by Ellis Avery
Before I translated, I knew Yukako had heard the word setto clearly: though she controlled her face, her visibly filling lungs betrayed her glee. “We’ll have them here for sale tomorrow,” I said, my words practiced and clear.
“For how much?” asked a man, clearly indulging his wife.
I did not need to translate the question, but I did, knowing that the words would be more welcome from an oracular fairy queen than a wheezy buffoon. Echoing Yukako, I allowed a tiny pause and coolly named a figure large enough to deflate the men but small enough to make the women’s eyes gleam brighter.
We made no further mention of money as Yukako knelt before the brazier to begin temae with her own utensils, brought from home. The foreigners leaned from side to side to note variations on the objects they’d just seen.
“It’s that same silk square: look at how she’s folding it.”
“And there’s the tea box again; this one’s black.”
“There’s that shuttlecock.”
“Have you ever seen anything like this in Holland?” I heard one of the Parasol Girls ask the blond man. He smiled at them with his big square teeth, his friend gamely translating. There had been Dutchmen among the foreigners at the last Expo—canal engineers, I remembered vaguely—but I had never seen one up close.
And then the company exclaimed over the gaily colored robes of the girls from Toraya wafting in with their sweet trays, and silence fell as the guests lifted the lids off their lacquer dishes and smelled citron syrup poured over shaved ice. All was well. Yukako whisked tea for the ambassador, a subtle incense burned in the scroll alcove, and the Eminences sighed over their sweet, sweet ices.
THAT NIGHT, Tai and Kenji, sworn to secrecy, arrived with the hundred Raku student tea bowls. They didn’t know that Yukako had paid for the shipment with their father’s Shunrai bowl, but that detail aside, they were enthusiastically aware of Yukako’s plan as we sat together at the Expo site, assembling setto by the dozen. I copied out and stamped my label fifty times as the boys slid whisks into tubes and lined wastewater bowls with linen wiping-cloths. The heaped assembly of cloth-wrapped tea sets called to mind the days when the boys were newborns, the way the cloakroom filled with all those boxes of gift eggs. “They’ll buy them all tomorrow,” Tai predicted confidently.
“What will we do with the other fifty tea bowls?” Kenji asked.
“We’ll keep them for new students,” Yukako explained. “Do you remember when you were little boys, and you wanted Aki and Toru to have tea bowls too?”
The boys nodded, and I could see them looking eagerly at Yukako, wanting her to say more. I could also see Yukako making room for them to reach her conclusions on their own.
THE NEXT DAY, Yukako decided, I was not to accompany her. She didn’t want the foreigners asking questions; she wanted them to pay their money and go. I don’t know how Tai and Kenji convinced their father to let them go in my place without revealing Yukako’s plan, but I know they were desperate to see the big-nosed blue-eyed monsters for themselves. Jiro seemed none too pleased by this arrangement, but his most advanced students welcomed the privilege of being asked to assist at that evening’s tea gathering in the boys’ place.
JIRO WAS IN FOUL SPIRITS, his breakfast interrupted by a messenger from Shige, one of that evening’s guests. He was so sorry, there was nothing he could do, but that hayseed Kato had begged to accompany him to the chakai and he was indebted; there was no way he could avoid bringing the fellow. “I had planned for a select few,” Jiro sniffed, after sending his reply. “I’ve put Kato off on other occasions, but I guess the man’s bent on worming his way in through the side door. And Shige’s weak. First there was that French loom, and now Kato’s given him a fat uniforms contract, so he can’t say no.” Jiro drained his miso broth. “Uniforms. How much further can you get from brocade? His father would be so ashamed.” He talked to me as if I weren’t there, and yet he made it impossibly rude to leave the room. “Why should I have to pay for him to sell out to that high-collar fool?” he said. “I mean, how could you live with yourself if you really talked like Advisor Kato?” Under all the peevishness and bluster, I saw a childlike anxiety on Jiro’s face, as if Shige were not, at base, inconveniencing him but actually leaving him behind. I slowly became aware that he was keeping me in that room with him. I realized how rarely I saw him by himself.
Because Jiro spent so much time on retreat, it did not occur to me that he might miss his family’s company, but as I served him breakfast all alone, Yukako and the boys having left before sunrise, he seemed out of his element. His morning offerings to the ancestors seemed a little uncertain, and I wondered what it meant to him to make them without his children, his link to the Shin bloodline. I wondered if it put him in mind of his first year as an adopted son. He was a grown man facing the ancestors in the queer timid shoes of a new wife. I remembered the way the Pipe Lady (and she was not alone in this) would dismiss her grandsons’ wives to their faces: A womb’s a borrowed thing, she’d say. We can just as well get others where you came from. I wondered, had Jiro ever felt that abject? “Usually I see you with your students or guests, or your sons,” I observed, and stopped myself, ready to scuttle away.
But Jiro gave me a rare open look and nodded. “Or I’m with my brother, or my sempai,” he reflected. The word for those ahead of one in rank could have referred to the monks at Sesshu-ji temple, or it could just as easily have meant his older drinking companions.
“Today I’m like your Rie,” he said, looking at me. His eyes were soft lamps and there was a catch in his voice. Who is Rie? I wondered, acutely aware of his gaze.
I stood uneasily with my tray to clear away yesterday’s ancestral offering of rice and tea, and Jiro plucked at my sleeve with his long calligrapher’s fingers. “I didn’t really think of you as a foreigner until that day you read the play with the boys,” he said quietly, not letting go. “You aren’t so ugly when I think of you that way.”
He pulled my sleeve steadily, harder, yet as if he weren’t pulling at all, as if I were the one deciding to sink back to the floor, to give up the tray he took from my hands, to look up as he tilted my chin toward his haunted, lonely face. Still holding my sleeve he circled me with his other arm, fitting the heel of his hand into my sternum, and held me there in place as his brush hand opened the fabric vent under my arm, stole in between my breast and obi. I looked back at him as he cupped my breast, this man who had once been the Stickboy. My pity became a swollen, trembling thing, and I closed my eyes, feeling his breath go uneven against my nape. Yukako wouldn’t be jealous, the thought came to me, and was completed a moment later: because she thinks so little of him.
My eyes blinked open, and in a fraction of a second took in the fact that the door to the study was open, the shoji to the garden thrown wide. Chio—or anyone—could see us. It would be so easy to lose my place here. My hands closed on the man’s wrists. I spent my days lifting iron pots and brimming buckets; Jiro spent his in the tearoom. It was not difficult to take his hands in mine, peel them off my body, push them to his sides, and set them down, so. He’d only been seeing what I’d let him do, after all. I stood again and looked back at him on the floor, half kneeling, gazing mournfully up at me. I felt lofty, remote, like Kannon looking down at mortal suffering. I was glad for the tray I took up, because I wanted so much to turn, lay my hand on his forehead, and say something reassuring and stupid. I felt sad for him and, for once in my life, very tall.
And I felt exposed, stirred up and buzzing like a broken hive. I left the tray with Chio and walked, then ran, to Baishian, crawled in through the square door, and shut it tight, shut myself and my thudding heart up in the teahouse. Why would a man who stopped sleeping with his wife when she began looking even a little foreign show any interest in me? We were alone, I supposed. I was there. I need to be careful, I thought. My happiness here means nothing to him, and men like to finish what they start. Who told me that? Inko, I remembered, my hazy night with her re
turning hot and sharp, as my body, though I did not want the man, convulsed with desire. My breasts felt soft and alert and my thighs felt damp. At that moment, there was just one person in the world I wanted. I jammed my hand between my legs and rocked and shook until I could think again. Think, think, mentally locate a knife in the kitchen I could use to defend my place in her bed, however chaste, at any cost.
Leaving Baishian, I took the long way back to the kitchen entrance, which brought me past the front gate. I saw an extravagant jinrikisha that struck me as familiar: painted court ladies hurried across its surface in their swirling black hair and dozen-layered robes, intricate as artichokes. Who had a cart like that? The jinrikisha boy, sitting in the cloakroom with Chio’s cold barley tea, did not look familiar, but when I saw his elegant master, I froze. A flash of color rippled under the man’s gauze robe.
I wasn’t surprised, then, to see a dagger hanging in the disused sword rack outside Jiro’s classroom door. Had he known of the tattooed man and his deadline before today? I thought not, and my guess was confirmed when I topped up the barrel backstage in the classroom mizuya. Jiro’s face, drained of ardor, was drawn and tight, and he paid no heed when his student set down the teascoop in one motion instead of two. I felt pity again, and a flare of vindictive pleasure: let him feel how fragile his place was!
Between my disturbing exchange with Jiro and the reappearance of the man without a fingertip, I had forgotten about the little brocade-wrapped bomb ticking in Muin. But that afternoon I glimpsed Master Teacher raking the garden more meticulously than usual; at twilight, when the moonflowers, or evening faces, bloomed, I saw him rigorously plucking them all, saving the most perfect specimen for the tearoom. Oh, I remembered. Tonight’s tea! The Shin family had not given so much attention to its gardens since culling all the irises when the former Emperor’s nephew came to visit, when I was a child. What was he planning?
I RECOGNIZED Shige’s voice in the gathering when I ferried trays over from the kitchen, and Okura Chugo’s too. Advisor Kato’s voice needled through the group as well, loud and callow, forcing even the flimsiest of connections between Okura Chugo and his young engineer. “You like natto, Mr. Okura? Why, so does our Mr. Tanabe! What’s the difference, would you say, between Tokyo and Kyoto natto, Mr. Tanabe?”
The young man spoke in a cool and reticent voice and, to his credit, seemed embarrassed by Kato’s brashness. “Kyoto’s is richer and more subtle,” he said diplomatically. “I’m so grateful to be here.”
“I wasn’t planning on this, but you’ve inspired me, Advisor Kato,” Jiro said, his voice frosty. “You will be pleased to know that the teascoop you’ll see tonight, New Moon, was named for the teahouse you destroyed to build the Ladies’ School. The bamboo was taken from an especially lovely example of ceiling work.”
The Advisor was too thick-skinned to feel the dart. “It’s all worth it if the girls are learning, right? Perhaps you have a niece or cousin who’d like to join Mr. Shige’s girl next spring?”
I heard Jiro shift his weight, surprised. “This is news,” he said.
“Well,” said Shige.
“True, true. I waived the tuition. We’ve finally got him on board for the canal; it was the least I could do, eh, Mr. Shige?”
“Is that so?” said Jiro. His voice sounded strangled at this new revelation.
Advisor Kato filled the uncomfortable silence that followed. “But my deepest gratitude goes to your brother. It was my pleasure to award him the contract for digging the canal, considering his level of support.”
At this third blow, Jiro’s voice was a pained squeak. “Congratulations.”
“We should break ground in September,” the Advisor said, beaming.
Jiro looked like he would topple when he left the tearoom. He sat on the floor and pounded his numb feet, savagely trying to work the pins and needles out. I wondered if he wished he could abandon the evening entirely. But he’d taken such pains! It was still not clear to me what he had wanted from the chakai, let alone if he could still hope to gain it. Whom had he meant to impress? Clearly not Kato or Tanabe.
I was surprised to peek in and see that while I could not make out the scattering of men in back, Shige was the main guest again, with Jiro’s older brother Okura beside him. They both came so frequently; why had Jiro gone to all the extra trouble? Along with Chio’s elaborately prepared morsels, he’d ordered boxed delicacies from a restaurant, and the tatami, already new when we switched from the winter hearth to the summer brazier, had been refaced once again. Its new-grass smell, like the painted fan that hung in the display alcove, like the ice-clear jellied sweets in their green glazed bowls, added to the sense of coolness Jiro worked to evoke in this evening chakai.
My questions were answered during the intermission between the meal and tea ceremony halves of the event when Jiro, hands shaking from the cascade of unpleasant news, brought the wrapped tea bowl out from the tearoom alcove and set it down in the mizuya beside a fresh pine box. Instead of Shunrai, Spring Thunder, the box bore a different name. I made out the large kanji on the lid: Rain Field. The two together composed the character for Thunder, or Kaminari. Wasn’t that the name Shige had suggested Jiro call his Shunrai bowl at their springtime tea? In poetry—I just barely knew this; the knowledge shimmered in me half formed—the only season Thunder evoked on its own was summer. At Shige’s bidding, Jiro had turned a spring bowl into a summer one.
While, during the tea meal, I had felt spitefully glad to see things go badly for Jiro, when I saw the box he’d painted, the same pity that had drugged my body that morning welled up in me again. Poor Jiro. Bad enough that he was about to unwrap a tea bowl he wasn’t expecting. Worse, it now seemed that he had staged the whole tea gathering as an opportunity to make Shige—or his brother—buy the Shunrai bowl. Or maybe, before he knew they’d been won over by Advisor Kato, had Jiro meant to make a gift of the tea bowl to his friend or brother, to grease the way for asking for an enormous loan? Was this how he’d planned to pay back our debts? I remembered his shrill voice the morning Yukako laid the bill from Chojiro’s Heir before him: You’ll see there’s no need to meddle. I bit my lip. Thanks to me and Yukako, when Jiro unwrapped his beloved Rikyu bowl, broken and mended with gold, he would be forced to part with it. We’ve made a terrible mistake, I thought.
As Jiro reached to untie the knot on the brocade bag, I moved without thinking. The Muin tea hut, like most Japanese buildings, stood a foot or so off the ground, to protect it from insects and rot. Unheard beneath the sound of Shige and the others strolling out to the waiting arbor, I took out my last tray for the kitchen, flattened myself on the pebbled walk, and slid under the teahouse.
I saw nothing. I felt damp earth and ooze. I heard deep silence overhead. And then I heard a burst of footsteps leading to the main house. A burst of footsteps back. Urgent, angry whispering. Someone walking twenty paces toward the storage tower, first passionate, then stunned, then sleepwalking. Then the walker stopped, seemed to come to a decision, turned, and firmly walked back to Muin.
IN THE TEA WORLD there is a phrase, ichigo ichie. One moment, one meeting. Every moment is what it is. Even though tea people watch each other constantly for slips in form, and gossip shamelessly about one another’s technique, in the end, in the deepest sense, there are no mistakes. This is what the Mountain meant to teach in giving his students the precious antique with the crack, the flaw, certain to break with use.
For years I blamed myself for my mother’s death, that I could have stayed home and saved her. That I could have done something, and had failed. But it was no more cause for blame, I understood, flat under the house that night, than to be the one for whom Rikyu’s bowl finally gave up its bowl-ness and became clay again. She died, and I was not there. There are no mistakes. Ichigo ichie. Actors know this, plunging ahead as they drop a line here, a cue there. Jiro knew this, mending the bowl with gold, and he knew it again as he summoned the great calm required to slide the low square door
to the tearoom open, giving the sign for his guests, whether he liked them or not, to return to Muin.
I COULD FEEL the night coolness seeping from the earth into my chest where I lay on the ground. My eyes adjusted to the dark and made do with the light of a candle in a small stone lantern, low to the ground by the square guest door. The candlelight shone yellow on the paving stones, and the wooden sandals of the four guests stood in the light like miniature bridges. And then an unexpected fifth pair of feet became visible. In the dark tearoom, I had made out only Shige and Okura, and I had heard only the voices of two others, Kato and Tanabe. I hadn’t known there were five guests. And what was wrong with those feet? Something curious, confusing: I saw hands, fingers, strings. A man was taking off a pair of foreign shoes! Those must be Advisor Kato’s, I thought. Bad enough to barge in and crow about his canal, but wouldn’t he know what a purist Jiro was? The kind of man who let his wife run around in foreign dress because he still hadn’t gotten over the shock of her teeth and eyebrows. The last man on Migawa Street to wear his hair in a queue. A man who wanted the Japanese to be Japanese.
A man who wants foreigners to be foreign, I thought, remembering what he said before he touched me. I shuddered and made myself take deep silent breaths, listening to the temae overhead. I heard the guests shift softly, seeing the utensils Jiro brought in. I heard the splash of water on water and realized Jiro was performing a special temae for high summer, in which the host brings out a tea bowl full of water, a linen cloth suspended inside like a white lotus. When the host wrings out the linen cloth, the sound of splashing water conveys a further sense of coolness to the guests. I imagined the sheen of water on the lamplit gold veins of the tea bowl.
I knew I’d be heard if I crawled out from under the house, so I waited, listening to the sounds of water and bamboo, to the guests sliding their bodies across the floor just overhead. My breath caught as Shige asked the ritually prescribed questions about the tea bowl.
