The Teahouse Fire

by Ellis Avery

  WHEN I WAS A CHILD I carried secret gifts of food to an invalid who repaid them with poems. Yukako’s betrothed had seemed like such a grown man to me; I remember being impressed by his carving, by the cold curved shimmer of his longsword. As an adult, visiting Kenji in that same annex, it occurred to me that Akio must have been just as bored and sullen as Kenji was now. “I can’t talk to her,” he complained after lying silent when Yukako came to see him. “Because if I say any-thing, I’ll have to say I’m sorry, and I’m not sorry. I’m only sorry we failed. I’m only sorry I can’t just get up and find her. Have you had any news?”

  “O-Kuga went to the Katos’ to collect her and they said she’d already left. That’s all I know.”

  “They didn’t have any ideas? Any guesses? Anything she might have said?”

  “I wasn’t there. I don’t know.”

  “Obasan.” Most young people called me Aunt, but from Yukako’s son, the word made me wish she still called me her sister. “Aunt, I think if you asked them you’d find out where she went.”

  “Me?”

  “You watch things, you hear things. You’d hear more.”

  “Do you think they know and they aren’t telling? Why would they do that?”

  “See what I mean? Just now, o-Kuga would have said ‘Yes, Master’ or ‘Well, Master, I don’t know…’” resisted a laugh. “You know what I mean. I’m sure she went and said, ‘I’m here for Miss Aki,’ and they said, ‘She isn’t here,’ and she said, ‘Is that so,’ and turned around and walked home.”

  “Don’t be mean.”

  “You know it’s true.”

  “Her husband divorced her. He sold her son. I don’t think she was always like that.”

  “Just, please. Mother asked me to come apologize with her today when she goes to see Advisor Kato. Can’t you go with her and ask them?”

  “‘Well, Master, I don’t know,’” I said, both joking and earnest. I would be the obvious choice of attendant, to avoid student gossip. But could I help him? I saw again the utter devastation on Yukako’s face when Kenji was brought home. She’d sat on her bathing stool that night with her arms wrapped around her, staring at the floor, a forgotten washcloth drooping from a slack hand. He won’t even look at me, she’d said.

  “Is there anything I could give you?” the young man pleaded. “Is there anything I could do?”

  The raw need in his voice called forth another day: Kenji with a Western book satchel, walking up the street toward us from Sesshu-ji. I bowed in welcome and his beautiful festival-boy face shone gold in the late sun. I have a new book for Aki-bo! he’d announced.

  “You were so in love with her,” I said, using the English words, in rabu. “It was right in front of us and we never even noticed.”

  “I didn’t, either, at first,” he said. In the porous, tender silence that followed, I wondered if he was about to tell me the whole story. He cleared his throat. “Please, would you go talk to them?”

  “I’ll do it for a reading lesson,” I said, surprising myself.

  Kenji looked uncomfortable. I could feel him looking at my bulbous body, my dropped-on-the-head-as-a-baby face, my first white strands of hair, discovered just these past few days in the stronger light of Yukako’s bath. “Aki wa…” he said, explaining why he did not desire me. He meant both the girl’s name and the autumn season, aki, which my age no doubt called to mind.

  “That’s not what I meant,” I said irritably. “I just know it’s the best thing you have to give, and so that’s what I want.”

  “I knew you were the right person to ask,” he said, impressed.

  I saw his hope and anxiety, and felt guilty for helping him. “Do you have any idea how much you hurt your mother?” I said. Kenji turned away. That very morning at her tea she’d asked me, Has Kenji eaten yet? Should I bring him his breakfast? She’d caught herself and inhaled. I’m not going to lose my head over this. I’ll visit him once a day, and when he’s ready to apologize, he’ll talk.

  Kenji mumbled something. “We didn’t do it for her.”

  “What?”

  “Jump like that,” he said, his back to me. And what he said next dislodged something inside me, like a coracle stuck in sand, some not-yet-shaped thought that lifted up in me unmoored: “We did it for each other.”

  THE MAN WAS VERY HANDSOME. His hair was parted on the side and cut just above his ears, shiny as a crow’s wing. He had a finger’s-width moustache, a trim goatee, a strong L-shaped jaw. The woman was fresh and young, slightly cross-eyed. The man wore scrub-brush epaulets of gold braid; a ball gown exposed the woman’s lovely shoulders. In their hand-tinted pastel finery, they both looked straight at the camera with the wary, challenging gaze of those who have steeled themselves to be photographed well. “Why do those people look familiar?” I asked Yukako as we waited.

  “Don’t you recognize Their Majesties?” boomed Kato’s voice. I jumped and glanced again. Who else’s photograph would he hang in the entrance? Yukako gave me a pained look and began bowing to Advisor Kato, adding my ignorance to the staggering debt she had to account for.

  “The house is built and ready for the Minister’s visit this fall,” Kato announced with savage politeness, reminding Yukako of her relative lack of clout. “Why don’t you come take a tour?”

  Yukako nervously accepted, and I followed some steps behind, as she had not yet given him the gift I carried.

  “I hear my glazier’s done nice work in your home,” said Advisor Kato, digging the knife in a little more.

  We had no idea where Nao was. “Why don’t you come to tea in Baishian?” said Yukako, her voice brave. “I’m having him leave all the windows uncovered this season. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance: the fireflies coming in through the empty lattices.”

  “It sounds like an opportunity not to be missed,” said Kato, in a way that expressed no interest.

  I remembered Sumie living in this house long before Kato bought it. Approaching the moon-viewing pond where I’d once fed carp, Kato and Yukako swerved away from it toward the newly built house. “You know, in consideration of who her father was, I had the girl nursed back to health. I offered her a job with my wife’s family, the chance to support herself in a Christian environment—surely, no man will marry her now—and this is how she shows her gratitude.” At this, Kato clenched his pocket watch.

  “I offer my most abject apology for everything that has happened,” said Yukako, in a tone that indicated she was prepared to say it many times.

  The new guesthouse, generous and graceful, boasted a handsome glass-windowed Western wing and a tiny French garden, symmetrical and opulent. There was a Japanese wing as well, with a round paper window opening onto a little dell of raked gravel and stone.

  After they withdrew to speak in private, I went back to the pond, out along the narrow platform to the moon-viewing gazebo. I tried to see past the luscious coolness of the water, past the shimmer of the carps’ orange bodies, into the minds of the children who jumped. The platform had been built a good few feet above the pond, to offer a view of the eastern mountains. A long ornamental bamboo fishing rod leaned against the railing. I looked behind me to see if anyone was watching, then lowered it in: the dark, mysterious water was quite shallow, actually, its unseen floor jagged with rocks. I knew, then, how Aki and Kenji had been so badly injured. What a thing to discover on the way down, I thought.

  When a servant brought me tea in the cloakroom, I asked if she knew anything about the girl they had found in the pond. There was no way not to ask it rudely: she gave me a hard look and a shrug for my pains. “She left,” she said.

  I FOLLOWED the soft flat knot of Yukako’s obi home. She had dressed penitently: her kimono was a pattern of tight gray and white stripes; her obi a green so dark it looked black except in sunlight, with a scattering of green-on-green carp that quietly but emphatically announced her shame. Just so, Kuga—in Nao’s absence—had gone that week in her very best kimono to the gardeners’ hut
where Toru lived with his grandfather, to kneel with her head almost touching the ground. I know this because she had me and the other sewing-girls follow behind her, each of us holding a vessel of sake to offer in apology. “Aw, it’s all right,” said Aki’s betrothed uncomfortably while his grandfather knelt in the doorway, silently accepting Kuga’s gifts. “Really, if you don’t mind me staying on to do the charcoal, I don’t have any complaints. Wasn’t meant to be, that’s all.”

  Kuga said neither yes nor no, but kept her head bent low. The job, the only thing of value her family had to bring to a marriage, was supposed to go to Aki’s husband. She was loath to compromise Aki’s prospects, but on the other hand, how much more was she going to put herself out for her brother’s selfish girl? “Maybe there’s a widower who won’t mind her,” I’d heard her mumbling to herself. “Maybe there’s a blind man.” I knew she hated parting with that much sake.

  Toru continued to talk nervously as we knelt with our gifts. “I mean, I’d been kind of hoping to maybe get out of charcoal and learn some more about glass, but it seems like you’d have to move around a lot, and my grandfather’s not so young. Charcoal’s fine. It’s good.”

  With those words, louder than Mariko upsetting her breakfast miso, louder than Tai’s glum visit to the Baishian worksite, louder than Kuga grimly scrubbing out her cottage, louder even than Yukako’s bright lies, Toru expressed the love they all felt for Nao, and their betrayal at his having left them.

  YUKAKO PAUSED at the Canal Street bridge and watched the bright water, shallow before Kato’s Biwa Canal had begun to flow, deep now. The hydrangeas were in flower, a robust blue squadron. “Well, that’s over. He made it as uncomfortable for me as he could without using his claws,” said Yukako. “I can’t say this hasn’t spoiled my prospects with the Minister this fall, but I’m glad he was civil.”

  “Toru’s grandfather was gracious too,” I volunteered, telling her about Kuga’s apology.

  “Poor Toru,” said Yukako. “You have to admire Kenji, that business with the sacred water.”

  “What?”

  “A forgery. I’m sure they did it so that as soon as Aki got her first period, she could run away to Sesshu-ji instead of having to marry that boy.”

  “A forgery?”

  “Of course I was fooled. He really has his father’s gift with the brush, doesn’t he? But I should have known when I saw the jinrikisha money. That man never paid for a thing in his life.”

  “Wait, what do you mean?”

  “Remember, the night before Aki gave us the note from that ‘messenger’ no one else saw? She stayed home from the bath with a bellyache.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  She sighed. “If he had just asked, I would have happily sent her off to go work someplace near Sesshu-ji. I’m sure Great Teacher would have helped find her something. She could even go now, if the boy still wants her.”

  And then that beached coracle—that thing that had begun to lift inside me when I spoke with Kenji—began to rise again. We did it for each other, he’d told me. “You know, if you apologized to Kenji for not thinking of his happiness, he’d probably talk to you. You could just let them marry.”

  Yukako’s laughter was stunned and bitter. “Kenji’s happiness! Of course! I could have saved myself the trouble of getting tea in the schools, training teachers, bringing all those setto to court. Quick, Matchmaker, tell Toru he’ll have to find another job. Kenji can be our new charcoal man, and everyone’s happy.”

  “Sorry,” I said, hurt. “It’s just, what you said about Tai and Tsuko, that they might be happy together…”

  Calmer, Yukako looked at me contritely. “That was rude of me.” She looked down into the canal. “I wasn’t thinking of both boys,” she reflected, herself a woman who had not married for happiness. “I was thinking of the Shin house.”

  Leaning on the bridge railing, she watched a leaf dance by on the water. “It’s bitter medicine,” she concluded. “I’d have to think long and hard before I drank.” I felt a poised wariness I remembered from the night she first let me share her bath, as if I were holding my breath, as if I were balancing a cup of tea on the back of my hand.

  Yukako clapped to brush the dust off her hands and led on. I clopped along behind her, relieved to have some small thing I could tell Kenji, since our visit to Advisor Kato had yielded nothing. Everyone had their idea of what to do with Aki, if they found her. Yukako’s plan to send her to Sesshu-ji, Kuga’s blind widower, Kato’s Christian home. I stopped.

  Yukako kept walking, and I ran to keep up. “Excuse me for not coming in,” I said when we reached the Shin gate. “O-Kuga asked me to stop at the market.”

  “DID THE CHILD tell you she was here?”

  My head snapped up. Standing in the front office where a young British secretary had asked me, in halting Japanese, to wait, I’d been gazing absently at two letters on a tall Western table. They were spread wide with paperweights, and in my boredom I’d begun making them out. One was from a carpenter, one from a student’s father. Their calligraphies, though wildly different from one another, were clear, even if their statements were vague. The carpenter wrote in kana only, while the gentleman had added smaller, explanatory kana to show the reading of rarely used kanji. I had just worked through the second letter, and was wondering why anyone would leave this sort of thing in plain sight, when an American woman’s voice jerked me back to the present: this Western wood office smelling of lemon oil, these English words—Did the child tell you she was here? I felt dirty standing inside in my shoes.

  “No, I just wondered,” I said in my creaky English. She did not look surprised that I spoke her language. “We see your students every day, walking up the street.”

  “She was certainly quick enough to be one of our students,” the American woman said. “My teachers said she read well in Japanese. But we’re not running that kind of school; we don’t have the funds. We’ve found that families who are ready to pay for the kind of education we offer are also the ones best suited to launch their girls into environments where that education will make the biggest difference.”

  My head swam, my neck ached from tilting my head back to see the tall woman’s face. So this was Alice Starkweather, with her steel sausage-curls. I could barely keep up with the English she was using. “She came here?”

  “In America this would never happen.” Miss Starkweather sat down at the desk and left me standing in my servant’s indigo kimono and wooden sandals. Myself excepted, I had not seen a white woman up close in years. Her nose seemed waxy, powdery, misshapen; her mouth was crinkly with fine lines. I was uncomfortably aware of her blood: the capillaries in her eyes, the blue veins in her hands. “But here in Kyoto,” she continued, “there are so few of us, we’re learning more about the true meaning of Christianity. I drew her a map and sent her to Mother Margaret.”

  “Who?”

  “Papists! Would you believe it? But the girl wanted to make a life in Christ, so who am I to stop her?”

  “Nuns?”

  “They’re a nursing order. I know they have money for fitting up fallen women for hospital work.”

  “Excuse me, it’s rude, but if it pleases you to draw me a map as well?”

  She made me repeat myself, this woman in formidable bodice and glove-tight sleeves. “Your accent is shocking,” she laughed.

  I blinked at her. Who was she, to live in Japan all these years and speak to me in English? “I recommend you fold up your letters,” I said coldly, enunciating as carefully as possible. Why, any Japanese person could just walk in and see that the floors were in disrepair and well-known men were pulling their daughters out of school mid-semester.

  “Our translator’s away, you know; these are waiting for the substitute,” she said, as if I’d spoken without insult.

  “I see,” I said. So she had never learned to read Japanese, nor had she hired a secretary who could. I read each sentence aloud in Japanese, then repeated it in English, very carefu
lly, willing the child I’d been so many years before to rise up, to speak clearly, to talk back to the Irish girls, to tell that nun my mother was more than two arms and a mop. “I’m sure you understand that more tuition will not be forthcoming,” I said, proud and angry.

  “Why, thank you,” she said, impressed. She scrutinized me, this not-so-young woman in pagan rags. Half a savage, I could feel her thinking, and then she nodded as if she’d figured me out. “Are you a Eurasian, then?” she asked.

  “I’ll be going now,” I said.

  “Excuse me, but our translator, you know—”

  What was she going to do next, trot out the foreign sailor and the Kobe whore? I was so angry I could barely hear her. I bowed crisply and turned away. “Pardon my rudeness,” I said, by which I meant good-bye.

  I had misunderstood. “Whatever the Catholics offer, we can do better,” she called out to my back.

  I paused, blushing with sudden power, and left.

  WHEN I FIRST ARRIVED in Miyako, I had not spent even one night in our new house before it was lost to fire. In its place stood one brick house among many, a place—like the church across the way—I’d never seen, and yet a certain angled light stood my hair on end. I glanced up the street, but I saw a French tailor shop where I expected a red torii gate. I heard a startle of bells and saw a clot of old white monks cross the slate church walk in rapt discussion. They looked like bald toads.

  I found the convent on the far side of the church block. A Japanese sister asked me to wait by the gate: she had not completely lost the coy, baroque language of the floating world. I remembered the silence of the Pontocho geisha quarter after the Emperor left Miyako, and I imagined more than a few of its flowers and willows would have welcomed rescue.

  Aki came to the gate holding a pair of butterfly-handled shears, as if she’d been called from gardening and at any moment expected to go back. She wore the rough indigo coat and trousers of a farmwife, with a tea picker’s pointed straw hat, but where a farmer might have used just a wisp of mosquito netting to veil his face, a thicker gauze hid hers, like the curtains of a shrine. I felt so deeply ashamed.