by Ellis Avery
Kato arrived in a suit and a great thick coat with a silk muffler that he kept on in the tearoom. He wore Western shoes, as always, but they no longer squeaked at his approach. I was aware that the faddish sound made by strips of extra leather added to one’s Western shoes had faded from the streets: even Bozu had stopped squeaking as he worked.
After Kato had eaten and drunk and formally appreciated the utensils, he and Yukako spoke a little. “I hope you’ll come see your glazier’s work in the new bathhouse,” she invited, before addressing him seriously. “I’d like to have the girls I’m training as teachers board with me, even the ones who live in Kyoto, if their parents approve,” she said, bowing. “I want them to feel as much like family as possible.”
“Is that so?” said Advisor Kato. “Interesting idea.”
“Miss Mariko’s a very good student,” Yukako added. Was she angling for Kato’s daughter, of all people, to come live with us?
“She can be disobedient,” said Kato, politely deflecting the compliment. “Obedience is a Christian and Confucian virtue,” he said warmly. “I’ve often thought of writing a little tract on the parallels. All this East-West nonsense! We’re more similar than anyone wants to say.”
Yukako pursued him on the subject no more. “Do you feel ready for the Inspection?” she asked. She’d heard that not only had Kato gotten funding for the next stage of his canal, he was actually ahead of schedule with the latest wave of schools.
From my perch backstage in the Baishian mizuya, I saw the big man beam. “Much to do, much to do, but this year’s new schools are built and ready for April. Now I’m fitting up the house for the Minister’s visit. I’m planning a new guesthouse by the moon-viewing pond.”
“I hope that goes well. May I ask, do you think it could be arranged for me to meet with the Minister in private at some point once he sees the girls’ schools? I’d like to speak with him about tea in the boys’ schools as well.”
Yukako was rarely nervous, but after this bald request, I heard her ramble a little to fill Kato’s silence. “We talked about it some years ago, that after the Inspection…”
“Ah! So we did. And I’m sure he’ll love what you’ve done. No doubt you’ll have plenty of opportunities to see him on this visit,” Kato boomed, vague and jolly.
Yukako swallowed visibly. “I look forward to it,” she said.
“DID THAT MEAN yes or no?” I asked later, after admitting that I’d stayed to listen.
“He’s not going to help us,” Yukako said, changing into her bath kimono. As I carefully set wands of fresh charcoal into the ash and embers in the brazier, Yukako cursed, her hand caught in a sleeve. Kato hadn’t even asked to see the new glass.
A FEW NIGHTS LATER, when Yukako sat late bent over her sums—the figure the imperial household would send her for the new tea teacher’s services; the amount she would retain before sending the young teacher the balance—her back suddenly straightened. Her face lit up; a drop of ink fell from her brush and flecked the ledger. “Maybe I don’t need Kato, to meet with the Minister. Why, I could ask him myself.”
JIRO, known in his retirement as Great Teacher, had reached an accord with his friend Shige, the silk wholesaler I’d once called the Bear. The merchant had also sent some of his factory profits to help restore One Pine, which no doubt sweetened his good intentions. It was a warm spring when Yukako and Tai left for Tokyo that year, with Tai’s most advanced student—Shige’s second son—in tow. After two years of Tokyo-Kobe rail service without major upset, Yukako had finally decided to forgo the hard mountain road in favor of one of the new trains: she and Tai came back in days instead of weeks, jubilant. Kenji had stayed to look after the house in his brother’s absence, and Yukako and Tai returned to find us all in the sewing room, where Kenji was giving Aki a reading lesson whose texts—the swashbuckling tales of ninja and ronin that he and Tai had grown up on—made good entertainment for the rest of us.
But not as good as the adventures which Yukako and Tai recounted. “We went so fast!” Tai crowed.
“They’ve sold Ito’s dance hall to a private club, can you imagine?” asked Yukako. “There’s no more Belling Stag.”
“I never even got to see it,” said Kenji, disappointed.
“You’ll come with us one day, I promise,” Tai gusted. “And in Ginza, where all the houses are brick, you can see Western lights all night long! Ii-re-ku-to-ri-ku lights!”
I had seen one of those lights at the Expo—a bulky, delicate, faltering thing, more often off than on—but never imagined a whole street lit by electricity.
“I finally understood what Kato keeps nattering on about with his next stage of the canal,” said Yukako. “They can use the water to make electricity!”
“In Tokyo they’re building a Western hotel the size of a palace!” said Tai. “And a cloud-scraper! A building twelve stories tall, can you imagine it?”
Kenji’s eyes went wide. Nao was there, sitting by his mother, keeping an eye on Chio’s needle and her cold barley tea. Even he, who took a dim view of Shogun-era pomp and Meiji-era dazzle alike, leaned forward, excited. Then he frowned. “I’m sure they’ll find an army of poor sods to wear their lives out climbing up and down twelve stories to fetch and carry, and count themselves grateful for the work,” he grumbled to Kuga.
“No, no!” Tai insisted. “They’re importing an elevator machine from America! Have you heard of it?”
I never had. While Tai explained how an erebeta worked, Yukako reflected on how, amidst the bright lights and skyscrapers, Tokyo was turning away from its initial giddy embrace of the West toward a more selective mode. “I didn’t see a single man with his hair done in the old way,” she marveled. “But outside of the Palace, I didn’t see a single Western dress, either, unless it was on a white woman. And just last year I’d see a few of them in every crowd.”
“What’s the old style?” Aki asked shyly.
Yukako and I caught each other glancing over at Chio in her widow’s obako coiffure, to see if she’d heard.
“Do you remember when my father lived here?” asked Kenji.
Yukako continued. “They’re still playing Western games, like gorufu and tenisu, but the old ones are back too. I hadn’t played an incense-guessing game since before you two were born,” she told the boys.
Tai had clearly heard this before, because he eased away from her to tell more of his feats of speed and noise. “You can’t imagine it,” he told me, both gloating and awestruck.
I remembered my girlhood, a desert train at night through Suez. “I can,” I said gently.
He moved on to Nao, who’d shown interest in the erebeta. “The foreigners measure power in how many horses it would take to pull the cart, so I rode hundreds of horses at the same time!”
“Seems like a way to break up what little self-rule poor people have in their villages and suck them away to work in cities and factories,” Nao said bleakly. Tai stared. I did too; I had never heard anyone talk this way. I wondered again what Nao had done in his years away from home.
Tai turned to Aki, undaunted, and promised her a train ride someday. “You haven’t lived until you’ve taken a train!”
“Then some of us may never live,” said Kuga, with a tart, anxious glance at Chio, who had just stabbed herself with a needle.
“Why weren’t you watching her?” asked Nao softly, below the sound of Yukako’s incense story.
“You were watching her,” Kuga whispered, holding a rag to their mother’s finger.
“You were too,” Nao hissed.
“I’d like to take a train ride,” Kenji assured his brother stoutly.
“You will,” ai promised.
THOUGH YUKAKO HAD TALKED freely of all the changes she’d seen in Tokyo, she’d said nothing of her mission there. That night, however, in private, she all but purred as I combed out her hair. “So many people ordered tea sets of their own,” she bragged. “Everyone wants to wash the taste of Ito and the Belling Stag out of the
ir mouths, and Ocha is just the thing for it. Shige’s son will have more students than he can handle, and the court wants more teachers!”
“Congratulations,” I said warily. I had missed her, and I hated any hint of her leaving again.
“And the women were all over our Master Teacher. When we gave them each a tea set, we gave them each a memento of that pretty boy from Kyoto, didn’t we? ‘I wish you could stay and be my teacher,’” she simpered. “And everyone asked about tea in the girls’ schools: ‘So when are girls going to start learning tea in Tokyo too?’ It’s working! It’s working!”
She smiled, ebullient, and added a crowning dollop of good news. “And I spoke to the Minister myself. I invited him to a harvest moon tea during his visit, and he accepted!”
“Just like that?”
“He said, ‘What could be more lovely?’”
Yukako had a daruma, a doll so fat and round that when we made snowmen they were called snow daruma. When you buy them at the temple, they have one eye painted in, and when your wish comes true, you paint the other. Yukako capered through the room, ground a little ink, and dotted in the missing eye to my applause. It was so bold of her, too, to fix a date: the full harvest moon falls just once a year, on the fifteenth day of the Eighth Month of the old calendar, or sometime in September in the new. The timid, safer thing would have been to propose a tea gathering and wait to hear more about her busy guest’s plans. She was so beautiful, looking up at her two-eyed daruma on the shelf, her head thrown back with pride.
26
1891
WE WERE ONLY SUPPOSED to start with three girls boarding as teachers-in-training: Sumie’s youngest, the Bear’s youngest, and Io, the daughter of the Hikone merchant Noda, who stood to become wildly rich the moment Advisor Kato’s canal opened. After Tai’s success at court, however, three well-to-do Tokyo men asked if Yukako would train their daughters, too, including the railroad pioneer Sono, recently named a baron for his service to Japan. Baron Sono, who was amassing a second fortune selling Japanese antiques to Western art museums, sent Tsuko, his large-eyed girl. And Advisor Kato, with much clearing of his throat, came to ask if Miss Mariko could continue her studies with Yukako as a boarding student. He was still pushing for his electric stage to go smoothly and needed all the support he could rally.
There was an attic in the sewing house where Yukako’s mother, like many highborn ladies, had once raised silkworms as a hobby. Yukako had the room fitted up to use as a dormitory for the girls, and arranged for their meals to be served in the little room off the kitchen where Kuga and Aki had slept until Chio took ill, and where the new live-in sewing-girls, two sisters named Tama and Hisui—Jewel and Jade—now slept. Yukako borrowed back her father’s hakama from the boys, who had dressed in them as children to stage their samurai plays. The sober pinstriped trouser-skirts dated from the Mountain’s own boyhood, before he’d been adopted into the Shins, who had served, and often married, samurai but were technically of merchant caste and forbidden to wear warriors’ dress. The Mountain had owned four pairs of hakama in a blend of wool and silk: black, navy, brown, and gray. Yukako chose the black pair, I chose the brown pair, and she saved the other two for students from merchant families. The women’s bathhouse was ready, glass and all.
The work was complete just after Yukako and Tai returned from the capital and Kenji left again for his father’s retreat at Sesshu-ji temple. The next morning, as Yukako laid breakfast before her son in the garden study that had been her father’s and husband’s, Nao came in and bowed deeply to both of them.
“My sensei asked when I was coming back, but if there’s anything else you need here…” he said, with downcast eyes. He flicked a quick look at the kitchen. Yukako followed his gaze toward the scent of Kuga’s grilled eel, half as good as Chio’s had been.
I think Tai had forgotten that the man was only with us to do a job. Nao had lent him a book and a scraping plane. He was going to teach him how to hunt with a gun. Tai pressed his lips together and looked at his mother, alarmed; she looked at him. She had no plans for more glass in the house, but she said, “Actually, my son said there’s money for you to do the sewing house too, if they can spare you.”
Tai smiled. Nao bowed repeatedly, and left.
THOUGH YUKAKO DIDN’Tsay she felt strange wearing a dead man’s clothes, she refused to wear the hakama until they’d been washed. No sooner had we finished stitching up the cleaned panels, however, than she came to the sewing house to try the trouser-skirts on. Nao was in the room, washing every last trace of paper off the sliding door frames, so Yukako took me up the ladder-staircase to the new attic dormitory, a quiet expanse of fresh tatami that followed the shape of the roof, high-ceilinged at the center and low at the edges, with narrow horizontal strips of shoji window on all four sides.
Yukako had me take off my wide obi and stand in my kimono. Given all the undersashes used to put on a kimono, the obi was not, strictly speaking, necessary for tying it closed, though no woman called herself dressed without one. But that’s what Yukako was demonstrating, in that dim, milky, floor-level light, as she twisted out of her sash and stepped into the hakama. She pulled the enormous trousers up and lashed them tight around her with their long streamers: each leg of the hakama was so wide, she and I could have stood comfortably in a single pair. The four ribbons tied up like those of an apron and formed a wide sash in place of the obi. The split of the trousers was slung so low, below the knee, that I couldn’t even see a lump where her kimono bunched up and fell open on either side of it; I just saw a double-barreled skirtlike bell. When she was dressed, Yukako helped me into my hakama and stepped back.
“You look different,” she said approvingly. I did; I could feel it. While my Western dress, based on a pattern for a little girl, fit like a sack, when I wore a kimono my obi bound me from mid-breast to mid-hip, fitting as poorly as a cigar band around a peanut. Hakama, however, designed for exertion rather than display, tied at the actual waist, not the waist-inclusive midsection that an obi gestured toward. While Yukako looked lankier than ever in her mannish getup, I felt as if for the first time I were wearing an outfit meant for my own awkward womanly body: full at the bust, tight at the waist, full at the hips. I felt good. “Come show us!” called Aki from below.
“There’s a mirror downstairs; do you want to see?” asked Yukako, as if I were a little girl again. Shy but eager, I led the way down the ladder. “Ara!” chorused Kuga and the new sewing-girls, and Aki gave me a look of frank curiosity, one that Nao echoed surreptitiously but held longer. It was strange that in all my years of wearing shifts based on my mother’s design, I had never registered as anything to them but a Japanese servant girl dressed up in Western clothing: Yukako’s accessory, sometimes chic, sometimes outré. Now, however, as I stood at the mirror with my new silhouette, the room of servants scrutinized me. Aki asked, “Was your father a foreign man?”
“She lost her parents in a fire,” Kuga recited. “She doesn’t know.”
But I saw Nao flash his sister a look, saw her shrug in agreement: Could be.
“She had no look of pollution, and Young Mistress took her in, didn’t she?” said Chio, surprising all of us. She spoke rarely now, and often seemed lost in her own mind: I bowed to her in startled gratitude.
Then Yukako reached the foot of the ladder and crossed the room to the mirror herself. She was stunning, a samurai daughter to the bone. Aki cheered. Kuga and the sewing-girl sisters gasped. Tai, passing by outside, paused to stare. Surprised and pleased, Yukako raised her arms into a fighting stance. “You need a sword!” ai cried out, grinning.
Yukako laughed, and Chio echoed with a laugh of her own, low in the throat and gently scolding. “Mr. Shuji!”
Yukako’s trouser-skirt swirled as she spun to face Chio. “What?” she asked, a little breathless. I didn’t know what Chio had said, but I’d never heard her use that tone of voice.
“Who?” asked Aki.
Chio blinked drowsily. “Wh
at?” she asked in her everyday voice.
Yukako gave her a hard look. Aki continued to stare at me. She asked her father, “If you were born in Kyoto but your father’s a foreigner, are you still a Kyoto native?”
“Don’t be rude,” Nao snapped. “You can’t help who your parents are.” Flinching, Aki bent over her sewing again.
I hated Aki feeling hurt on my account; I gave her a sympathetic glance. Nao looked at Yukako. “You look just like your brother,” he said. It was the first time he had addressed her, just her, since his gift of glass dishes years before.
Yukako stopped staring at Chio and fixed her confusion and shock on Nao. “Oh,” she said awkwardly, and went back up the ladder to change. She turned to give Chio a last questioning glance, but the old woman looked straight ahead, squinting into the bright day.
I remembered Yukako once saying that Hiroshi and Nao had played at dressing up in the Mountain’s hakama as children. “Did people call your brother Shuji?” I asked upstairs, changing back into my obi.
“No! That was one of my father’s childhood names,” ukako whispered.
“Spooky,” I said, nodding.
“Isn’t it? Him and my brother, in the same piece of clothing?” She folded the hakama at arm’s length, shuddered.
“I bet this is happening to schoolgirls all over Kyoto this week,” it occurred to me.
Yukako turned her surprise in a third direction, toward me, for thinking of something she wouldn’t have. “I bet,” she agreed.
THAT NIGHT, on the way to the bathhouse, Aki lagged behind to walk with me. “I’m sorry I asked that about your father,” she said. “It was rude.”
