by Ellis Avery
“No, he likes you!”
“He has that wife.”
“Who?”
“Miss Aki’s mother.”
“No! He threw her out!”
“No, she’s still in Asaka, waiting for him.”
“I heard she died.”
“I heard he has a mistress, a rich married lady who sees him in the afternoons.”
“You made that up!”
“What? You lie all the time.”
“But he likes you, I can tell.”
“No, he likes you!”
I would try to fall asleep before they could come around to their giggly refrain a third and fourth time; I lay at their feet with a channel between my futon and theirs.
Yukako’s students, however, were the most blatant gossips of all, and wellborn as they were, their prattle was more varied: it might be about Mariko Kato and Io Noda getting drunk on Kuga’s liquor by the fireproof tower. It might be about how the Prime Minister had chosen Lord Ii—grandfather of the shy, aloof girl Sumie had sent us—to write a poem for the gate to Kato’s electric plant, in an effort to build bridges between conservatives and bunmei kaika men. Or it might be about Mariko tying a string across Nao’s path up the stairs, so that she could help him up when he tripped.
Today, Mariko was whispering in the sewing room with Io: the Emperor had licensed Tsuko Sono’s father to open a Japanese art museum in Tokyo. All the fine ladies had hoped to see Tsuko’s brother married to their daughters, but the boy had married a considerably older geisha on his own. “She’s Sensei’s favorite, have you noticed?”
It was true: Yukako often took Tsuko on errands that had, until just months before, been ours. I found myself listening intently to the girls for Yukako’s news, the kind of nightly chitchat I had let wash over me before: the Minister of Education—the Emperor’s August Cousin—had a new wife he planned to bring to Kyoto when he came that fall, a former geisha who spoke French. In honor of this event, Yukako had commissioned a patisserie in Kobe to develop a French sweet that would taste good with frothy green matcha.
I wondered if I would be dug up from obscurity to speak French to this woman—but surely not. I remembered Yukako displaying the flower-cutting scissors, not the flowers, during cherry-blossom season, and I could imagine her voice: To use French food flatters his wife’s accomplishments; to speak French would test them. Which do you think will leave him with a better feeling? I tried to answer her in French in my mind and I caught myself reaching for a word in English. The districts of my brain had been redrawn, so that instead of French and not-French, as I heard the speaking world as a young child, I knew Japanese and not-Japanese.
Though it was excellent form on Yukako’s part to include the Minister’s new wife with this nod toward France, I wondered how she felt about it. Had so many years gone by that inviting a former geisha to tea would no longer stir up unpleasant memories? The Geisha Who Speaks French, I mused. I wondered what had happened to The Geisha Who Did Shin Temae, and to her servant girl. I wondered if Inko was still married to the sweetshop boy, if she had children now, if she’d ever gotten the gift I sent all those years before. Suddenly I heard Io tease Mariko. “I bet you’re glad your husband’s staying on longer, hm?”
“My husband, who?”
“We all know that was no ordinary piece of string! That tripwire was the red cord of destiny!”
“Oh, him,” said Mariko, rolling her eyes in the direction of Nao’s upstairs worksite.
“Don’t play dumb!”
“What?”
“You probably told your father to press Sensei about the windows, eh, Miss Kato? Admit it!”
“What?” Mariko snapped.
“You really don’t know?”
“Do we have to play this game all day?”
“Sensei asked Mister Red Thread to put glass windows in Baishian for the Minister’s visit!”
“Is that all?” sneered Mariko, but as Io gloated over being the one to know first, I saw a tiny smile lilt across Miss Kato’s face.
Oh, I hated him, Mister Quiet and Skillful, Mister Cheekbones! Why had he agreed to stay longer? The only thing that had been holding my despair at bay was my sense that he’d soon go. I was glad to be sitting behind Mariko and Io, not in their line of sight, as angry tears blurred the blind seam before me. If he would only leave! Yukako would realize she missed me. I’d have my place back.
I closed my eyes. Since losing my nights and errands with Yukako, I circled from sewing house to bathhouse to futon, seeing other rooms only to clean them. Without daily excursions, I was spending more time wiping tatami with the other housemaids, our backs bent full, our obi knots in the air. We had come out of the early-summer rainy season at last, and this one, sore and soggy, had been my longest ever.
I caressed the small of my back a moment and took a break, ostensibly to fetch tea for the others, but I made a longer walk of it than I needed to. Aki had wandered off from the sewing house too; I saw her by the front gate in the last light of the day, with even less to justify her lollygagging than I: she just stood in the servants’ gateway, watching the Starkweather girls walk home in their hakama. She was fifteen, skinny as a sweetpick, with a head and eyes that looked too big for her little body. She was eating less and less, I realized, noting how her head rested on the doorframe as if its weight were too much for her. Though her eyes were open, it seemed as if she had flown off from her body and were walking, invisibly, home with the Starkweather girls, her books buckled together with a leather strap. Linger away while you can, Miss Aki, I thought grimly. Any second now you’ll get your period and have to marry Toru. I thought of Hazu at the bathhouse, boasting how she’d lost a tooth for each child she’d given birth to. I was unhappy, I realized, but I was lucky. I’d made my own luck before, and I could do it again.
29
1891
WE LIVED NEAR A TEMPLE, to which I had accompanied Yukako on many visits over the years. Beside it stood a shrine. The temple barred its heavy gates before sunset every day, but the shrine kept its lamps burning all night: the torii wicket had no gate to close. The shrine walls enclosed three kinds of venerated objects. First, holy things of the natural world: great rocks or trees with sacred straw ropes around them, festooned with rope tassels and white paper zigzags. Second, objects of Shinto devotion such as mirrors or jewels, protected by stone guardians, like foxes or boars. Third—though they’d been chased off in the first year of Meiji, they’d quickly returned—Buddhist deities that had been adapted to Shinto needs, like a statue of Benten revered as a face of the Shinto goddess of agriculture, or one of Kannon honored as the Shinto goddess of childbirth. There was often a star attraction on Shinto grounds, enshrined in the largest building—at ours, a pair of wise warriors—but so many other sacred beings and pavilions were clustered together on shrine grounds that the main god seemed more like a bright star at a dinner party than a monarch surrounded by his court. Japan would have accepted Christianity without batting an eyelash if it could have just tucked another altar—this one with a cross, guarded by stone angels—into the democratic, capacious fold of sacred earth behind the torii gate.
Personally, I think the Buddhist gods returned so soon to the Shinto shrines in case someone needed, as I did when I heard Nao was staying longer, to say a prayer when the temples were closed. Before dinner, I rifled through the drawer in my wooden pillow and tucked the coin I found into my sleeve. I left early for my bath that night, the cicadas whirring in the summer dusk.
I passed through the torii. A lamp sat just beside the stone shrine basin, into which a trickle of water spilled down a bamboo pipe. I rinsed my left hand, my right hand, my mouth. A great willow stood between me and the moon-lights of the shrine that housed the Shinto goddess with Kannon’s face. The lamp on the ground lit a few leaves green-gold; overhead, the tree was a black cutout against the starry night. I parted the raspy curtaining willow branches with both arms and walked down a lantern-lined stone path.
AT THE BATHHOUSE, as every night, I took off my sandals in the outermost room and left them in their cubby on the women’s side. Looking at the honeycomb of shoe compartments lining the walls, each a perfect cube, it was easy to see how crowded the bath would be and who was inside. A certain pair of sandals with fresh new yellow thongs never failed to tighten my shoulders: Hazu was already here tonight.
I went, as always, to the corner of the changing room that had been Chio’s, where we each kept a box with a comb and bran bags, a scrubbing cloth hung to dry on each box handle. Tonight my towel was, strangely, folded and tucked inside. I looked up: had I taken someone else’s box by accident? No, that was my cloth, the crane crest of the Shin servants clear enough. Had someone at the bathhouse laundered, dried, and folded them all? No, Jewel’s and Jade’s cloths were hanging just as they’d left them.
“Miss Urako, excuse me.”
I looked up at Hazu. A few of her friends stood nearby, watching us with folded arms.
“Could I talk with you for a minute?”
“Why so formal?” I asked mildly, my stomach knotting.
“Look, my children have been giving you trouble, and I want to apologize.”
“Your children are charming,” I lied. “They’re no trouble at all.”
“Could we step outside for a moment?” asked Hazu. She took my box by its handle and walked us both to the shoe-lined outermost room.
“What is it you’d like to tell me, Little Hazu?” I asked, oozing condescension, I hoped, instead of fear.
“Well, you’ve had to put up with a lot of disrespect and insinuation. And that’s not right. So I’m just going to speak directly here. You’re not Japanese.”
“Is that so?” I said calmly, stalling.
“Maybe no one knew any better when we were all young, but I’ve seen foreigners and I’ve seen you. I don’t care if some Kobe sailor’s sheep whore gave birth to you, the fact is, you are a foreigner and this is a Japanese bathhouse. Do you understand?” she asked, her voice remaining forthright and friendly.
I wish I could have deflected her by pointing out that foreigners had not arrived in Kobe until long after my birth, but I was too rattled to think of this. “I don’t see that there’s ever been a problem,” I said, and borrowing Yukako’s mettle I added, “Except the one you’re giving me. And furthermore”—my throat began to constrict here—“I don’t think you know a thing about my mother.”
“I’m sorry if I said this in a way that confused you before,” said Hazu pityingly. “I really am. I should have known better than to expect a foreigner to understand, and that’s why I’m trying to be clear tonight. I don’t care how your Okusama does things and I don’t care how o-Chio did things. There’s clean and there’s dirty, and we Japanese come to the bathhouse to get clean.”
I was blushing and I could see black at the corners of my eyes. “I do too,” I insisted quietly.
“Look. If you ever—ever—get into the bath here again—” she began. I wondered what the end of her threat would be. Was she threatening to break my kneecaps if I dirtied her water? “—we will have to drain the water, scrub down the basin, and start over. Do you understand how much trouble that would cause for everyone?”
I was so stunned I laughed, one coughlike bleat. “That’s not what I thought you were going to say.”
“I don’t think I need to say anything else,” she said, handing me my bathhouse box. “Good night.” She opened the door behind her and I saw the other women in the changing room had crowded round to listen, including her mother, hawk-eyed and sinewy, and her daughter, a girl as pretty and vain as she herself had once been.
I looked past Hazu to her mother standing in the doorway. The woman looked me in the eye and added a stinging farewell. The meaning of the word for good-bye, if that is as it must be—which suggests passive resignation and regret, suggests that we are helpless before the forces pulling us apart—cut tartly against her daughter’s decisive actions. “Sayonara,” she said.
Cowed, I turned to the wall to collect my sandals. They were gone. On the shining, just-cleaned floor of my wooden compartment sat a small dish of salt. “They were dirty,” Hazu’s daughter said. The other women nodded approvingly. “So we burned them.”
“I hope this will help you remember,” said Hazu. She took a step back into the bathhouse and the door to the changing room slid shut.
On my way home, shoeless, shaking, I walked past a loose knot of Shin servants on their way to the bath and bowed to them curtly. Nao saw my face and gave me a questioning look; I all but bared my teeth at him.
I passed the shrine gate. “Well, I prayed for something to happen,” I said. A bitter sound, almost laughter, burst out of me.
I HAD NOT SEEN AKI with the others on the path, but when I went to Yukako in the garden office she shared with her son, I saw the girl in attendance and guessed that Okusama had kept her home to fetch tea and grind ink. Why not her students? I wondered in the doorway.
“Miss Ura,” called Yukako, her voice relaxed and merry. When I entered I saw she was not alone. Her student Tsuko Sono sat with her at the low table under the mosquito netting, looking fresh and earnest in her indigo robe and red-and-white-striped obi. “Come in, try this,” Okusama welcomed.
As I lifted the netting to let myself in, I saw a pot of tea at the table, two little cups, and a tray with the strangest-looking sembei crackers I’d ever seen. “Taste this and tell me what you think,” ukako said, as if I’d never been sent to sleep downstairs.
I looked from her to Tsuko, her sober face alight like a child allowed to stay up late with the grown-ups, and understood why Aki, and not the other students, had been called to sit in attendance: the other girls would be jealous.
Controlling my own envy, I took a bite of one of the round puffs on the tray. “It’s sweet!” I said, surprised.
“That one’s my favorite,” said Tsuko, nodding. “Yuzu.”
The crisp citron-flavored disk melted away quickly in my mouth, with a soft charcoally squeak, like—irritatingly enough—Nao’s glass. “It’s delicious,” I said dully. It was also oddly, primordially, familiar, and this made me even more angry.
“We’ll have them in yuzu, black sesame and chestnut. I think they’ll go over well with the Minister and his wife,” Yukako said, and I recalled The Geisha Who Spoke French. “They’re called macarons.”
The labored French accent she used made me recognize the taste from childhood: meringue! I flushed a deep and complicated red, and felt, amid my anger and jealousy, proud that I had defended my mother in the bathhouse. “Okusama, may I please speak with you in private sometime?” I asked.
Tsuko looked startled. “No doubt the others are wondering where I am,” she said, with downcast eyes. “Please forgive my rudeness for leaving.”
“I’m sure it’s all right,” said Yukako, but the young woman quickly bowed and left. Preoccupied, Yukako nibbled at a macaron. “I don’t plan to have the Minister’s wife in the tearoom, of course, but these ought to make a good impression while she waits.” Her tone of voice was frosty, and I could tell time had not mellowed her to the prospect of hosting a geisha—even a former geisha—at the Shin house.
“So, Miss Ura,” Yukako said, with a glance toward the doorway Tsuko had exited. “What do you need?” She seemed disappointed the girl was gone.
“Okusama, I have to make a special request.” The formal words felt thick in my mouth. “May I please bathe here at night?” I told her, as matter-of-factly as I could, what had happened, steeling my voice whenever it began to wobble. “And may I have another pair of shoes?” I finished. Take me back, I didn’t say. Didn’t we once drink three cups together?
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Yukako nodded, her face soft with compassion. “Of course. That’s awful,” she said. “There’s no dealing with a crowd like that, if they’re all against you. Of course you should bathe here.”
“When I first came here, I think Miss Hazu’s mother wanted her to work for your family, but you and o-Chio took me.”
“I remember her.” Yukako nodded wryly.
“I think they’ve hated me ever since.”
“Oh, you mean if you hadn’t come along, we would have taken in that woman’s Little Hazu instead?” She laughed. “I remember o-Chio complaining about how hard she pushed. Eta.”
My eyes bulged. I had never heard a woman, let alone Yukako, say the word for the outcast aloud. The eta, reclassified by Meiji law as New Commoners, were the families who handled dead animals as butchers and leather workers, anathema in a Buddhist country. They were so deeply outcast that, though I had spent almost all my life in Kyoto, I had only the haziest idea where in the city they might live. I remembered Chio, the few times we’d had pork delivered, splashing the street in front of the house with water after the non-eta middleman came by. “He deals with a rough crowd,” she’d grunted when I asked.
They were so despised that, though teenage boys were quick to call one another baka, I had never heard of anyone calling even a sworn enemy an eta. This made me think Yukako wasn’t speaking figuratively. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“That woman always insisted a little too much to the contrary,” said Yukako, and it was the third time I realized that she’d avoided calling Hazu’s mother by her name, Fujie, or Painted Wisteria. “But we really can’t know about her family. Her father’s mother was married to a carpenter named Toshio. A very pious woman, four sons. But when she died, it was discovered that she’d had a secret lover the whole time. A butcher. Can you imagine? So did Toshio father those sons? Nobody knows, but listen: except for Hazu’s grandfather, the sons all went off on pilgrimage”—under the old laws, no commoner could leave his hometown, except on religious pilgrimage—“and never came home.”
