by Ellis Avery
“Do what?” I squeaked. I knew she wouldn’t answer.
Over the next few mornings, always after the Mountain made his daily offering to the ancestors, always before he began to eat the meal Yukako set before him, I witnessed a series of strained, sidelong conversations between father and daughter. As I knelt in the doorway of the garden study, I heard the words dream and Kitano Shrine. I heard Kuga’s name. Did she say that Kuga would work for food alone? I could not understand the whole of what Yukako said, but I knew she was lying.
WHATEVER WORDS HAD PASSED between Yukako and her father, a week later Chio’s whey-faced daughter returned to wash and sew, sometimes with Yukako’s and my help, sometimes alone. It was painful to see Kuga without little Zoji, to know her son was working off a term of indenture to pay his father’s gambling debts. What had Lord Ii sold to pay for years of a boy’s life? A horse? Half a horse? Kuga was an anomaly, a grown-up girl cast off by her husband, now childless. She was ashamed of imposing on her parents when the Shins had so little, so she’d worked like a young unmarried girl at Sumie’s house until Yukako hired her back. Once again I trailed behind her back and forth to the bathhouse at night, and once again ate a silent evening meal with her and Chio and Matsu, feeling the sour weight of their disappointment.
The day after Kuga’s return, I followed Yukako, bulky boxes in my arms, to the narrow streets and high walls of the northern geisha quarter. When the dense greenery of the sacred grove came into sight, Yukako pointed. “Kitano Shrine. I told him I’m coming here every day to pray.”
“He believes you?”
“Mukashi mukashi,” she began, which is how Japanese fairy tales begin: Long, long ago… “I know you remember the picture in Koito’s alcove,” she prompted me.
“Your ancestor.”
“Rikyu. He favored a humble tea,” she said, using a word that also meant forlorn. “Tea in a straw hut. Nothing showy, not even flowers in the spring. Just a shoot of green through the snow was spring enough for him.” I was so happy; she was talking poetry and I could finally understand. “He was the tea master for the warlord Hideyoshi. They were very close for a time, and together they held the largest tea gathering the world has ever known, right here in these woods by Kitano Shrine. Then they drifted apart: Rikyu wanted a two-mat hut, Hideyoshi wanted a great tearoom made of gold. In the end, Hideyoshi required Rikyu to commit seppuku.” Ritual suicide? I knew about it from the games of the noisy little brothers at Sumie’s house. They were sober-faced young men now, but as children, between bouts of chasing their sisters and Miss Miki, the hairdressers’ daughter, they had gigglingly ordered one another to commit seppuku. “I die for honor!” the older one cried. “I die for honor and forbidden passion!” shouted the younger one, giving pretty Miki’s sleeve a tug. They’d mime slitting their bellies, then compose grim poems and die manfully on the veranda again and again, pushing their imaginary intestines back into their stomachs. I couldn’t imagine it really happening—and certainly not to anyone in Yukako’s family.
“And so I do pray here,” Yukako continued. “That Rikyu’s good fortune will befall us, and that his bad fortune will pass us by. Imagine this whole grove filled with tea people. It happened once,” she said. She gave me a coin to toss in the shrine box, and I set down my packages, pulled the bell-rope, bowed, clapped, and bowed behind her. Then I followed her into the geisha quarter.
You might as well give gold to a cat, it took so long for Japanese music to grow on me. I had grown up on Latin hymns and New York street music—the accordion, the fife and drum, the Irish fiddle—and my mother’s craggy French alto, her love songs and lullabies. These had not prepared me for the meowl, the twang, the start-and-stop of Japanese music. I sat in the packed-earth cloakroom at Koito’s as I did when Yukako practiced at home, alternately bored and grated upon, happiest when Inko appeared with tea and treats, a glint in her eye. “Your Young Mistress is good, huh?”
Japanese is fraught with little crises of etiquette: say yes and risk the rudeness of bragging about your own household, or say no and risk the rudeness of disloyalty? “She’s trying,” I offered.
“No, she’s quite good,” Inko insisted brashly. “I live here, I should know.” She vanished back into the house. Why had I been so careful? Wasn’t this the girl who called her own employer’s mother “the best dancer of her generation”? I liked her, I realized, her ready smile and funny close-set eyes. As the music screeched on, I wished I could hear what she heard.
When the shamisen lesson ended, I was summoned with my packages into the back depths of the house. Yukako opened the boxes and unwrapped tea utensils: a whisk, a tea bowl, a linen cloth, a bamboo scoop, a bronze bowl for catching waste water, a lacquer tea box and large round tray. Was she trading tea utensils for music lessons? I looked down at my lap, upset. She was lying to her father and stealing his things, and for what? Why not just sell the tea utensils outright? I took tiny comfort from the fact that these were her own tools, and not even her nice ones: it was the set she’d had me practice with until she could trust me with her good things. I looked over at Koito. Surely she could see that these weren’t treasures. Was Yukako underestimating her? Insulting her on purpose? The worry that had begun to creep up on me the night Yukako burned her kimono bared its teeth. “Miss Urako,” ukako said.
“Hai!” I jumped. Me? She’d called me Little Ura all these years: what had I done?
“Do you remember your temae?”
Of course I did.
“Here is the brazier, here is the kettle, here is the host’s door. Here are your sweets,” she said, pointing to a half-eaten tray of sembei crackers. “Take these into the kitchen and set them up.”
“Hai.” Was she going to do tea ceremony for Koito? I couldn’t imagine a more grudging way to go about it, I thought, eating a broken sembei cracker—crunchy, salty, encrusted with black sesame—and arranging the rest on the tray. I couldn’t understand what Yukako was doing. You were supposed to invite the guest to your home, ply the guest with your own sweets, set up the tea utensils with your own hands. I left the tray of sembei and the wastewater bowl outside the garden room door, then retreated to the kitchen with the rest of the utensils. The black lacquer tea box was round with a flatly domed top, mirror-smooth. I spooned in the powdered tea as Yukako had taught me, in the shape of a soft hill, with no lumps, no green dust on the shining walls of the box. Then I washed the tea bowl and sprinkled the tea whisk with water. The spokes of the whisk were fretted with black thread; I shaped the wet loose ends of the thread to a point like a man’s queue. I wet the linen cloth, folded it into a stylized swab, and set it inside the bowl, resting the tea whisk on the cloth and the teascoop across the rim. I placed the bowl and the tea box one behind the other on the tray and set the tray by the door as well. “Young Mistress, it’s ready,” I announced, bowing. Then I looked up. The shamisen cushions and little tea table had been tidied away into a corner so that the brazier and steaming kettle took pride of place. Koito sat opposite me, calm and expectant. She seemed unmoved with Yukako’s break with custom. Had she never seen a real Shin tea ceremony? Perhaps this was Yukako’s way of satisfying Koito’s curiosity while keeping the upper hand. After bowing, I half-rose to go back to the cloakroom and let Yukako take over, but then she spoke. “Use these,” ukako said, passing a fan to each of us. She was sitting on the mat off to the side of Koito, just beside the brazier. I gasped: She was in exactly the spot her father used when giving lessons.
Was I to do temae? The hair rose on the back of my neck as I set my fan before me and recited the phrase I’d heard the Mountain’s students use with him, the phrase she’d taught me to use before our play lessons in her room: “Sensei, please be kind to me.” ukako set a fan in front of herself and we bowed together. Then, as the Mountain’s students did for one another, I turned my fan, then my body, toward Koito and bowed to her as well. “Honored guest, please be kind to me.”
“No, bow back this way,” ukako directed
Koito. “Don’t sit like an entertainer.” My skin prickled. That was the word Akio had used when he told Yukako not to do temae. “If we’re going to do this, you need to forget all the temae you ever learned in Pontocho. This is real Shin temae. Your fan goes here. Say this.”
Koito bowed. “Thank you, Sensei.”
Yukako passed me a silk tea-cloth, the emblem of the host. “Now, Urako, tuck this into your sash and make tea for your kohai.” Her voice was a bright blade.
I backed my fan and my kneeling body out the door and flushed, finally understanding. Koito had asked Yukako to teach her Shin temae. Yukako wasn’t stealing her father’s tea things, she was stealing his art, his role, the very thing he and Akio had denied her. Her back was long and alert as she knelt on the teacher’s mat; I saw in its firm line all her years behind the lattice during lessons, permitted to observe, but not to practice, the tossing nights after Akio said no wife of his would do temae, all the lonely secret lessons in her room with me, like a girl with her doll, her shock in Koito’s parlor and her hissed yes by the river. This was the bright blade in her voice: she would practice tea, she would teach it, she would be her father’s son and not wait to marry him, and if this life offered only her old rival to stamp her will on, then stamp she would. I heard the pleasure she took in calling Koito my kohai, my junior, my lesser-in-rank. Though an entertainer, Koito was the oldest, most beautiful among us, and she had what Yukako wanted: the means to support herself. But in this room Yukako had blown a small bubble-world where the woman she hated was the meanest among us. Now I saw: my dazzling older sister knew exactly what she was doing. My hands shook as I folded the silk cloth into my waistband.
I brought in the sweets, then the utensils on their tray, then the wastewater bowl. I wiped the tea box and scoop with the silk scarf, poured water in the tea bowl, swished the whisk in the water, and poured the used water away, wiping the bowl with the linen cloth. I added powdered tea, offered Koito her sembei, and whisked hot water and green tea together into a foamy brew. After the geisha ate and drank, I formally restored the utensils to order and carried them away.
I had done this temae so many times that Yukako did not correct me but focused on her other charge instead. “No, like this, like this.” hen she’d spoken to Koito before, she’d used polite though not obsequious language, but as soon as Koito bowed to her as sensei, she began using the short, imperious verbs she used with me and Chio. Chaimasu, a polite way of saying It’s different—though I rarely heard Yukako disagree outright even politely with anyone but me—became Chau: You’re wrong. “Raise the sweet tray in thanks and set it down, then set your paper pad before you—wrong!—fold-side toward you—touch the tray with your left hand—wrong!—palm up—and take your sembei with the right hand and set it on the paper—wrong!—first move the tray to the right—wrong!—with both hands—”
Koito took Yukako’s critiques with good humor, and even eagerness. I understood. Though she’d spoken with more affection, Yukako had been just as stern with me, just as precise, and I had loved how carefully she’d watched me. Temae, though mysteriously affecting, was not mysterious: each gesture took clear shape in the light of her attention. That day in Koito’s garden room, not being critiqued, for the first time I felt while performing temae something of the solemnity and grace that I felt watching it. I felt the austere precision of the choreography, and my voluptuous surrender to it. I felt the desire to give something precious, this bowl of tea. I felt this one moment in all the world, three women in a room, doors thrown back to the bright day, the drunk bees in the purple flowers. I felt the alchemy of food made flesh. We were candles that burned on rice and salt. These ground green leaves came from earth, water, light, and air, and so did my guest’s drinking body. And I myself was a leaf adrift, my own body borne down a river of temae. I felt my mind both river and leaf at once.
After I cleared everything away, I was allowed to stay and watch while Yukako walked Koito through the very first thing she’d taught me: how to fold the host’s silk cloth from a large square napkin into the tight pad used for wiping the tea box. Of course there was only one way to do it. Patient and severe, Yukako broke the fluid motion down into twelve separate steps, demanding, as her father had demanded of his students and she had demanded of me, that Koito pay strict attention to the position of her back, head, limbs, and fingers. “Here. Here. Like so. Wrong!” he said, striking Koito’s fingers with the flat rib of her folded fan. I was the daughter of a charwoman, trained by a missionary; Koito was the daughter of a dancer, trained by musicians: she learned so much more quickly than I had. She had already studied temae before, I consoled myself; she knew the style they learned in the geisha quarter. Still, as Yukako hectored and pushed, I felt envy as I watched Koito’s body remember what it learned. When Koito could fold the silk cloth perfectly three times, Yukako grunted approval, just like the Mountain. “Un. That’s enough for today.”
“Tomorrow, then?”
“Very well.”
Koito and I bowed the ritual end to the lesson, and then Yukako switched back to using polite longer verbs. “May I leave my shamisen here?”
“You don’t plan to practice at home?” Koito chastised, a student no longer.
“I have another,” ukako said curtly.
“Oh, how could I forget? You don’t want your father to see,” said Koito, baiting her.
“Well, would you?” Yukako sniped. “Or do you even know who your father is?”
Smiling, Koito replied, “I would advise you not to presume.” Or something in that vein. As she became more nastily indirect, I understood less. Four years before, I remembered, she had used the very long verbs of a flatterer or servant, but now, I realized, she spoke only just as politely as Yukako did. When had she shifted? Oh: when Yukako asked for help.
“Perhaps we should keep conversation to the lesson at hand,” said Yukako.
“We stand to gain so much from one another,” Koito agreed. “Of course you can leave it here,” she added. “It’s not bad. It has a nice sound, considering the quality.”
Yukako’s hand clenched around her fan. Too bad her hour as a teacher had come and gone: I knew she wanted to give those pretty little fingers another smack. She held herself in check, and bowed. “Thank you, Sensei.”
I’d felt so close to them not long before, and now I just wanted to leave. I was surprised that Inko even came to the door to bow us out, let alone smiled at me.
IN THE YEAR THAT FOLLOWED, as Western canes and bowler hats began to appear in the market crowds, the Mountain’s fortunes slowly improved. He acquired a merchant patron, the portly new head of the Okura household, heir to a shipping fortune. The Emperor had seen no need to outlaw tea, assuming that without his support the traditional “pastimes” would die a natural death. He had not anticipated the way that those who had been denied the trappings of aristocracy during the Shogun’s time would claim them now that they could: for a merchant like Okura Chugo to buy the services of a feudal lord’s tea master was to declare himself that lord’s equal at last. Following Okura’s lead, other merchants began to seek out the Mountain, and in the spring of Meiji Four we had students in the Long Room again: three merchants’ sons, including the Stickboy and the Bear. By then Koito had long since surpassed me as a student of tea, and Yukako, a quick learner herself, had been accompanying Koito on her music lessons for months. To conceal Yukako’s identity as the tea master’s daughter—and to conceal Koito’s identity as a geisha—they posed as teacher and student from Tokyo, with Yukako as teacher and Koito as student. When the young pupils were ready, Koito told the mothers of the fine houses we called on, they would begin work with “Migawa Yuko” herself.
My only moment of alarm when Yukako worked as Migawa-sensei was one day when I spotted Miss Miki, the hairdressers’ daughter, walking out of a comb shop in the geisha district. Yukako and Koito had already turned the corner, but Inko noticed me gasp. “You know Miss Miki?” she asked as Miki crossed the
street in front of us, unseeing.
“Why? Is her mother your hairdresser too?”
“Oh, no,” Inko said, as my heart thudded with relief. “They just shop there all the time.”
KOITO PROPOSED WORKING incognito soon after she and Yukako began exchanging lessons. Yukako’s need for discretion was evident, but when Koito mentioned her own, Yukako gave her a superior glance. “Beg pardon?” she said snidely, just to hear Koito repeat herself.
“If it were to circulate that a woman of a certain profession with a reputation for making money made in fact so little money that she had to find a second source of income…” oito trailed off. I didn’t quite understand her, but it was something like this, only more so.
“What a shame,” said Yukako, almost sincerely.
“Listen,” sighed Koito. Though geisha were dancers and musicians, not prostitutes, they were enough in that world that Yukako had just offered an insult that bordered on obscenity. “My mother is sick and in debt. When she dies this house won’t be mine; Madam Suisho next door will take it over as payment. I have no tree to shade me, Sensei. I’m sorry I hurt you, with the young lord. But don’t you see? It could have been any of us. I was a bought thing, I was a toy. And then I lost my heart a little. I waited for him to say ‘I’ll marry you,’ and he never did. Do you understand?”
Usually Koito seemed all of a piece, as if the exquisite cascade of silk she wore simply clung to her like water, but for a moment she looked like what she was, a worried young woman who happened to be wrapped in brocade. Yukako couldn’t meet her eyes. “I’ll stop, Sensei,” she said. “I’m sorry.” When Koito performed temae, Yukako was as finicky as ever with her corrections, but her “Wrong!” fell without venom. When she lit incense before the sober-faced goddess of compassion at the temple that afternoon, I heard Koito’s name in her prayers.
