by Ellis Avery
24
1885–1890
CHIO FROZE as she faced the man. I had never seen her so tautly still. For a moment I was a child again, arrested by the dim enshrined photograph of a solemn young boy. And then I saw Chio’s arm in the air, saw her strike her son across the face, saw him brace himself and take it.
Chio bowed in greeting, the tears plain on her face. “Take this and help us,” she said gruffly, handing him her wooden bucket of water for washing Matsu’s stone.
“Thank you,” he said.
“That’s Nao, isn’t it?” I breathed.
Yukako shot me a look: Who else could it be, baka? Her face was sharp and hard. Her grip must have clamped too hard on Aki’s hand because the little girl jerked away.
Nao performed every gesture for Matsu—from lighting the incense to paying the priest—just as Jiro had performed it for the Mountain, just as the Mountain, in place of his interned brother, had performed it for the Pipe Lady. He filled out the form of the oldest son’s grief correctly and with sincerity, and yet I could feel, beside the young people’s curiosity and Chio and Kuga’s thunderstruck disbelief, Yukako’s seething irritation.
“WHERE HAS HE BEEN all this time? Doesn’t the man have any proper mourning clothes? Has he never heard of a barber?” Nao’s wrapped package sat pointedly ignored on Yukako’s low mirror table as she undressed, hanging her kimono on its airing rack. Nao had brought small gifts for Chio, Kuga, and Aki, and when he found out he had an adopted son, “He just gave the boy Aki’s present. ‘Take care of this for your wife.’ Did you see how the girl looked at him when she found out he was her father?” I nodded, remembering the naked longing on Aki’s face.
“I can’t believe he’s been here all this time and we never heard,” said Yukako. “He’s got a lot of nerve, playing the grieving son. Did he feed the man? Did he wipe him in the privy?”
“I guess you’re not going to open his present,” I said. The white-wrapped package seemed to glow in the lamplight, like a private moon. I remembered the tall man looking down at Yukako, his voice humbly offering the gift, his eyes, for a moment, meeting hers.
“You open it,” she harrumphed. I untied the letter bound to the gift, written in careful kana. After the usual preliminaries, he said, The enclosed are for ices, offered in the spirit of the one we mourn, and in honor of your triumph one hot August.
I remembered Matsu hauling up blocks from the icehouse, shaving them with his scraper. I could picture the white shavings mounded in wooden bowls and drizzled with Chio’s brown sugar syrup, thick and sweet. “What triumph?” Yukako murmured, puzzled and vaguely insulted.
I read on. I also wanted to show you a sample of my master’s work, as his current employer once mentioned it might interest you.
“Tasteless,” said Yukako. “What else does he say?”
“Nothing, really: Your humble servant wishes the best for you and your family, very sincerely yours.”
“Have you ever heard of such a thick-skinned face?” Yukako fumed.
“Should I open it?”
“Go ahead.”
I unrolled the cheap but exquisitely pleated paper to find five small objects wrapped in raw cotton and soft tissue: five translucent glass bowls, chilly white banded with blue. I knew exactly what he meant; ice would taste colder in these bowls than it would in wood or lacquer. “They’re beautiful,” I murmured.
Yukako compressed her lips and nodded. “True.”
Could I really have not seen a glass dish in nineteen years? “He’s one of Advisor Kato’s glaziers, isn’t he?”
Yukako held a bowl up to the lamplight. A white splash of magnified light fell on her face. “I suppose so,” she said.
I watched her think. And I saw it at the same time: the delicate cheekbones, the hands-on-hips stare. There was a craftsman at the Eppo who’d watched us too closely: yes. “I know which August he meant,” I said, remembering those sweet ices for the foreign guests.
Yukako gave me a wan smile. “I do too,” she said.
NAO VISITED HIS MOTHER OFTEN, always bringing some little gift. I felt his sister Kuga’s silent reproach on his visits, but Chio never asked him where he’d been all those years, or why he’d been in Kyoto so long without telling them, let alone without coming home to care for his father. She never asked him to live with them now, but seemed content to know he was boarding with his master glazier and fellow apprentices in the workmen’s quarter. How could it be that she had missed him for so long and now never insisted that he live with her, remarry, give her grandsons? She seemed even diffident receiving his offerings, embarrassed when he sent masseurs to work on her shoulders and stiffening hands, self-conscious when he brought fabric for her, Kuga, and Aki to have new kimono.
He gave Yukako no more gifts, and addressed her with no more than the humble formulae required by the occasion of his visits. Advisor Kato, however, was quick to brag to Yukako that he’d put her on a prestigious, though long, waiting list for the master glazier’s windows. Yukako suppressed her discomfort: it was an honor she couldn’t refuse.
A few months later Yukako took all four of Jiro’s former students who were older than Tai and brought them with her to the first girls’ school. Because the school asked that she train female teachers as well as male ones, Yukako also chose four unmarried young women from among her private students and brought the young men and women to the school on alternating days, training them at the Shins’ the rest of the week. (The seven-day week, and the Sunday sabbath, had come to us with Meiji too.) I carried Yukako’s tools and kept records, noting that while she was patient and thorough with the little students—who folded and tilted and lifted like an earnest if unathletic ballet corps—Yukako was as severe with her teachers-in-training as she had been with Koito years before, though less venomous. The first time one of her trainees gave a lesson, she would correct him or her—a humiliation—in front of the class of girls, but from then on she would only make corrections in front of the other young teachers, which smarted too, but less.
AMONG THESE NEW teachers-to-be, barely older than her students, was Kato’s cherub-faced daughter Mariko. The quickest to abandon her ashes in the brazier half laid, the slowest to remember what went where, she was not Yukako’s first choice, but the relationship with Advisor Kato was too important to compromise. I still remember the sound of her voice one day as she walked home from the Shins’ with the other young women; I’d just been summoned to help them sweep up a cloud of fallen tea powder. Each girl silently knelt, feather in hand, each brushing the endless green tea onto a sheet of clean white paper. The air was thick with blame. They left, still wordless, but I did hear an inimitable squeal on the path. “It was in the way,” Mariko burst out, kicking a carefully placed stone.
SCHOOLGIRLS STUDIED TEA for two years: from spring until the opening of the sunken hearth in November, they worked on the simplest tray-style temae, while from November until spring, they learned how to make frothy thin tea using the sunken hearth. During the second year they learned thin tea with the warm-weather brazier, and both summer and winter temae for the sticky thick tea. After training for two years, Yukako’s teachers would work in the new girls’ schools as they opened, each school purchasing Yukako’s tea utensils and contracting with her for the teachers’ services. She paid the teachers well, but she kept back a portion of the money she received as a fee for the use of her family’s name and tradition. Often I came home from the bathhouse to find the abacus and account book out on Yukako’s low desk, and though I spread the futon for her, I also ground ink and brought lamps for her late-night reckoning. She was charmed by the Western use of red and black ink for debts and credits, and I was proud to see the column of red numbers taper as she paid off the work on One Pine.
Just as Yukako had begun charging her teachers to use the Shin name, once the schools required more tea utensils than we could carry, she decided to do the same for her craftsmen. She had me help her stamp a license for each whis
k and scoop and linen cloth she ordered, and then she sold them to the craftsmen, who would sell the licensed utensils to the schools at a fixed price. The year she proposed this practice, she sweetened the deal by selling scores of licenses to make equipment she bought herself for the next imperial tea presentation, to mark the fifth year of tea education in the girls’ schools: one for each lady at court in Tokyo. She paid a higher price for these utensils than the school ones, as the work involved was finer. Furthermore, to keep the craftsmen happy in future years, she agreed to sell a few extra licenses to each so that they could sell equipment to foreigners or nouveaux riches at any price they liked. This work would be closer in quality to the imperial wares than the school wares, but as the pieces were new and not named by a tea master individually, they would still be affordable in a way tea utensils had never been before. They sold.
“What if the craftsmen try to cheat you?” I asked one evening, marveling at Yukako’s ingenuity. She had just finished a day in conversation with Chojiro’s Heir, who agreed to her scheme provided that the distinction between his own work and that of his apprentices be clearly maintained at all times. Yukako had put him at ease and walked away with licensing money in her sleeves. We were pausing on the way home by the Canal Street bridge, watching the V’s of geese overhead.
Yukako chided, “They’ve been supplying tea things to our family for generations, and now they’re making more money than ever before. They’re not going to cheat us.” Then she frowned. Since her father’s death, she’d always had a bit of a crease between her eyebrows; now it deepened. “I could go to the stores and check, or send people they don’t know,” she murmured. Then she smiled. “If I found out a craftsman was trying to cheat me, I’d sell licenses to his rival too,” she determined. “Let them fight it out themselves.” Pleased with herself, she flicked a stone across the shallow water. It skipped three times, falling in with a quiet splish.
“Where did you learn to do that?” I asked.
“I watched my sons,” ukako said with a shrug.
“That’s not what I meant,” I said, retying my carrying scarf.
“I think this big order for Tokyo helps.” She looked worried for a moment. “Our gift to the court ladies is going to cost buckets of money,” she said. “But I think it’ll pay off.” She skipped another stone.
That wasn’t what I’d meant, either. Where had she learned how to manage the outside world, and not be managed by it? Perhaps I was seeing the other side of the word shade. Yukako had no one to shade her: no father, no husband, no mother. And it turned out that she was no shy fern: the sun shone hard on her, and she’d grown straight and tall, a ridgepole pine, a mast.
WHEN YUKAKO RETURNED from Tokyo later that season, she seemed uncertain about the reception of her tea setto. The court was in a state of transition, constantly changing leaders after two factors had ended the long reign of Prime Minister Ito, the man whose broad, if naïve, vision had posed the Belling Stag ballroom as a way to inspire Western nations to revise their unequal treaties with Japan. A British ship had recently sunk off the Japanese coast, and all the survivors were British, while all twenty-six Japanese on board had drowned. Because of treaties favoring foreigners, the ship captain was tried under British, not Japanese, law, and acquitted. A few waltzes and ball gowns, it seemed, were not going to persuade the foreigners to treat Japanese like full human beings. What’s more, Ito was discovered in a compromising position with another man’s wife. After Ito’s hasty retirement, Yukako said, the Prime Minister kept changing from one Tokyo trip to the next: it wasn’t yet clear what the tone of the new government would be.
This was the uncertainty into which Yukako had set loose her gift of tea utensils. Would they seem Civilized and Enlightened enough? They were mass-produced; would they seem too Western? I worked her frozen feet between my hands as she talked: the road home was long, as always, and there was already snow at Hakone Pass. “Do you remember the man from the imperial court my father entertained when we were children? The former Emperor’s nephew?”
“Of course.” How strange to think of Yukako and myself as children together; when we were nine and sixteen, she’d seemed so much older.
The August Cousin, she told me, still a close confidant of the Emperor himself, had just been named Minister of Education by the new Prime Minister. “He’s the one coming to inspect the schools this fall,” she explained, anxious. He had expressed neither pleasure nor displeasure at Yukako’s gift. “His silence made me so nervous,” she said. “As if Father were watching.”
She was home, home: I rested my cheek on her little cold foot.
25
1891
JUST BEFORE NEW YEAR’S, Yukako had an answer, if not from the Minister, then from the imperial household: she was asked to bring a tea teacher to live and work at court when she came the following spring. “This is quite something,” she said, nodding. There were so many red stamped seals on the letter, I was afraid to touch it.
MEIJI TWENTY-FOUR, though it corresponded with the lucky occasion of Chio’s sixtieth year, did not open well for her. On New Year’s she choked on a bite of mochi, a chewy cake made of pounded rice, and her face turned purple. Aki, just fifteen, screamed and screamed as if gasping her grandmother’s air for her. Nao, visiting, gave his mother a precise blow to the belly and dislodged the mochi, but Chio was never the same after. Some sturdy part of her had been left absentminded, content to follow Kuga instead of lead. In the bathhouse I saw her lose track of herself and wander, half soaped, toward the soaking tub: Kuga and I leapt up and led her back to finish rinsing first. After the second time it happened, we watched her constantly while pretending not to, and in the kitchen Kuga slowly edged her mother out of work involving fire and knives.
After New Year’s, Nao got permission from his master glazier to leave the guild for a month or two and work on a project out of sequence: ours. He was able, in that way, to see Chio every day, and between us all, someone could always look out for her. Yukako, meantime, had decided to train her female teachers as boarders rather than day students: the first glass windows on the Shin compound appeared in the newly constructed women’s bathhouse. I barely noticed Nao at first. He slept in the little cottage by the kitchen; he worked on the windows; he looked after his mother and kept to himself. If Yukako still harbored the annoyance she had first shown on his return, the feeling, like the project she had hired him for, was a thing she set off to the side.
I wondered why Yukako had chosen such an insignificant part of the house to lavish her glass money on. And opaque panes! With glass windows she could see the tea gardens from her futon all year round, if she wanted to, or glass could make a new world out of the dim kitchen.
Then I understood: For all her innovation with tea utensils and teaching, Yukako didn’t want a new world. She was giving glass lip service as a way to please Advisor Kato. With the school inspection coming up, she could not afford to do otherwise.
Advisor Kato, meanwhile, was working hard to maintain his connections. He couldn’t join Yukako for tea at New Year’s because he was entertaining guests from Tokyo, courting funds for a new stage, su-tei-ji, of the almost-dug canal. The money was released, it seemed, on certain conditions. By the time Kato’s guests had left, the announcement had gone out to all the principals, parents, and teachers that starting with the new school term in April, the girls’ compulsory dress would shift. Plaid shawls would no longer be required. Instead, every girl was to wear hakama over her clothes, be they kimono or Western. I was glad the Pipe Lady was not alive to witness yet another slight to her abolished caste: girls in hakama, the trouser-skirts worn by samurai men! The Pipe Lady’s granddaughter Sumie lived in Tokyo with her late husband’s parents now, but once the Meiji government had released her father and oldest brother, they, like many former Shogun loyalists, had moved their family north to Yezo, to homestead as far from Meiji Tokyo as possible. How galling it would be for Sumie’s brothers to see the new girls’
uniforms, I thought: those boys had vaunted their hakama as much as their swords.
Though no one wore hakama anymore (except for sacred virgins at shrines, who wore red ones), samurai households everywhere kept them in storage. Since samurai and merchant girls were the first admitted to the new schools, hakama would, like the plaid shawls, be an inexpensive way to standardize dress, but the choice did mark a clear shift from West to East. The boys, similarly, who had been wearing a riotous mix of Japanese and modern dress under their Western uniform straw hats, were instructed to leave their hats at home.
When Advisor Kato finally did join us for tea, it was Setsubun, in early February, the day that fathers wear horned oni-devil masks and chase their children through the house, when children throw toasted beans and chant spells to drive the devils out. Kenji was visiting from Sesshu-ji that day, and though at eighteen and nineteen they were far too old for Setsubun games, the two boys bought a mask for Nao and teased and bullied him away from his work until he gave in and uncomfortably chased Aki down the hall. Shrieking with laughter, she hid behind me, though she was taller, and so he chased me, too, until the young men assaulted him with beans, triumphant. Jiro hadn’t joined us for Setsubun in six years, I noted: no wonder the boys seized on Nao. Even Chio remembered to hang the Setsubun talismans against demons on the kitchen doorpost: a sprig of holly and the head of a sardine. In the tearoom, Yukako chose an incense box with a lid shaped like an oni-devil mask, then changed her mind because Kato was a Christian.
It was the season when plum blossoms make their fearless show in the ice and sleet, and the plates I was to carry from the kitchen held sardines and winter herbs. Yukako decided to perform a special temae designed for the coldest months, in which the tea is served in a tall narrow bowl to hold in the heat. She even found a winter tea bowl in storage named Hakama to use in Kato’s honor: narrow at the base and flared at one side, like the leg of a blown trouser-skirt.
