The Teahouse Fire Page 6

  Yukako and her father, the last of their line, lived with a dozen-odd servants and eight young men who flocked around the Mountain like bats in their black silk robes: four students and four apprentices. The students were lords’ sons for whom a year or two of tea study was polish enough for them to make use of the teahouses and gardens they stood to inherit, while the apprentices were well-born and well-off boys who after long study hoped to hire themselves out to lords too busy to look after those same houses and gardens. As proud as the Mountain’s lineage, and as highborn his disciples, none of them had ever met anyone as nobly ranked as the Emperor’s nephew. A court favorite, the young man was known for his painting, poetry, and mastery of the Chinese classics, as well as for the esteem in which he was held by the Emperor and the fourteen-year-old Crown Prince.

  The August Nephew’s acceptance of the Mountain’s invitation had thrown the whole household into a pother of anticipation. Every place the imperial guest’s eye might fall was made new, every place his foot might touch. New tatami arrived, pale green and sharp-smelling, and the old mats were sent home with the sewing women as gifts: their fathers and husbands all gathered outside the kitchen one day to collect them, cloth sweatbands tied around their foreheads. The mats made up, somewhat, for the extra hours the women had to spend on the two dozen rolls of fabric that had arrived, each the precise amount of cloth allotted for one kimono, each in its own wooden box. Under the supervision of Chio’s husband, Matsu, the gardeners, students, and apprentices replastered the outside walls, re-thatched the front gate and the teahouses, and replaced the shoji paper in all the walls and windows.

  TWO OF THE MOUNTAIN’S apprentices were of merchant caste, a jovial, neckless fellow I called the Bear and an ill-starred creature I called the Stickboy: the first tea lesson I ever witnessed, a bowl broke of its own accord in the boy’s long nervous hands. The Mountain’s other two apprentices, like his one-year students, were samurai caste, young lords themselves, one of whom I could not help but call the Button, so pertly did his features seem dotted on his round brown face. The other was a compactly handsome young man named Akio. Though he was the best at lessons, with the blackest hair and quickest eyes, there was something about him I did not trust.

  Akio was engaged to Yukako, and would have married her already if he had not fallen ill. My first morning at the Shins’, the Mountain had informed Yukako of the match—when he said Mr. Akio and Chio clutched my shoulder in surprise—and that night I witnessed their Sighting, a formal meeting between marriage-minded parents and their eligible children. Chio let me spy with a serving tray in hand while Yukako sat before Akio and his father, Lord Ii of Hikone, a castle town north of Miyako, across broad Lake Biwa. Chio called him Lord Horse, because he was known for his stables, and from the way the old man sat at the Sighting—long-backed and crook-legged—I could picture him more comfortable in the saddle than the tearoom. Yukako knelt in a dark blue-green robe painted with white flowering branches, her eyes downcast throughout the meal she served. Once, however, as she poured rice wine, a lamplit drop fell to the tatami floor and her eyes met Akio’s: I saw naked curiosity leap between them.

  For two months after the Sighting, it was my task to bring Akio his meals in the Bent-Tree Annex, the tiny wing of the rambling Shin house that served as his sickroom. Each day when we heard a specific conjunction of iron clanks and lacquer taps from the kitchen, Yukako’s face would come alive. The sound meant that Chio, her kimono sleeves tied back, the folds of her chin wobbling as she lifted the iron pots from their sockets on the charcoal stove, had made up the lunches, stubby hands delicate as she tweezed food into bento boxes, swiftly and precisely assembling each mosaic of vegetables, pickles, and rice. After Chio left the kitchen with her tray of soup bowls and her stacked tower of student lunches, Yukako would furtively doctor Akio’s meal, imagining herself in his place as she held the black bento serving box. I once watched her gently remove the lid with a hollow lacquer pock-pock, set it aside, and look down at the spartan dishes: a scoop of rice, a little mound of spinach dressed in sesame sauce, a few cubes of sweet potato. Then I saw her smile slowly as she pictured him uncovering the cut of sparkling blue mackerel hidden under the heaped rice. And so those weeks I ferried petals of fatty tuna, whole peeled chestnuts, jeweled orange salmon eggs, and festive red beans to Akio’s sickroom, each purchased by Yukako on our morning errands and tucked into his sober student bento. I had specific instructions to inspect each empty box before returning it to Chio: I felt as if my sleeves were burning with the tiny strips of paper handkerchief I slipped into them almost daily, each folded delicately and tied into a knot. I can attest he ate every bite.

  YUKAKO TOOK MY NEED to learn Japanese as an opportunity to talk, repetitively and at length, about Akio, which in turn meant talking about her brother Hiroshi and Chio’s son Nao, the boy from Perkins Studios Yokohama. He may have been a servant’s child, but Nao was a year older than Hiroshi, thuggish and handsome where Yukako’s brother was spindly and awkward. One of the first phrases she taught me was that summer: she meant the summer she was twelve and Hiroshi fifteen, when their father took in Akio. Yukako’s brother had a kind of starstruck sweetness about him that made everyone he met want to shine, but until that summer, Nao had had no serious competition for Hiroshi’s idolatry: the Mountain’s students, all much older, had always come for a short year and left. Until then, Hiroshi had been the one to turn over his sweets and umbrella when no adults were present, and Nao had been the one to choose each game. That summer, however, Akio was just a year older than Nao, and there was talk of him staying longer as an apprentice.

  The three boys quickly became a tight unit, bound tighter by the rivalry that flourished between Nao and Akio. Nao knew all the good places for swimming; Akio had money to take them to the theater. (Yukako would have to take me to a play before I could understand the word for theater.) Akio had finer clothes, but Nao was stronger. Nao taught Hiroshi how to smoke a pipe; Akio kept him flushed with sake, a strong rice wine. Akio, a samurai, was allowed to carry swords, but Nao had learned how to make Roman candles. That summer, that summer, they took rice balls to the river and lit fire-flowers all night long. Hiroshi played his flute; Nao and Akio beat their legs for drums. Yukako trailed after them one night and watched them swim naked, piss in the river, light fireworks in their bare hands. Across the river they saw a riotous parade of men with torches, stripped to the waist and chanting. This was difficult to picture until I saw it myself: once a year each neighborhood entertained its local god by giving him a ride down the street on a golden palanquin. Drunk on sake, Nao and Akio picked up Hiroshi and ran him down the riverbank, whooping in the moonlight, their bodies bright as flares.

  Within a year, Akio had gone to Edo at his father’s behest, to serve the Shogun. Nao had run away from home, an act forbidden by law. And Hiroshi had died. When Akio came back, his cocky abandon ground into silence and quickness, he was one apprentice among four. Yukako said the night she found me, she’d gone to sleep in the teahouse knowing the Mountain had planned a Sighting with one of his apprentices’ fathers, but not knowing whose: in the face of having family chosen for her, that night she chose me for herself.

  ONE DAY, INSTEAD OF FOOD, Yukako sent me to Akio with a cracked flute made of speckled bamboo. It had been Hiroshi’s: for Akio, she had uncoiled the lonely weight of her brother’s loss into a rope that two could hold. I saw her the next morning with her father, grinding ink into his inkstone without remembering to add water, gazing daftly into the garden.

  A few nights later Yukako gasped when she unwrapped the contents of Akio’s empty bento. I gave her the package as we lay on her futon in the room we shared above the kitchen. The object was long and slender, the size of a pen: Akio had rolled it in one of his paper handkerchiefs and tied the package fast with red thread. Inside was a teascoop he had made from Hiroshi’s flute: I recognized the flecked bamboo. A short flat wand with a curved end for spooning tea, it was a beautiful objec
t, humble yet graceful, speckled, satiny, simple. How did the carver shape the bamboo curve? I wondered, asking Yukako, “How?” and crooking my finger.

  “By fire,” she said. She wrapped the teascoop tenderly in its paper again and tucked it into the hollow wooden base of her pillow where she kept Akio’s little tied notes. She hunched in a ball on the futon in her night kimono, head hidden in her arms, pale knees exposed. I touched her bath-hot back, circling the soft blue cotton with my palm. “Thank you,” she said. She was crying. I began to cry, too, and she stopped. “Your mother?” she asked, and I nodded. “I understand.” Folded close behind her, I listened to her heartbeat through her curled-up body, bent the way bamboo might bend in flame.

  I had begun learning Yukako’s family story in Baishian, the teahouse where she first found me. Though the Shins already had several rooms for tea ceremony, Yukako’s grandfather Gensai had talked of building a little freestanding house called Baishian: Plum Thread Hut. Sixteen years before my arrival, when a retired imperial prince, now dead, had agreed to come to tea, the Mountain had built a new teahouse for his visit, calling it Baishian in his adoptive father’s memory. When the death of Yukako’s mother rendered the Shin house impure, the prince’s tea was canceled, but the Mountain had never given up on his dream of expanding his network of allies by hosting a member of the Emperor’s line. So he had kept Baishian empty, save for small family events, like his tea with Yukako the morning after she found me. As children, Yukako and her brother had claimed the teahouse for themselves as a secret place to play. They once found a hidden room in the teahouse, she claimed, a spy hole for a bodyguard. “Show me?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. Her brother had never shown anyone else, and had made her promise the same.

  “Not even Akio or Nao?”

  “Not even Akio,” she assured me. “Not even Nao.”

  Though I pouted, I did not feel excluded. Just a few nights after I arrived, Yukako had led me silently to Baishian. She nested a sprig of tiny white blossoms called snow willow in a hole of her brother’s flute and hung it in the wood-floored alcove. Above it she hung another treasure, a scroll mounted by her grandfather: her mother Eiko’s first childhood attempt to write the family name, Shin, three splashes of ink undergirded by a single curved line. Yukako pointed to the crude fat brushstrokes—Mother’s—and the smoke-wisp lines beside them: Grandfather’s. My brother, she said. My mother, I replied, and nodded. (Have you seen my Saint Claire medal? I wanted to ask, but I could only touch my neck and say, Where?) We sat together sadly. When I embraced Yukako, she staggered, clearly startled, then woodenly patted my back. I pulled away, confused and embarrassed. I quickly realized that though she had folded around me in sleep, Yukako had never embraced me, just as I had seen parents carry their children affectionately, but never hug them. “I’m sorry,” I said. Yukako gamely circled her arms around my shoulders and gave me an experimental squeeze. Then she had me formally drink sake with her from three red lacquer saucers: I felt blessed and dizzy. In the teahouse that night, over giddy solemn sips of rice wine, she asked me to call her Older Sister when we were alone.

  TO EVERYONE ELSE, however, I was to be her servant. During the day, while she ran errands and made calls, I trailed behind as porter and chaperone: without taking off my clunky wooden shoes, I waited on benches in chilly cloakrooms floored with the same stone or earth as the street outside while she stepped up out of her fine leather clogs into the warm soft tatami rooms within. At night I went out for my bath with Chio and the others, while the fine students soaked in a tub of their own and Yukako soaked in water only her father had used. When their water was a few days old, Chio boiled it down and used the fluid left to polish the wooden verandas and corridors: thus every inch of the Mountain’s house was oiled with his skin.

  The servants’ public bathhouse made me anxious at first: there was a girl named Hazu who took an instant dislike to me when Chio made me give her candy I’d thought was mine. “But you gave it to me,” I whined.

  “To carry,” Chio snapped. She took me aside and scrubbed the scowl off my face. I handed over the sweets, but the damage was done: Hazu made faces and showed me the red of her eyelids. Even without bratty Hazu, it would not have been easy to sit naked in a room full of naked men and women who gaped, asking if I was one of the hairy Ainu of the far north. When Chio told them I was a foreigner, literally, an outside person, the others simply stared, until an old man in the tub, his jaw so long it almost jabbed into his throat—I was to recognize him eventually as the man who sold tofu door-to-door in the neighborhood—pronounced his verdict: “That’s no foreigner.” The rest agreed. (No one believed Yukako, either: after an embarrassing first attempt, she let them think as they liked.)

  “After all, we had never seen a real one before,” Chio told me some years later. “But we had seen pictures, and everyone knew foreigners were huge, piggy people with very long noses, very red hair, and very green eyes, so you obviously weren’t one. Clearly someone was playing a trick on us with that clothing.”

  “Well, then, what was I?”

  “We thought you might be from Yezo or perhaps you were the child of some girl in the water trade.” She meant a prostitute or a singing-girl. “Maybe when she was pregnant with you, your mother tried to let you go, but she had you anyway, and that’s why your face turned out like that. So sad. So when she couldn’t hide you in the house anymore, she bought some foreign clothes at a curio shop, dressed you up, and abandoned you, hoping some kind person would find you, the way those fishermen dragged up the statue of Kannon from the waters.”

  “They thought my mother was a prostitute but they didn’t think maybe my father was a foreigner?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous; even a whore wouldn’t sink so low. And besides, we all knew what foreigners looked like. You just looked a little deformed. We all knew foreigners couldn’t speak Japanese. You could; you just sounded like you’d been dropped on the head as a baby.”

  “Oh,” I said, wishing I hadn’t asked. “And did you believe them?”

  “Yes and no. I mean, you couldn’t even eat like a human being when we found you. But you’re the one who said you were from Miyako,” she sniffed.

  I didn’t understand what they said about me at the bathhouse. What I understood was the idea of “shade.” When Japanese people say you should find an important person to protect you, they say, Seek the shade of a big tree. When you receive a compliment, you should, if it makes even a little sense, reply by saying, Oh, it’s only thanks to you: literally, It’s thanks to your shade. And what I felt at first, balled up naked on the edge of the wooden tub with my arms around my knees, was “shaded” from the staring men and women by the bulk of Chio’s indulgence, her good humor, her occasional protective, if pitying, pats on the arm with a dripping warm hand, pruney from the bath. And if she felt at all afraid of their censure, she took shelter in the “shade” of the names she repeated: Young Mistress Shin Yukako, Master Teacher Shin. They had taken me in: who was she to turn me out?

  WHAT I LIKED most about our bathhouse trips—until I got used to the scalding water, which I loved most of all—was the walk home single file with our lanterns, carrying inside our bodies the heat of the bath. I loved the bobbing round globe of the lamp I held before me as we snaked by files of other bathers. When we passed the neighborhood shrine gate, I thought with wonder of the night Yukako found me, how I’d watched the net of lanterns crossing before me in the dark street. Now I was a part of that net. I’d glance at the neighborhood torii gate as we walked past, as if there might be another girl beneath it, large-eyed and uncertain. All I ever saw, deep in the back of the shrine, was a candlelit glint of gold.

  5

  1866

  USUALLY THERE WERE twenty minutes or so between when I came home from the servants’ bathhouse and when Yukako came upstairs from the family tub. One night, however, a week before the August Nephew’s visit, she came home much later.

  In those day
s my Older Sister and I each made a kind of religion out of our own attentiveness, mine to Yukako and hers—when it wasn’t fixed on Akio—to tea. I liked to pass the time before Yukako came upstairs at night by playing with her tea ceremony tools, trying to copy what I saw when we spied on the Mountain’s lessons. Tea was like church, boring and hypnotic, a tiny meal wreathed in solemnity. This was what adults did. Already Yukako was teaching me how to be a formal guest: how to enter, how to sit (painful!), how to use the packet of paper carried in the breastbone fold of my kimono, how to use the fan tucked into my sash. (Never use it to actually fan yourself, I learned: it’s a silent place-marker.) How to bow, how to receive sweets and tea and offer thanks: I humbly receive what you have made. Yukako didn’t use the words make tea when she talked about the whole choreographed ritual—the ceremony in what we call tea ceremony—she actually used a word that sounded like hand and before—te and mae, temae. I need to practice temae. His temae is a little stiff. It meant the next point, as on a list, or maybe procedure, but without the bureaucratic coldness that clings to the word in English.

  Just as there was a precise way to move through each stage of the temae as a host, there was a precise way to do each thing Yukako asked of me as a guest. I liked the way she reached her arms around mine to lift the sweet tray with me, just enough. I liked her sitting beside me, tea-papers in hand, folding a used sheet into eighths as I followed her in time. Just so. Everything I did mattered. I felt so seen. If the guest role was this hard to play, however, I feared that Yukako would never teach me how to play the host’s role and make tea.

  And so at night, when I had her room to myself, I would try to fold her red silk cleaning cloth into the tight pad she used for wiping the tea box, try to draw imaginary water from the jar with her same heron-like movements of the dipper. Recently, Yukako had been practicing a style of tea—a temae—that called for a little iron teapot instead of a dipper and a water jar; she carried in all her tools at once on a lacquer tray instead of making several trips in and out of the room. I liked this temae: the earnest little teapot, the way everything—even the tray—fit into a silk brocade bag, as if for an extravagant picnic. And it moved quickly, so I got my tea-candy sooner. The only thing I didn’t like was that Yukako sometimes tied the bag closed with an ornate knot, since it was only when she’d neglected to do so that I could finger the smooth red lacquer tea box, the rough black bowl, Akio’s speckled bamboo scoop.