The Last Tea Bowl Thief

by Jonelle Patrick

  “Me too.”

  That surprised him. “You’re blind?”

  “No. But there was a big fire. When I was a baby. They didn’t quite get me out in time so . . .”

  “You got burned?”

  “Yeah. That’s why I can’t sit seiza.”

  “Oh.” Must have been pretty bad, if she couldn’t kneel on the floor like everyone else. On the other hand, having an excuse not to sit with your feet tucked under you for hours might actually be pretty convenient. You wouldn’t be expected to sit seiza, just to be polite. When Yoshi kneels before his wheel shaping a pot, he’s too wrapped up in what he’s doing to notice the discomfort, but sitting respectfully while adults drone on about the dull things grown-ups talk about puts both his brain and his legs to sleep.

  He resumed his broom waving.

  “Does it still hurt?”

  “No.”

  “But you can walk, right?”

  “Not very well.”

  “Oh. How did you get in here, then?”

  “I use a stick. My maid helps too. Sachi goes everywhere with me.”

  And years later, the faithful Sachi still does. That day in the garden was the first time he’d heard Kiri’s voice, but it wasn’t the last. Over the years, they’d devised ways to run into each other on the day of the Sheep, when Kiri is on her way home from painting lessons, and sometimes on the day of the Rooster, when she and Sachi are allowed out to the shops. Being different from everyone else is what first drew them together, but over the years, their friendship has become something more.

  Oddly, nobody forbids their meetings. Kiri’s comings and goings seem as little regarded as his own. Yoshi has decided that invisibility is one of the best things about being “handicapped,” although it still annoys him when people talk about him like he’s not in the room. Do they think that being blind also makes him deaf?

  It does occasionally allow him to learn something to his advantage, though. Last spring, he’d overheard two visiting samurai wives tut-tutting about what a pity it was that Kiri’s face had been so disfigured in that fire. If the damage had been confined to her limp, they might have considered a match with her powerful family for one of their younger sons. The poor girl, she’ll never marry.

  Which had kindled a hope Yoshi had never dared consider. Kiri’s face doesn’t matter at all to him. It’s her ready wit, her soft hands, and the way her silken robes smell of flowers and rain that he cares about. And her voice. When he’d told her she must be prettier than his sisters because her voice is so much nicer than theirs, she’d laughed in a slightly bitter way and said that was the first time anyone had ever said that to her, and would probably be the last.

  If he hadn’t already been convinced that having the gift of sight isn’t as important as everyone claims, that clinched it. Having two good eyes somehow blinds them all to the fact that Kiri is the most beautiful girl in the world.

  He slips his newest tea bowl into his father’s next firing, waiting impatiently for the kiln to cool off enough to dig it from the ashes. And when he does, he finds the waiting was worth it.

  This is the one. He knows right away. Running his fingers over the cascade of delicate rivulets spilling down its curves, he can feel the magic that the kiln gods worked with their fiery breath.

  Just to be sure, he retrieves the other candidates and holds each between his palms, but they only confirm its rightness. Tossing the rejects onto the trash pile, he wraps the bowl in a piece of linen, settling it into a fresh wooden box and tying it with a blue silk cord. Finally, he stamps his artist’s mark on the lid with vermilion ink.

  The days pass with maddening slowness until his next meeting with Kiri, and when the hour finally arrives, he’s waiting for her on the bridge, nervous as a fledgling sparrow teetering on the edge of its nest. He invites her to a nearby shrine to stroll in the garden, so he can give her his gift in the most secluded public place he knows.

  Just as he’d hoped, she gives a small cry of pleasure when she opens it.

  Pure joy shines from his face as he waits for . . . why isn’t she saying anything? He hears a sniff. And another. Is she . . . crying? He’s been imagining this moment for months, but tears are not what he—

  “It’s . . . it’s beautiful,” she quavers. “I’ll take it with me, and treasure it forever.”

  “Take it with you? What do you mean?”

  “I’m being sent away. Right after the new year.”

  “What?”

  “My father . . . two nights ago, he sent for me and told me I’m going to Jakkō-in.” She draws a ragged breath. “It’s a convent. Near Kyoto.”

  The bottom drops out of his world. “For how long?”

  “He says . . . he says that soon I’ll be old enough to marry, but he won’t defy the gods by finding me a match. That any man in search of a wife would take one look at my face and know that the kami-sama have other plans for me. That no man from a decent family will marry a woman who attracts such bad luck. And since I’ll never have children, it’s . . . it’s my duty to spend my life praying for those who will.”

  No. He doubles over. This can’t be happening.

  “Yoshi? What’s wrong?” She steps closer. “Please don’t . . . are you all right?”

  How could he have been such a fool? He’d been so busy imagining the moment he wins her heart, he hasn’t given any thought to how impossible it will be to win her hand. A crippled girl and a blind boy. A samurai’s daughter and an artisan’s son. He doesn’t have a prayer of persuading her father to give his blessing to a pair the gods have so doubly cursed.

  “Please don’t worry about me,” she begs. “I hear Jakkō-in is a beautiful place. And the nuns there don’t have to give up everything, not like at some temples. I can still wear my favorite kimonos, and I can still paint.” Her voice breaks. “I can still drink tea from your tea bowl.”

  “I didn’t mean for you to drink it alone!”

  “I won’t be alone. I’ll . . . I’ll have Sachi. Sachi is coming with me.”

  Sachi is not who he meant.

  “What about others? Will you be allowed to see . . . others?”

  “No.” He can hear her gulping back tears. “Once I take my vows, I won’t be allowed to see anyone from outside. Not even my family. Not until . . . not until we meet again in the next life.”

  Then her cough becomes a sob, and her composure crumbles, overcome by the despair she’s been trying so hard to keep inside.

  He reaches out to her, but they’re in public, and he manages to pull back just in time. Touching her will draw attention, make everything worse, not better. All they can do is stand there with wet cheeks, throats too choked to speak, their misery and longing expanding to fill the space between them.

  Somehow he finds the words to part with her and stagger back home. Bereft, hollow, he drags himself through the side gate and locks himself in the outhouse, where he can finally bury his face in his wadded-up cloak and surrender to his anguish.

  For the next two days, he rages against fate, see-sawing between anger and grief.

  How could the gods do this to them? Haven’t he and Kiri had more than their share of bad luck? Isn’t it someone else’s turn?

  Then his fury hardens to resolve. If the gods are powerful enough to set Kiri on this path, they’re powerful enough to derail it. He just has to convince them. He visits the family shrine many times a day, plying the gods with coins and prayers. He even makes his servant take him across town to the Ojiyama Inari shrine to climb the tunnel of a thousand red torii gates.

  But the weeks fly by, and preparations for Kiri’s journey proceed unchecked. The gods aren’t listening. Either they aren’t mighty enough to change her destiny, or they choose not to.

  But if they don’t care enough to save her, surely they won’t mind if he does.

  4.

  Present-Day Japan

  FRIDAY, MARCH 28

  Tokyo

  Nori can’t get away from the
pawnshop fast enough. She speedwalks down the sidewalk, and ducks into the first alley. Falling back against an uneven brick wall, clutching the Family Mart bag to her aching chest, she tries not to cry. The pawnshop she’d hung her hopes on is a dump, her grandmother’s friend thinks she’s trying to cheat him, and the valuable tea bowl she thought would save her is missing.

  After opening the utility bill, she’d been afraid to look at the one from the phone company. Unless the shop gets a big order, by next month she’ll have to choose between food and internet, even if she cleans out the petty cash box. What’s she going to do?

  One thumb is already hovering over her best friend’s phone number before she remembers that Yu-chan had never called her back. On the day ’Baa-chan had been rushed to the hospital, she’d interrupted her best friend’s dinner, desperate to cry on a sympathetic shoulder, but the friend who’d been there for her since primary school couldn’t give her more than a fraction of her attention while keeping her children from killing each other. Nori had hung up, fighting tears, sure she’d call back later, offering the kind of sympathy that Nori would have showered on her if their situations had been reversed. But she never did. Had their friendship really dwindled to the gossipy chats that only happen when she occupies the chair at the cut-rate clip joint where Yu-chan works?

  She scrolls half-heartedly through her contacts, hoping a sympathetic name will pop out, but none do. Layers of work, weddings, family obligation, and kids have silted up between them, making it hard to get together without moving mountains. She hadn’t called a single one of them when her grandmother had her stroke, so she can hardly expect sympathy now. Besides, none of them can help her with her real problem: she has no money, and no way to get it. Not unless she finds the real Hikitoru.

  And she doesn’t even know what she’s looking for. She hadn’t caught a single glimpse of what was inside the box when she discovered ’Baa-chan opening the hiding place a week ago, because her grandmother had packed her off to restock their cleaning supplies. An hour later, when she’d called from the drugstore to ask whether to get their usual brand of cleanser or buy the one on sale, ’Baa-chan hadn’t answered the phone. She’d dashed back to the shop to find her grandmother sprawled on the floor behind the counter, unconscious. In the maelstrom of ambulance, hospital, and one discouraging doctor consultation after another, she hadn’t thought about the tea bowl again until she dug the box from its hiding place this morning.

  Nori tips her face to the sky, but the clouds melt and blur. A tear escapes down the side of her face, and she swipes it away angrily. Don’t cry, think.

  Where could that accursed tea bowl be? Miura said it couldn’t have been sold without the box, so . . . stolen? But if it was stolen, why would a thief leave the box and replace the real bowl with a fake? Only her grandmother could have done that.

  And that’s a good thing, she tells herself. If ’Baa-chan hid it, it’s got to be somewhere in the building. If she tears the place apart, surely she’ll find it.

  But first, she has to know what she’s looking for. She consults her phone. Searching for the tea bowl Daiki found, she discovers there’s a second Yoshi Takamatsu tea bowl. Waterlily. From the side, Snow Bride and Waterlily are both rounded—not straight-sided, like most—and both have drips of glaze running down the sides, but there the similarity ends. Snow Bride is a pale beauty, glazed an ashy white, with regular drips of chestnut trickling down from the rim in perfectly imperfect stripes. Waterlily is a muted brick red, overlaid with glossy drips that are both finer and wilder. Are the drips two different colors? Or are they the same glaze, the contrast tricking her eye? She zooms in on Waterlily’s thumbnail, but that just turns it into blurry squares. There are more photos, but they don’t help. In one, the rivulets seem to be a solid medium-brown, in another, a much lighter golden color, and in a third, somewhat greenish. One hints of a bubbling texture in the glaze near the rim. Is that because the photo is especially good or especially bad? She can’t tell from the tiny square on her phone, so she navigates to the source and gets her answer. It must be good, because it’s from the Tokyo National Museum.

  Holy crap. A tea bowl by the same artist who made Hikitoru is in the National Museum? She checks the time. If she hurries, she can make it to Ueno Park before they lock the doors.

  Nori scowls at the prices posted above the ticket window. She has to pay to get into a public museum? Shouldn’t she at least get a break, because it’s nearly closing time? Sorry, says the ticket lady.

  She grudgingly pushes a thousand-yen note through the window. A museum is the last thing she wants to spend money on, but until she knows what she’s looking for, it would be pointless to turn the house upside down trying to find it.

  More people are streaming out than in as she squeezes past them through the heavy front door. She makes it halfway across the lobby before being slammed with the sensation she’s been here before. But the reception desk had seemed taller, the floor closer. The gray granite had been wet, the afternoon drizzling with rain. It was a few weeks after her father died, and she’d spotted a hundred-yen coin lying unclaimed at the foot of the reception desk, but ’Baa-chan had been gripping her hand so tightly it hurt, and she didn’t dare pull away to pick it up.

  Earlier that day, her grandmother had packed her onto a bus and taken her to a neighborhood so devoid of landmarks, it had taken her years to find it again. ’Baa-chan had sat her down on the bus shelter bench and given her a picture book to entertain her while she crossed the street to take care of some “business.” But Nori had looked at that book so many times, it only took her a few minutes to finish flipping through it. She’d glanced up and caught ’Baa-chan ringing the bell at an apartment block across the street. When the door opened, her mother was standing there, her mane of bleached curls and way of standing as familiar to Nori as her own body. But in the months she’d been gone, it was her mother’s body that had changed. A growing baby was making a bump under the front of her dress.

  Nori had leapt up and clapped her hands with delight. That’s why her mother had gone away! She wanted to surprise Nori with the little sister she’d been asking for. Nori had jumped up and down and waved. But whether she was too far away, or the rain was coming down too relentlessly in the street between them, her mother hadn’t waved back before closing the door on her grandmother.

  When ’Baa-chan returned, Nori had taken one look at her face and swallowed her questions. Her grandmother’s lips were set in the grim line that meant she might be dealt a swat on the bottom for reasons she didn’t understand.

  So she watched and waited. She didn’t know how long it took to make a baby, but the months dragged by, and still her mother didn’t return. It was more than a year before she mustered the courage to ask why they’d never been back to meet her new brother or sister. Her grandmother’s face had hardened as she said, “You don’t have any brothers or sisters,” and walked away.

  Nori didn’t understand, but she knew better than to ask again. If she wanted to know anything about her mother and the baby, she’d have to find out for herself. But by the time she was old enough to sneak out and find the nondescript building across from the bus stop, nobody with her mother’s name lived there.

  She drags herself back to the present. Less than thirty minutes to closing time.

  She unfolds the map that had come with her ticket, and her heart sinks. There are dozens of galleries. Scanning the lobby, she locates the information desk. Swimming toward it against the tide of exiting visitors, she calls up the photo of Waterlily.

  “Excuse me,” she says to the uniformed woman behind the counter. “Can you tell me where to find this tea bowl?” She hands over her phone.

  The attendant studies it, consults her exhibition list. A crease appears between her brows.

  “I’m afraid that might be difficult.”

  “Difficult? Why? It says right there that it’s in your collection.”

  “It is,” the woman replies, han
ding back the phone. “But it’s not on display right now.”

  “Not on display?”

  “Our collection is huge. Only a fraction of the works can be exhibited at any one time. The rest are in storage.”

  “But . . . I need to see it. I came all the way here to see it.” She’d spent money she didn’t have to see it.

  The woman keys a search into her computer.

  “The last time that piece was shown to the public was . . . two years ago, in a show of art from Buddhist convents. You might check the gift shop,” she suggests apologetically. “There were lots of nice pictures in the exhibition catalog, and there might be a few copies left.”

  Disappointed, Nori thanks her and crosses the lobby to the museum store, but there are a dizzying number of books on display. She backtracks to fidget in line before the register, while the only employee in sight rings up twelve postcards for the customer in front of her.

  “Excuse me,” she says, stepping up to the counter. “Can you help me find a book with photos from a show that happened two years ago? I think it was art from Buddhist convents, or something like that.”

  The clerk leads her to a section in the far corner and pulls out a glossy hardcover with a golden, hundred-armed deity on the front.

  “Is this what you’re looking for?”

  Sacred Treasures from Behind Convent Walls, the title reads, in inch-high letters. Sure enough, halfway though, there’s a lavish photo of Waterlily, bigger than life. It’s not as good as seeing the real thing, but at least she now knows that Hikitoru could be either grayish white or brick red, but the glaze dripping down the side will certainly be the same glossy chestnut. She scans the page to find out how big it is, but her attention is hijacked by something else: Waterlily was named a National Cultural Treasure in the year Heisei 29.

  A tea bowl by the same guy who made Hikitoru is a National Cultural Treasure? That would mean Hikitoru isn’t just valuable—if it’s anything like Waterlily, it could be priceless.