The Teahouse Fire

by Ellis Avery

  ENTERPRISING HAIRDRESSERS like Miss Miki’s father continued to see good times as more and more men wore their hair Western-style, such that by the time the boys were twelve and thirteen, Jiro’s topknot put him in the almost eccentric minority. Listening for news of Miki’s cousin—fruitlessly hoping she’d returned to Tokyo so I could hear from Inko—I learned instead that her father did so well for himself that he let Miki buy a camera, cumbersome and fragile, for her child-husband, our Zoji, who began teaching himself how to make portraits. He was popular, as the streets were full of people eager to show off: men in kimono and bowler hats, kimono and leather shoes, kimono and Western umbrellas—called “bat” umbrellas in Japanese for their blackness and their curved struts—kimono jackets and wooden sandals worn with Western trousers, here and there a man dressed head to toe in a Western suit, while the blocks sang with the squeaky-leather sound of progress: everyone, even the gardener Bozu, was doctoring their Western shoes to make them noisier.

  Though shaved brows and blackened teeth were dramatically in the minority, women’s clothing changed less than men’s, noted Hazu and her bathhouse friends, among them Chio’s niece Miss Ryu, who’d left us to marry a thread-winder’s son. High-collar families aside—only two kinds of Japanese women wore full Western dress: “sheep,” or mistresses of white men (who walked, the bathhouse girls whispered, side by side with their women! Opened their doors! Helped them into jinrikisha!), and teachers, of whom there were a visible few.

  Most noticeable of all were the teachers employed by Advisor Kato’s two American ladies, whose brick school for young women lay between us and the Palace wall. The ladies’ names were Sutoku-sensei, Miss Starkweather, the big rawboned woman indeed shaped like a stalk of corn or a sunflower stem, and Pamari-sensei, Miss Parmalee, who unfortunately resembled the nervous Pomeranian she carried everywhere in a little lidded basket. In halting Japanese they exhorted anyone they stopped on the street to come to church, and a good few of the young men went, the better to look at the teachers.

  Miss Starkweather and Miss Parmalee had hired a handful of English-speaking Japanese women as teachers, and had the young women wear their own mended castoffs until they could get dresses made to fit by a tailor from Kobe. How ungainly those Japanese girls seemed at first, with their unfamiliar silhouettes, their corseted waists and bustles and protruding bosoms, their tight sleeves and showy hats. And so many buttons! On the other side of the bathhouse wall, we heard a carpenter’s son announce that the teachers wore fourteen buttons down the bodice alone.

  Just a handful of students attended the Christian Ladies’ School at first, though more came with time, and I would stare at the girls as they walked up the street in pairs and threes. In less than ten years, their numbers swelled to two hundred. Like the rest of hopeful young Kyoto, they wore what Western clothes they could: leather shoes here and there, often gold crosses. A girl might carry a frilly French parasol instead of the round oiled-paper one she’d grown up with, or a kimono sleeve might lift to expose the ruffle of a Western blouse-cuff underneath. You’d see a sprinkling of hats decked with fruit or flowers, and here or there an entire Western dress on a girl from a very well-connected family. However, with time they all began wearing their hair like the wife of their school’s patron, who was none other than Yukako’s first Christian student, Lady Kato. Her soft, unoiled Gibson Girlesque pompadour was called a sokuhatsu, a word evoking the eaves of a broad roof, for it sheltered the face with “eaves” of hair swelling from a central topknot.

  One Western article of dress that enjoyed faddish pride of place in those years, worn by both men and women over kimono and suit alike, was a plaid wool shawl called an ami, or net, because the crosshatched pattern looked like the mesh of a fishing net. Advisor Kato, the man responsible for getting the new army into Western-style uniforms so soon after Meiji’s revolution, left his touch on the Christian Ladies’ School in a way even more visible than his money by requiring each student, no matter the welter of familiar and Western clothes worn underneath, to wear an ami shawl over her shoulders at school: gauze in summer, wool in winter. Though almost all the girls wore kimono, together they made an incontrovertibly modern picture, walking up the street to school, brisk and breezy in their plaids and wisping hair.

  We knew none of these students well, probably because Jiro lobbied so hard among his own contacts to foil Advisor Kato, both because he disliked the man and because he was averse to Kato’s latest pet project. Won over by the success of the Asaka Canal in Tokyo, Kato talked about canals with a convert’s zeal, taking advantage of his position as Imperial Advisor to promote his brainchild. In spring, when he introduced the public dances of the geisha; in summer, when he opened the Gion Festival procession; in fall, addressing the crowds gathered to see the maples at their peak, he announced his dream: a canal from Lake Biwa into the city. We’d have cleaner drinking water, which would fight disease; our little canals and streams would flow high all year round, which would fight fire; we’d have a clear and taxable waterway all the way from Osaka to the cheap rice of Hikone, which would fight poverty. Kato had a Dutch waterworks team agree it was feasible. He had an award-winning young engineer from Tokyo with plans in hand. He had most of the money lined up from the Meiji government. All he needed, we heard ceaselessly, was the support of Kyoto’s merchant community. Though Hikone types like Mr. Noda, the greasy rice merchant who wore his netsuke fob on a Western watch chain, were eager for the canal to be dug, Jiro’s merchant friends, suspicious, gave Kato and his engineer Tanabe as wide a berth as possible in their tiny social world, promising to consider his request and waiting to see what their fellows would do. Thus, the Christian Ladies’ School taught mostly daughters of Meiji officials, like Advisor Kato himself; the merchants were more likely to hire Starkweather and Parmalee’s teachers as tutors than send their girls to the Americans’ school.

  For example, the silk merchant Shige, whom I’d first thought of as the Bear when he and Jiro were both the Mountain’s students, had a piano teacher from the Ladies’ School come and teach his girls, but he went out of his way to ask if Yukako could teach tea to his wife. Over the years we observed a number of women teachers going in and out of the Shige house, and Yukako’s attention was drawn by their full Western regalia: French and English teachers had worn Western dress from the first, but now Japanese music and dance teachers were also dressing in Western style. Chio, graying but strong as ever, was startled to learn at the bathhouse just how much more the Japanese women in Western clothes were paid than Yukako, and just how much more the English and French teachers were paid than all the rest.

  It was a spring morning in Meiji Eighteen when I passed this information on to Yukako, the month we brought Tai to the temple to pray for wisdom in his thirteenth year, while Jiro was in Tokyo making his tea offering to the Emperor. Yukako frowned over her accounts as she listened, but I knew I had her full attention by the way she held the loaded brush over the grinding stone to catch wet ink as she thought. “How interesting,” she said.

  21

  1885

  A WEEK AFTER LEARNING Chio’s news, when we went with the boys to the spring temple plays, Yukako slipped away home without us, complaining of stomach pain. That night she gave me a smug look and said, “When we teach at Shige’s house tomorrow, wear the Western dress you made for the Expo.”

  The next morning, as I waited at the gate for Yukako, exposed and ungainly in my grown-up-child’s dress, I saw a white lady with a parasol leave our house. A missionary, no less, from the clipped-gait S-curve look of it. I halted, afraid. No time had passed; I was a stray cat hiding from nuns.

  The way she walked, was the lady ill? Drunk? She lowered her parasol: it was Yukako. “I think it fits well, don’t you?”

  “What happened?”

  Yukako smiled triumphantly in her Western clothes and Japanese coiffure. “I bought it from that engineer Tanabe’s sister. She teaches at the Ladies’ School; she’s just my size.”


  “When did this happen?” I asked, flabbergasted.

  “Yesterday, when you and the boys were at the play.”

  I blinked. “You just walked up to her and bought it off her back?”

  “Not the one she was wearing, her other one. Western fashion changes every season, can you imagine? Now Miss Tanabe can buy a new one. What do you think?”

  “Well…”

  “I did give her a lot of money. But I’ll make it all up fast, if I play my students right.”

  “Come back inside with me; I think some of those hooks are on wrong,” I said. In the cloakroom, I laced and tugged until she looked a little less queer, incredulous that she’d gone and had this adventure without me. She looked more than a little foolish, truth be told, a pencil-shaped woman in an hourglass dress. But more strikingly, she looked like someone else. “I would have helped you carry it home,” I said, my tongue thick in my mouth as we went outside again.

  “I wish you had,” she admitted. “I felt so conspicuous, walking home by myself with that big box. I wore her plaid shawl so people would need to look twice to know it was me.” ukako, pigeon-toed in her leather shoes, kept looking back at her bustle with surprise and distrust. As best she could, she watched herself walk up and down the stone path. She looked like a man in a dress. “It’s a bit tight, no?” she asked gaily, laughing at the picture she made. And then her laughter died mid-breath.

  I turned to see what had caught her eye: a man at the gate. He looked at Yukako carefully, his controlled face betraying no shock at her clothing. She was afraid. I followed her gaze to the man’s hand as he passed her a brocade-wrapped scroll case: he was missing the tip of his fourth finger, what we called his medicine finger, the one used for testing powders and spreading balms. His bow was deep, his kimono was clean, his tone was humble as he apologized for troubling our home. But Yukako shook a little as she accepted his message, staring at the blunt club of the man’s fourth finger, at the gap between sleeve and wrist revealing a flash of red and green scrollwork down his forearm. A tattoo!

  Yukako started to slip the scroll into her absent kimono sleeve, stopped, and steadied herself, bowing as the man departed. He was swept off in a cunning and flashy jinrikisha painted on every side with flowers and beauties, their layered robes rivaling the blooming cherries overhead. “Anyone can have an accident,” mused Yukako, reaching for her own fourth finger.

  “But only a few people have missing fingers and tattoos,” I said, shuddering. I had never seen a mobster, but who hadn’t heard of them?

  “Don’t say that word!” hissed Yukako.

  “Tattoo?”

  “Stop it!”

  WE ONLY OPENED the man’s message much later, long after Yukako had negotiated with the Bear’s wife for more money and changed back into her familiar kimono. We sat with the mysterious scroll in the privacy of Baishian: it did not contain a letter, just three lines of text, written plain enough for a woman to read, with explanatory phonetic kana on the side. A date: the first of August, some four months hence. A place: the central geisha booking office of Pontocho. And a sum of money: a very large number, a figure against which the Shiges’ raise was a trifling amount.

  When Yukako opened the terse message, a little brocade bag fell to the floor: a talisman from a temple. Mothers bought these for their homes and children for every occasion: a safe voyage, a successful endeavor, a good wedding. I picked up the talisman; it was embroidered with characters that looked familiar, but even more striking was the scent. I recognized the subtle perfume that once suffused Jiro’s robes after his nights out, in the days before his brother stopped paying his bills. When I passed the bag to Yukako, she inhaled, met my eye, and nodded sourly. Then she glanced at the strangely familiar kanji embroidered on the talisman and her eyes widened, her jaw went hard. Oh! I had just seen dozens of brocade bags adorned with these very characters on the day we presented Tai at the temple with his agemates. To send this talisman was to suggest that the boy might need its protection, that the tattooed man was prepared to do whatever it took to make Jiro pay his debts. Yukako dropped the little bag, chilled. How dare they threaten my son?

  That night another bad omen befell our house. Chio’s husband Matsu, now deep into his seventies, seized his chest and stopped breathing for two full minutes. He didn’t die, but when he opened his eyes again the next day, he didn’t recognize anyone. His hands reached involuntarily to cut lengths of charcoal, to mold charcoal stubs and seaweed together into spheres for fuel, but he could no longer speak, and his tools were foreign to him. Morning and night he sat by the fire, gazing at the opposite wall.

  WE WENT TO THE TEMPLE every day that week, and we prayed for Tai’s safety. I had never noticed how Benten-sama, Yukako’s patron goddess, carried not just musical instruments but swords and arrows in her many arms: on one statue, her plump, mild face leered in victory. Yukako took my spot by the drafty upstairs door at night, in order to place her body between her sons and danger. We prayed, too, for the return of Matsu’s wits. Since the gardener Bozu had been working under Matsu for years, Yukako asked him to continue in the old man’s place, and assured Chio that she had no intention of turning Matsu out on his own. Mostly, however, we prayed for money.

  After five days, only leaving her prayers to give lessons in her Western dress, Yukako took action. First she laid out all her kimono, as she did when misfortune first came to the Shins. As she set aside the dazzling brocade robes that she, then I, had worn as little girls, we heard Kuga come stumping up the stairs to deliver a letter from two visitors who had dropped by.

  I watched Yukako anxiously untie the month’s second unexpected letter, this one addressed to Master Teacher, then saw her face relax as she read. The city was holding another Exposition that summer, after the flamboyant Gion Festival in July, and would the Shin family be willing to participate again?

  With a quick, sure hand, Yukako wrote a response, “signing” it with her husband’s square jade seal. He would be delighted to participate in educating the barbarian world about the cultural triumphs of Japan, and was prepared to offer his time—and a priceless thick-tea container from Rikyu’s day—for a small fee: here Yukako unhesitatingly copied the enormous figure presented by the tattooed man.

  Full of hope, Yukako continued her rounds of teaching in ladies’ homes. Jiro’s trip to the capital was timed to fall after the old year’s students graduated and before the new year’s class began, but Yukako’s hands were full nonetheless as she coached her older son through the duties usually performed by the head of the household this time of year: washing the Buddha in the family shrine with hydrangea tea, organizing flower-viewing events and memorial offerings to honor great patrons of the past. With Jiro away, I was allowed to follow behind Yukako and the boys on the annual Shin pilgrimage to Sesshu-ji temple, where the family offered tea at One Pine House to mark its construction three hundred years before. Because Jiro usually made the offering, or her father before him, it was the first time Yukako had ever seen the old temple or its garden, a long white wedge of raked stones. Though cleaned by the monks daily, One Pine—a handsome four-and-a-half-mat-house with a great round window—had long ago crossed the line from wabi to shabby, its paper walls torn and poorly patched, its tatami yellowed with age, its thatched roof balding. Tai made a handsome and assured picture, lifting his offering of tea to the ancestors as Yukako, with as much decorum as possible, removed a large crawling thatch bug from her hair. I could tell she took grim satisfaction from the scruffiness of the place: at least her errant husband wasn’t spending all their money here. I had been trusted with the tea utensils, while seven-year-old Aki carried the ceremonial charcoal made from the last of her grandfather Matsu’s precise widths of oak, each cut to its ritually prescribed length. As the weak sunset light charged the path home, I heard Tai say to his brother, “Next year, you be the host, no?”

  Long and weedy like their parents, the boys had shaved heads like the other tea students, and b
oth wore white strips of cloth around their foreheads to mark them as pilgrims. Kenji had lassoed a fat dragonfly with a silk thread when we stopped at a hillside shrine to eat on a picnic veranda and drink at the spring; now, as his brother spoke, he let the insect go. “Don’t talk that way,” he said. He was so beautiful, everyone talked about it, even handsomer than the boys chosen to ride on the Gion Festival floats. Aki reached for the dragonfly as it lofted away; Yukako watched her sons, breath drawn taut.

  “You’ll be old enough then; why shouldn’t you?” asked Tai.

  Kenji looked away, laced his hands behind his back, stretched. “I’d only take your place if you were dead,” he said simply.

  Yukako flinched. Kenji continued explaining. “When you’re the Master Teacher, I want to be the first of your students. And when you have a son, I want to teach him everything I know. That’s all. I just want to be your younger brother,” he said.

  “You are my little brother, baka,” said Tai, uncomfortable with Kenji’s sincerity.

  “Baka yourself,” said Kenji peaceably. I wondered if most boys with fathers seemed as self-made as these two.