The Teahouse Fire

by Ellis Avery

  Perhaps Yukako meant to leave my spy-window open, to vent the close air of the brazier fire, or perhaps she was distracted by the footsteps pattering quickly toward her from outside. “Yes?” I heard her say.

  I was surprised by a gusty intake of breath and a triumphant screech that could only have belonged to Mariko Kato. “Sensei, I found out what happened to the Minister!”

  “Did you?” ukako asked, none too warmly.

  “I just ran home and back,” Mariko announced, proud of her own daring. She gasped for breath. “Mother told me. He and Father were at a golf game with a big American schools expert. They decided to go out to dinner together, so he sent his wife instead.”

  “You really went to a lot of trouble for us, Miss Mariko, and I appreciate it,” said Yukako, and from her tone I could hear how glad she was not to have Miss Kato for a daughter-in-law. “But now is not a good time for me to hear your news.”

  “Oh, Sensei,” said Mariko, responding to the chill in Yukako’s voice. “I’m sorry. It was thoughtless. Excuse me.” Deflated, but only somewhat, Mariko slipped away. From the pleasure in her voice as she apologized, I think she was planning who to tell next.

  FOR A FEW SECONDS Yukako stood above me backstage. “Golf,” she whispered to herself, and sighed, a long trembling five-count sigh. A moment later I heard her murmur thanks to Tsuko, who must have brought a change of clothing. “Good color. But there’s no time.”

  YUKAKO RANG A BELL to tell Koito the tearoom was ready for her return, and slid the guest’s door back open. A little soft light fell on my mirror. I could hear Yukako refill the washing-stone more clearly than I could see Koito walk in a minute later and sit to look at the flowers; I saw just a long silken line, shadow on shadow, compressing to a kneeling fold. And then, just as she sank down, the mirror went golden. All the color returned to the room at once as the blurry polished metal revealed the green and violet of the cascading hagi flowers, the muted blue and saffron of Koito’s obi, the white of her face gazing at the moon. “It’s beautiful,” she said as Yukako entered.

  Yukako paused: the compliment was all the more sincere for being out of place. In the full yellow moonlight, Koito completed the picture framed by the alcove, framed by all Okusama’s work as host: moon, hagi, luminous woman. “Thank you,” she said quietly. She laid the second charcoal and began preparing tea.

  “I’m sorry that it’s me instead of my husband,” Koito said.

  Yukako’s voice went hard and light. “It can’t be helped, can it?”

  “I’m sorry you didn’t know it was me,” Koito persisted. “I just meant to stay in the background this visit, but then he asked me to come at the last minute.”

  “It can’t be helped,” ukako repeated.

  “We both did the best we could in hard times,” Koito said.

  “That’s one way of putting it.”

  “I’m not here to dwell on the past. Think of me as just an envelope, a lucky good news envelope,” Koito said, her voice playful and cajoling.

  I could hear the whisk rasping as Yukako kneaded the thick tea. “I’m listening,” she said, her voice reined in.

  “What my husband wanted to tell you was that he’s so impressed with what you’ve done in the schools. The experiment was truly a success; your son is a young man to be proud of. In the Emperor’s name, my husband asks Master Teacher to come to Tokyo and make tea part of every girl’s education in Japan.”

  “Is that what he said?” asked Yukako, too overwhelmed to deflect the compliment. Her voice was dense and quiet. I heard in it the proud black-sleeved young nobles of her father’s day. I heard in it the trembling sigh that followed the word golf. She was silent so long it became awkward. The tines of the tea whisk hissed in the bowl. “I had spoken with Advisor Kato about the chance of bringing up a different matter with His Honor,” she said.

  Koito tilted her head, and I could imagine her as a maiko many years before, a pouty and flirtatious child. “He didn’t mention anything else. Nor Advisor Kato. Was it the teacher you left in Tokyo this spring? He’s in such demand, it’s astonishing. You’ll surely be asked for more. Congratulations, Sensei.” Sensei, not Okusama? Of course, I thought: that’s what they had called each other as young women, studying music and tea.

  Yukako noted Koito’s choice of address too. “Let’s not, as you say, dwell on the past,” she said. She bowed to Koito, her head almost touching the floor. “Thank you for this happy news. Please tell His Honor that our family hopes to serve the Emperor to the best of our mean abilities.”

  A long silence followed. The yellow light began to fade as the moon continued rising. Yukako served thick tea, laid charcoal a third time, brought out a candle and the second course of sweets. “Macarons, quelle surprise!” said Koito. Even heavily accented, her French spooked me. Yukako accepted her compliments tersely and whisked the thin tea. “What is the name of this tea bowl?” Koito asked.

  “Hakama,” ukako said. To one who knew her, it sounded as if she might cry.

  35

  1891

  PLEASE, JUST LEAVE ME ALONE,” Yukako told Tai, her voice like weathered wood. “I’ll have a bath, and then I’ll tell you how it went. Tell them all it was a great success and they should take their supper and sake now. Have everyone gather after breakfast for my announcement and we’ll all clean up together. Please?”

  “Mother?”

  “It’s all good news,” she assured him. “Just go.”

  THE MOON HAD LEFT the window, but Yukako remained in place, the nearby taper illuminating her long hands. They covered her face. They fell to her knees. They fingered her green silk dress. She spread them flat on the tatami and I saw her body shake as she cried, heard her breathe in wet little ragged gusts. Her breath went calm again, and she raised her hands to her eyes. I felt ashamed watching her, but I knew she’d hear any sound I made to leave. Suddenly her body tensed. I heard footsteps overhead. “Just go away,” she said, looking at the host’s door.

  “Where is he?” asked a man’s voice.

  “Oh, it’s you,” ukako said tonelessly, as if in a dream. Her voice was empty of fear when she asked, “Is that a gun?”

  “Where is he?” It was Nao.

  “Put that away,” she said. “He never came.”

  “I only saw the woman leave,” he said.

  “He sent his wife instead.”

  “He’s at Advisor Kato’s?”

  “They’re having dinner with the American Minister of Education,” ukako said haughtily. “Where have you been all this time?”

  “Waiting next door. Clever idea, an ornamental privy.” Nao faced her for a long moment. I saw only his blurry underwater outline, but it was enough to make me flushed and queasy. He lowered his arms. “Feeling sad, Okusama?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “All dressed up and the big man didn’t come to your tea party? What a shame.”

  “Would you please go away?”

  “You’ve suffered so much in this lifetime, Okusama.”

  She was seated, he was standing; her narrow face turned full toward him, her long vulnerable neck tilted up. “Don’t mock me,” she said quietly. It was an order and it was a plea.

  “Don’t what?” he said, only half mocking. His face caught a spark of reflected light: he was smiling. He sank beside her. He was a gray shape on the floor; she was a green one.

  “Put that thing down,” ukako said. I heard a heavy tap of metal on tatami and then the two shapes of them collapsed together, green and gray. I saw flashes of white where her hands reached for him. I heard a scramble of clothing. I heard her scissoring breath. “What are you doing?” she whispered.

  “You don’t even know the first thing, do you?” he said.

  “I know enough,” she said.

  I could hear their serrated breathing, feel the wood-framed house respond to their jerking bodies overhead. The triumph of my sticky August nights curdled into bile. I touched the box of charcoal a
t my feet: if it came to that, at least I would not have to be sick on myself. I clutched my knees to my chin; I floated up out of my body as I had my first night with Nao, as I had long ago, as a child on my uncle’s lap. I funneled up through the thumbhole of the mizuya. I stood before those beautiful bodies taking what they wanted at last. I felt like a hungry ghost: greedy, vengeful, and forlorn.

  I was so upset by what I saw, I looked away. I made my eyes focus on the shining mirror of my spyhole instead of on the image it reflected. And that’s when I saw the scratches, off to the side, six simple kana characters, three and three. Yu-ka-ko. Hi-ro-shi. They had come down here as children and left their names. I remembered Yukako telling me about the secret room in Baishian when I was a little girl, how she and her brother had promised each other they would never show it to anyone. Not even Akio. Not even Nao. I felt superior for a moment then, remembering the smugness in Nao’s voice when he said he’d hidden in the privy. Yukako had kept her promise to Hiroshi, never telling me about this place. And Hiroshi had kept his, I realized, never telling Nao.

  I could hear them overhead, Nao’s fast locomotive grunts and Yukako’s blunt sobs. Then he spent himself in a groan: the house rocked in its joints. It was silent, and then I heard her sigh. “No more?”

  He laughed. “You’ve always had everything you wanted,” he said tenderly. “It’s good for you to go a little hungry.”

  She drew away from him, remaining seated; I saw the moving white bars of her arms, heard the rustle of her dress. “Are you cleaning yourself off with tea-paper?” Nao asked. I had never heard him giggle before.

  “It’s to hand,” ukako explained crisply. I heard a weary intake of breath, an angry and regretful exhale. Then she picked something up from the floor and gave it a causal inspection. “Heavy,” she remarked. “So, you wanted to kill my guest?”

  “That’s not a toy, Yuka,” Nao said.

  “I know,” said Yukako. She did not put it down.

  “You think I stayed here all these months after Mother died to collect your little commissions? After my daughter’s misadventure, I asked for an assignment in Tokyo. I would have stayed there gladly, blending in, but when my brothers heard about the Minister’s inspection, they said to go back to Kyoto. This was too good a chance to pass up.”

  “‘Too good a chance’?” Yukako repeated. What was Nao saying? What kind of “assignment”? And why did he need to “blend in”?

  “As long as there is an imperial family, nothing will change for the rest of us,” he explained.

  “Are you part of some kind of revolutionary group?”

  “It’s a brotherhood,” he said tersely.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Yukako said. She sounded fed up, like a teenage girl who has stayed up too late, like she couldn’t believe she was having this conversation. There was something almost jaunty about the way she hefted the heavy object, flapping it around from time to time. I could not see Nao’s eyes, but his whole face seemed to be watching the gun. “Isn’t one revolution enough?” she asked peevishly. “Everything’s different now.”

  “No it’s not,” Nao snapped. “The rich are wearing different clothes: that about sums it up. The Emperor’s kinsman marries a girl from the floating world.”

  Yukako gasped in irritation. When Nao shared my bed, I’d caught glints of a specific bitterness in his voice whenever he mentioned Akio’s name, but now I heard the whole bare knife of it. Perhaps he had never forgiven Yukako’s brother for choosing Akio, and with Hiroshi gone, she was the only one he could exact penance from.

  “All these years have gone by and you’re still bowing to the Minister with your head touching the floor. Does that sound like change to you? Except now he doesn’t even bother to come.”

  Yukako winced visibly. “Everything has changed,” she repeated more quietly.

  “Oh, girls make tea now? Do you think that makes a damn’s worth of difference to all the people who wear their bodies to a nub so you can sit here in your pretty little house and”—here he paused, trying to sum up the aim of tea—“feel serene? Carpenters, tea pickers, charcoal men?”

  “Tea gives them work,” ukako demurred.

  “Tea keeps them exactly where they are. Tea keeps them exactly the way it once kept me.”

  There was a dull glint of metal in the candlelight. Yukako raised her arms and kept them raised. Nao flinched. “I don’t think you stayed in my ‘pretty little house’ just to be a hero for your ‘brothers,’ Nao-han.”

  Nao was silent.

  “I think you stayed here because you have a gift and a skill. Glass windows don’t help anyone any more than tea does, really. I think you got pleasure out of making something beautiful.” She indicated the moon window with a tip of the chin.

  For the briefest of seconds, Nao’s face flicked toward his handiwork and back. He made a reluctant, barely audible sound of assent. “Un.”

  At this, Yukako pressed her advantage. Her voice took on a resonant, voluptuous authority. “And I think you stayed to be near me,” she said.

  It seemed he hadn’t forgiven Yukako for choosing Akio, either: there was a sudden scuffling scramble of limbs and thuds and then I heard something small and heavy fall to the tatami. Nao seized the gun and stepped back. “You’re wrong there,” he said, breathing hard.

  “Listen to you,” ukako said defiantly.

  “I’ve had women all over Japan. I’ve had women here in your house. Foreign whores in Yokohama. Rich wives in Tokyo. I married an eta girl in Asaka and I divorced her too.”

  Yukako gasped.

  “She was unfaithful.”

  Yukako didn’t hear him; she was still recoiling. “You what?”

  “Who do you think Aki’s mother was?”

  Yukako wrapped her arms around her stomach like she was going to be sick.

  “Why do you think she just left the baby here like that? She knew she’d be found out herself, but a child?”

  I remembered Yukako taking extravagant pains to tell me how I could not possibly be an eta. Now she whimpered, a little strangling noise like she was choking.

  “You would have paid those nuns off even quicker if you’d known, huh?” I knew that Nao was telling it this way to hurt her, but I had not understood this part of Ruri’s story. Because you’re a foreigner, I’ll tell you, he’d said. He must have guessed I wouldn’t understand unless he spelled it out. He was right.

  I heard Yukako pant to regain composure. “Look, don’t soil my brother’s memory by being cruel.”

  Nao paused. “Un,” I heard him say again, softly. He paused, and then his voice was harsh again. “Lucky for you he was so sickly, wasn’t it? You’ve made a better Master Teacher than he ever would.”

  “You’re a monster,” ukako whispered.

  “I’ve often wondered what would have happened if I’d taken his place.”

  What was he talking about? “Stop, just stop. I’ve had it with you,” Yukako said, all in one hissed breath.

  “I always wondered why Matsu seemed to hate me. Why he always beat me so hard. And then, after Hiro died, right after the fifty-day memorial tea for the household, Mother made me leave. She saw the way Master Teacher was looking at me and she saw the way Matsu was looking at him. I always did look a little like Hiro, but you’d never notice it outside the tearoom. And then, right after the tea, Mother gives me a sack of rice balls and tells me not to come back. Funny, right? And there you were, the last time I saw you, in your pretty new robe and your shiny new sandals. Do you like my shoes, Nao-han? I had no idea where I was going to sleep that night, and that was the last thing you said to me.”

  “How could I have known?” Yukako protested. “I didn’t know o-Chio made you leave.”

  Nor had I: this wasn’t the story he’d told me. “I was going to leave anyway,” he mumbled.

  Yukako sat very still. Her voice, when she spoke again, was weak and distant. “I don’t believe what you’re saying.”

  “You know,
your father always gave me the dirtiest jobs. But they were all for tea. Matsu had me scrubbing human shit, but your father only gave me tea work. Ever wonder why?”

  Yukako inhaled. “You’re dismissed,” she said.

  “Is that so?”

  “And you won’t be finishing the upstairs. Do you understand?”

  “I didn’t think I would,” he said cockily. He stood. “Well, thanks, Yuka. I had a nice evening.”

  “But,” said Yukako numbly, “why would you—? If you thought I was your sister?”

  Nao shrugged. “You wanted me.”

  Yukako’s face tilted up toward him. She held herself as if she were cold. “Nao-han, I loved you. The three of you. I—”

  “Now I’m really going,” he said, his voice rushed and vulnerable. And he left.

  YUKAKO LAY FACEDOWN on the tearoom floor, breathing shallowly. “Nao-han. My Kenji—” she whispered. And then she propped herself up on her elbows and vomited. “Oh,” she groaned.

  I was out of the coal bin in one fluid motion. “Okusama?”

  After the blurry dim image of the tearoom in the polished metal, everything was so hard and bright and clear. Every ruffle of Yukako’s green gown, every foamy bloom of hagi, seemed as distinct as a wood-block print.

  “Go. Away,” ukako moaned. She sat up, trying to look composed.

  “Shh. Shh,” I said tenderly. “I’m sorry, Okusama. I heard everything.”

  “Oh, what next?” asked Yukako, as if appealing to heaven. It had been a long night indeed.

  “Let’s clean you up,” I said.

  I brought in wet cloths and wiped her face, wiped the floor. Yukako sat as limp as a rag doll. “Could you bring me my kimono from the mizuya?” she asked plaintively.

  I found it backstage and carried it in while Yukako, still seated, struggled with her dress, tugging and gasping. “Shh,” I repeated. I unlaced her bodice and her corset and stroked her exposed back. She shuffled off the architecture of her dress and reached for her kimono undergown. I held up the white silk robe and she leaned back, spreading her arms into the sleeves, sinking backward into me. To wrap the left side of the robe over the right was to fold my arms across her chest.