by Ellis Avery
“We just saw her in the Fourth Month. In the jinrikisha, remember?”
“No, my cousin Sumie,” ukako said, choosing the wrong cup.
“Stop letting me win!” pouted Kenji.
“Does it still hurt?”
“We’ll play again, and this time I’ll really watch,” ukako promised. “Yes and no. She was just doing what she was told. He was just doing what he was told.” She closed her eyes briefly and exhaled. “I would have liked to have been the thing he betrayed his parents for,” she said simply. “But I wasn’t. The middle cup, Ken-bo,” she said, without opening her eyes. She was right.
I WAS NO BETTER companion for Kenji at the service that day: I kept looking over at Sumie, baby on her back, surrounded on all sides by brothers and sisters. She had the same heartbreaking prettiness she’d had at sixteen, but she seemed more defined, now, less stylishly pliant. And yet she softened when Yukako threaded her way through the crowd and stood beside her. I saw them look at each other, briefly but steadily, and then look up again at the chanting priest, the incense rising among the narrow wooden memorial tablets.
And so it happened that they were together again, leaving the pickets of the graveyard, when the horseman came. Sumie looked up at the man wearing the crest of Lord Ii and called him by name, surprised.
“Ii Sumie-sama,” called the horseman, and she looked at him quizzically. Why was he acting like a stranger? Even I remembered him, from the night of the August Nephew’s tea, when we discovered Akio and Koito together.
Sumie went to his horse and looked up: I watched her as she listened, and I watched Yukako as she watched her. I saw shock cross Sumie’s face, and then she closed her eyes and pressed her lips together. Yukako glanced backward and caught my eye. There was only one thing he could be telling her. I held Yukako’s gaze and nodded, and then I saw her go to Sumie, my chest flooding with shock and with a kind of pleasure that of all the people gathered, Yukako had turned to me.
AKIO WAS DEAD. The Meiji army had routed Saigo’s men and only a few stragglers remained. He had died like his brother, just as Yukako predicted, except he was fighting for the southern rebels, not against them. Sumie stayed with us that night, and the two cousins sat up whispering long after Kenji fell asleep and I pretended to. Yukako’s voice was gentle and steady, her own loss set aside, while Sumie’s had an edge of rage I’d never heard before.
The next morning Sumie sat in Yukako’s room, blinking and abstracted, oblivious even to Kenji’s questions. Yukako fed Sumie with her own hands, and when Miss Miki and her mother came as scheduled, Yukako offered Sumie her place. Sumie sat numb, occasionally seized by fits of tears and anger. “I should have done this last year, when he left,” she said as Miki trained her locks into a widow’s obako.
After the hairdressers left, Sumie sat nursing her baby, a tiny girl named Beniko. “Grandfather,” she said, meaning her children’s grandfather, Akio’s father Lord Ii, “is still in Tokyo, but he’s paying money he doesn’t have to get the body brought back to Hikone. I should leave today.” She looked worried. “I wonder if he’ll sell another horse for this.” She held Beniko over her shoulder and patted the baby’s back. “You know, a buyer from a geisha house offered to take this one when she’s three.” I heard the Pipe Lady’s samurai pride in her calm voice, and her arms tightened around the girl.
“Oh, Sumi,” ukako sighed for her cousin, pained. She looked at her humbly, and bowed. “I never even said good-bye last time.”
“I know,” said Sumie, forgiving her.
WITH THE PIPE LADY gone, there was nothing holding her family back from heeding the Emperor’s summons to Tokyo, and so Sumie’s mother made the long journey to the capital with her four youngest children, hoping to find her husband and firstborn son. Advisor Kato bought their empty compound, moon-viewing pond and all, and offered his townhouse near the Palace to the two American ladies for their Christian school. Akio’s father Lord Ii, meantime, was told at last that his request was not accepted and sadly moved his family to Tokyo too. Outside the temple one morning, gazing at Mount Hiei, the great northeastern sentinel that reminded me of the Mountain, Yukako sighed. “For a long time, I’d think, Akio is just over that mountain, just across Lake Biwa. And now he’s gone, doubly gone, triply gone. Not even Sumie’s left there.”
She stood very still. I touched her shoulder. “When did you know you liked Mr. Akio?” I asked. “When exactly?”
Yukako watched her sons absorbed in drawing with sticks in the dust outside the temple. “Only you would ask that,” she marveled, sitting on a shady bench. Her face softened and she ran her thumb along the top ridge of her obi.
“It was that summer before my brother died, when Akio was here. And Nao,” she added, naming Chio and Matsu’s son as if delicately tonguing out a stray tea leaf. “Sumie’s family had just moved here after all those years in the Shogun’s court.” I watched her remember her cousin as a young girl. “My brother stole one of Sumie’s obi, just to be troublesome; I think he was sweet on her. I was on my way to the storeroom tower to look for it one night, and I heard them in the woodshed by the stream, where Bozu’s living now. They were just talking about this and that, smoking pipes, pretending to be grown men. My brother asked Akio about his home, how many days it took to get from Miyako to Hikone. ‘You walk over the Eastern Mountains,’ Akio said. ‘That’s a day, and then you sail across Lake Biwa: that’s a second day.’
“‘Why do you have to walk? Why can’t you go upriver?’” my brother asked.
“‘It’s too shallow,’” Akio told him. ‘The Shogun keeps it that way so he can mass troops where the river meets the lake.’
“‘I heard the punishment is death if you dig the river deeper, but it’s so shallow that every year, when the lake floods, the fields flood,’ Nao said. ‘The farmers dredge the river at night. They fill baskets with mud and say they’re gathering shellfish if anyone asks.’
“And then I had the strangest picture in my mind,” ukako said. “It was so powerful and clear. Akio and I were farmers together in another life, filling baskets with mud in the dark, scooping out the riverbank. And as if in answer to my thoughts, my brother said, ‘Imagine that, a farmer with his yoke and baskets full of earth. In black on black lacquer, as a tea box for the rainy season.’
“Then I heard Akio’s voice: ‘If we need it shallow, we need it shallow. I wouldn’t want to lose a horse in high water.’
“And then their talk turned to sumo wrestlers. I found Sumie’s obi soon enough, but I could not shake that image. Me and Akio, together in some other lifetime, stealing wet earth in the dark.” As Yukako told her story, her thumb never stopped tracing the top edge of her obi. She turned to me. “Only you would ask,” she repeated gratefully. She shook her head to clear it. “Look at me now,” she laughed. “Don’t eat that, Ken-bo, it’s dirty.”
FOR TWO WEEKS after Sumie left, Yukako spent her nights at Baishian alone once Kenji fell asleep. For even longer, every morning, no matter what color she wore on the outside, I saw her belt on the black gauze robe worn under summer mourning. She roused herself to teach Lady Kato and the handful of other women the Mountain chose for her, but mostly she shut herself away in the upstairs room while I netted minnows and chased butterflies with my little charge. Sometimes we went to observe lessons in the practice room the way Yukako and I once had, and Kenji would spy longingly on his big brother while the Mountain watched Jiro teach the other students. After each student took his turn as host, the young men would file backstage into the mizuya to prepare for the next lesson while the Mountain berated Jiro for his mistakes. “If your students don’t lay the ash and charcoal right, you need to teach them how. If they don’t understand, don’t keep repeating the same instructions louder, baka! Find another way to say it!” The Mountain had once embodied calm itself, but his mother’s death had brought out a side in him I’d never seen. Perhaps, in an effort to bring her back, he had borrowed her spleen. Once he even made Tai wat
ch as he castigated the boy’s father. The Mountain’s eyebrows had grown wild and long in the past year, and when he corrected his heir, both boys turned away as the black-and-white hairs jumped and fell and the spittle flew. The old man was all gentleness with Tai as he taught him the first steps of the tray temae, but that was not enough to keep Jiro from eating his breakfast in injured silence each morning, or from going on retreat on even the most obscure religious holidays.
THE MOUNTAIN DIED that summer, at the age of sixty-eight, after playing main guest at Tai’s first formal temae. He wept openly as his grandson whisked the tea with his little hands and carefully set the bowl before him. The next morning Tai came running up the stairs, his eyes round and wide. “Grandfather won’t wake up,” he said. Shaking, Yukako went downstairs to lay her hands on her father’s chest, to hold a silver mirror to his nose, but even as she pressed her sleeves to her eyes, she announced that the old man had surely choked on a fishbone, a lie spun to protect Tai from the inauspicious sign. Like her, I think the Mountain died of relief at witnessing his grandson’s skill. I think he died of joy.
I wish I could remember the last thing he said to me. I think he held up his pipe and nodded at me to fill it. It was his mother’s little pipe, which he had since started smoking: a long pale shaft made from a porcupine quill and those brass fittings the side of my head remembered well. Though toward the end I saw him beat Jiro’s hands with his fan to exact the right posture from the young man, he never struck me, not even once. Good tool that I’d been, I was beneath notice.
20
1877–1885
JUST AS A GREAT STORM pulls all the other clouds down from the sky, the Mountain’s death blew Akio out of the shrine of Yukako’s preoccupations. While that summer she had belted on her secret mourning robe in a voluptuous trance of self-pity, that fall she dressed herself and the boys in black with a kind of solemn vigor. After the funeral, she installed Jiro in the family shrine to copy sutras for the Mountain’s soul while she paid dozens of calls on her father’s friends and former students to share the sad news, and on his tradesmen to ask for a month or two’s grace on bills already long due. She drafted letters to a list of the Mountain’s far-flung contacts and, having set Jiro to writing them, cleaned house. She moved her husband’s possessions from the Bent-Tree Annex to her father’s study by the garden and moved her father’s things from the study to the storage tower. Jiro showed initiative by going through the fireproof tower himself, excavating the treasures of twelve generations of tea masters, trying to identify scrolls and tea wares worth enough to pay for the funeral but not so precious as to compromise the family honor by selling them. After all his work that season, he ordered brocade bags made for a few venerable pieces—including Inazuma, the Rikyu tea bowl he’d broken and had mended—but sold nothing.
At first, Tai slept in his same spot in the garden study, by the side of his father instead of his grandfather. But one night after the first week or so, he came creeping up the stairs and refused to go back down. “Miss Ura, would you go see what the matter is?” ukako asked. For a woman who went downstairs to see her own dead father, there was a queer catch to her voice. As I groped in the dark from stairs to tatami, my feet acutely aware of the textures of looping wood grain and woven straw, I wondered why. As I’d suspected, the moonlit study was empty: Tai was afraid of sleeping alone. This was the room where his grandfather had died.
Jiro had spent most nights away from home for six years, I thought: why should Yukako sound surprised now? For the boys, I realized. They don’t know this. From what Inko had once told me, it was fathers who introduced their sons to the floating world—but maybe not at ages four and five. “I think you should let him sleep up here tonight,” I said firmly when I came back.
IN MOST MARRIAGES, I knew from bathhouse talk, the wife stayed awake all night until the husband came home from his roving, to help him change and to heat his bath—but in most marriages, I suspected the husband didn’t avoid his wife’s futon as emphatically as Jiro did Yukako’s. At first Yukako neither acknowledged Jiro’s nocturnal ramblings nor turned Tai away when he stole, nightly, upstairs. But that fall, after Kenji’s Seven-Five-Three day at the temple, we had only a handful of nights as they should have been, with both small grown-up boys asleep downstairs. (I had a bad cold, I remember, so wretched I couldn’t even enjoy having Yukako to myself after all those years.) After that, once we started having two little ones padding back upstairs at night, Yukako dropped the charade of sending the boys to bed with their father. Instead, while Jiro and the boys bathed first each evening, Yukako would lay out one of her husband’s stylish kimono—heavy dark silk with an extravagantly painted lining—and leave a bathhouse kimono tied into a carrying-scarf for him as well. If he wanted a second bath before bed, he’d have to get it at the neighborhood bathhouse.
Yukako threw herself into raising her boys. She taught them all the writing she knew, and then, since Jiro was otherwise occupied, she hired a writing master to teach them the Chinese characters she’d never learned. I ground sticks of ink for the teacher, tracing each new kanji into the water, forcing the boys to help me read their texts out loud after each lesson. The year I outlived my mother, Yukako asked me to teach the boys how to talk with foreigners, and I was glad for the chance to hear my own voice speaking Claire Bernard’s language. However, when Jiro heard his sons counting in French, marking out the numbers in a spiral like the arrondissements of Paris in one of their three textbooks, he put an end to it. He did encourage them, however, after their morning tea classes, to repeat each lesson with their mother. Yukako also hired a music master to teach the boys to play the long bamboo flute, and a martial arts tutor to teach them how to fight with staff and fists. The bamboo flute-staves were used by mendicant monks both to earn money and to defend themselves, she told us, but I think Yukako also took bittersweet pleasure, not unlike mine when I spoke French, in hearing her brother’s music on her sons’ lips.
BUT MUSIC MASTERS cost money, and so do the pleasures of the floating world. The Emperor’s stipend, when all was said and done, paid for the two long yearly trips to Tokyo to thank him for it, and while the students of the Long Room kept us in food, their fees weren’t enough to pay off our mounting debts. Now that he finally had authority to name tea utensils, Jiro lacked the funds to commission them, though he was still welcome twice a year to the Raku studio, where the very act of his naming a favorite tea bowl—whether he bought it or not—raised its value. Jiro largely satisfied himself with calligraphing boxes for odd old pieces he’d dug up from the storeroom whose histories had been lost. There was no lack of treasures to choose from: even with his now weekly tea gatherings, even with his paid invitations to officiate tea events at shrines, temples, and the homes of newly rich merchants and imperial flunkies, he could still go through a year never using the same tea bowl twice.
The two elements of a chakai, or tea gathering, that Jiro could fashion himself were the scroll, a pleasure he only permitted himself yearly as they cost so much to mount, and the bamboo teascoop, which was inexpensive to make if one had grown up, like the Mountain’s students, learning how. Moreover, they were stored in cheaply made bamboo tubes that invited lush calligraphy. Almost every chakai gathering included a moment where one ritually examined the teascoop and asked its name and maker, and this gave Jiro the chance to add his own fillip, his own shining word, to the poem of image and gesture that formed a tea event.
Jiro’s life was arranged around duty—his dreaded trips to Tokyo, his morning lessons with young students, his evening lessons with grown students he’d inherited from the Mountain (minus, pointedly, Advisor Kato), his paid tea events—and pleasure: his chakai gatherings with friends, his longed-for retreats to One Pine at Sesshu-ji temple, his nightly visits to the floating world, his afternoons devoted to calligraphy and carving. He liked to wander through old temple gardens or poke around construction sites, such as at Advisor Kato’s wood-and-paper townhouse near the Pal
ace, which the two American ladies had knocked down to build their brick school. He’d return with a few choice sections of bamboo to work: some green, some gold, some blackened by hearthfire. His carving lacked the sturdy inevitability of Akio’s but had a playful grace of its own: he was proudest of a piece made from a weathered cottage timber in which an insect had bored into the bamboo just below the node. The result was a slim blackened teascoop whose like I’d never seen, one tiny hole perfectly centered on its stem.
While Jiro wasn’t earning much money, he was at least making an effort not to spend it on tea utensils. And he seemed to spend less and less of it on his nightly prowling as the years went by: the subtle perfume of geisha incense in the seams of the robes I laundered gave way to louder, cheaper scents, until his clothing began smelling harshly of grain alcohol and faintly of urine and bile. Jiro’s mother had taken holy orders at the family temple near Third Bridge, and bathhouse rumor had it that she was the force behind his sudden lack of funds. People whispered that once his older brother Chugo stopped paying his bills, Jiro was barred from running a tab at one gay house after the next until he reached the tier of pleasures he could afford to pay for up front with the allowance Yukako doled out to him. He did not contest her right to the strongbox: although he was a merchant’s son, Jiro regarded the Shin ledgers as if they were some kind of dense embroidery, intricate and squalid with the sweat of women’s fingers. Meanwhile, having ground ink and taken notes for the Mountain all those years, Yukako merely had to pick up where her father had left off.
Yukako taught the students in the Long Room only when her husband was on retreat, and when she did she focused on the temae her father had created for use with tables and stools, as Jiro refused to teach it. Since Jiro would rather have seen a geisha than a barbarian in the tearoom any day, she did have her husband’s permission to teach tea ceremony to singing-girls, but the fad for Shin temae had come and gone among them, so she earned money teaching a handful of Christian women and a few older ladies from the imperial family who had chosen to remain in Kyoto. When the boys were old enough to study with their father, I attended her on those lessons, some in the women’s own homes, some at Baishian. It felt so strange to walk behind Yukako carrying her tea utensils, just as I’d once carried her shamisen, doing in earnest now what we’d done half in play with Koito years before.