The Teahouse Fire

by Ellis Avery

  April was also the season for plays and pantomimes at Mibu Temple. Nights, the boys would imitate the samurai that the actors played onstage, making gargoyle faces at each other and swordfighting with their bamboo flutes. And just as Hiroshi and Nao had done before them, Yukako told me, Tai and Kenji dug the Mountain’s hakama out from storage for their games: the wide pleated trouser-skirts that had formerly been worn only by samurai were now only worn by actors playing samurai—and boys playing actors playing samurai.

  The year before, they had been allowed to go to the plays by themselves and eat roasted sweet potatoes and grilled rice cakes, but this year Yukako insisted that her sons only eat food from home, and—under guise of giving the servants a treat—that they be attended by at least two of us at all times, each armed with small sharp knives.

  One day when the boys were away at the theater, I followed Yukako home from her lesson at the Shiges’. Although it was rare and strange to see Yukako in her bustle and buttons, taking possession of a new way of moving in her body, for my part I felt like a clown in my Western shift, and always passed through our gate with relief. Today, however, a familiar figure blocked the path to the house.

  “‘My honored lord.’” It was Jiro, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “‘I’ve been waiting for you night and day. When I haven’t been praying for your safe return, I’ve been grinding rice with my own hands to make fine flour.’”

  For a moment I was flung back to another meeting on another path: I remembered Yukako’s father striking her outside Koito’s house. I looked up at her, my heart thrashing. And then I saw all the fear and anger, all the poison that had filled her since the tattooed man came to visit, cross her face at once. Beside Yukako’s, Jiro’s rancor seemed fussy and thin. She slowly peeled off her long white leather gloves and stood very still, looking at her husband, his adze-shaped head, his bushy brows, and said to him coldly, “Shall I draw you a bath, my lord?”

  It was a task that usually fell to Bozu or Chio. “I’d like that, yes,” he said.

  And so she did. I unhooked and unlaced her; we changed quickly into our kimono and I brought in fuel while Yukako fanned the bathhouse embers into a glowing bed of coals. We carried in bucket after bucket of water while Jiro napped, then came out to watch us, pleased with Yukako’s penance. While the water heated, he scrubbed himself, working his bran bag into the crevices between his fingers, soaping up the back of his neck and behind his ears. He winced at Yukako’s touch when she washed his back. After he had poured bucket after rinsing bucket of cold water over his body, Jiro settled into the hot bath and began questioning Yukako.

  “I wouldn’t have known it was you on the path if the servants didn’t talk of nothing else.” He glanced at me. “You and your lady’s maid”—he spat the phrase in English: reidizu meido. “What shall I tell my guests when they ask me why my wife parades herself all over town dressed like a foreign whore?”

  “Tell them to look around and see for themselves,” Yukako said. “This is what women teachers wear. Surely you’ve seen them at the Ladies’ School?”

  “I’ve had better places to go,” he replied.

  “Yes, I suppose you have,” said Yukako, her voice dripping with acid. “As for Miss Ura, isn’t it obvious? It’s humiliating to see those foreign ladies running around with Japanese servants and jinrikisha boys. I’ve dressed us both like this because I mean to earn as much as foreign teachers do.”

  Jiro crossed his arms over his bare chest and scowled in the steam. “Did you know, I’ve just spent two weeks at Edo hearing the same nonsense every day? The Prime Minister”—here he spoke of Ito, the man whose geisha mistress had followed him all the way from Gion—“has poured rivers of gold into a pavilion called The Belling Stag, where lords and ladies learn to dance and eat like barbarians, so that the barbarians will shift their treaties in our favor. They each cut their own plate of animal meat like butchers, and they bray to each other about how good it tastes. They learn barbarian dances where men and women touch and leer. There aren’t enough wives willing to dance, so they press whores into service to fool the foreign guests.” At this, Yukako raised an eyebrow, while Jiro went on to condemn gorufu, tenisu, and the other Western games he’d been forced to witness or endure, his crazy words spilling over each other. He was lounging in the bath and she was standing in attendance, so he had to crane his neck up to see her.

  “You’d best get all this nonsense about barbarians out of your system before the Second Eppo this summer,” said Yukako. “You’re presenting tea for them again.”

  “What?” spluttered Jiro, seizing Yukako’s wrist so that she all but staggered against the tub.

  “They accepted your terms this morning. They pay well,” said Yukako. “And we have debts.” I saw the unsaid words flash across her face: You have debts.

  Jiro saw them, too, and dropped her wrist, dumbfounded.

  “Would you like me to go in your stead?” Yukako offered gently. “The foreigners won’t know any better, and then people here will know where you stand.” Jiro gave a barely perceptible nod, and Yukako, emboldened, pressed on. “The city’s full of men who would applaud you for taking the barbarians’ gold and shaming them at the same time.”

  Jiro’s head dipped again and I realized that he was nodding not in gratitude but in disgust. “Very well, then,” he said.

  IF JIRO HAD SHUNNED his wife’s bed before that spring, he took his avoidance to new heights after, ostentatiously wiping the place where her hands had touched the tray at breakfast, insisting that the servants, me excluded, lay out his clothes at night. Of course, he didn’t trust their taste enough to dress him, so the task fell doubly on Yukako both to select the robes and to walk the other women through handling them. On a graver note, he sabotaged Yukako’s decision to use the Expo money to pay off debts: one day, a week after Jiro’s twice-yearly visit to the Raku kilns, Yukako received a second bill for a staggering figure, this time from Chojiro’s Heir.

  “The man’s full moon chakai is tonight,” ukako said, holding the bill at arm’s length between two fingers, as if it could pollute her. “We may find some answers there.”

  “I’ll try,” I said, bowing.

  THIRTEEN YEARS AFTER Jiro’s first chakai in Muin, the stark foursquare Houseless House where the Mountain had first chastised him, where Yukako, heavy with their son, had first brought in food at his bidding, that very son Tai set bowls of young simmered sweetfish before his father’s guests. In his early thirties, Jiro had lost the rawboned anxiety of his first chakai but retained a certain unsilvered look of eagerness, of wanting to be admired.

  And I knew right then that he was succeeding, in the eyes of his main guest, the silk merchant Shige. Though I had seen his wife at lessons, I had not seen the Bear himself since the Expo crowd in Meiji Five. I knew Shige could see just how much Tai resembled his father, could “read” the pattern carefully chosen for Tai’s narrow obi. Like the Edo-chic checkerboard weave popular a generation before, it was a series of alternating rectangles, navy and gray, of which all the navy blocks bore almost-imperceptible fleurets worked in gold thread. The ghostly gold medallions brought to mind, in as delicate and tasteful a way imaginable, the fact that if merchant sons like Jiro and Shige had worn such thread when they were Tai’s age, they could have been punished with death. Though the moonlit branch of young cherry leaves in the hanging vase mourned the loss of blossoms, of samurai, of bygone days, the very fact of this young boy marked a triumph for Jiro and his guests, finding their fortunes in this untried world.

  After thirteen years, half spent under his adoptive father’s thumb, half spent in stinting on all but his basest pleasures, Jiro had set a new pine box by the tearoom door, calligraphed with a new name. I made out the kanji for spring, and another two below it. Rain: a stylized window, its bamboo blind rolled up to reveal a stylized storm, four quick diagonal flicks of rain. And field: a square box quartered by a cross. Spring Rain Field. It made sense, as blossoms gave w
ay to greening trees, as Tai joined his father in the tearoom. I felt a dormant jolt of warmth for Jiro, even as I itched to open the box, to steal back whatever tea bowl he’d bankrupted us with.

  I couldn’t see the tea bowl at first as I leaned toward the room, listening to the main guest drain his matcha with gusto. “Spring Thunder,” declared Jiro, when asked the tea bowl’s name: Shunrai. He had chosen it, he said, out of all the bowls made this season by Chojiro’s Heir.

  “Perhaps a better name would be Kaminari,” Shige said, nodding toward the cherry leaves. What did he mean? He spoke with a certain misty gruffness used by men when they were being poetic, but his words couldn’t have been more ill-chosen. I had never forgotten Jiro’s first chakai, when he named the mended Rikyu tea bowl. Would he sulk again this time? Argue with his guest? Coolly put the Bear in his place?

  Jiro answered, however, with noncommittal cheer. “You think?” Kaminari, Kaminari, I groped mentally. Of course, it was another word for Thunder! I’d been reading Rain and Field separately when together they formed the kanji for Thunder.

  Kaminari versus Shunrai, Thunder versus Spring Thunder, cherry leaves versus cherry blossoms. You couldn’t find a fussier, more hairsplitting lot than tea people, I thought, crowding in toward the peephole I’d made thirteen years before.

  I saw the delicate cherry leaves, the mica glitter of sand in the clay Muin walls. I saw a flash of moonlight on black glaze, like the shining eye of an animal: I nearly gasped. Had Chojiro’s Heir known he was making, not a copy, but an uncannily similar cousin to the bowl Jiro had broken all those years before?

  I heard Shige sigh deeply. “I was there, at that lesson,” he murmured. He had seen the bowl break too. I saw, glowing in Shige’s shrewd hands, the same dark asymmetrical solemnity that had arrested me all those years before, as if never broken, never mended, as if flung up from the volcanic earth intact.

  After a long silence, the merchant set down the tea bowl. “When your brother hears about this piece, he’ll be jealous,” he said. It was a nod both to his brother Chugo’s well-known taste as a collector and to his vast wealth.

  “You think so?” repeated Jiro, pleased with himself. “Perhaps I can make tea for both of you in it sometime.”

  Breaking a rule more often honored in the breach, the Bear turned talk away from the tearoom. “Have you heard anything from him recently, about Advisor Kato’s canal?” he asked.

  Jiro chuckled. “Has that boor asked you to invest yet?”

  “I plan to follow your brother’s lead, whatever he decides,” Shige said. The other guests nodded sagely. Advisor Kato had recently asked Okura Chugo for more money than all the other Kyoto merchants combined.

  “I’m sure he’ll laugh the man out of town,” said Jiro.

  “He was going on about those looms from France that run on water power. Can you imagine?”

  “He doesn’t know a thing about your trade and he’s telling you to import equipment,” Jiro scoffed.

  “The man’s full of nonsense, but he tells a good story,” said Shige.

  “Un. If my brother wants to spend his money on Kyoto,” Jiro said, distastefully using the word in place of Miyako, which he still preferred, “I have a better idea.”

  “Yes?”

  “Everywhere I turn they’re knocking over lovely old homes and putting up brick boxes,” Jiro sighed. “Kato’s school, and so forth.”

  “True,” Shige nodded.

  “There used to be an exquisite four-and-a-half-mat room called New Moon Arbor behind that house. And now? The building, the garden, New Moon Arbor, gone. Girls are probably sewing American flags right on the spot where the teahouse stood.” Jiro paused a moment, lost in thought. “I should have you over at One Pine House sometime,” he said.

  “One Pine…” murmured the Bear nostalgically.

  “It’s really gone tatty since our student days. What I’d like,” Jiro said, “would be a fund to restore One Pine and buy up teahouses before they’re demolished. I’d move them to Sesshu-ji and the City of Kyoto could sell tickets. It’s counter to the purpose of a teahouse, of course, but it would draw men of taste and means like no Eppo ever will.”

  “A place for houses of retirement to retire. A hermitage for hermitages. You’re a true poet, my friend,” Shige bowed. “You remind me what to treasure most.” With that, he lifted the blocky dark tea bowl again and set it down, offering it a deep parting bow. Primal, ungainly, the bowl pulsed like black sand stuck by lightning. I bowed, too, before my peephole, a tiny gesture of awe.

  THAT NIGHT, long after Shige and his friends left, I crept backstage into the mizuya where the tea bowl sat drying on the shelf. I packed Shunrai up into its new pine box and brought it to show Yukako. “This explains the Raku bill,” I said, unwrapping my find. We looked at it together on the veranda while the boys slept inside.

  “I can see why he had to buy it,” she murmured, unexpectedly tender in the moonlight. When I told her of Jiro’s dream, she nodded, wry and sweet. She turned the bowl in her lovely hands, offering its maker, as the rest of us had, an unconscious bow.

  THE NEXT MORNING, after bringing in the breakfast dishes, Yukako laid another tray before her husband. I saw the pine box and an unfolded letter: the bill from Chojiro’s Heir. Without a word of accusation, Yukako asked humbly, “Shall I go to him and ask for a few months’ time?”

  “If you insist,” Jiro shrugged, though his words were crisp. His distaste for Yukako’s unsolicited offer of help, for the Expo—for the foreigners whose money it would bring in a few months’ time—crackled in the air unstated. And then Jiro looked up at Yukako as she rose, nostrils subtly flaring with desperation, saw his sons shrinking into themselves against him. “Though you’ll see there’s no need to meddle,” he added, his voice a little shrill.

  THE VOICE OF CHOJIRO’S HEIR was reassuring and generous. “A few months is nothing in the shared history of our families.” Nearly seventy, he’d hardly aged since our long-ago visit, when Kenji slept in my arms and Tai asked to see the studio: now, as then, he seemed as roundly sturdy as a horse chestnut. Outside, the spring rain hissed softly on the stones, while inside the roasted tea the Heir served gave off a cozy smell of earth and iron.

  Yukako had dressed carefully for this meeting. She was a wife in straitened circumstances with two half-grown boys, but she was also a beautiful woman in her thirties, nearing, though her nights with Akio and Jiro were long past, her sexual prime. And so she dressed just a little older than she needed to, chose a pattern of early summer grasses that climbed a bit lower than necessary, tied her obi and obi cord just a hair lower than convention required, in order to contrast the heaviness of her burden with the relative freshness of her face. But those young white grasses bent against a slate-green silk landscape, a coy cousin to the blue-green that had flattered her as a girl, and she exposed just a breath more nape—a white appeal against the brick-red collar of her underrobe—than anything in her sober ensemble prepared one for. Chojiro’s Heir could not help but lean toward her. “I need to prevail upon you for something more,” her voice came hesitantly as the soft rain fell outside.

  “What is it, Okusama?”

  “My husband has an unusual request,” she said. “I don’t know how to broach this.”

  “It can’t be so bad.”

  “You can’t be surprised that he has fallen in love with your work. He has made a box for your tea bowl with his own hands and named it Shunrai.” At this, Chojiro’s Heir gave a pleased nod. Yukako continued, “In a tea gathering this past full moon, he even paired it with Rikyu’s own Teardrop teascoop.” Because, within a given tea event, all the utensils had to have a similar rank, this gesture showed the new tea bowl high regard indeed. I watched Chojiro’s Heir suppress a smile.

  “But you know how things are for him,” she concluded. I could see her face in only quarter view, but her chin wobbled as if she were a little girl about to cry.

  The prospect of taking back a tea
bowl that had only increased in value, together with the project of consoling a beautiful woman, seemed to blunt the Heir’s concern over seeing the money he was owed. “Sometimes one has to return a thing one can’t pay for,” he said.

  “No,” said Yukako soulfully. “Here it is. This summer our family will perform in the Second Eppo. They will pay well.”

  Chojiro’s Heir nodded, Yukako’s plea for time made clear.

  “And we need gifts to give everyone involved. So…Well, my husband begs you to consider trading the Shunrai bowl for a hundred of the tea bowls made by your students as practice.”

  “Why, I would give them to you for the asking,” laughed Chojiro’s Heir.

  “I couldn’t have the world knowing that,” Yukako explained. “Surely you understand. It would look better if they were traded for Shunrai.” Of course: a gift that people heard was won dearly would be treasured more.

  She continued. “But if the Eppo went better than expected, if it happened that we were able to buy Shunrai from you a second time, would you be willing to not raise the price?”

  I watched as beauty, vulnerability, and the guarantee of easy money did their work on Chojiro’s Heir. “Don’t be silly, Okusama,” e assented, and basked in the trust and gratitude streaming from Yukako’s eyes. “When would you need them?”

  “We can bring Shunrai here and pick up the student bowls the first night of the Eppo,” ukako said, her quiet voice a little too quick and firm.

  Yukako’s shift in demeanor jerked the Heir back to his wits a little. “I don’t worry about foreigners at the Eppo,” he said. “But I don’t want these bowls making their way into the market here. We can’t have shopmen passing them off as real Raku,” he explained.

  Yukako nodded, girlish again. “Maybe you could cut a notch in the foot of the bowl to show it was made for practice,” she suggested meekly. “Or my husband said you could stamp the bowls with something like this,” she said, passing him a small box from her sleeve: it held a carved stone seal used for stamping documents or clay.