5.
Feudal Japan
DECEMBER, 1680
Sasayama
Yoshi stamps his feet, trying to keep warm. He’s waiting on the bridge spanning the Sasayama River, at the place he always meets Kiri after her painting lesson. A brisk wind is blowing from the north, and the night air has become bitterly cold as the hours count down to midnight. It’s less than a week until New Year’s Day, when everyone becomes a year older. Yoshi will turn nineteen, and Kiri will be sixteen, old enough to enter the convent and begin earning eternal benefits for her family.
The wind pries at his robes with icy fingers as fellow travelers scurry past, too intent on getting out of the cold to wonder why Yoshi isn’t somewhere warm, or at least trying to get there.
A distinctive clop clop sounds from the wooden planks at the far end of the bridge. Yoshi tenses, feeling exposed. Only samurai are allowed to ride horseback, and they can stop to question anyone, at any time. That’s the last thing he needs tonight. Best to keep moving. Hitching his traveling bundle more securely onto his shoulder, he walks toward the approaching warrior, one hand on the railing to guide him.
As the horseman and his attendant pass, he relaxes, realizing he needn’t have worried. This one came from the direction of the pleasure quarter, and even above the odors of horse and leather he can smell the sake fumes. Samurai are forbidden to frequent the so-called “teahouses” or waste their stipends on courtesans, but most of them do anyway. This one is probably slouching home under the kind of deep straw hat designed to conceal his face, hoping not to be recognized.
Yoshi makes it to the other end of the bridge and feels his way to the shelter of the shuttered noodle shop to get out of the wind. It’s a little warmer in the lee of the wooden building, but he dares not tarry. He doesn’t know if Kiri will be able to see him here, and he doesn’t want her to worry if she doesn’t find him waiting where they’d agreed. He sets out across the bridge once more. This time he meets no one. When he gets to the end, he turns and starts back.
Shivering, he wraps his cloak tighter. What time is it? He’d arrived early because he didn’t like the idea of her standing alone in such a public place, but he’s been pacing back and forth for some time now. It must be nearly midnight. Listening for her footsteps, he makes his way back across the span, but neither of the townsfolk he encounters have her halting gait.
A plume of snowflakes lifts from the branches of a nearby cedar grove, pricking his face with minty stings. His robes flap about his knees as he bends into the wind, makes another circuit. The town watchman cries midnight, and still she doesn’t come.
Maybe the weather is delaying her. Or—more likely—it’s delaying her father and brothers as they make their way back across town, pretending they haven’t been ignoring the shogun’s prohibition against the red light district. On a bitter night like this, the men of her family would be reluctant to leave their favorite pleasure houses.
He tells himself he should be happy she’d listened to him when he warned her not to set out until she’s certain everyone is asleep. She’s probably sitting in the dark right now, packing and repacking her carrying cloth right up to the last minute, changing her mind about which things she can’t live without.
He hopes that one of them is his tea bowl. If she brings the tea bowl, he’ll know she understood his unspoken message: that it wasn’t a gift for her family, it was a gift for her. A personal gift. The kind she could only properly accept from a family member or lover. They had never explicitly reached such an understanding, but he’s sure she feels the same way he does. He hasn’t imagined the warmth in her voice, or the way she contrived to draw out their meetings. He hasn’t misinterpreted her faithfulness, meeting him even when it was pouring rain.
He too had packed and repacked his bundle, but he’d never removed the new tea bowl he’d made for her as a sort of wedding gift, even though they’ll never officially be able to marry. They’ll have to lose themselves among people who’ve never heard of the samurai’s crippled daughter who shamed her family by running away with the artisan’s blind son. There can be no wedding papers with their real names on them, no new family register. But they’ll be together, and that’s what matters. He’ll help her with the chores of daily life that her leg makes difficult, and she’ll help him do the things that the world makes difficult, and together they’ll be happier than either of them expected to be.
He reaches the end of the bridge and turns around. His sandals and leggings are soggy with snowmelt, his feet aching with the cold. He should have worn the warm hemp travel clothing in his pack instead of his festive silk kimono.
The town is completely still now. Nobody has passed for some time. Even the pleasure seekers are home, or holed up with their favorite women. Only the sharp claps of the night patrol’s sticks periodically break the silence.
Now he’s beginning to worry. Had Kiri’s cough returned? Her whole household had been stricken this winter—the pestilence had carried off an old servant and the cook’s baby—but she’d assured him she was on the mend, well enough to travel.
Had she changed her mind? He quickly banishes that thought, telling himself that even if she had, she’d never let him stand out in the snow all night. At the very least, she’d come to explain. Or send Sachi to—
Running footsteps. It can’t be Kiri, though. Kiri can’t run.
He hears his name, recognizes the voice.
“Sachi!” he cries. “What is it? Where’s Kiri-san?”
“She . . . she . . .” The maid lurches to a halt before him, breathing hard. “The guard . . . outside our gate. Stopped her.”
No!
“Took her to her father. Woke him up. He . . . he locked her in her room. When I took her to the privy, she told me about . . . about you.” Now there’s accusation in her voice. “She told me to come here. To tell you she’s sorry.” Sachi begins to weep. “They’re taking her to Jakkō-in a week early. They’re taking us both. We have to be packed and ready to go at first light,” she wails. “I won’t even have time to say goodbye to my mother.”
Yoshi can’t sleep that night. And he can’t go home. He already has one foot firmly planted in the world where he and Kiri live happily ever after, and he can’t go back.
Wrapped in his cloak, he’s hunkered down in the shelter of the noodle seller’s doorway. He’d promised to save her from the future she didn’t choose, and he’s not going to give up now.
It’s not impossible. Nothing is impossible. Just a little more difficult.
Following her won’t be hard—even though he’s blind—because he knows where she’s going. Tomorrow, she’ll set out for Kyoto, and three or four days after that, depending on the weather, she’ll pass through the gates ofJakkō-in.
He decides against trying to intercept her mid-journey. Even when his far more humble family travels, they don’t set foot on the road without a couple of armed guards to discourage brigands and enough servants to keep them comfortable. As the daughter of a government official, Kiri will be traveling inside a palanquin with her maid, plus four bearers, a cadre of trusted family retainers, and a detachment of seasoned fighting men to guard her. Men who will be twice as vigilant, since she tried to run away.
It would be easier to liberate her from behind the walls of the convent, where her only jailers will be nuns. Maybe Sachi will help him. Kiri’s maid doesn’t want to be shut away in a convent any more than her mistress does. No one consulted her either.
The wind dies at daybreak. At the public bath, he changes into his humble brown traveling clothes and packs away his finery. As soon as the town begins to stir, he recruits an enterprising urchin to guide him.
“I’m making a pilgrimage to the famous healing Jizo at Jakkō-in,” he tells the boy. “There’s a bonus in it for you if you can find a comrade who knows his way around a staff or knife, to protect us on the road.”
As he hoped, the boy has an “older brother” who fits the description, and the three are well on
their way by the time the pale winter sun climbs high enough to warm their faces and send snowmelt racing into the roadside streams. Fortunately for Yoshi’s unseasoned feet, Jakkō-in isn’t actually very far away. But because the convent perches at the end of a valley, deep in the mountains outside Kyoto, the journey by foot will take them two days. It will take Kiri and her more ponderous escort at least three.
They reach Jakkō-in by late afternoon of the second day, and he finds an inn near the walled temple complex, in the settlement that has sprung up around the pilgrimage site like a patch of unruly moss. Outside the gate, florists hawk thin bouquets of chrysanthemums to those paying their respects at family graves. A pickle stand tempts hungry pilgrims as they arrive to petition the healing Jizo, and a cacophony of vendors sell incense, rosaries, and small carved replicas of the famous saint.
He pays his two companions what they’d agreed, but apparently they felt a little additional appreciation was due, because he wakes the next day to find his gold lacquered medicine vial has disappeared with them. Not that he’s really surprised—that’s why he sleeps with his money pouch tied securely beneath his robe. He’d brought along the small but valuable inrō in case he needed to pawn it in an emergency, but the gods must have decided that his guide and guard needed it more.
In any case, it’s long gone now. Nothing to do but thank the kami-sama for lightening his pack.
In exchange for that, they send him some luck. By the next afternoon, he’s standing before the gates of the convent, dressed in the ragged robes and conical hat of an itinerant monk who gladly accepted a shiny coin in exchange for his clothing, staff, and begging bowl. For another coin, he’d taught Yoshi the sutra he chanted at arriving pilgrims, hoping to persuade a few to stop for a blessing.
Yoshi has already dispensed several fake blessings by the time Kiri’s retinue plods to a halt before the great wooden gate. When her name is announced by the men-at-arms, he’s ready. Just as he’d hoped, she recognizes his voice and hears her name when he inserts it into the sutra he’s loudly chanting, even though she’s sequestered behind the bamboo blinds of her palanquin. She asks her entourage to pause long enough for her to send her servant back with a small coin for the blind monk. He’s able to have a whispered exchange with Sachi, while pretending to give his blessing. The maid agrees to meet him at the narrow back gate of the convent at midnight.
But when she slips through the portal later, her news isn’t good.
“Her cough is back, worse than before, and she burns with fever.” Sachi wrings her hands. “She never should have defied her father. The gods are punishing her. They’re punishing both of us.”
“Nonsense,” Yoshi says firmly, as if saying it will make it so. “She’s not being punished, she’s heartsick. Of course she’ll pine away if all she can look forward to is being shut inside convent walls for the rest of her life. If you want her to recover, you have to help her escape. And,” he adds, “it’s not just her health and happiness that’s at stake, is it? What will happen to you if she dies in the convent? Have you thought about that?”
Sensing the maid wavering, he presses his case.
“You won’t be left alone and penniless if you help.”
He shows her a string of coins that will make sure she gets safely back to Sasayama, with a dowry big enough to marry the water vendor’s son she’s been in love with forever.
That does it. They part in agreement, the first shiny installment tucked into the folds of Sachi’s sash.
6.
Present-Day Japan
FRIDAY, MARCH 28
Tokyo
Nori navigates the now-familiar route through the twenty-four-hour fluorescence of the hospital, the mingled odors of disinfectant, floor polish, and illness catching her attention before they become the new normal. As she rounds the corner by the nurses’ station, the head nurse emerges from her grandmother’s room, a clipboard under one arm. She spots Nori as she closes the sliding door, and they greet each other with the familiarity that grows up around chronic illness.
“I’m sorry, but there’s been no change,” says the nurse, in answer to her unasked question.
Nori didn’t expect there to be. She bows her appreciation for the nurses’ diligence and slips through the heavy door.
The room seems darker than before. The lights over the closer bed have been switched off, the crisp white sheets pulled tight as a drum. Where’s the elderly woman who had been her grandmother’s roommate? Nori had wondered why she was occupying a hospital bed in the first place, but everyone knows that small doctor-owned hospitals like this one often turn a blind eye to elderly people being parked there by relatives who need a respite, even when all that’s really wrong with them is old age. As long as the family and the National Health pay the bill, neighborhood hospitals are happy to act as a sort of medical hotel and take their money. Patients can stay as long as the bed isn’t needed for someone whose complaints aren’t quite so vague, or until family caregivers are rested enough to take them home. Is that what happened with the lady in the other bed? Because she certainly didn’t seem in any danger of—Stop. Don’t go there. Even thinking it can attract bad luck.
Speaking of bad luck . . . Nori groans. Is that why everything fell apart today at Miura’s? She pulls up the online astrological calendar, already knowing what she’ll find. Sure enough, today is butsumetsu. Bad luck all day. She kicks herself. ’Baa-chan never would have charged off to the pawnshop before making sure it was an auspicious day to sell the tea bowl.
With a sigh, she pockets her phone and crosses the room. Her grandmother lies in the bed next to the window. The green lines on the monitor overhead silently trace and retrace the faint beating of her heart, but Nori still anxiously studies the motionless figure beneath the covers, holding her own breath until she sees ’Baa-chan’s chest rising and falling.
When her grandmother had first been admitted after her stroke, she’d been surrounded by banks of blinking machines. As her condition stabilized, but she still didn’t regain consciousness, they’d been withdrawn, one by one, trundled away to monitor patients in more acute danger. Now, she’s mostly observed by the cadre of nurses who look in around the clock, as she inexplicably sleeps on. The human mind is an unpredictable thing, the doctors tell her. They’ve done all they can. Patience is what’s needed now.
Nori studies the familiar face, which looks curiously unlined and serene, the fiery feelings that had so often transformed it now buried deep. Oxygen tubes snake into her nostrils and a bag of clear fluid drips into her arm, tethering her to her sickbed. Nori smooths a stray hair from her grandmother’s brow, then pulls the visitor’s chair to the side of her bed. The nurse told her it’s good to talk to people, even if they’re unconscious. Stroke victims can sometimes hear you, she’d said, even if they can’t open their eyes. It’s good to let them know you haven’t given up on them.
“Hi ’Baa-chan. How are you feeling?” she begins, pretending her grandmother is just resting her eyes. “I’ve got something important to ask you, so I hope you’re listening. Remember last week I told you I didn’t think I’d have enough money to pay the bills this month? Well, they came this morning, and I don’t. I know you don’t trust banks, so you must have a stash somewhere, but I can’t find it. I didn’t know what else to do, so I opened the hiding place under the tokonoma. The note you left with that tea bowl said to take it to your friend Miura. So, I did.”
She studies her grandmother’s face, hoping for a response. Nothing.
“He knew right away the bowl inside the box wasn’t Hikitoru. Why did you do that to me, ’Baa-chan? What did you do with the real one? He said you couldn’t have sold it without the box. That you must have hidden it. Did you? Why didn’t you tell me, ’Baa-chan? Why did you hide it from me?”
She’s talking too loudly. Rising abruptly, she turns to the window, pushes aside the curtains to gaze, unseeing, into the darkness. Thunder rumbles and rain begins to streak the glass. Crap. Th
e astrology forecast isn’t the only thing she forgot to check this morning. She didn’t bring an umbrella.
Returning to the bedside, she clasps her grandmother’s limp hand in hers.
“Tell me, ’Baa-chan. Please,” she begs, willing the sleeping eyes to open. “Please wake up and tell me where it is. At least give me some idea where to start looking.”
Her grandmother’s heartbeats flare and fade across the monitor, but her eyelids don’t even flutter.
Nori rounds the corner, her sodden hair straggling into her eyes, the worthless tea bowl drooping from her wrist in its fraying Family Mart bag. At least she’s finally on Kappabashi Street, where the wooden awning held up by carvings of the street’s impish mascot will keep her from getting any wetter.
The restaurant supply district wasn’t spared in the firebombing that leveled great swaths of Tokyo during the war, and the Okuda & Sons building is one of many Western-style structures that sprang up afterward, replacing the more gracious ones that had been reduced to ash. Time has not been kind to these hastily built postwar boxes. Their aluminum-framed windows vacantly reflect the shops opposite, weeping dreary tears down stucco walls that the decades have stained a grimy gray. Many of the stores have been renovated and enlarged as their owners’ fortunes improved, but Okuda & Sons is still just one room wide and three stories tall. The large wooden characters spelling out the Okuda name across the top once gleamed proudly with gold leaf, but over the years, it has mostly weathered away, the shiny remnants no longer hiding the dull brown primer beneath.
The shop occupies the entire first floor, with the family’s living quarters on the second. Above is an empty attic, with a bucket to catch the leaks when it rains. The goods that used to be warehoused on the third floor are now crammed into a small lean-to behind the shop, tacked onto a back room that serves as the office.
Nori shivers and breaks into a trot for the last half block, spurred by the recollection that the tea bowl wasn’t the only bundle hidden in the secret storage space. She’d ignored a softer one in a faded cotton carrying cloth because the silk-wrapped tea bowl looked much more valuable, but now she wonders. Anything that would keep the lights on for another month would help. If it’s a kimono—a wedding kimono, perhaps?—it could be worth something.
The Last Tea Bowl Thief Page 4
