the lacquer hearth-frame with its bundle of feathers, Yukako set the first tray from the kitchen in the corridor outside the Muin teahouse. Pausing, she looked over the utensils laid ready to enter the tearoom, including Jiro’s calligraphed box, set out in the place where a tea bowl would go. “He named it?” she whispered, her mouth a black zone in the lamplight. During the intermission that followed the Mountain’s ritual meal, Yukako helped Jiro replace the scroll in the display alcove with flowers, then settled backstage as Jiro began to do temae in earnest. Come on, she mouthed, waving as I lingered by the closed host door.
Didn’t she want to see the new tea bowl? I made a gesture of licking a finger and dotting it on the shoji door to make a peephole. No, she whispered. This from the girl who’d spied on every lesson? But she got tired so easily these days. With an embarrassed smile, Yukako leaned against a post and closed her eyes, her panting short breaths relaxing into long ones in a matter of seconds. I moved the lamp to keep my peephole from shining like a star in the wall and leaned in.
Muin, a thatched hut nine feet square, was the most restrained of the Shin tearooms. Lacking the broad expanses of the classroom or the fourteen-mat hall, lacking the clever floorboards of Baishian or Cloud House—tricks to make a tiny room seem bigger—it stood a simple four and a half mats, with the four rectangular mats arranged like petals around the center square half-mat: a square within a square. The winter hearth was cut into the half-mat, and I saw steam in candlelight. I saw the pale-gold tatami, the ceiling like a dark plaited basket, the two darkened windows. A candle lit a shimmer of sand in the clay-plastered wall, lit a camellia blossom and the white tips of a budding plum branch in the alcove. A second candle lit Jiro and his red-lacquered tea box, a spot of color counterbalanced by a dab of green on the sweet tray. The flecks of green and red emphasized the quiet black-white-adobe palette of the tearoom, as did the occasional spark rising from the charcoal fire.
The Mountain bowed appreciatively over his sweet, its swelling green center visible through a white outer layer, and asked Jiro its name.
Shitamoe, he said, shoots under snow. It was a nod to the hope of spring returning, to the ancestor Rikyu’s simple tea, and to the new life, unbelievably, slumbering inside my older sister. I felt a deep sense of alignment radiating from the two men, of serenity, of rapport with each other, with the beauty in the room, with the snowy night outside. The only sounds in the room were like breath: the soughing of the boiling water, the whisper of the tea whisk in the bowl. Then Jiro set the tea bowl on the tatami beside him, and the Mountain moved forward to retrieve it.
I saw a flash of black and gold. Yukako didn’t stir when I gasped. I looked again. I saw a rough black vessel that shone like a hot thing newly formed, flung up from the earth: I recognized it. It was the lesson bowl from years before that had fallen apart, as if of its own accord, in Jiro’s hands; I remembered the wet loose sound it made, the faintest sandy grinding, like unglazed dishes rubbed together, the way he froze, eyes and mouth wide at the chunk of fired clay still cupped in his left hand, the two black petals of the bowl trembling on the tatami floor. It was the same bowl, humbly saved and mended with soldered gold. I looked at Jiro with new respect. The gold vein was like the white thread of moon in the wood at Baishian.
The Mountain remembered the tea bowl too. I heard a grunt of recognition: “Un.” Jiro all but beamed as the Mountain drank deep, then held up the bowl for a closer look. I had seen a chipped tea bowl or two mended with gold, a vase from Rikyu’s time. And once, to celebrate the fifteen-day moon of the Ninth Month, the Mountain had chosen an ancient iron kettle, a perfect sphere that had once broken and been mended with silver, the bright lines like striations on the full moon. But I had never seen a tea bowl broken so badly and mended like this, the gold arc like the seam of an orange. Where had he gotten so much gold? A new bride’s kimono and lacquer were her own; perhaps Young Master’s wedding koban had been his own to melt and use.
I could picture Jiro, a shy, humiliated boy, hiding the shards of the black bowl. I remembered how he always took the last seat in the room, how the samurai students would tease him by hanging a wooden sword up with his clothes, since, as a merchant, he was forbidden to bear arms. “Did you forget something?” they’d say when he ignored it. I remembered a young lord striking at him in the air, daring him to fight back, when to raise a hand against a samurai was punishable by death. The Stickboy had crossed his arms and turned his back. How beautiful he must have found tea, how brutal its disciples. I remembered again his stealing Yukako’s robe for Akio, his calligraphy next to Akio’s stamped seal.
I wondered how, after the Shin fortunes fell and his father died, he had persuaded his brother that it was worth making a life in tea, even without the support of a great lord. What had he said, so that Okura was now our staunchest patron? And how could I not have known he was Okura’s brother? My eyes must have glazed over, like Yukako’s, with disdain. But here it was, the fruit of his forbearance, the gold vein in the dark matrix, like an underground stream.
Turning the bowl in his hands, the Mountain gave a softer grunt, a breath of approval: “Un.”
Basking, Jiro announced, “I named it Inazuma.”
The Mountain gave a third grunt, like a cloud crossing the sun. He composed himself and returned the tea bowl, asking the next question of ritual importance. What happened? I wondered. Now the old man seemed just as content as before.
Yukako blinked awake, and I joined her, tucking myself out of Jiro’s sight as he carried out utensils no longer needed: the ladle and the lid rest, the bronze bowl for wastewater. I heard the Mountain move to inspect the tea box and scoop while Jiro cleared away the water jar and tea bowl. When Jiro reentered the tearoom, Yukako picked up the bowl and gave it a close look, fingering the line of gold. She gave a nod and a wan smile.
We heard Jiro, in answer to the Mountain’s questions, identify the lacquerwork of the tea box and then the origin of the teascoop: carved by one of Rikyu’s great-grandsons, it had the poetic name of Nestled Rice Fields.
Father and adopted son offered ritual thanks to each other, and then I heard them settle out of seiza, the formal kneeling contortion required during temae.
“How
pleasing,” the Mountain said, “to see the white hill of snow melt and then boil. Nestled Fields and Shoots under Snow conveyed similar feelings, but were different enough so as not to cloy. Your restrained use of color shows maturity. The tea bowl was a daring choice, and I compliment you on it. My adoptive father told me never to use it, as it was cracked. But he also said it was made for Rikyu himself by the potter Chojiro, so I kept it for lessons. It seemed a crime to never use it. A quandary, no? You’ve solved it well.”
The Mountain paused. “However. Though the bowl’s name has been lost, it is not yet your place to give poetic names. If you’ve inscribed a box for it, you’ll have to burn it and make a new one when you become Master Teacher.”
The floor gave a soft pop as Jiro rose again to sit formally and bow. “I humbly apologize,” he said.
The Mountain remained in place. “That aside, a good first chakai event. The first of many.”
“I humbly thank you,” Jiro said, as if choking.
“And I have saved this auspicious night for more good news. I have, at last, had word from Court.” Yukako’s sleepy eyes went wide. The Mountain named the August Nephew we’d once hosted, now the August Cousin. “Thanks to him we have both the Emperor’s countenance and his support.” ukako grabbed my wrist and shook it, trying to contain herself.
The Mountain named an annual figure worth roughly a hundredth of what he’d once received, enough to keep thirty men in rice for a year instead of three thousand. Yukako nodded, sobered but still hopeful. Even that much put the Mountain’s house in far more comfort than many, including the Pipe Lady’s family. And if the Emperor no longer condemned tea as a backward “pastime,” that was cause for hope too: more students, more tea events. Yukako exhaled quiet relief. A look of vindication briefly crossed her face: she hadn’t dashed her father’s hopes by teaching Koito after all. And then betrayal took its place, and she dropped my hand. She looked stricken. She mouthed a few words: “He didn’t tell me.”