The Teahouse Fire Page 5

  They each took one of my wrists and began to talk rapidly, arguing, as they marched me down the path. I panicked, stumbling on my shoelaces as their voices rose like tumbling gravel. Three, three, I understood, and today, and doll, and the two words—completely different—for your father and my father. I saw a blur of other gardens and more stone pathways, glimpsed the thatch and lattice of other little houses, tripped on cobbles underfoot. Today someone’s father was going to chop me into three pieces and make my bones into dolls. It made sense: I was seeing exquisite dollhouses for child monsters; the square hole in the floor was a well for blood. They steered me toward a larger building and their voices got softer, if no less vehement. Kekkon, the older woman rasped, which I was to learn means marry. And I heard the younger woman whisper a word: Baishian.

  They led me into a dark doorway and dropped me on a wooden step between a stone-floored room and a tatami one. One unlaced shoe fell off my foot and the older woman tugged at the other. “Stop it, you’re hurting me,” I protested in French. “This one’s tied!” She dropped my foot, startled by my voice, and the two of them stood, watching—curiously, I realized—as I unlaced my other boot. Hoping to catch them at a moment when they seemed least likely to chop me into pieces, I made overdue use of the longest Japanese sentence I’d learned: “Excuse me, please, where is the toilet?”

  The older woman gasped, then shrieked, setting off a gale of laughter from the younger woman. They tried to laugh quietly, the young woman covering her mouth, the older woman silently throwing back her head, cheeks jiggling. The young woman, eyes beginning to tear, took me by the hand and led me by my stocking feet to a closet where I could put on a pair of toilet sandals and crouch, relieved, over a hole in a polished board (had I just spent the night in a very elegant outhouse?), then sprinkle my hand with a dipperful of water from a clay jar. I was no longer terrified; I was humiliated, which was worse, hearing the nearby giggle of the young woman and the farther chortle of the older one outside the door. The squat wooden room was very clean, and I wanted to stay there until they stopped laughing at me, but a faint, needling odor pushed me out again—minus the toilet sandals—to the young woman, who led me back toward the stone-floored room, where I stepped down again into a different pair of sandals. The older woman looked at me and started laughing again. Excuse me, please, where is the toilet? she asked. Was it how I asked, or just the fact of me?

  “Now,” the older woman said in Japanese, crouching to fix me with her small eyes, “your father?”

  “None,” I said, as far as I knew.

  The woman blanched a little, and persisted. “Your mother?”

  Now I flinched. I didn’t want to say it. “None,” I repeated. The two women glanced at each other. I felt queerly translucent. Saying the thing for the first time made it more real, but saying it in this language abstracted it from me, as if the moment were happening to someone else.

  “Family?” asked the younger woman.

  “None,” I said, slowly blinking my eyes to push the fire away.

  The women looked at each other again and, speaking, seemed to agree on one thing. They spoke to me in Japanese, quickly and slowly, the older woman’s black teeth and the young woman’s white ones clearly visible, but all I could understand was the word arau, wash. I watched them hopefully, but no sense emerged, and then the older woman started fingering my dress and the young woman brought wet cloths. I didn’t understand what the older woman wanted with my clothing, but it became clear that my buttons were wholly foreign to her when she brought over a pair of Japanese scissors—butterfly handles and tiny blades—and I stopped her before she could cut the dress off me.

  It was one thing to stand in my dress from New York while they stood in their kimono—my body squarely in my world, theirs in theirs—and it was another to unbutton my dress in the dim room and let the older woman sponge me clean. I felt so very naked.

  “Kusai kusai kusai!” cried the older woman. It’s true: I reeked. Something about the water mixing with the smoke in my skin made me smell even worse than before. She wet a small cloth bag filled, I later learned, with rice bran, kneaded it to make suds, and worked briskly and thoroughly, rubbing between my fingers, behind my ears, even into my hair. The cloth bag was rough and cold, and its attentions alternated with buckets of cold water. The stone floor sloped toward the doorway and formed a gutter, draining water, suds, smoke, fire, Uncle Charles, ocean, and Mott Street away as I shivered, arms wrapped around my chest.

  My teeth chattered as the older woman dried me off. We were in a kitchen: I saw a covered well, a wall of cookstoves, a row of jars. On a shelf in the corner stood the only photograph I had seen since my arrival, of a young Japanese man in a black kimono jacket, a severe expression on his baby face. I blinked, surprised by the Roman letters stamped on the bottom edge of the daguerreotype—PERKINS STUDIOS, YOKOHAMA—and looked up at the older woman curiously.

  “My son,” she said loudly and clearly. “Little Nao.” His name sounded like the English word now.

  The young woman reemerged with her arms full of bright silk: a child’s kimono! She wrapped a white underdress around me, then tied the kimono with a wide obi sash and looked at me, pleased. Then she tugged white socks onto my feet: my big toe sank into a separate sleeve from the other four, which made sense when she slid my feet into little red wooden sandals: I could grip the thong between my toes.

  Pretty, pretty, I understood them saying: so many beautiful colors, and so many shapes! Fans, flowers, ribbons, bridges, ocean waves, treasure boxes, fat babies—it made me a little dizzy. “Pretty!” I echoed, floundering in my uncomfortable new getup. They laughed again, occasionally hushing each other, and the older woman made me copy her walk, a pigeon-toed shuffle that kept her robe from flopping open and her shoes from falling off. Barely containing their laughter, the two women froze when a human shadow paused at a window, relaxing when it vanished. The older woman tucked a paper handkerchief into the neck of my kimono, slapped something from a pot into a bowl, poured green tea over it, and stirred. Then the women sat on either side of me, on the step between the stone kitchen and tatami house. I was so hungry. If they had poisoned the soupy bowl of rice, barley, pickles, and tea I drank, I hardly cared.

  ONCE AGAIN I CROUCHED at the low square door of the tiny house, only this time I was on the outside, looking in at the young woman as she had looked in at me. Her rose-pink kimono bound by a golden obi, she knelt quietly, sitting on her feet, her hands in her lap, her back very straight. Her painted eyebrows arched black and high. Her long face and swept-up hair made her look severe, like a face stamped on a coin. She glanced over at me and crossed her hands over her mouth: Quiet! The older woman stood beside me, a hand clamped on my arm.

  The room looked the same—two tatami mats on either side of a floorboard and a square hole—but dramatically altered. The alcove, which was to the right of the young woman and thus straight ahead as I looked in on her profile, was no longer vacant. Instead, the woman sat framed by green leaves and faint colors on the wall. On a hook on the raw-wood post that framed the alcove hung a clay vase from which willow branches cascaded, shining in the chilly wafer of sun that fell in from one of the little windows: a stained-glass waterfall of green-gold leaves. I saw a branch of pink buds in the vase as well. On the wall inside the alcove hung a scroll, bordered in brocade, with a picture of a Japanese doll, smooth and armless in her layers of kimono. Surrounded by color and light, the young woman could have been a princess in a painting.

  A sudden pop of wood: the young woman glanced over at us, alarmed, and the older woman pulled me away from the door. I pressed my face up to a bamboo-latticed window, and the older woman let me stay. I peered in at the empty mat opposite the fairy princess with her flowers and scroll. Directly to my left, I saw a modest paper door, which suddenly slid open a little. A hand knifed into the inch of empty space—the fingertips of a large blunt hand—and slid the door half open.

  Behind the door
, in a part of the little house I hadn’t even noticed, sat a man like a mountain, like the great north sentinel mountain I saw when I looked across the Kamo River. Silver-haired but hardy, with a round solid head and thick eyebrows, he looked at the young woman with an expression of utter tranquility. If rain had been pouring in through the ceiling, I thought, he would have sat as still. If the young woman had been pointing a pistol at him, he would have looked at her as calmly. He slid the door the rest of the way open, stood, and walked into the room, then knelt before the young woman, setting a large basket before her. He bowed to her, and she placed her hands in front of her knees and bowed back.

  Seated in the doorway, the man had looked like a priest or a king, and yet what he did was so humble. Was she a real princess, then, served by powerful men? A heathen priestess in a secret ritual? Was I a sacrifice? Steam rose from the hole in the floor; I clenched my fists, afraid, and the older woman clasped my shoulder all the harder.

  The Mountain bowed in the doorway, a clay jar at his side, and walked in, setting the jar on the tatami mat opposite the one where the Princess sat. He entered twice more, each movement precise, controlled, setting down first a clay bowl and a shiny round box, then—pausing to slide the door closed—a metal bowl with a bamboo dipper laid across it. He and the young woman knelt silently, facing each other across the floorboard and the steaming gap. The man quickly drew a short round piece of bamboo from the metal bowl and set it before him, then rested the dipper on it with a deliberate clap of wood on wood. He adjusted the metal bowl by his side, tugged smooth his robe, and paused, as if gathering strength.

  “Father!” The young woman’s voice startled me. Really? I could see it in their cheeks, a little.

  “Yes?” He asked, as if she hadn’t interrupted. Was it her birthday, that he was showing her such deference?

  The Princess placed her hands in front of her and bowed again, then spoke at length, first humbly, then bitterly, then seductively, never changing her position. The Mountain listened, impassive, his hands resting calmly on his knees. At one point he interrupted briefly, with a few short sentences that included a man’s name—a Mr. Akio—and the older woman’s grip on me tightened with surprise. The Princess gasped, then continued, unswayed. Both people were motionless, the woman’s body taut, the man’s relaxed. When she fell silent, he asked, “Is that so?” and her eyes flickered to the low door. The older woman took hold of both my shoulders. Me? My heart beat in terror as she pushed me into the little doorway, tugging off my sandals as I crawled in. I reached for my Saint Claire medal to steady me: it was gone.

  I was too upset to stand. Father and daughter stared at me, and I bowed where I sat; it seemed like the safe thing to do. I heard the Princess say, “No father, no mother,” and then they spoke back and forth, bird and thunder, and finally the Mountain asked me in Japanese, very clearly and slowly, “Where are you from?”

  I knew, in that moment, as I bowed in a silk kimono on a woven straw floor, that I was cheating the future I ought to have: that cold-fingered nun with her boiled dinners and her wooden ruler. I intended to cheat her as long as I could. If I said a word about New York, or my uncle, or the mission, or the fire, I was certain she would have me. I missed my Saint Claire medal, but I steeled myself. If I had lost it, then perhaps its very loss would protect me from the fate I feared. I had not been lying when the older woman asked about my family, but now I said, “Koko,” here. I’m from here.

  “But before, from Yezo?” he asked, naming the northernmost island of Japan. I had heard of it from the British captain of the Singapore: he said Yezo was peopled by a hairy tribe called the Ainu, more Russian than Asian.

  “From Miyako,” I insisted. At my side, the young woman tensed, as if to correct me, as if to demand, But what about your foreign dress? Why can’t you speak Japanese?

  “And before?” the man said.

  “I don’t know.”

  He did not believe me, but he did not quite know what to believe, it seemed. “What is your name?” he asked.

  “Urako,” I said, and I felt the young woman relax with pleasure.

  The Mountain looked at me, thinking quietly. “Un,” he said at length, a grunt that seemed to accept me. And then they spoke together again, back and forth, the young woman sounding, at last, forlorn: Older Brother, she said, and Mother. Her father relented, visibly, and said something with a sigh. The older woman still kneeling outside asked, “Me?” At the Mountain’s nod, she crowded into the house with us, offering apology and thanks in the same breath, hands clasped uncomfortably before her. I sat between the two women on the mat with the alcove, while the man sat across from us, offering a shallow bow. “I am Shin Sokan,” he said, “and this is Shin Yukako.” The young woman bowed in greeting. “And this is Chio,” he said, and the older woman bowed as well, never looking at the Mountain.

  “And this is Shin Urako,” said the young woman, Yukako, gesturing toward me.

  The older woman’s breath caught. Thinking quickly, I remembered the monks saying that the finer folk in Japan had family names, while their servants did not. The Mountain and the Princess, it seemed, had a family name, Shin, while Chio beside me did not. When Yukako asked if my name was Shin Urako, she was pushing her father to say what sort of person I was to be, and what my place was. In Chio’s caught breath I heard questions: Was I above her or below her? Was I a Shin?

  “Not Shin,” the Mountain admonished. But he bowed back, and said, “Miss Urako, welcome.” As Chio breathed again, I bowed deeply and thanked him, and thanked the young woman, and then thanked Chio. The other two laughed at me, as if it were silly to thank Chio, but the older woman gave me a benign nod, as if it were quite proper indeed. Yukako’s father smoothed his already-smooth robe and picked up where he had left off.

  I did not understand his slow movements, but I was drawn to the grace of them. He folded a silk scarf. He removed beautiful objects from his clay bowl. He reached into the steaming heart of the room and drew out—a flayed animal? A pumping heart? A metal pot-lid. Just as in my mother’s kitchen, a billow of steam burst up in its wake. And then I understood, finally, what I was seeing: the hole in the floor was a little firepit; there was a cauldron of water boiling on a charcoal fire. He lowered the bamboo dipper into the cauldron and drew it out, a ball of steam at the end of a stick, like the paper lanterns from the night before.

  I closed my eyes against the memory. Because I was safe, I began to sweat with fear as the red mouth of the fire opened over me: I remembered the stillness of Uncle Charles’s tumbled boots in the hot light, and then the screaming rafters and the flames, the falling roof tiles, the terrified horses.

  I opened my eyes and looked down at my particolored kimono. I was alive; I was lucky. I was so far from home. I felt the largeness of this world and the smallness of my life. I was a bubble in the ocean. I was a wisp of steam. I missed my mother so badly. Suspended in the Mountain’s slow gestures, in the gathered concentration pouring from the women flanking me, I felt like a tiny fleck of light on the skin of an orange, this earth. The little house, so lovely empty, was a stage, I understood, for this quiet dance.

  The Mountain and the Princess spoke, their voices drained of struggle. I looked at the rectangles of the tatami floor with its steaming sunken cauldron, the rectangles of the paper windows. The grids of window, walls, and floor framed the gentler shapes of natural things: the curved willow branches, the soft hills of our bodies. Yukako lifted the large basket before her and bowed. On a plate inside the basket stood a pyramid of pink, blossom-shaped cakes made, I was to learn, of dyed white beans and sugar: sweetness suspended in pure texture, rich and dense, the beans an even more self-effacing medium than cream. She drew a packet of paper from her kimono and laid it on the floor, then reached into the basket for a cake, which she set on her paper and ate. Then her father set the small bowl before her, and Yukako brought it to her lips.

  After we each ate and drank in turn, the Mountain tucked away his s
ilk cloth, solemnly gathered his tools, and bowed farewell, leaving the remaining three of us to make our exit through the tiny door. I did not know I was witnessing the ritual known in Japanese as Chanoyu, Hot Water for Tea; or Chado, The Way of Tea; or Ocha, simply, Tea. I did not know that the Shin family had been teaching tea ceremony to the most powerful men in Japan for three hundred years. I saw only the doll scroll and the willow branches. I tasted only the cool moist bean-cake and the hot green foaming tea, sweet mixing with bitter. I knew only that there was room in this small house for father and daughter, servant and foreigner alike.

  4

  1866

  TWO MONTHS AFTER YUKAKO took me in, the Mountain had the Emperor’s nephew to tea.

  Yukako’s father, I slowly learned, was the adopted patriarch of a merchant-caste family whose head had served for twelve generations as tea advisor to three of the Shogun’s underlords. The post, like that of the keeper of a castle wine cellar, made the Shins both the servants of their liege lords and the masters of a body of art. The previous head of the family, Gensai, had had seven children, six boys and a girl. Waves of cholera took all six of Gensai’s boys, then his wife, then Gensai himself. In his last days, Gensai adopted one of his apprentices, the Mountain, to marry his daughter Eiko, who died giving birth to Yukako, their second child. Their firstborn, Hiroshi, had died of cholera at sixteen.