by Ellis Avery
Though he’d come in kimono before, in deference to Jiro’s sensibilities, today Kato wore a three-piece suit and stovepipe hat, which he hung on the sword rack outside the tearoom. He also took off his squeaky new Western shoes.
Every detail in Baishian, while in harmony with the early autumn season, was also clearly chosen to honor Advisor Kato, from the flower arrangement evocative of his samurai father’s bamboo-leaf crest (a single early chrysanthemum in a vase freshly cut from a section of green bamboo, a few green leaves still attached) to the dish of sweets, jellied persimmon in lychee syrup, recalling his mother’s family’s trade as fruit wholesalers.
“Though conditions were not always propitious in the past,” Advisor Kato’s southern voice burred, delicately referring to the many times Jiro had put him off, “I’m grateful to be here today.”
“I know everyone’s aware of my husband’s tragedy,” ukako said, by way of apology. “His wits were not always with him.”
WHEN MY TRAY-RUNNING duties were over, I sat backstage in the Baishian mizuya, proudly watching Tai’s first chakai. The new Master Teacher looked so at ease as he brushed the brazier with its bundle of feathers. Though I privately continued to call him Tai, he had just received his first adult name, Rensai, in Tokyo, when he went to present tea at court: he wore the new name with elegant modesty. His temae was clear and understated, his responses to Kato’s ritual questions learned but unpretentious, if a bit short. Yukako had to step in and explain why Tai—but really she—had chosen the net-patterned tea bowl, though I understood later that she’d planned it that way. “My son was impressed by your simple yet effective choice of uniform for the schoolgirls,” she explained. “What gave you the idea?”
Koito had told us long ago that there is nothing a man likes more than being invited to talk about even the slightest of his accomplishments. Though Advisor Kato, like any good samurai, made an effort to sound humble at first, the advice stood Yukako in good stead. “When I worked with the army boys, the most important thing in the beginning was to get the world to see them—and them to see themselves—as one modern unit in the service of the Emperor, not as farmers’, merchants’, or craftsmen’s sons from this town or that,” he said. “That’s what I insisted on for the canal team, laborers and engineers alike, and that’s what I wanted for the Ladies’ School. Something that would level them all and mark them as part of the modern world, where daughters aren’t just kept at home in boxes. However, men’s Western dress is standard issue, more or less,” he explained. “But women’s Western dress has to be made to measure, and that’s too costly for most families. So I chose something affordable that would still convey newness and command respect.” His voice took a wistful turn. “And it would be awfully jarring to see all those lovely young girls in narrow little stovepipe sleeves, don’t you think?” ukako’s mouth twisted almost imperceptibly at this slight to the clothing she wore as a teacher, and then she joined Kato in a low chuckle.
The most impressive thing about Tai’s temae was that when Advisor Kato and Yukako began speaking at length, he did nothing to draw attention to himself, though his feet were no doubt numb and on fire. He moved to ease them so naturally that neither guest looked up, and yet they both unconsciously followed his lead.
Yukako listened attentively to her guest and then, thoughtful and hesitant, she spoke. “When my father was alive,” she said, instantly causing Advisor Kato to lean forward in sympathy, “he dreamed of Tea becoming a similar kind of leveler, a uniform.”
“Imagine,” said Advisor Kato.
“When he wrote to the Meiji court, he said the aim of tea was that people face one another as equals. Just as you said, he wanted a way for merchant and samurai, commoner and artisan, Kyoto native and Satsuma man,” she said, nodding here to Advisor Kato, “to set those differences aside and meet each other in the teahouse as equals, as fellow men”—inspired, she snatched at Kato’s rhetoric—“under the Emperor, citizens of a new Japan.” I had never heard Yukako speak this way before.
“Some tea people do not think this way,” said Kato.
“My husband was not well,” ukako agreed. She paused, then continued. “I know part of your work is to determine what today’s young people ought to know.” Having dropped the hint she quickly backed away from it. “I so much admire the steps you’ve taken. How many schools did you say you’d already set up?”
“In Kyoto, five for boys and one for girls so far, not counting the Christian schools. It takes seconds to declare education compulsory,” he said, referring to the Emperor’s proclamation in early Meiji. “But it takes years to build schools. So we’re starting with the sons of the wealthiest fathers, since they stand to gain most by Western training. But give me ten years…”
Yukako sat quietly, and then, as if the words had just occurred to him, Kato spoke. “A uniform. A leveler.” Yukako made a sound of bland encouragement.
“The old men are complaining about the Women’s Higher School in Tokyo—they say it produces girls fit only to be teachers and foreigners’ wives. These girls can speak French or dance a waltz at the Belling Stag with the Prime Minister, but they’ve never made rice or recited from the Hyakunin Isshu. I’m opening two new girls’ schools in the spring and I’ve been wondering how to respond to these criticisms. But today…” he trailed off, speaking more to himself than Yukako. “What’s more, I’ve earned so much rancor from the priests for closing down the temple schools. They think a secular school is by definition a Christian school.” He paused. “Don’t they always say, Tea and Zen have the same taste?” I almost laughed at Jiro’s self-justifying phrase, uttered whenever he left for Sesshu-ji, spoken in Advisor Kato’s thick accent.
“I’ve always been a man of action,” Kato declared. “In our fathers’ time we’d wait and hint and go through intercessors, but these are new days. I’ll simply ask you, Master Teacher”—here he bowed deeply to Yukako’s son—“do you think you and your students might be willing to consider teaching The Way of Tea in the girls’ schools we’re building?”
Tai’s eyes widened. He was a thirteen-year-old boy, after all. I could see him restrain himself from turning to his mother for counsel in front of this man. For a moment he said nothing.
“On the city payroll, of course,” Kato added. I saw Yukako look pensive in order to rein back a smile.
“I’d have to think about that,” said Tai.
“There are old men who ask, ‘Why should we educate them at all?’ You don’t need to read to give your father-in-law a grandson or obey your mother-in-law in the kitchen. But in the West a girl isn’t just a borrowed womb. She’s a good wife and a wise mother; she educates her sons and advises her husband. Fifteen years ago, the court sent five girls to grow up in America, to come back and teach Japanese women how to be good wives and wise mothers themselves. The girls came back three years ago; I’m eager to see what comes of the experiment.”
I leaned closer: as something of an experiment myself, I wondered too. Kato continued, “My countryman Saigo Takamori used to say we shouldn’t toss out the best of the old in favor of the new, and here I agree with him. A wise mother can use tea to teach her sons the Five Constant Virtues; I can’t think of a better way to learn them. And a good wife? You know how happy I would be, as a Christian, to see tea in the home instead of in the floating world. Why, every son and husband in Japan would benefit from women learning tea.”
I could see that Yukako, while pleased, was a little surprised by the direction Advisor Kato’s enthusiasm had taken. “I wonder if boys wouldn’t profit by the study of Ocha as well,” she said mildly. It seemed excessive to point out that her family had been training young lords in the Way of Tea for hundreds of years.
“And where better to learn it than in the home? As your father said so well, tea teaches wisdom, honesty, loyalty to the Emperor. Imagine, all the advantages of a centralized curriculum, transmitted at a child’s most impressionable years, in the home! Look at your own result
s!” he said, with a nod to Tai.
“I know his temae is nothing to speak of, but my son did learn from his father and grandfather,” ukako gently corrected him. She seemed puzzled and a little huffy. Why was the man harping on these girls’ schools when it was clear they were an afterthought?
Advisor Kato’s voice turned brisk and assured. “Point taken. You see, the boys’ days are scheduled to within an inch of their lives already, at least for the next few years. Engineering, mathematics, science. It’s not up to me anymore. I have more latitude with the girls, since these schools are just forming now. I hope, Master Teacher,” he said, bowing to Tai, “you’ll consider my request. Perhaps we could start in the girls’ schools next spring and see what happens? In six years the Ministry of Education will come from Tokyo to see how we’ve done, and after that, it’ll be a good time to try and get Ocha in there for the boys.”
Uneasy at Kato’s presumptuous vigor, and because he had grown up, after all, steeped in his father’s distaste for the man, Tai bristled a little at the Satsuma fellow’s brash, easy voice. “I’ll be glad to consider your request,” he said, a bit stiffly.
Advisor Kato’s mouth tightened at this display of juvenile hauteur. Yukako gave her son a hooded look.
“I look forward to your response,” Kato said, and changed the subject. “As a Christian,” he began, “I do have my qualms about the mixed dancing at the Belling Stag Hall, but one place Prime Minister Ito and I are in total agreement is on the subject of glass.”
“I’ve heard rumors to that effect,” noted Yukako, glad the awkward moment had passed.
The Christian Ladies’ School had glass windows, as did the other Western buildings going up in Kyoto, but Advisor Kato was the first Japanese person that any of us at the servants’ bathhouse had known to install garasu in his own home. Jiro had seen dozens of glass windows in Tokyo and had described them with a shudder, while Yukako and Tai had marveled about them to Kenji when they returned.
“In the new capital we visited an official who had a Western parlor for entertaining foreign diplomats in front and a regular home for his family in back. So he had glass in the parlor and shoji paper in the other rooms,” she said, the Japanized English words hard on her tongue: garasu, paaraa. “Is this your plan?”
“Oh, no. I’ve found a crew of Japanese gureijezu,” he said. Gu-rei-je-zu? Glaziers! “They install glass in our own doors and windows, right where the paper goes. It’s expensive and it takes time, but the money goes right back into Japan, and look at the results!” Look at the results: I mouthed Kato’s pet phrase to myself, mocking.
“I’m encouraging everyone I can to consider this step, especially anyone personally benefiting from the Emperor’s largesse,” he said, making us only too aware of our small imperial stipend and his large one. “What better way to show one’s commitment to a Civilized and Enlightened Japan than by bringing that Light straight into one’s own home? Why, imagine how beautiful this tearoom would be!”
Yukako looked back and forth at the walls and windows of Baishian, the bright milky light softening her son’s face. “How interesting,” she said coolly. “You’ll have to give me the name of your glazier.”
EVER SINCE THE BOYS had left the upstairs room, Yukako let me massage oil into her cracked feet at night. She’d brought a bristly foreign brush back from Tokyo, and I would work it through her thick hair: she had not known how much she would enjoy having her hair brushed until she began wearing it foreign-style. I noticed, early in the exercise of my new duties, a dime-sized patch of scalp at the very top of her head, exposed from years at the hairdresser’s hands. She had covered it with a knob of false hair before Jiro left, and now her soft deep-eaves bun concealed it. But I could see it at night, as well as the thick strands of white here and there, which I was instructed to pluck. I marveled at these secrets, perhaps even more than I did at the miracle of her lush black mane, silky after years oiled stiff, mine in a way it had never been before, to work and weigh in my hands. Every night I plaited it into a loose braid to keep it from knots, while Yukako drank her soba-cha, a hot tea made from roasted buckwheat. I was happier than I’d been in years. The boys were grown and she was mine to cosset and long for. Not long after Tai and Kenji began sleeping downstairs, I’d once dared to reach for her in the dark, not just to hold her but to grip my wanting body tight to hers. She’d stiffened, turned abruptly, and, without a word, pushed me away.
That night after Tai’s first chakai, as I brushed Yukako’s hair, she fidgeted with the rim of her teacup and frowned. She still had that puzzled, distasteful look. “Girls’ schools,” she murmured now and then, surprised. I brushed her hair far longer than necessary, until her face softened and she sighed as if she were sinking into a hot bath. “He’s an odd man,” she said, falling asleep.
IF TAI HAD FELT RESISTANT to Advisor Kato’s idea, a look at the family ledger was all it took for him to see the wisdom of his mother’s position. When the Satsuma man’s formal request came, Tai, with Yukako’s input, sent word that he’d be glad to supply instructors to teach Shin Ocha in the girls’ schools next spring, provided that the parents or schools were prepared to purchase—from us, of course—enough utensils for each student. When Kato’s assent came, Tai was glad enough to let his mother take on the project, overwhelmed as he was, at thirteen, with the round of tea offerings and classes already expected of him.
NOT LONG AFTER Advisor Kato’s visit, Matsu’s health began its last decline. When Chio’s husband could no longer use the toilet on his own, she and Kuga met with Bozu, the gardener with the shaved head. Matsu’s son Nao should have taken his father’s place as head gardener, but we hadn’t heard from the boy in Chio’s photograph—beyond his best wishes for a healthy and prosperous new year—since the year his daughter Aki came to us. Instead, Bozu and his grandson Toru, sweet and daft at fourteen, had taken over Matsu’s work during his illness. In Chio and Matsu’s hut off from the kitchen, the adults decided to marry Toru to Aki and declare Toru adopted as Nao’s son. The girl, however, was still under ten, so the marriage was postponed until she began to menstruate.
I was many years Toru’s senior, but when I was between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four, the slow, pockmarked boy named for Queen Victoria had been among the harelips, hunchbacks, and deaf-mutes the bathhouse girls had talked of as potential husbands for me. Nothing had ever come of such talk, and now that I was nearly thirty, it was unseemly to speak in such a way about a woman of my advanced years. The bathhouse was full of children who called me Aunt, and Chio had quietly taken up the girlish sleeves of all my kimono: I wore the name and dress that would see me for decades hence.
MATSU DIED in late September. He had been so strong; it was a mercy that he was spared knowledge of his frailty at the end. He had accepted our care with the placidity of an infant, and experienced pain and discomfort with an infant’s storm-and-sunshine lack of memory. The anger and tenderness of Chio and Kuga’s grief was spent by the time the man died, and I understood: the sight of Matsu’s waxy husk asleep in the kitchen drew no tears the way that feeding him had, or the sight of his hands when he first became feebleminded, cupping those imaginary snowballs.
Matsu’s theory of why I couldn’t speak Japanese at all when I came to the Shin house and spoke fluently twenty years later had been that the fire burned the language out of me, that I had not been learning Japanese at Cloud House but remembering it. In the summer, when he made shaved ices for the children (his grandson Zoji, at first, and later Tai, Kenji, Toru, and Aki), Matsu always made sure I received a bowlful, even when I had left childhood long behind, to fight the taste of fire. In this way he would take credit for the Japanese I learned. When I studied with the boys, he’d chide: Don’t ever say you’re too old for shaved ice. Just look how much you forgot. I wished, at the end, that I could have given him as much comfort. When we began leaving food offerings at his grave, the season for shaved ice had passed, and so I left a perfect sphere of white r
ice, round as his lumps of molded charcoal, white as a bowl of snow.
Perhaps to make up for Matsu’s absence, the day he died, Chio moved Nao’s photograph from its place in the kitchen to a shelf in her own little cottage. She, Kuga, Aki, and Toru wore black for forty-nine days, avoiding Shinto shrines, blood, and alcohol. This last prohibition proved especially trying for Kuga, for whom sake had cushioned the longest vigils with her father. On the fiftieth day, Yukako, Tai, and even Kenji—though Jiro required him to stay at Sesshu-ji most of the time—made it their business to come to the memorial ceremony at the neighborhood temple. Yukako held Aki’s hand while Chio, Kuga, and Toru made their offerings and drew water to wash Matsu’s small stone.
As we crossed the small graveyard toward the servants’ plots, I had the prickling sensation of being watched. There was a man sitting calmly on a bench near Matsu’s grave: he stood as we approached, as if waiting for us. He wore Western leather work boots, servants’ leggings, and a straight-sleeved short kimono coat, like a jinrikisha-runner or a carpenter. He did not, however, seem to be here on an errand: his hands-on-hips stance was too calmly expectant, his clothing too clean. He was in his late thirties or early forties, solid as a bulldog, with a boyish cast to his pronounced and delicate cheekbones. He was taller even than Yukako, with hair almost as long as hers. It was tied back with leather thongs but not oiled, which gave him the look of a hill brigand. When Chio’s eyes met his, he bowed low before her. “Mother,” he said.
