by Ellis Avery
Yukako kept her face studiedly blank as Chojiro’s Heir carefully read the reversed kanji aloud: “By students of Raku, for students of Shin Chanoyu.”
“Really?” asked Yukako, playing the illiterate.
Chojiro’s Heir seemed put off by the stone seal, its deliberateness and its presumption. “I see he has anticipated my concern,” he said stiffly.
“I’m ashamed,” Yukako said humbly, her face luminous, her head drooping on its graceful stem. “Please take all the time you need to consider this importunate request.” She used language so self-abasing I cannot reproduce it in English, but she gazed right at him as she spoke, her eyes bright, her lips delicately parted.
“YOU PLANNED the whole thing,” I marveled, as we sheltered from the rain on a covered bridge. “You designed that stamp! You knew you’d ask for those student bowls when you offered to go in Master Teacher’s place!”
Yukako smiled sadly. “Do you remember my wedding day, when we sat looking at Okura Chugo’s gold?”
“Yes?” I remembered her crying through closed eyes.
“I felt so small,” she said. “I’d worked so hard, remember? Even if I hadn’t gotten caught, even if the new currency hadn’t come along to make what I’d earned worthless, it was so little next to those koban.” Setting her jaw, she explained, “I decided I never wanted to feel that helpless again. Migawa Yuko was never going to get as far as Master Teacher’s Wife, right?”
I felt glum hearing her say that, but I nodded.
“That’s why I offered to go as a favor instead of sneaking off on my own,” she said. “Same with offering to present at the Expo in Master Teacher’s place.” A sly grin played across her face. “But…maybe I didn’t tell him everything.”
FOR THE NEXT MONTH Yukako relieved me of all my duties attending her at lessons and serving meals. Through the long rains of June, she posted me on the veranda closest to the kitchen door to pick apart seams of soiled garments and sew up seams of laundered ones, so that I could observe every messenger that came. And so it happened that I was the one to offer tea and cakes to the boy from the Raku studio, to tuck away the answer he carried, to present it to Yukako late that night. It was a box containing one tea bowl, humble but handsome, with a pair of notches cut in the foot. The base bore a large square stamp: the very seal Yukako had had made.
AFTER THE BOWL ARRIVED, Yukako sold all her gorgeous girlhood kimono. I fingered the robe I’d once worn a last time. “I’ll never have a daughter,” Yukako said pensively on the way home, her sleeve full of coins. But you had me, I thought. I followed her to a series of shops where she placed a number of large orders, the most interesting of which involved another object of her own design.
AFTER THE MOUNTAIN’S DEATH, Jiro was no longer beset by frequent, mysterious illnesses. So one evening, a night he’d planned to dine with Shige, not long after Advisor Kato plied the silk merchant with the gift of a water-powered jacquard loom, we were surprised to discover that Jiro was ill.
Because the boys were still in the grip of their acting craze—making speeches in hakama and bashing away at each other with their bamboo staves—they asked me to read one of my Shakespeare plays for them to act out in the garden. Just as we were discovering how ill suited Lear was to their taste for blood—“Now you, call him a waterish duke! Now you, beseech them to make good their professions!”—we were surprised by Jiro, who jerked his study door wide with a noisy rattle. We turned to him with dropped jaws.
“You don’t all have to look so shocked,” he said. “I do live here. I have a fever; I’m staying in.” As the boys bowed to apologize for bothering him, he waved them away like mosquitoes. “A foreign girl in a foreign dress, telling a foreign tale, that’s what I like to see.” I was still in the shift I wore to accompany Yukako to lessons. “It all goes together so well.” His sarcasm held an edge of approval that surprised me. “You two, on the other hand, look ridiculous. Put those away,” he said, gesturing at the boys’ hakama. “Bring me something to eat.”
Jiro’s outburst jolted the boys out of their acting mood and into their other favorite game: Jiyu Minken. Throughout the countryside, we heard, taxes had gone so high that farmers of the Jiyu Minken, or People’s Movement, had begun blowing up government offices, echoing the Satsuma rebels of years before. One boy would play a tyrannical tax man, and the other would tiptoe around his “house,” whisper-singing the most popular ditty of the eighteenth year of Meiji: “Dynamite, Boom!” And then the “house” would explode and one boy would roll on the ground in agony while the other sang as loud as possible. Out of concern for their father’s health, they mouthed the words instead: For our more than forty million countrymen, we’re not afraid of wearing convict red…
Due to his sons’ solicitude, no doubt, Jiro recovered with astonishing speed and was out the next evening until dawn.
22
1885
JIRO KEPT Lightning and Spring Thunder, his two prize tea bowls, side by side in a special cupboard in his study, on a wave-shaped shelf behind a sliding panel. Rikyu’s gold-mended bowl sat a little higher than the one Chojiro’s Heir had made, but the two together formed a kind of hypnotic unity, like a pair of dark eyes. Yukako easily located the two bowls and their calligraphed boxes, and that summer she visited the cupboard often to make sure the Shunrai bowl would be there when she needed it.
On the morning of the Expo, however, Shunrai’s elegant box stood empty on the cupboard floor. The bowl itself was gone. I followed Yukako as she paced anxiously from Jiro’s study to the classroom where he sat at lesson with his students, kneeling by the lattice window as if she could pry an explanation out of him just by looking. Halfway to the fireproof tower—had he locked the bowl away in storage?—she halted. “Isn’t he holding another tea event tomorrow night?” she asked, embarrassed with herself. “Go look in the Muin mizuya.”
“I don’t think he uses the same tea bowl more than once a year with guests,” I demurred. I was right: Muin’s backstage preparation area, though its water barrel stood full and its plaited basket waited newly stocked with charcoal, yielded nothing.
“We don’t have time for this,” fretted Yukako. “Let’s look in all the mizuya.”
We looked quickly, even checking the classroom mizuya, though it required some creeping around, but none stood in readiness like Muin’s. “What about inside the tearoom?” I asked.
“Where would he put it?” she snorted. But sure enough, no calligraphy hung in the scroll alcove. In its place, like a pert little apple on a windowsill, sat a plump silk bag tied with bright cords. Opened, the bag sank flat into a perfectly round disk of brocade, on which Shunrai glowed like polished jet. “You were right,” Yukako said contritely. Relieved, she took the tea bowl, and with a backward glance, replaced it with its gold-veined brother.
“Can you just do that?” I whispered, as we stole away.
“After that bill, he should be glad I didn’t replace it with a cabbage.”
IN THE OLD CALENDAR, the festival of the dead had often coincided with the first whispering days of autumn coolness: early September with its clearest air, through which the dead could pass as easily as bonfire smoke. Now it fell in the dog days of August, the limbs of the circle dancers moving heavy in the blunt night heat. Just so, August, that worst of months, had once featured the Gion Festival, in which young men stripped to the waist hauled two-story floats crammed with pipers, drummers, and sacred boys, and girls in gauze robes panted by the river, limply lifting their moon-shaped fans. Every gesture at Gion Festival used to speak the words Enough. After this, the heat breaks. Now the festival fell mid-July, squarely in the hot eye of summer, with weeks to go before a breath of fall air.
Into this foundry, the city of Kyoto (all gauze and paper fans, bare feet and shaved ice on its night verandas) welcomed the foreigners: leather shoes and stuffy linen, bone corsets and smelling salts. “What an oasis we’ll be,” ukako said, claiming the breeziest booth at the Expo for the Shin
s. She borrowed a few armchairs—the kind a foreign lady could wilt into—from the Expo offices to mix with the spartan stools of her father’s design, and hired a shaved-ice man from one of Kyoto’s most prestigious confectionery shops to work backstage in the mizuya. “I hear they like sweets, so I need to remind the Toraya man to use twice as much syrup,” she noted. Although she seated her guests, she decided to forgo her father’s tabletop temae and had tatami brought in for her own use. “It gives a cooler feeling,” she determined. After a calculated look up and down the hall at the booths in progress—an uncertain array of technologies and products, from brocades to velocipedes to a headache’s worth of maps for Advisor Kato’s ambitious canal, drawn by his protégé Tanabe—Yukako nodded to herself. “I think the foreigners will like seeing us on the floor.”
She gave me a writing set and a few leaves of paper and set me to work in our booth. “Make a label in the foreigners’ language for the tea things,” she told me, rushing off to deal with the shaved-ice man. I wrote rarely, and my hand around the brush was a stiff child’s fist, but the coarse paper emboldened me. I experimented with English and French, ran roughshod with my spelling, wrote short and long descriptions, from the crudest—Tea Things—to the first sentence of what could have been an essay on the history and cultural importance of tea. Yukako reappeared and chose one of my labels by sight alone:
implements for
the Japanese
Rite of Tea
“Is this a dictionary?” she asked, pointing to another sheet I’d filled: a column of tea words and their English explanations–Chawan, Chasen, Chashaku, Natsume, Kensui. “Let’s take it home for the boys to learn someday.” hen she sat on the tatami beside me, pulled aside her right sleeve with her left hand and stamped a red pigment square on the label using a stone seal similar to the one she’d given Chojiro’s Heir. She took the brush and added two kanji characters to my taut little label: Tea and Road, Cha Do, the Way of Tea. “There,” she said. “Now leave it to dry.”
THE FIRST DAY of the Expo was reserved for only the most important foreigners. Though Yukako’s sense of what the foreigners might want to see in her was acute—seated on the floor instead of at a table, dressed in a kimono just a touch more showy than appropriate for her age and station—it did not extend to me, and so I sat on a stool beside her in my overgrown girl’s dress cut from kimono fabric, my hair oiled into a shimada, my voice pitched feminine-high, my English rusty with archaism and disuse. Facing the well-upholstered British ambassador, his bone-china wife, and the large-nosed entourage behind them, I was too embarrassed to know whether I was an embarrassment.
I began the speech Yukako had prepared for me, after hours of questioning me on foreign habits. “If you go to empty church and listen for Voice of God,” I said, my articles slipping along with my confidence, “and then you go to a botanical garden and look at a thousand flowers, and then you go to a museum and look at a hundred paintings and sculptures, and then you go to a ballet—the ballet,” I caught myself, “—and see twenty ballerinas, and then you go to a restaurant and eat a ten-course meal, and then you sit up talking with a roomful of friends, will you not be tired, Eminences?” I asked. My words felt false, baroque, and yet it seemed bald and crude not to add that tag, so humble in my mind, so pompous on my lips. “Especially when suchlike heat should tax the limbs?” Just speak, I told myself, be natural! The gathered company looked indulgently at one another, suppressing laughter, but a few women, plying their feathered fans, nodded in agreement. “Eminences, please imagine, if you will,” I said, preparing to invoke the pair of words most beloved by the Meiji regime, “A Civilized and Enlightened form of art experience.” At this, I caught an outright rolling of eyes by two young women in back, gloved hands holding lace parasols. Everywhere they turned in Official Japan, no doubt, they heard the phrase bunmei kaika, Civilization and Enlightenment. In the silence that fell as I lost my nerve, I heard, off to the side, a precise little man—the American missionary I recalled from the last Expo—translating for his flush-faced companion into a harsh Germanic language. “Ah, bunmei kaika,” he added, when he finished my last sentence, and the two men shared a laugh at my expense.
The American’s Japanese accent was wretched, I thought, and those frilly parasols were redundant in the deep eaves of the Expo pavilion, a waste of space. This jolt of superiority, however petty, gave me the momentum to press on. “In Chado, the Japanese Rite of Tea, you are invited to spend time with one flower, one painting. To touch and taste from one piece of sculpture, to sample a few delicacies, to watch the balletic movement of one trained artist. You are free to converse, or you are free to contemplate in silence. Is this not a restful and salutary activity?”
My syllables felt wrong, stiff, like pennies dropped in a tin pail, but the travel-weary foreigners seemed to understand, and nodded among themselves, self-congratulatory in their pleasure. Relieved, I concluded: “All the arts of Japan circle Chado the way”—here Yukako had pushed for a little more bunmei kaika—“all the planets orbit the sun.
“Before we perform Tea Procedure for you,” I said, fumbling with a poor equivalent for temae, “Shin Yukako will display the utensils used for Chado.” I was finished! The worst of my humiliation was behind me, my blush steamed into the humid air as the harsh translating voice trailed away.
Years of training in tea had made it easy for Yukako to kneel quietly while I rattled on in my gasping stilted English and the foreigners stared at her gauze kimono, her waxed hair, her almond eyes—which looked nothing like almonds—her tea-with-milk skin. She bowed in welcome and held up a cloth bundle for their inspection. When I had told her about the foreigners at the first Expo, she had been intrigued by the notion of a Tea Set. “How can you show your skill at coordinating tea utensils if they come all together in a set?” she’d puzzled, with much more doubt than she’d expended on the notion that planets revolved around the sun. And while she never showed much interest in the foreigners’ language, let alone bothered to remember that there were languages, plural, the word set charmed and distracted her. “Setto, setto,” she’d murmur, the word none too distant from Seto, a famed ceramics region. And now, smiling as I translated, she announced that her cloth-wrapped package was a Chado no Setto.
“It looks like a hatbox,” one of the Parasol Girls whispered to her friend.
It did, if slightly smaller. Yukako’s version of a tea setto was wrapped in humble cotton—navy striped with white—and tied with red cord. My label on its straw-flecked sheet seemed to glow against the dark cloth. “Japanese paper is so rustic, so charming,” I heard the Eminent voices agree. Then I remembered Yukako inspecting my slim collection of foreign books, and realized she’d chosen the paper that would seem least familiar to her audience. And cheaper besides, I noted.
Tucked into the red cord, placed diagonally across the calligraphed label, the implement we called a chashaku gleamed like a pale twig. “A bamboo teaspoon,” I announced solemnly. It sounded so silly in English, but I kept my face grave.
Ah, responded the crowd.
Yukako untied the wrappings and lifted the lid of the hatbox, laying it before her: it was a raw wooden version of the lacquered tray used in the simplest temae. Inside, like a series of nested dolls, sat a wooden wastewater vessel with a white linen wiping-cloth laid across it, and inside that, one of the Raku students’ bowls, and inside that, wrapped in a tea host’s silk napkin, resting on a packet of powdered green tea, sat a bamboo cylinder. Clever Yukako! The top and bottom of the cylinder fit together to form a humble but serviceable tea box, while a center tube housed the chasen whisk.
“Is that a badminton birdie?” I heard someone ask. “A shaving brush?”
“This is a whisk for tea. When you beat the clear part of an egg”—I had never learned the word in English, I realized—“you can make a mousse or soufflé. Insomuch, beaten tea is a likewise airy trifle.” I shouldn’t improvise, I groaned inside.
The gathered com
pany, however, was prepared to be delighted. In this respite from sun and rickshaw and seaweed in soup, with no one asking them to agree what a Civilized and Enlightened nation they were visiting, they were receiving a special glimpse of Old Japan, never mind that it had been concocted for their benefit. Yukako’s setto couldn’t have been made from cheaper materials, and yet the foreigners murmured and gasped at each new implement as if she were firing off Roman candles. They sighed with pleasure when I mentioned the three-hundred-year-old relationship between the Shin and Raku families. They all but cheered when the whisk emerged from its bamboo tube.
I slowly became used to the strange translating echo from the American off to the side, and to his young friend who nodded constantly, wavy blond hair bouncing in a pageboy bob. I didn’t mind the harsh sentences trailing after mine, but I minded the way the blond man looked from Yukako to me and back again, flat and appraising with his dog-blue eyes.
I looked away, uncomfortable, and saw a ghost of that same look in the face of a Japanese man from one of the other displays, drawn by the crowd. A young-old man with the fine high cheekbones of a lord and the heavy apron of a craftsman, he watched Yukako in a hands-on-hips stance I found distracting. He looked away, attention caught by something to the left: his master waving him back to his own booth. I saw him glance back at Yukako as she finished packing up her setto. She bowed to the British ambassador, extended the box to him, and bowed again. “Please accept this gift on behalf of the Shin family,” I said.
The deep and gracious thanks of the ambassador and his wife unleashed a flurry of envious glances and whispers among the Eminences. “Would it be possible,” began one of the parasol girls, her voice remarkably loud for its blue-blooded fragility, “to find other tea sets?”