The authentication tests will only take two—a fact she declined to mention to both her boss and the police. She’s ninety-nine percent sure that the numbers will prove it’s the right age, with the right chemical signature, to have been made by Yoshi Takamatsu. The real challenge won’t be connecting the tea bowl to the potter, but using the bowl to connect the potter to the poet.
She brews a pot of industrial-strength coffee and carries it to her low table, then plops onto her cushion. Highlighter in hand, she resumes harvesting citations from where she’d left off last night.
This piece had been published in a popular international poetry quarterly, not a scholarly journal, but the author is a respected professor at an elite university. A quick skim promised it will provide a quotable overview of the current thinking on Saburo’s death poem, which also revolves around the word hikitoru, like the poet’s eighth Attachment.
The famous poet’s date of death is a matter of record, but there’s little information about what actually killed him at the ripe old age of sixty-nine. One commonly held theory is that his disappointingly prosaic final poem and the crazy deathbed request he left behind point to dementia, but epidemiological studies also make a case that he could have succumbed to one of the periodic fever outbreaks, virulent enough to cause delirium.
Fortunately for poetry lovers, the note instructing Saburo’s literary heirs to burn his last great work was tossed into the fire instead, and The Eight Attachments has become one of the world’s most-studied pieces of Japanese literature. The eight elegant poems on the subjects of “pride,” “arrogance,” “perfectionism,” “rigid thinking,” “first love,” “ambition,” “revenge,” and “taking back what’s yours” have generated thousands of pages of analysis in the two and a half centuries since he’d written them. Even Saburo’s bafflingly mundane death poem had been dusted off and imbued with deeper meaning.
At first reading, his final verse seems to suggest that the poet died in poverty, that he had frittered his fortune away on wine, women, or gambling, and was regretting his frivolity on his deathbed, but that interpretation was quickly dismissed by Saburo devotees as far too obvious, and not nearly dignified enough. For the next several hundred years, the finest literary minds set about divining deeper insights.
One school reads the character “debt” as “loan,” and asserts that the aged poet was ready to stop running on borrowed time and be reborn.
Buddhist scholars, of course, subscribe to a more spiritual theory—that the poet was exhorting his followers to stop trying to escape their attachments and face them instead.
Others interpret the final line as “taking back what’s mine,” arguing that the poet intended to cap decades of not publishing a single verse with a final crowning achievement. That he knew the eight poems he’d left behind would be his legacy-assuring masterpiece, and the falsely humble gesture of asking they be destroyed was a brilliant ploy to make them the most talked-about piece of literature since The Tale of Genji was passed around, one tantalizing chapter at a time, behind closed doors.
But Robin doesn’t subscribe to any of these theories. Not anymore. The existence of a second Yakibō tea bowl with the same name as one of the eight attachments suggests another meaning altogether. The word hikitoru doesn’t mean taking back, seeking enlightenment, or hoping for posthumous glory. Hikitoru is the name of the tea bowl sitting in Fujimori Fine Art’s safe.
The poet owed someone a great debt, and that tea bowl is the key.
33.
Present-Day Japan
FRIDAY, APRIL 4
Tokyo
Nori charges through the hospital’s automatic doors and stalks down the hallway. Standing before the elevator, she punches the button repeatedly until it arrives. How could those double-dealing, so-called experts from the auction house do this to her? How could ’Baa-chan do this to her? Where did she get that miserable tea bowl, anyway? Did she know it was stolen?
The head nurse looks up from her charting. Hustling out from behind the desk, she meets Nori halfway down the hall, diverting her into an unoccupied room.
Fear eclipses Nori’s fury.
“What happened? Is it my grandmother? Is she . . . did she . . .?”
“No,” says the nurse. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. There’s been no change in her condition. But . . .”
“But what?”
The nurse lowers her voice, even though there’s no one else in the room.
“She’s ah, had a visitor. Two visitors, actually.”
She pulls a pair of cards from her pocket, both embossed with the five-pointed star of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. One of them belongs to an assistant inspector whose name Nori doesn’t recognize, but the other is Anzai’s.
“Do you have any idea why the police were inquiring about your grandmother’s health?”
“Did you tell them she’s unconscious?”
“Yes, but they wanted to see her anyway,” the nurse replies, uncomfortable. “I told them she was unresponsive, that she needed peace and quiet. But they insisted.”
“Insisted on what?”
“Asking her questions.”
“What kind of questions?”
“About a tea bowl.”
“A tea bowl?”
“Yes,” the nurse says, shaking her head. “Some stolen tea bowl. I can’t believe they barged in here, demanding to question one of my gravely ill patients about a crime that happened over seventy years ago.”
“Did my grandmother answer?”
“Of course not. But I was worried that if she could hear them, she’d be distressed, so I asked them to leave.” She lifts her chin defiantly. “I told them I’d call them if she woke up, then shooed them out the door.”
Nori thanks the nurse profusely, bowing herself out. Back in the hall, she aims for her grandmother’s room. Now it’s her turn to ask the distressing questions.
She slips through the door slotted with Chiyo Okuda’s name and slides it closed behind her. Contemplates the grandmother lying in the bed across the room.
The grandmother who’s more conscious than she lets on. The grandmother who always knows more than she tells.
34.
Wartime Japan
MARCH, 1945
Tokyo
It’s been the coldest March in living memory, and still too soon to know if the cherry trees left standing will ever bloom again.
Chiyo Okuda picks her way through a landscape that has become as alien as the moon. The world she knew has been reduced to mounds of blackened spars and crushed tile; even the parts that didn’t burn are twisted and charred. Will she even recognize the remains of Okuda & Sons when she finds it?
The shells of a few brick buildings and the gravestones around the temple are all that still stand amid the ashes of the kitchenware district. New landmarks, in a city of the dead. One week ago, fire rained down from enemy bombers flying so low that she’d seen the flames reflected in their vast, shiny underbellies as they delivered the war to her backyard.
She can make out the rough outline of streets beneath the still-smoking debris, but it’s hard to get her bearings, because she has to look and not look at the same time. Rescue brigades have begun to remove the coal-black figures that used to be human, but so far, they’ve only gotten around to collecting those caught fleeing when the bombs fell. It’s still far too possible to stumble across remains of your neighbors or their pets if you venture too far into the ruins.
Which is why Chiyo is nervously picking her way down the middle of what used to be a street, keeping her chin high, focusing on the angular remains of buildings, nothing smaller. She’s beginning to despair of ever finding her way when her eyes fall on a familiar shape. The monument is blackened and leaning crookedly, but still standing, at what used to be a shrine sacred to rakugo storytellers. It marks the place where fifty-three traditional tales deemed too irreverent to perform during wartime had been buried. Standing with her back to the stone, she scans
the surrounding area. The bigger ruins off to the left must be what’s left of Senkō-ji, the Buddhist temple.
No wonder she hadn’t recognized it. The imposing wooden sanctuary is gone, reduced to a mountain of charred timber. Only the plaster-walled treasure house still stands. Figures are moving in and out of the roofless shell, so she heads that way. The priests look like refugees too, in their grimy, burn-spotted clothing, handkerchiefs tied around their noses and mouths to filter the stench beginning to rise from the surrounding rubble.
She pulls up her own kerchief and offers to help dig out the valuables buried when the temple’s roof collapsed. They’re being moved to the treasure house as they surface, making them marginally safer from looters, if not the weather.
She isn’t just being neighborly. Priests are the first to hear who needs a funeral and she might learn who else from the neighborhood has survived. Every soul from Kappabashi will have to pass through Senkō-ji on its way to the afterlife, and she’s told that requests for services are already flooding in. In the days to come, the priests will be chanting sutras day and night.
At noon, she excuses herself and thanks the young priest who refills her water jar from the temple’s rain barrel. Making sure the lid is tight, she stows it in her carrying cloth, along with the borrowed spade and the plain rice ball she brought for lunch. Water is a welcome bonus for her few hours’ work at the temple—it’s become more precious than gold in the wake of the attack. Percussion bombs were dropped just before the wave of incendiaries, shattering the water pipes and blocking streets with toppled buildings, so the fire brigades were unable to fight the flames when the bombs fell. In one night, a quarter of Tokyo had been blasted back to the age when water vendors hauled buckets through the streets.
She reties her kerchief and turns her back on the treasure house. Shading her eyes, she gazes toward distant buildings never visible from the temple before. Tiny figures move on the banks of the river that traverses the burnt-out landscape, its water so befouled by the countless bodies still being pulled from its icy grip that it’s dangerous to drink from. Of course, the desperate still do. Before she returns to the refugee barracks tonight, she will detour to its banks, asking again for news of her grandfather and brother.
She knows that the bridge their volunteer fire detail was assigned to protect had been consumed in a roar of flames, as bombers targeted points clogged by panicked citizens trying to escape the inferno closing in from all sides. She’d spent the first week after the disaster frantically roaming the riverbank, asking anyone and everyone if they had seen her brother and grandfather. She hadn’t given up, even after discovering that nearly all of those who hadn’t burned to death had drowned. At first, as she watched bodies being hauled from the water with long poles and stacked like cordwood on its banks, she stubbornly clung to the hope that her family would be among the lucky ones whose members had merely gotten separated in the chaos. But as week one turned into week two, and sad shakes of the head were the only answer she got to her questions, she began to accept they were never coming home. Unlike her mother, she’s given up hope of finding them alive. Now all she wants is something—anything—to chant the sutras over, because that would at least spare her mother from being haunted by their untethered spirits.
But today’s main mission is to find what’s left of their shop. Setting off in the general direction of where it once stood, she spots a few scattered residents in the distance, sifting through the ashes. Thin sounds of weeping suggest that what they’re uncovering is worse than they expected, but she’s holding onto the hope she’ll find something worth salvaging. Unlike chopsticks and lacquerware, pottery doesn’t burn. If their building didn’t take a direct hit, there might be enough dishes left unbroken amid the ashes to start anew.
She thinks she’s prepared herself for the worst, but it’s still shocking to discover the heavily charred signboard that has been reduced to the “O” of Okuda & Sons. It sits atop a heap of cracked tiles and burnt wood—all that remains of where her family had lived and worked for generations.
She clenches her jaw. Don’t cry. She knew the building would be gone. Everything in it would be gone. There would be nothing left of their house, their belongings, or the street where they lived.
But she’s wrong. Nearly every shovelful holds a memory, and that’s far worse. A short unburnt length of doorframe, pencil lines still marking how much she and her brother had grown each year. A broken triangle of the rice bowl she’d eaten from since she was a baby. Pretend they’re not ours, she tells herself fiercely. Pretend they belong to someone else. But by the time she drags a charred futon off to the side and spies a smiling red fish gleaming at her from the rubble beneath, her throat is so tight that all she can do is hastily scuff ash back over it and walk away. Eyes stinging, shovel in hand, she stalks to a spot closer to the street. Dig, toss, dig, toss.
But the more she ignores what’s back there, the more she can’t ignore it. She throws down the spade and returns to the ashy grave of the cheerful Ebisu god whose porcelain belly she had rubbed on her way to school every morning. All that survives is one arm wrapped around the red fish of good fortune.
Even the god of luck has run out ofluck. A sob escapes as she drops to her knees, hunching over what’s left of the once-cheerful figure, bitterly homesick for the everyday life she hadn’t appreciated until it was gone. She weeps, envying the Chiyo who thought squid for dinner was the worst thing that could happen to her. The Chiyo whose greatest chore was scrubbing the front steps. Now she’d give anything to have those front steps back, to look out the kitchen window on the life that had disappeared and would never be the same again.
The sun continues across the sky, and presently her tears dry and her breathing calms. She’s lost more in the past week than in all of her thirteen years, but each shock is armoring her a little more against the next one. Her bouts of grief are becoming shorter, even as her mother’s are getting longer.
She dusts the ash from her hands. Rises wearily to her feet. If they’re going to have any future at all, someone will have to make it happen. Her brother and grandfather are missing, and her mother is drowning in a sea of grief, so she’s the only Okuda left standing. With a final sniff, she wipes her face on her kimono sleeve, wraps what’s left of the God of Prosperity in her last unburnt handkerchief, and buries it in the blackened wasteland that used to be their garden.
Then she gets back to work. By late afternoon, her arms ache and there are blisters across both palms. She stops to take stock of her progress. She has cleared enough rubble to reach the layer of broken pottery, but so far, unbroken dishes have been few and far between.
The shadows are lengthening and the temperature dropping. If she wants to make it to the river before the rescue workers go home, she’ll have to get there before sunset. Piling her meager finds onto her spare carrying cloth, she knots it around them. She’ll clean these up and sell them at the unofficial market near Ueno Station. That might keep them in rice long enough for her to dig up the rest.
She knocks the ash from the spade and shoulders it, then wearily sets out toward the river to ask after her grandfather and brother. Tomorrow she’ll return, and dig some more.
35.
Present-Day Japan
FRIDAY, APRIL 4
Tokyo
Standing at her grandmother’s bedside, Nori aims her words at the too-serene face.
“The police were here, ’Baa-chan. Of course, you already know that.”
The monitors beep. Her grandmother doesn’t stir.
“Did you know Hikitoru was stolen, back in 1945? I saw a copy of the police report. After Senkō-ji burned in the firebombing, it was stolen from their treasure house.”
No response.
“How did it end up hidden under our tokonoma, ’Baa-chan?”
Nori studies her face, but isn’t rewarded by so much as a twitch. Frustrated, she turns to the window and parts the curtains. It makes no sense. Where had someone
in her family gotten a fancy tea bowl? Their shop doesn’t sell tea bowls. They’ve never sold tea bowls. None of their customers are the kind of people who fuss around with tea ceremonies. What would possess someone in the Okuda family to buy something like that, when they didn’t have two yen to rub together?
Unless . . . they hadn’t bought it.
That lone remaining bundle under the tokonoma. The stack of workman’s clothing that’s not the least bit valuable. Dark clothing, made for a man. There’s more than one reason for hiding something.
Who had the clothes belonged to? ’Baa-chan’s grandfather had died in the same firebombing that destroyed Senkō-ji, and her father never came home from the war. That left—
She whirls to face her grandmother.
“You had an older brother, didn’t you, ’Baa-chan?”
She leans over the bed, watching her grandmother’s face.
“You never told me much about him, just that he was too old to be sent to the countryside with the schoolchildren, but too young to be drafted, so I know he didn’t die in the war. He was still alive in 1945, wasn’t he?”
No response. But Nori doesn’t need one. If ’Baa-chan’s older brother had become a shameful blot on the family register, that explains why she always changes the subject when Nori asks about him.
Times were hard—she’d heard plenty about that —and the Okudas had lost everything but the clothes on their backs in the firebombing. Her grandmother had only been thirteen when the war ended, but to hear ’Baa-chan tell it, she’d saved the family all by herself. She’d been the one who scrabbled and scraped and worked like a demon to pull together the means to start over.
But if that were true, she must have been an unbelievably industrious teenager or incredibly lucky, because a year after the bombing raid that flattened everything in northeast Tokyo, the Okuda store had been up and running again. It was one of the first shops on the block to reopen.
The Last Tea Bowl Thief Page 18