by Ellis Avery
Yukako’s voice startled me from my thoughts. “What if I were to buy a jinrikisha for the Minister’s visit?” she reflected. “So in a way, the temae could begin when he left Advisor Kato’s house?”
I watched Tsuko think, both sparkling and opaque. On her flat pretty features, her hesitation was distinct and self-contained, like a wisp of red fire in an opal. “In Tokyo I’ve seen a new kind of jinrikisha,” she said at last. “It has rubber wheels full of air, like—” Yukako looked perplexed. “Like a belly full of water,” Tsuko decided. “Or a frog’s throat.”
Yukako asked a little about the smooth-riding Tokyo jinrikisha, and from Tsuko’s answers, it occurred to me that her father might have one of his own. I couldn’t help but admire her tact.
“Now, imagine leaving Kato’s house in that,” ukako murmured, a little competitively. “I shouldn’t be like this,” she said, stopping herself. “The man’s mourning his friend. It would be better to have him as an ally…” But her voice choked off with anger and she gave in. “But he thinks he’s climbed past us, that climber!” she fumed. Noboru-han, she called him: Mister-Bumpkin-Visiting-the-Capital.
A rejoinder formed on Tsuko’s face; she tidied it away as easily as a girl tucking her hair behind her ears.
“He’ll always be a hayseed,” ukako said. “You’ll never guess what happened. I walked into his office and there was a stack as tall as a man of those imperial photographs. ‘One for every classroom in Kyoto,’ he told me. Who would think of such a thing? And then he asked if I’d like one for each of the tearooms! Can you imagine?”
“What did you do?”
“I said he was so kind to think of us, especially after everything that had happened, and how honored we were to have the opportunity to join the vanguard of schools using the image of Their Majesties to inspire the next generation, and so forth, but I didn’t dare make a move without asking Master Teacher. Of course we’ll accept: it would be rude not to. But how ridiculous. It makes me wonder if he ever understood the Way of Tea at all. A photo for every tearoom? How inelegant!”
She used the same word Sei Shonagon had nine hundred years before, describing a hayseed of her own acquaintance. As Tsuko nodded and soothed, more gracefully than I’d ever been able to, I wondered if the Heian court lady had ever written of being upstaged in the eyes of her Empress by some young modern thing. Perhaps it was on a page Shonagon had brushed and burned, a list of inelegant feelings.
I read on through the sweltering summer, cooled by Shonagon’s spare and lovely prose. Shaved ice with liana syrup in a silver dish. Duck eggs. Wild pinks. The face of a child drawn on a melon. Reading Shonagon, the squalid narrowness of my days with needle and wiping-rag expanded into gossamer nights in Baishian. A clay cup. A rush mat. I savored those hours, reading alone in the exquisite two-mat house, the lamplight flaring on the basket-woven ceiling, the room as given over to beauty as Shonagon’s lines.
I felt most bereft in the mornings, when I cleared away Yukako’s breakfast tray, and at night, when I washed myself in silence as she talked with Tsuko, planning every detail of the August Cousin’s visit. Since the Minister preferred Western dress, the host would wear Western dress as well, and perform the temae the Mountain had created for Western rooms. The stools the Mountain had designed weren’t meant for tatami floors, but since Yukako wanted to use Baishian—or one of the other tearooms, if the windows weren’t ready—she designed stools that could glide freely across tatami. “And I’ve ordered another piece of wood like the floorboard in Baishian,” she announced, pointing at a spot on her shoulder.
“Here?” suko kneaded as Yukako talked.
In place of her father’s table, Yukako wanted to make use of the central element already in Baishian: the floorboard that divided the host’s mat from the guest’s. If there were a table in the same place as the floorboard, of the same size and wood, with legs that did not draw attention to themselves, surely it would clutter the tiny room less than a great black lacquer stand off to the side? “Perhaps the stools should be made of the same wood too,” she thought aloud. “Oh, I’ll need you to serve tea when the cabinetry man comes tomorrow.”
“Of course,” promised the younger woman, draping a towel over her mother-in-law’s shoulders before getting her own. The word for a bride is the same as the word for a daughter-in-law, yome. As I watched them, I thought how lucky Yukako was, never to have been a daughter-in-law herself: the girl had to work just as hard to please Okusama as she did to please her husband. Still, as they left the bathhouse ahead of me, I knew this: I would rather have been her yome than her discarded toy.
AT MY MOST JEALOUS, I felt impatient with Shonagon. The snow mountain she piled up for Her Majesty eased the sticky July heat no more than her Empress’s approval eased my loneliness. On such nights, I read quickly and badly, like a brute gobbling up a tea ceremony meal: Shonagon meant to tell the reader what happened next no more than a kaiseki chef meant to fill the belly. But it was on such a night, skimming past the well-turned lists to see if anything ever came of her love for the Empress, that I found I’d reached the end of Shonagon’s book, but not the end of Kenji’s.
Pushed tightly into the last fold of The Pillow Book was a stack of thin pages in Kenji’s clearest hand. Half a generation after Shonagon, he explained, another great writer served in the next Empress’s court: Murasaki Shikibu. I knew her as the author of The Tale of Genji, beloved by Yukako and Sumie as girls. Like Shonagon, Murasaki also kept a diary of her time at court, and Kenji had rewritten parts of it for Aki as well, her archaic forms and obscure words updated for a contemporary ear. I almost ignored it, as it began with a tediously detailed account of imperial birth rituals, but I read on and discovered a moment when the speaker pulls back the sleeve of a sleeping woman to look at her face. “You look like a princess in a story,” she tells her waking friend.
Though the prose was less intoxicating, I felt drawn to this shyer, less arch and worldly voice, this woman less at ease than Shonagon with the court and its gossip, quick love affairs, and lack of privacy. She was not above gossip herself: she envied the witty court of sacred virgins at Kamo Shrine, and lamented the dullness of the Empress’s ladies. I laughed out loud to read her characterization of Shonagon as dreadfully conceited. She thought herself so clever and littered her writings with Chinese characters. How interesting to learn that the Empress had chosen Murasaki for the secret task of teaching her those same Chinese characters. Very unladylike! editorialized Kenji, but he was clearly proud of her: then, even more than now, he explained, men wrote using kanji, the Chinese ideographs, and women wrote using kana, the simpler phonetic characters. Murasaki and Shonagon were unusual in using both systems of writing. I thought about this book, translated and copied as a gift of love, and I imagined Murasaki waiting for a secret meeting with her Empress, a young woman resplendent in twelve-layered robes and flowing hair, learning as Aki had learned, one brushed kanji at a time.
As I read on, I recognized, in Murasaki’s drier prose, many of the moments that had seemed unique to Shonagon. Her Majesty looked so radiant this evening that it made one feel like showing her off…and later: In the clear light of a small lamp hung inside the curtains, Her Majesty’s lovely complexion was of translucent delicacy…and later still: Her Majesty has also remarked more than once that she had thought I was not the sort of person with whom she could ever relax, but that now I have become closer to her than any of the others.
In the lamplight, surrounded by Kenji’s copied sheets, I looked from Murasaki’s diary back to Shonagon’s. With her whole heart, Shonagon, like Murasaki, loved Her Majesty exactly as she should love a liege, and Her Majesty, with her whole heart, loved Shonagon exactly as she should love a vassal. Nothing was going to happen. I had mistaken Shonagon’s sensual fervor for the thing I heard in Kenji’s voice when that coracle lifted off the sand inside me, when he said why they had jumped, for each other.
THE NEXT DAY, as I sat heavy-eyed in the hot sewin
g room, my sweaty fingers thick around the needle, facing one more endless seam, one more endless afternoon with Jewel and Jade chattering about where Nao could have gone; facing the robes the students had just soiled, the robes in the gardens and tearooms they were just then soiling, the robes they were certain to soil soon; facing all the unsewing and washing and resewing, all the thread and stitches and dirty water that would total the rest of my life—at that moment I spotted Yukako walking outside, her swift, long-bodied gait unchanged in all the years I’d known her. As my chest tightened under my obi, all at once I remembered that day in our time of direst want, when in this very room Yukako had preferred to burn her own robe rather than sew it.
My eyes flew wide open. I would do as Murasaki had done, I decided, and as Yukako had herself done. You can get used to anything, I’d told her then, gently, because I had not yet discovered the one thing I could not get used to, and her disparaging reply lent me steel now: Maybe you can, she’d told me.
I left.
32
1891
I BEG YOUR PARDON?”
“Would you be desirous of an English or French tutor?” I said again in the lemon-polish room, staring at Alice Starkweather, her eye-whites pink with veins.
“Repeat yourself, child, I don’t understand you.”
I began to blush in anger and frustration. “Do you remember me?” I asked.
“Of course I do,” she said, nodding at a stack of papers on the table. The room bristled with wooden legs: the table, the desk, four wooden chairs, two overstuffed armchairs. Miss Starkweather sat in one of them, her back as straight, in spite of the cushions, as if she were sitting in the tearoom. “You were an angel with those letters the week our Noriko left. As you can see, she never did come back.” The papers, I realized, covered not only the table but every chair as well. “It’s always the fathers. Are you here to help?”
I concentrated as I framed my reply, willing my English not to skitter off into Shakespearean murk. “What would you pay?”
She named a figure and I felt myself bowing uncontrollably. “Do you have time today?” she asked.
With five coins in my sleeve, I stopped on my way home, as Yukako had before me, for a few skewers of grilled dango: rice cakes slathered in thick, sweet sauce.
AT DINNER, out of habit, I filled my bowl as high as any other night, but I forgot that I had just eaten. Each cake of mochi is as filling as six times its volume in rice; for the first time I had trouble finishing a meal at the Shin house. I remembered the way my mother spoke of les nonnes when I was a child, and I felt shame that I had walked up the road to those Protestant nuns. But I thought of the freedom Aki had found behind the convent wall, and I thought of my mother’s gift, her blessing on my future. You could be a translator. The letters Miss Starkweather had not understood, she now did, and I had the full belly to prove it.
We were doing well now, thanks to the money from the schools, and even sewing-girls could eat more if they wanted. I watched Jade lift the lid off the steaming pot of rice and barley and dip in the bamboo paddle for a second helping. When she reached for my bowl, I covered it with my hand. “I’m fine,” I said.
I watched the steam climb in the air even after Jade replaced the lid. I ate another slow bite of rice. We all had Yukako to thank for our dinner, her cunning and vigor; the great steaming pot held hours of her life. This is her rice, I thought. I was too full to eat another bite: I almost cried. I remembered the way the sewing frame had stood ready as if at any moment I might return and bend over that wretched black student robe again, remembered Yukako receding in the Shin gate, long and straight and tiny as the needle I’d left behind: it felt like the longest road I’d ever traveled, the short walk to Miss Starkweather’s school. I used both hands to hide my weeping face. I was too full to eat. My independence tasted like exile.
“Aunt?” said Jade’s young voice.
“There was something in my eye,” I said.
I WASHED THE DISHES briskly when we finished, dried them with a quick snap of towels. When Kuga was alone, I spoke to her, as Yukako had once spoken to Chio. “O-Kuga, I’ve found other work in the afternoons. I can still serve and clean, but what would it cost to hire someone to take my place in the sewing house?”
Kuga thought slowly. Kenji would have said it looked like she was chewing. “A friend did ask me yesterday about taking in some sewing,” she said. “Her daughter’s old enough.” She looked at me sideways and slowly named a figure that was patently higher than what Jewel and Jade earned, but still half what Miss Starkweather had offered me. I agreed, wondering how much of the money she planned to drink up herself. “Just bundle up your share here at the door and I’ll give it to o-Hazu.”
“O-Hazu? From the bathhouse?”
I did not pretend to be happier than I was, but Kuga shrugged. “Do you want me to help you or not? It’s not like she’s coming inside.”
“Oh,” I said. Kuga was ready to defer to Yukako’s wishes, but if I felt betrayed, it was no concern of hers. “Very well.”
AND SO I BEGAN wearing hakama again, this time down Migawa Street to the school by the Palace wall. I felt so heavy inside, wearing the clothes I loved for Miss Starkweather instead of Yukako, but sometimes, when I walked in the shade, or when a rare summer breeze whisked at my parasol, I wished Aki could have seen me swishing up the street, like the students she envied, with my modern deep-eaves hairstyle and my billowing trouser-skirts. Usually I took small steps when I walked, so my kimono wouldn’t flap open and expose me, but with my hakama, when my skirts flapped, no one saw. I felt my strides lengthen, my wooden shoes ring out on the street.
Reading and translating Miss Starkweather’s letters and newspapers was like learning English all over again. A born teacher, Miss Starkweather was merciless and precise in her corrections, insisting I repeat myself over and over until I had pronounced a word to her satisfaction. “Required. Required,” I tried again, eliding kuwai into that central syllable, reacquainting my mouth with those sticky double consonants: kw, rd. I had never lost the distinction between r and l, but Miss Starkweather, expecting of me a level of English that would have sorely vexed anyone who hadn’t grown up with it, never offered comment or praise. Wherever Noriko the translator was now, I was sure she was happy not to be repeating English words. “You are required to show this photograph. May I say display?”
“Yes, it’s more appropriate. But not displai, dear, displei. Repeat.”
“Display.” My only English-speaking companions for years had been Tales from Shakespeare and Paris for Travelers, and I could hear them only in my fickle mind’s ear. As July sweated into August, however, I found I remembered more and more, and my accent and usage, seized up from years of solitude, relaxed with exposure to another speaker. My work with the stern and rabbit-eyed Miss Starkweather, though demanding, was like a guided tour of a lost childhood city.
And her work with me was clearly one area among a very few in which she had total control of her environment. Nothing seemed to calm her so much as correcting my English. “You are required to display this photograph in each classroom, or you hazard imprisonment or fine.” Had I slipped and used the French word?
Miss Starkweather cast a grim eye on a stack of Their Majesties’ portraits. “Risk, dear,” she said, her voice mechanical and soothing. Another father had recently pulled his daughter out of school, and made so bold as to say why: to improve her marriage prospects. “One day Yoshiko was here, the next she was gone,” sighed Miss Starkweather. “And such a bright girl too.”
In a week or two I had read my way through all the mail on the chairs and we had moved on to the table. And then, in the hottest part of August, when bowls of sweet shaved ice puddled instantly into sugar water, as I sat making out a notice from the fire inspector one afternoon, a flurry of lace and ruffles burst into the office announcing Miss Frances Parmalee, red and gasping with news: “Oh, dear, an American has gone and killed some Jap tart in Yokohama. And t
here was a riot and it’s in all the papers.”
Miss Starkweather, energized briefly by Miss Parmalee’s appearance, sank deeper into her chair. “Oh, Fanny, and right before the Obon festival.”
“Obon is always a trial here,” explained Miss Parmalee, acknowledging both my presence and my confusion. We had been introduced but had never spoken. “This is Japan, so the school year runs from April to the beginning of March. But this is a Christian school, so we can’t take a holiday expressly for Obon. We simply can’t. But this is Japan, so half the girls just don’t show. ‘Yes, Sensei; no pagan nonsense for me, Sensei; see you tomorrow, Sensei.’ And then they simply don’t show. I wish they’d never relaxed that ban.” he fires and dances, forbidden in the early years of Meiji, had quietly returned to Kyoto some nine years before.
Miss Parmalee crumpled into an empty armchair while Miss Starkweather shook her head gloomily, adding, “And this is the time of year when, if the families mean to marry off our girls, they disappear. And, given the summer so far—”
“And now this,” moaned Miss Parmalee.
“Another blow struck for international accord. I wonder how many students we’ll have left when Obon is over,” sighed Miss Starkweather. Her hands, large and red-knuckled, gripped her armrests.
“Don’t you think we should just take the whole month of August off?” Miss Parmalee asked me, setting down her ruffled basket. It moved: her venerable dog pushed open the lid with its snout, sniffed the stifling air, and sank back into its cushioned grotto. It was hard to look at this ballooning, tiny-waisted creature without hearing the taunts of the bathhouse children, and yet here was Pamari-sensei, in all her absurdity, smiling at me, enjoining me to agree. “American schools take a long summer holiday, after all.”
“As if butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth,” said Miss Starkweather. “Fanny, don’t start with her. Haven’t we been through this before? We get these girls for such a short time, we can’t squander a month of it every year. Moses was on the mountain for just forty days before his people started worshipping the golden calf.”
