by Ellis Avery
“That’s a good idea,” Yukako agreed, her voice betraying some annoyance at the girl for suggesting the obvious.
“But I have no tools,” Lady Kato said, looking down.
“Isn’t your husband studying tea with my father?” asked Yukako.
I popped a candy into Kenji’s mouth so I could lean in as the girl whispered, “He doesn’t want me touching his things until I can do temae.” Given his own experience with other peoples’ tea utensils, I could see why Advisor Kato would say that; I smirked, remembering the One Meeting teascoop.
The Mountain had one set of practice tools for each of his eight students (now including Tai), so Yukako lent Lady Kato her girlhood practice tools, reclaimed from Koito when the geisha began buying fine utensils of her own. When Kenji seized his mother by the legs, Yukako lifted the boy absentmindedly, listening to the jinrikisha that wheeled Lady Kato away. Something was on her mind. “What if I have two students?” she mused.
We heard a voice. “Is my jinrikisha still out there?”
We turned to see the Pipe Lady, flanked by her son and grandson-in-law. “Have you ever seen anything so hideous?” she marveled.
“It was like a bird’s nest,” Jiro shuddered in agreement. He was perhaps overdoing the invalid’s part, his silk robes covered in an out-of-season wool kimono jacket.
“I believe that’s how the foreign women at the Expo wore their hair,” said the Mountain, looking at me.
“I don’t remember,” I said, from habit, looking down.
“I’ve heard that Western women fix their own hair, which both protects them from the gossiping tongues of hairdressers and saves money for the household,” said the Mountain. Then he almost laughed. “But I’m not sure what I think of the results.”
Yukako rocked her son on her hip thoughtfully and gave me a sly look. “You do so remember,” she said, so that only I could hear.
KENJI HAD THROWN himself at Yukako and even bitten her when he thought she’d leave without him, so I sat with him that afternoon in the entrance of the Raku showroom. I suppose I’d been imagining an atelier full of clay and potter’s wheels, because I was disappointed to see an ordinary, if lovely, reception room with a scroll alcove and vase of autumn grasses, where a twinkling, thick-bodied gentleman unwrapped one bowl at a time for the gathered observers.
I wasn’t expecting this. Twice a year we received shipments of tea utensils: whisks, ladles, and linen cloths, each fashioned by its own workshop. A messenger would deliver, say, a score of tea whisks, and offer a little gift of sweets or fruit to Chio, who would serve him tea and whatever she had on the fire for the sewing-girls. At his leisure, the Mountain would look over the delivery, and Yukako, before her father’s dictum and her children’s needs had confined her to the house, would walk to the workshop herself to handle payment. Now Yukako kept the books and counted out coins twice a year for Jiro to bring instead. I remembered, vaguely, the man Yukako used to deal with at the tea-whisk shop: kindly, sawdusty, and curt, proud of his family’s craftsmanship, no doubt, but never one to sign his work or try to make it different from his fellow artisans’, never one to boast of a tea whisk’s antiquity or pedigree. The delicate, birdlike creations were made to be used, not to express the unique essence of their creator or materials. Like the ladles and linen cloths, they weren’t even meant to last a year.
How different it was, then, to peek into this formal room knowing that the man before me was the eleventh-generation descendent of Rikyu’s potter, Chojiro, and that his ancestors and the Mountain’s had met twice a year in this very room for the past three hundred years. Any sense that we’d drop by to pick up a crate of tea bowls and head home was quickly dispelled as the courses of a small ritual meal, each served in exquisite ceramic dishes, were laid out before the assembled company.
The Mountain sat in the place of honor while the students, in order of seniority, lined up beside him, Tai last, with Yukako just behind the boy, not served and not eating, an occasional yawn betrayed by the stirring of her jawbones.
After the trays were cleared away, Chojiro’s Heir laid out a series of plain pine boxes. One by one, he opened each box, unfolded a set of silk wrappings, and displayed the black, red, or smoke-colored bowl within. I felt the tension of the students as they watched the Mountain for his response. Often he sat quietly, and the potter would silently pack the piece away. Occasionally, however, he would nod, and the potter would pass the bowl to him. I could picture Jiro growing frustrated with the game of trying to guess when Master Teacher would nod. I wondered if the whole process was just a way to keep the students from presuming they could know the master’s taste. I wondered, too, if the Mountain would actually choose any tea bowls at all, and if so, by what discreet, ceremonious means Chojiro’s Heir would fix a price and receive payment.
For each bowl that earned a nod, the Mountain would inspect it as if he were in the tearoom, lifting and caressing the vessel briefly and expertly, then passing it to his students for their inspection too. Tai, though clearly bored and drowsy, watched his fellow students intently all the same, copying their precise movements: he bowed, braced his elbows on his thighs, turned the bowl in his tiny hands, and offered one last bow. He was very patient as the Mountain and the other students looked at some nine pieces, handled three, and chose, in the end, just one, but when the group made ready to go, he could no longer control himself, complaining, “I thought we’d get to see them make the tea bowls!”
Yukako hushed him and the Mountain glared his way, but Chojiro’s Heir asked the Mountain graciously, “Would that be of interest?”
Able to keep an eye on his mother at all times, thanks to the cloakroom’s proximity to the parlor, Kenji had long since relaxed into sleep. I lashed him to my back and carried him to a large handsome outbuilding, redolent with the scent of mud. The dapple-gray tea bowl the Mountain had chosen, though I’d only glimpsed it, seemed to embody, in its modest uneven form, this thatch-roofed, heavy-timbered building, this room of half-naked men building each bowl by hand. Awestruck, Tai reached up and took the potter’s sleeve while the Mountain’s gathered students clumped together, nervous for their kimono. Bringing up the rear, Yukako halted—surprised—and caught my eye. I looked: the shelves lining the studio walls were filled, brimful, with tea bowls by the dozen, more than I’d ever seen in my life, none too different, to my untrained eye, from the one her father had chosen.
“What are these?” ukako asked.
“My apprentices made them,” said Chojiro’s Heir. “I’ll critique them and then break them up.” In response to Yukako’s widened eyes, he explained, “Madam, our good name depends on releasing only our very best wares. I’m draining a marshy corner of the garden; I’ll use the shards for tile.” ukako lowered her head in thanks for the explanation, giving the tea bowls a backward glance as we left the building.
PERHAPS JIRO WAS NOT showing enough gratitude for his miraculous recovery, because the next morning, as I helped Yukako serve breakfast, the Mountain was more severe with him than usual. “Your son was a welcome face yesterday.”
I had not known that the appropriate reply was abject apology until Jiro said, “I hope he had a good time.”
I had only seen the Mountain’s anger unleashed once, outside Koito’s house years before, but I caught a barb of it now. “I’m sure Raku was impressed I had fathered a son in my dotage.”
Jiro ate a pickled plum, his face curdling. “So, will you unveil your new tea bowl at New Year’s?” he asked.
“Perhaps you mean to flatter me into thinking I’m a young man. Perhaps you think that because my mother still has enough wits about her to scoff at foreign styles, it doesn’t matter if you go to the kilns or not”—saying nothing, Jiro prised the plum pit out of his mouth with his chopsticks and reached to set it self-consciously back in his empty bowl—“but Raku has a son your age who was there,” the Mountain said. His unspoken accusation filled the room: You embarrassed our family. If the heir sulked
at home like a boy, waiting for the Mountain to die, the world would see no man in place to lead the Shins in the next generation. The faint tap of Jiro’s plum stone was loud in the thick silence.
Yukako saw her moment and broke the tension. “Mr. Tai was very serious and responsible,” she said. I could see Tai preen, and both the Mountain and Jiro melted a little with pride. “I’m so grateful we’re able to patronize the Raku kiln again, even if in a limited way,” ukako added, nodding to her father. Their means had once allowed them, in the days when Akio was being groomed for Jiro’s role, to bring home seven or nine tea bowls a season, which they had kept or circulated into the families of their patrons and highborn students.
The Mountain nodded curtly.
Jiro, a boy in those days, bowed his head. “It’s a lost world,” he sighed.
The moment of shared melancholy cleared the air. Then Yukako spoke. “I am so grateful to you, Father, for ensuring our future. I am so grateful to both of you for making the long journey to Tokyo to keep us from being a ‘lost world’ in the Emperor’s eyes. But it’s a new world too. We’ve lost our old patrons, but we don’t have to lose our new ones.”
“Why ever would we?” Jiro looked guilty and angry as he spoke, as if she were accusing him of planning not to go to Tokyo once he became the Master Teacher.
“I don’t mean the Emperor,” Yukako said. Her voice deepened, then, as if she had been waiting a long time to speak. “I mean the high-collar men, I mean barbarians, I mean women, I mean Christians, I even mean geiko.”
The Mountain glowered. Yukako bent her head in apology, but pointed out, “We don’t survive on the grace of a few rich families anymore. But look around, the Long Room is full. More people want to learn our temae than ever before. And they’re prepared to pay for it. They may never be able to afford the best Chojiro’s heir has to offer, but when that foreign man at the Eppo asked to buy a tea set for his mother, we should have had something to sell him. Not the best things, of course, but something he could afford. When Lady Kato told me her husband wouldn’t let her use his tea things until she learned temae, I shouldn’t have lent her my practice things, I should have sold her something. Raku’s studio is filled with tea bowls his apprentices made that he plans to break into pieces and bury: it’s gold he’s burying!” she said, heated.
Jiro and the Mountain looked at each other, stunned. Yukako pressed her advantage. “Right now you choose one or two prize tea bowls every year and give them away, or you sell them for a fortune once they become antiques. Not everyone has a fortune. But everyone does have a little something to spend more than they ought to on a bowler hat or a French ribbon, or a new Satsuma kimono, if that’s where your heart is.”
She continued, speaking very quickly now. “What I propose is this: that you also approve an apprentice grade of tea bowl. It doesn’t have to have its own box or calligraphy or a poetic name. Just a tea bowl that’s the right shape that costs a little more than most beginners want to pay. They’ll know they’re not getting an antique. But they’ll be getting the approval of the Shin Master Teacher, and look: the more of a beginner you are, the more that means to you. We can sell the Raku apprentice bowls—”
“Do what?” asked the Mountain.
“We can say they’re made by Raku apprentices. And if they lack the master’s touch, even better: it will whet people’s appetites for the real thing.”
“You’re turning my stomach,” Jiro said. He had clearly been waiting for the Mountain to say something, anything, to give him leave to speak. “A tea vessel is not a bowler hat or a French ribbon,” he said with slow condescension. “People don’t want to learn Tea in order to buy cheap ugly things. They want to be surrounded by what’s finest in Japan before it’s gone.”
“There’s a certain wabi charm to using an apprentice’s tea bowl,” the Mountain reflected, using Rikyu’s word for humble or forlorn. “But the measure of a wabi tea person is his ability to make do with what he has, not his willingness to go out and buy what he’s told. As for Lady Kato, she should use her husband’s utensils; the man’s being unreasonable.”
“Father, if you bought a few hundred of these every year, you could give one to each person in the Emperor’s court and start a fad for learning tea. You could post your students to teach at court, once they graduated, and have them send a portion of the fees back to Cloud House.”
The Mountain looked at Yukako in reply, pointedly saying nothing.
The children had glazed over a little, confused, but some understanding seemed to cross Tai’s face in the silence that unfolded. “Toru wants to learn temae too,” he announced. Jiro’s lip curled to think of the gardener’s blocky, dull-witted grandson in the tearoom. “Could I have a tea bowl to give to him?” the boy asked.
“Absolutely not,” said his father.
“Can I have a tea bowl for Aki-bo?” asked Kenji on my back.
“No!” I whispered. “Hush!”
Spent, Yukako shivered. The two men seemed as of one mind as they had when Yukako first married, long before the Mountain had put Jiro in his sullen place. “I only wanted to help,” she said softly.
“Yes, I seem to recall you saying that before,” said the Mountain. Yukako winced. “Daughter, would you like to help your family?” he asked softly.
“Hai,” she whispered.
“Do not speak to me of this nonsense again.”
“I humbly understand,” she said, bowing to her father, husband, and son. Her forehead touched the floor, but I could see from the back that her feet were clenched like fists.
19
1877
THE PIPE LADY died in the tenth year of Meiji, on a flower-viewing picnic with her large family. The two little boys who had once tormented me now had children of their own, both girls, and the dowager had just been telling their wives what to eat to ensure they had sons the next time around. She leaned back to look at the sunlight through the curtain of cherry petals, closed her eyes, and didn’t open them again.
Her body was burned with all due office. Though Akio was still missing in Satsuma and Lord Ii was still waiting at court to see if his family would be permitted to stay in Hikone, the Pipe Lady’s granddaughter Sumie sent word that she planned to leave her four older children with her mother-in-law and attend the fifty-day memorial service. Not everyone could. Sumie’s father and oldest brother were still interned in Tokyo, where the Pipe Lady’s family had been ordered to move years before. Failing to do so meant that Sumie’s younger brothers were not allowed to take the army jobs Advisor Kato offered to arrange for them. They stayed for the sake of their grandmother’s dignity, and lived off it slimly: the Pipe Lady’s trips to the antique dealers were all that kept them in rice.
I realized that the last time I’d seen the Pipe Lady alive, just a couple of weeks before, must have been her last trip to the pawnshop. As always, in preparation for the Buddha’s birthday, the Mountain had sent Yukako to his mother’s house with a flask of hydrangea tea for the family to wash the Buddha statue in their little chapel. As we approached the moon-viewing pond and the sprawling house, now more weathered than ever, the Pipe Lady greeted us from a jinrikisha.
“She was carrying a sword across her lap that day,” I remembered the night of the funeral, when Yukako had come home.
Everyday life had hardly changed under the Sword Decree: it was a little easier to move through a crowded street, and the curio shops were suddenly glutted with swords. But I heard loss hang in the air when Tai asked the Mountain about the sword rack outside the Muin teahouse: “The only time a samurai lets go of his sword is in the tearoom,” the Mountain said. He paused, a confused creaky old-man moment, and added, “In the old days.” And I saw the stubborn set of the Pipe Lady’s mouth, her hands tight around the long silk-wrapped scabbard.
Yukako remembered it, too, as she nursed Kenji. “That must have been her husband’s sword. My grandfather.”
“She can’t have gotten a good price for it,” I m
used. “How could she let it go?”
“I think it’s what he would have wanted,” Yukako said, thinking aloud. “It would be disloyal to disagree with one’s lord in secret. The honorable thing would be to state your grievance plainly and then kill yourself.”
“Oh,” I said, shrinking.
“Some samurai really need the money, but most are selling their swords as a kind of public suicide.”
I almost understood. I shook my head in disbelief.
“It’s what my father would have done, if he hadn’t been adopted out,” ukako said.
“She looked like you, in the jinrikisha,” I said shyly.
“Am I that old now?” teased Yukako. She was twenty-seven to my twenty-one.
“Strong,” I insisted. “Like she’d seen everything in this world.”
“You think?”
Jiro went alone to present tea to the Emperor that spring, as his doubly adopted status removed him from any impurity connected with the Pipe Lady’s death. The Mountain fretted, though silently. He performed ocha for himself each day in Cloud House, as he had when the family’s future seemed most uncertain, and shut himself away with Jiro for two days before allowing the young man to go on retreat.
IN JUNE, fifty days after the Pipe Lady’s death, Yukako seemed nervous as I helped tie her thin summer obi. “I haven’t seen her in eleven years,” she said, as Kenji tried to engage her in a kind of three-card monte using teacups and a breakfast tray.