The Teahouse Fire

by Ellis Avery

  I had been straining for the Mountain’s words as he announced his news, but I was also aware of a certain damp unease coming from Jiro ever since he’d been reprimanded. “This is great good news,” Young Master finally said, his voice queerly breaking. “We owe all our good fortune to you.”

  A last emotion took its place on Yukako’s face as I realized, and doubtless she did, that Okura hadn’t been their last hope after all. In the next room, Jiro said nothing, and then a sound cut the air: a sniffle.

  “I too am overcome with joy,” said the Mountain. But it was shame, not joy, in Jiro’s silence, shame at being chastised, shame and disappointment and no small anger. I watched Yukako as he sniffled again. I could see her contempt.

  14

  1872

  IT’S QUIET TODAY. Is my son here?” Jiro’s mother asked, after bowing thanks to Yukako for her lesson. She was a gray-faced gloomy creature whom young Okura Chugo had pressed into service to assist with tea gatherings and keep his utensil collection clean. I liked her, I’m ashamed to say, because she was so awkward that she made me feel less hopeless about my temae.

  “He didn’t go with the others,” ukako said, shifting her awkward bulk out of seiza. “He said he wasn’t feeling well.”

  As I led the older woman to her son’s bent-treetrunk room, she fretted over her temae. “As soon as I stand up, I forget everything,” she sighed. “My feet go numb and my memory does too!”

  “You remembered both ways to exit this time,” I consoled her. “Sensei didn’t even have to remind you.” he gave me a shy smile as I went to help Yukako clean up after the lesson.

  It was the end of cherry-blossom season; on all sides, the petals shimmered down through the still air. The Mountain had welcomed five students this year, up from three the year before: four new faces and the Young Master. He was taking them all on a visit to the Raku Master Teacher, the direct descendant of Chojiro, the potter most favored by Rikyu.

  “Young Master didn’t seem sick this morning,” I mused, tactfully maneuvering Yukako away from lifting the heavy kettle herself. That morning, because the men’s excursion would have left Yukako alone with only servants in the house, the Mountain had asked the Pipe Lady to come. (The idea of Yukako, swollen-ankled and runny-eyed as she was at this point, waddling off to go cavort with geisha, strained credulity.) The older woman hadn’t even descended from her jinrikisha before Jiro waved her off with some formal words and a cut of silk; he wasn’t well enough to leave today, so there was no need for her to trouble herself. Truth be told, he seemed vigorous enough stopping that jinrikisha.

  “He’s not sick. But Father’s choosing tea wares, and you know how the man is after studio visits.”

  I did: ever since his first chakai event with the Mountain, Jiro would come home from studio visits glitter-eyed and sullen, shutting himself away in the treetrunk room. He’d paint tea bowls and Chinese characters on cloudlike paper, sending me off for candles and cups of miso broth. He must be naming them, Yukako said when I asked her about the paintings.

  “It’s so strange,” I said. “He loves pottery.” We were sitting backstage in the Baishian mizuya, a one-mat-plus-wooden-sink annex to the two-mat hut.

  “He loves it too much,” Yukako shrugged, coaxing the powdered tea back into an airtight vessel for storage.

  I finished scrubbing the green dust out of the linen cloth and wiped down the boards of the mizuya, checking the level of the water in the ceramic barrel a last time. I could see the silhouette of my face in the water, the peaks and mounds of my coiffure. When I scratched my forehead I felt stubble where my eyebrows used to be: I should get them shaved again soon, I thought.

  Yukako put out the fire in the floorboard pit, and I sat with her quietly. When she found me in this room, she was the age I am now, I marveled. The host’s door to the mizuya was open, as was the outside door beyond—the push-up skylight, too, the small windows and the little crawl-through door—so that the bleached-bone gold of the house was lit on all sides by green air and pink petals. The very house seemed to be breathing light. Above the lovely dark board with its whitegrained streak, a calligraphed scroll hung in the alcove, edged in sky-blue silk. Beneath it, in place of flowers, lay a small pair of flower-cutting scissors, their butterfly handles gleaming. “Why?” I asked, pointing.

  “Why?” Yukako teased. “What flower is most beautiful of all?”

  It was a matter of catechism, not opinion. “Sakura,” I answered.

  “Sakura only bloom a few days a year,” she said. “And now they’re everywhere. To cut a branch of cherry blossoms and bring it into the teahouse is too much, don’t you think?” She nodded toward the alcove. “This is just enough, the shears alone.” Walking back through the moss-and-slate garden, the fresh spring air blowing petals my way, I felt joy, joy, at how I saw the outside world more intensely for having seen the world Yukako made inside. No wonder Jiro resented not getting to choose and name the tea bowls himself; every aspect of speaking through tea gave pleasure.

  AS A YOUNG MAN, the Mountain had asked the Emperor for permission to present tea at court, and he had done so every year until Meiji. Now that the new court had approved the Mountain’s declaration that tea ceremony was a laudable discipline of body and mind, they had also granted permission for him to resume his twice-yearly tea offerings. The first date he was permitted to appear fell during Yukako’s confinement, and so Chio’s watch was shared by the two women who had adopted out their sons to the Shin household: Jiro’s mother and the Pipe Lady. On a moonless night not long after my own birthday, they sent me running for the midwife in the dark.

  I sat up all that night with Yukako, and after Chio, the midwife, and the two older ladies had fallen asleep near us in the upper room, I reached over to touch the tiny boy on Yukako’s chest as if he were my own. “My treasure,” Yukako whispered, her face slack at last. “I’d like a bath,” she said, and fell asleep. The little creature’s hair spiraled out from the crown of his head in a dark whorl. His ears were the softest things I’d ever touched.

  Jiro and the Mountain came home on the wave of eggs that arrived, sometimes thirty in a box, as gifts for the newborn. The entrance looked like a series of white staircases, each box wrapped in white paper and tied in red-and-white string. Jiro seemed a little dumbstruck by the boy: when I brought up Yukako’s morning tray, I saw him beside her on the futon I’d laid out, quietly tracing the dark swirl on his son’s scalp with a finger. “His hair’s as thick as scales on a tai,” he bragged to the Mountain when I served their breakfast. Images of the tai fish, or sea bream, usually showed it under the arm of one of the gods of good fortune, robust and cheerful as the new baby. Giddy with pride, the Mountain gave Young Master a tea box named Omedetai, a pun on sea bream and happy occasion. It was a family treasure that had belonged to his adoptive father Gensai: the glistening red curve of muscle and scale fit perfectly on the round lid of the box. On the baby’s seventh-day festival, when we dyed rice red with lucky beans, Yukako, Jiro, and the Mountain went to enter the boy’s baby name at the local registry: Tai.

  15

  1872

  THE MOUNTAIN SEEMED invigorated by his experience in Tokyo—buoyant, enthusiastic with his students and the round of tea events, often using a word I hadn’t yet encountered: eppo, eppo. I first became aware of the Kyoto Exposition of 1872 not long after Tai’s seventh-day festival, pouring breakfast tea for the Mountain as he talked with Jiro of this Eppo, and of something that required a tei-bu-ru. A table? I wasn’t sure, but I could see that Jiro, though he smiled and bowed, was gripping both chopsticks in one hard-knuckled hand. When I cleared the meal away, the lacquered edges of the chopsticks were dull where he’d ground them against each other. I followed him to the bent-treetrunk room to gather up any dirty dishes, and asked, as he ground ink in water with unusual vehemence, what was an eppo.

  Jiro glowered at me and burst out, “He’s creating a new temae!”

  “Really?” Why did he se
em so angry?

  “No one has created new temae in generations, and now these, what, these swine float in with their boats and guns, reeking of butter, so we’ll have a pig temae in a pigpen? You might as well give a cat a koban, but the mood of today is Oh, let’s! Let’s make a tea whisk that fits on a trotter! It’s too hard for a pig to lift a tea bowl: let’s change the temae so they can push their big snouts into a bowl on the floor! Indeed, why use a tea bowl? Let’s have Rikyu’s family design a special trough!”

  I had never heard him speak like this. “Ah, I’ll just take these,” I said, nervously stacking up his dishes.

  “Look here,” he ordered, brushing ink across the page.

  I took a tentative step forward.

  “The barbarians have an enormous kettle with wheels,” he said. A kettle? “It slides on a metal bar like a door slides in its groove.”

  I stared. Had the trip addled him?

  “And they’re bringing it to Edo! Pardon me, Tokyo.” Jiro sneered. “The Emperor has more than granted permission; he’s paying his hai kara crony Sono to have these metal bars laid,” he said, using an English phrase—high collar—coined to describe those who aped foreign fashions.

  I took a step closer and saw a spare brushed rendering of a curved train track. “Ara!” I remembered something the monks on the ship had told me: when Admiral Perry’s black ships came to scare Japan into trading with the West, they brought a miniature steam train—with cars just big enough for a man to straddle and ride—and set it up on the shore to astonish the natives.

  Jiro pointed to the train track: “It looks like a long scar in the ground,” he said. “They call this kettle a servant, but I can see it’s one of their gods, look.”

  He showed me a woodblock print of a bijin—a beautiful woman in a fashionable kimono—except there was something wrong with her face. What was it? “Why, she’s smiling!” I cried. I had never seen a print like that.

  “Look at her eyebrows! Look at her teeth!”

  “Eh! Is it a little girl in a grown-up kimono?”

  “No, this is how barbarian women go about,” he said, shaking his head in horror. “And this is no woodblock artist’s fancy. The very Empress has started tricking herself out like this, and so now all Edo is full of these faces.” He groaned. “It’s a city of aging girls. And don’t they see?” He dotted his finger along the woodblock beauty’s smiling mouth, then along each white tooth of negative space formed by the curved train tracks and straight railroad ties. “Every time I looked at a court lady? Torakku, torakku.” As he said the English word track, he bared his teeth and clicked them together in a mockery of a smile.

  Could the woodblock beauty have been Koito? Or did all bijin look alike? “When you were in Tokyo—” I broke off. Should I say Edo to please him? “—did you hear about a geiko who does Shin temae?”

  Jiro’s eyes widened at my poor taste for mentioning Yukako’s unsavory past. “What would you know of the floating world?” he asked, with a certain lazy menace. I shifted from foot to foot, flustered. He relented. “If there was one, they kept the news away from Father. Tea is the language of diplomacy,” he said, imitating the Mountain’s grunted pronouncements.

  He sighed. “Bad enough to see what’s become of Edo. Bad enough that the foreigners have been granted a new settlement so close to us.” He was talking of Kobe, a not-too-distant fishing village where a new port had been built for Westerners en route to Osaka. “But now Miyako? Obon has been forbidden this summer, but we’ll have a barbarian festival to make up for it in the fall!” He snorted. “Maybe Master Teacher will build a torakku for the Eppo. He can slide the tea bowl to the foreigners.”

  Before the Meiji coup, I had heard protesters crying Sonno! Joi! Revere the Emperor! Expel the Barbarians! I shrank back, wondering if Jiro had been one of them. Surely when those protesters fought, they had not imagined their revered Emperor’s ban on Obon festivities: for ten summers, we would see neither dancing nor bonfires.

  “They belong over there, we belong over here,” Jiro continued. “We need to learn how to build their cannons to protect our beautiful things. We don’t need to learn how to make our beautiful things ugly like theirs. Father says Shin temae looks frivolous when women do it, but I say a bijin would grace a tearoom better than some diplomat pig in a furokku koto.” A what? Oh, a frock coat.

  “On your trip, did you say any of this to Master Teacher?”

  Jiro gave me an appalled look in reply. “He’s my father,” he said.

  I NOTED, then, Jiro’s peculiar silence the next day at breakfast, when the Mountain said to me, as offhandedly as if calling for his pipe, “For the little one’s thirtieth-day festival, tell my daughter to start now. She shouldn’t blacken her teeth anymore, or”—he pointed at his eyebrows and made a gesture. “It’s not how Her Majesty does things.” Before I could stop myself, I looked up at Jiro and saw his downcast eyes, the way his jaw worked behind his closed mouth. When his own mother came to see the baby, her eyebrows and teeth left untouched according to the new style, I saw the way Jiro shrank from even her.

  And so I understood a few days later, when Yukako’s teeth emerged (gray, then yellow, then white) and the stumps of her eyebrows began to sprout, Jiro’s retreat to the bent-tree annex at night. “Should I serve your morning tea in your office tomorrow?” I asked when he hadn’t slept upstairs in days. I tried not to sound too hopeful.

  “Thank you, yes.” Jiro rolled his eyes and imitated his son crying. Tai had begun to fuss at night a bit, but Jiro hadn’t seemed to mind at first. “Anything that cries out at night delights me—except babies,” he said, in an affected, world-weary tone.

  “Is that from a book?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Just the way you said it.”

  We were sitting just after breakfast in the room by the garden where the Mountain slept and took meals with Young Master; it also served as his library. I noted the authority with which Jiro walked his fingertips through his new father’s small book collection: he found a thin volume and pulled it down for me. Light for its bulk, it was bound in a pattern of exposed violet thread, illustrated with dozens of black-and-white woodblock prints. It was written all in women’s kana, run together, like all Japanese writing, without spaces between the words. Even worse, this book had almost no kanji characters to show where words began and ended. But I saw a page numbered like a list: one, one, one, one. And I picked out nouns here and there: snow, moon, egg. Before she married, Yukako had read to me aloud from a book of lists by a Heian court lady named Sei Shonagon; was this it?

  “Who taught you how to read?” Jiro asked.

  “Okusama, a little, four or five years ago,” I said, meaning Yukako. Her title had changed since her marriage, from Young Mistress to Madam.

  “Is that so?” he said, unbelieving.

  “Why don’t you borrow it?” said a voice from the doorway: the Mountain. Startled and embarrassed, I all but dropped the book.

  “I’m sorry, Father,” Jiro said.

  “No, I mean it,” the Mountain said to me. “Wash your hands first.” I bowed deeply, alarmed. He had never paid me so much attention before. Though I had neither time nor ability to read, refusing seemed even more impudent than looking at the book had in the first place, so I bowed again, and thanked him. I could feel them both looking at me as I carried out the tray.

  WHEN I FIRST TOLD Yukako her father’s orders regarding her teeth and brows, she’d simply shrugged and moved Tai to the other breast. “Does he think I’ve had time to fuss over my face up here?” She craned her neck and grimaced at the mirror. “I haven’t left the house in days. It’s just as well,” she said. She rubbed one of her stubbly eyebrows and laughed a little. “Ask him if I grow these out so long they cover my eyes, will they double our stipend?” I giggled. “What if I paint my teeth bright white?”

  TODAY, as she prepared for Tai’s thirtieth-day festival, she gave the mirror a longer look. When it seemed li
ke Jiro wouldn’t be coming back upstairs, I had quietly but decisively taken my place in her bed again, and so I sat with her as she dressed. For the festival she wore a married woman’s black formal kimono, but she looked just as she had all the years before her marriage, younger even, with her girlish expressive brows. “I thought everything would be different when I was older.” Yukako glanced from the mirror to me. “But here we are. There’s only one thing different,” she said fondly, taking Tai out of my arms and inhaling his baby smell. “Tai-bo! My Tai-bo!” she crowed. We tucked three gorgeous little kimono one inside the other, laid them on the floor on top of a sash, and placed the baby faceup on the kimono-wrappers. Yukako lifted each arm into a set of nested sleeves, then belted the baby into his clothing with a single knot. For a moment as she stood with the baby in her arms, I saw a flash of the old Yukako, my indomitable sister, armed to stride off in the sun to the temple, to dedicate her boy to her own special protector, Benten-sama, the goddess of water and the arts. Then I saw a look of shock and despair cross her face. Did she still pine for Akio? She thrust the baby at me, aimed her face at her breakfast tray, and heaved. “Oh, not again,” she groaned.

  For another week, the cloakroom looked like a world of staircases, as we orchestrated dozens of black lacquer boxes to send out as thank-you gifts, each on its own fine tray, each wrapped in brocade. We filled them with mochi cakes and lucky rice, and they all came back, as custom decreed, unwashed. The Mountain went overnight to Kobe to talk about returning the next year for a temple tea presentation: when he left, the entrance hall was full of laden boxes; when he returned it was crowded with empty ones. When we had cleared out the cloakroom—washed every box, stacked every tray, and folded every strip of brocade—there was a curious box left in the corner, easily missed by anyone passing through the cloakroom, anyone whose task wasn’t, like mine, to clean it.