The Teahouse Fire

by Ellis Avery

  The box was full of books. Not Japanese books, either, with their exquisite thread bindings and cunning boxes. Western books, cloth and leather bound, some stamped with gold. They smelled, oh God, like books, like long voyages by sea—like ink and rags and glue—like a ship’s library, like, to a certain stomach-twisting degree, my Uncle Charles. I laid them out one rainy day and sorted them on the stone floor. There were two in unfamiliar alphabets, one blocky, one curving—Russian and Greek, maybe. Two or three were in Roman letters, with queer large b’s in the center of words and a forbidding font, like bat’s wings and diamond-paned glass. German, I think, or maybe Dutch. A few looked like Italian, but could have been Spanish or Portuguese, all those lovely staccato t’s and Latin vowels. One book with very clear type was freckled with umlauts, barred with diagonal lines through its o’s. And three books were in languages I recognized: a British guide for visitors to Paris, a slim illustrated French bird book, and an old friend—I almost cried—Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb. The book had been difficult when I was nine, having read English with help for four years. At sixteen, when I opened the volume, all the fusty moths of its scent dancing toward me, I was baffled. I recognized the cover and the language, but when I looked at a particular phrase—Tarry a little—it entered my mind as sound and nothing more. When I looked at the pictures of birds I’d never seen, I saw arrangements of letters that looked familiar—French—at first glance, but on closer inspection yielded nothing I could grasp. All the same, I kept the three books. I stacked the others into their wooden crate and set it in its overlooked corner, padded upstairs as Yukako bathed the baby, and set my new treasures with the Japanese book the Mountain had lent me, under my best kimono. I felt rich. In the time between coming home from my bath and Yukako coming up from hers, I could learn how to read again. Not only had he (thanks to the Mountain) given me a book; by leaving Yukako’s bed Jiro had given me the time and privacy in which to read it. Anything that cries out at night delights me: he’d sounded so surprised when I asked if it was from a book. Even if I couldn’t read Sei Shonagon, I loved her for making Jiro feel glib and clever about giving me what I most wanted. I came alight thinking of Yukako coming up to me, the milky baby falling asleep between us. And as I waited, I paged through the bird book, pausing when I saw a familiar picture: a karasu, its dark body glossy as the bird that flew through my mind when my mother once called me by its name, fingering my black hair. I sounded it out, my voice thin and halting as I struggled with the old sounds. My blondest crow, I murmured, the way she’d say it after singing her favorite song. Ma plus blonde corneille.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, when I mopped down the cloakroom, I noticed that the box of books had vanished, and the next day, when I laid breakfast out for the master and his heir, the Mountain stopped me. “Miss Urako.”

  “Hai?”

  “In three months Kyoto will host a great festival. People will come from all over Japan, and from foreign countries as well. Even now, carpenters have started building foreign-style halls for this Eppo. It’s a chance to show the world that we are just as civilized and enlightened as foreign countries, if not more so. For this Eppo, I have developed a temae that can be performed in a foreigners’ room.”

  “I humbly understand,” I said, not looking at Jiro.

  “And you will speak to our foreign guests about it.”

  “Me?”

  “In English and French. Don’t tell me you can’t.”

  I hung my head. Of course! He’d gone overnight to Kobe, the port town full of foreigners! Why hadn’t I thought before taking those foreign books?

  “I saw you in that foreign dress on the stairs last summer,” the Mountain said. “I saw the way you looked at that book, as if you’d grown up with them, and yet I know you can barely read. So I brought the books from Kobe, to see what you’d do.”

  I felt a violent panic in my stomach. I breathed a shallow breath and then pressed my forehead to the ground in supplication. “Master Teacher, I have no home in this world but yours. Please let me stay,” I panted.

  “Who said anything about you going?” said the Mountain dryly, amused. “I’m your employer. This is your work.” I kept my forehead down. “You’ll wear this,” he said, and I looked up to see my mother’s dress in his hand.

  “I—yes, sir—I—” I really did feel faint. “It’s too small,” I gasped.

  “I’ll arrange fabric for you,” he said. “Make another.”

  A WEEK LATER I sat in the sewing room with a bolt of silk dug up from the storeroom, a tight pattern of red and gold leaves for the fall event. It was the same width as all Japanese fabric—just over a foot across—so my first task was to join three panels of silk together in order to have fabric wide enough to cut for a Western dress.

  So much less had changed than I imagined since the Mountain gave me his orders. Yukako was the same toward me. The Mountain told me that when the carpenters had finished building what he needed for the new temae, he would teach his students, and I should observe those classes behind the lattice. That—and the silk he found for me—aside, he favored me with the same benign indifference as always. When I returned his copy of Shonagon after Tai tried to chew on it, he made no comment. Chio and the sewing-girls, meanwhile, treated me with mild curiosity, their coolness toward me for having moved back up to Yukako’s room tempered with pity that I’d been chosen to be exposed to so many butter-smelly barbarians in such a monstrous garment. “Glad it’s not me,” Kuga said as we walked to the bathhouse. It was the week the wall went up between the men’s and women’s sides of the great soaking tub, in compliance with a new imperial edict. Where I once saw the old pointy-chinned tofu man straight across from me, I now saw a wall of cedar panels. That’s no foreigner, I remembered him saying. “Can you really read those barbarian languages?” Kuga asked.

  “Or did you just take the books for the pictures?” said Ryu.

  “No, I can, a little. I don’t know why,” I said, cagey. “I don’t remember much before the fire.”

  “You were a foreigner in a past life,” Chio said philosophically. I remembered Inko once coming to that very conclusion, and I blushed in the twilit street.

  I floated among the students as before, unseen except when they sent me back to the kitchen for more tea. Only Jiro treated me differently: suddenly the miso I brought was too hot or too cold; I laid his futon out askew, or too early, or too late. He was quick to dismiss me when before he’d let me linger with questions, and his speech, which had used to trail off vaporously as I awaited instructions, now fell curt and clipped. I was, I suppose, the enemy.

  HOW WAS I GOING to make Western clothing? I fingered my mother’s dress in my lap. A more visually skilled person—Chio, no doubt, or even Jiro—could have copied a child’s dress for an adult just by looking at it, but not I. I turned the dress inside out. My mother’s stitches were small and persistent but not precise. I could see her impatience as they loped wide sometimes, or danced crooked on the fabric. I could see her renewed heart—or candle—as they shrank, for a spell, into demure tidy lines. She’d loved me so much. I had never seen her make either of us a dress from whole cloth: she usually mended or altered whatever came in the church box at Christmas. But she’d bought new fabric to make this for me, found new velvet ribbon to match. She knew she was dying, I realized. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. I opened them.

  The most precise thing to do would be to cut out each of my mother’s stitches, press the pieces of fabric flat onto paper, and trace them with a compass to my grown-up size. I couldn’t do it. I demanded paper, scissors, a brush, and ink, and then, in the sewing room, I laid out my work. When I took apart kimono to wash them, beyond the long straight seams, I’d see the woven selvage, compact and self-contained. Beyond each of my mother’s seams, however, was a half-inch of raw fabric where she’d cut the triangle pieces of the dress from a length of new cloth. The raw linsey-woolsey was a soft fringe. Tenderly, I brushed ink on the ragg
ed hidden edges, then pressed the piece flat on the white page. A rough inked outline of the dress emerged one piece at a time.

  There was a goddess to whom the sewing-girls offered a prayer when they made the first cut into a new bolt of fabric. Once a year when they held a funeral for their old needles, the girls sank the dulled and broken spines into a cake of tofu and left it at her shrine. As I rolled the inked cylinder of a sleeve slowly on the page, I said a small prayer: Please let this work.

  Straightaway the goddess replied to me in French: Don’t cut the silk yet. I laughed for a moment, at such a swift no-nonsense answer from heaven, and I cried too. It was my mother. As I traced my pattern larger by the inches I had grown, I resolved to ask Yukako for a bolt of rough cotton to practice on.

  ALL THAT WEEK, as the trees in the garden blazed red, I had wondered how I would explain myself if I met a foreigner at the Eppo. Where was I from? How did I get to Japan? How had I learned Japanese? Don’t flatter yourself, I chastened. They won’t ask, they won’t care, and if they do, you can just say you don’t remember anything from before the fire. After all, there hadn’t been a year without a fire somewhere in Kyoto since I’d arrived. In the last few days before the Eppo, I had less time to worry: between wrapping and loading the Mountain’s lacquer table and stools, looking after out-of-town guests, and running messages back and forth to the confectioners’, I didn’t even have time to see the hairdresser when she came.

  Each guest at the Expo was to receive a sweet cake stamped with a chrysanthemum and wrapped in festive paper, presented in a silk pouch printed with the Shins’ crane. The day before the Expo, as Ryu, Kuga, and I threaded violet cord into dozens of bags, I closed my eyes for a moment in the sewing room. I went to get a cup of tea to wake myself and saw a man at the gate with a cane.

  He wore Western dress, his arms and legs sharply outlined by his clothes, which made him look like an animal on its hind legs. His trousers and shatsu were two different colors of black, which sat awkwardly together, unmitigated by a single breath of color or contrasting lining. How jarring! The only place for an eye to rest was a spot of white at the throat, which hardly counted, and in fact drew undue attention to his unlucky face: he had a large ugly nose and waxy pale skin. I blinked: he had blue eyes, like a dog, or an infant. What was wrong with him? Was he not a he, but an it—a fox spirit?

  “Excuse me, I’m very rude,” the spirit said, as if its mouth were full of stones. I hid my face with my sleeve, but stood firm before the open gate. I didn’t want his evil touching Yukako or the baby. “Mukashi mukashi,” the spirit said, except awkwardly, as if it were speaking some other language: “Moo cashy moo cashy.”

  I blinked again. It was my Uncle Charles.

  The man had aged before his time, his tonsured hair a silver wreath around his wrecked but still-young face, the scarred and twisted lip, together with the cane, suggesting that he hadn’t left the fire unscathed. He spoke, the same voice reedy and nasal, but hoarse, as if he were still inhaling smoke. His speech was a string of poorly pronounced nouns, a few verbs in their rudest forms: “Jesus Christ. Church. Seven years. Fire. Girl. Aurelia Bernard. Now I search. Now I go. Paris.”

  As he spoke, I lowered my sleeve. He saw a dark-eyed servant girl in kimono and obi, her black hair oiled and pinned in a neat shimada, who spoke to him in Japanese. No recognition lit his eyes. “There’s no one here by that name,” I said stiffly.

  “Pardon?”

  He was looking at me and he didn’t see me. I was speaking to him and he didn’t understand me. I felt a jolt of rage, and of cruelty. With impunity, I said the stock phrase kept in reserve for guests who have overstayed their welcome, a phrase that implies that they’ve eaten you out of house and home: “Would you like some tea poured over rice?”

  “O-cha-zu-ke?” he repeated, as if his tongue were made of wood.

  “I see seven years haven’t done much for your Japanese,” I said.

  He heard the word Nippongo and he thanked me, with an air of one used to being complimented.

  I affected the elaborate speech of the singing-girls. “So sorry, but as your query poses insurmountable difficulty, perhaps you would be so kind as to…” said, the word depart left to the imagination.

  He blinked at me, dull and hopeless.

  “Go Paris!” I said, making shooing motions. “No girl here!”

  He bowed in comprehension. “I understand,” he said, using the crude verb of a lord or a nursling. He looked me straight in the eye without seeing me. Hadn’t anyone ever told him it was rude to stare?

  I looked at him, this lightning-struck tree. I looked the same rude way he did, like an animal, straight into his face, and I saw a glint of the man who’d held me on his lap with his French-English Bible, teaching me one word at a time. And then I remembered his hands around my waist, his breath hot with drink, and I said the one thing I’d wanted to tell him that night, matching his imperious form. “Amari suki arahen,” I said. I don’t much like you.

  I closed my eyes and opened them: I was in the sewing room. “Don’t make us do your work, Sleepy,” said Ryu, half smiling.

  16

  1872

  MY DREAM of Uncle Charles proved prophetic. No one asked me to account for my Japanese. In the Exposition Hall the next day, an enormous blue-eyed Englishman with hairy nostrils and ears like oyster shells looked down at the little maid in her Japanese coiffure and maple leaves, groping for substitutes for dozens of tea words: temae, chado, chashaku, chasen. As I choked out yet another article-less, pronoun-less sentence with the verb at the end, he asked me, “How did you learn such good English?”

  With a giggle that hid my outrage, I raised an arm to curtain my face, but my narrow tube sleeve offered no shelter. “From the church,” I piped.

  WE HAD WITNESSED an opening ceremony—in which a very large man received a very large imperial medal—and served tea for two seatings of guests before any foreigners came to our enclosure. It was already clear, however, that Jiro was not enjoying the Exposition. He fidgeted through the speeches granting the large man, Mr. Kato—a Satsuma nobody, he muttered later—the post of Special Advisor to the Court for Kyoto in thanks for his work planning the Emperor’s new conscript army, based on the Prussian model. Jiro also seemed overwhelmed by the displays of steel and ceramics and power looms, and while he was glad to see friends—among them his elder brother Chugo and his old classmate Shige, the Bear—there were far more people present whom he found distasteful. He liked neither hangers-on nor those on whom they hung, and the Exposition was rife with both. Okura Chugo, I saw Jiro note, had made a gift of his own tobacco kit to elegant Mr. Sono, the Satsuma art collector whom the Emperor had tapped to run the railroad that outraged Young Master so. And neither man had seemed able to tear himself away from an exhibit by a pair of Dutch hydraulics engineers, displaying plans for a fifty-mile canal north of Tokyo.

  “If someone like you were leading the project, Mr. Sono, I’m sure it could be done,” said a man Kuga told me was Noda, little Zoji’s current employer. Though the frog-lipped Hikone rice merchant had made it down from the shores of Lake Biwa for the Exposition, we saw neither Zoji nor Akio that week.

  “Thirty-five mountain tunnels? That’s quite a few men digging,” reflected Sono.

  “You’re a wise man, an exceptional man,” oozed Noda, caressing the ivory netsuke fob that hung from his sash on a Western metal watch-chain. “But Satsuma’s crawly-bug full of men who can’t move with the times like you. Send them to prison and your problem’s solved and your tunnels dug,” he declared.

  “Troublesome as my countrymen are, as a Christian, I can’t condone what you’re saying,” burred Advisor Kato, the big Satsuma man from the opening ceremony, still wearing his palm-sized medal. The essence of hai kara—high collar—Western fashion in his swallowtail coat and trousers, he was flanked by two white American ladies, one tall and rough-hewn, one short and dumpling-shaped, astonishing in their crinolines and flounces. “S
uch a canal could do a great deal for Japan, but the Bible, like the Buddha, says Do not kill. A prisoner’s life breaking rock would be a short one.”

  “But surely you killed your share when you fought the Shogun, Advisor Kato?” asked Noda.

  “The Emperor’s cause is holy,” Kato explained good-naturedly. “The canal’s cause remains to be seen.”

  As greasy Noda croaked with laughter, Advisor Kato moved closer to our booth, arms braced akimbo. “I never had the leisure to learn tea,” he said as Jiro bowed before him with a slice of sweet bean cake.

  “I imagine not,” said Young Master dryly. I looked over at Advisor Kato to see if he’d acknowledged the insult, and then looked back to see Jiro’s knees lock in alarm: one of the students in the mizuya backstage had neglected to lay out a spicewood pick with the Advisor’s sweet.

  Over the appreciative murmurs of the two American ladies, I could almost hear the hiss of students blaming one another behind the screen. In the narrow strip of backstage tatami visible from where I perched to welcome guests, I saw a plate appear with a single sweetpick. Jiro turned to fetch it as graciously as possible while Advisor Kato, unaware of any problem, nodded in thanks for the sweet yokan and looked over our displayed utensils. His gaze fell on the One Meeting teascoop, a pale wisp of bamboo carved two hundred years before by Rikyu’s great-grandson, the Mountain’s founding ancestor Shinso. As Jiro stood with the missing sweetpick, Advisor Kato called after him, “Don’t worry! What’s this here?” Reaching into the display alcove set up in our booth, he took One Meeting and dug into his sweet. “I’m a problem solver,” he chuckled at himself. “This is delicious.”