She climbs the steep staircase leading to their flat, then hunches over her purse in front of the door, digging for her key. The worn lock complains as it gives way, and she plods into the tiny, stone-floored entry, dripping. Shedding her coat and shoes, she steps into worn Hello Kitty slippers, flipping on the lights as she makes her way down the narrow hall to the eight-mat tatami room that’s still used for everything but cooking, bathing, and sleeping. Pulling the cord to switch on the overhead light, she automatically glances at the bear-shaped stain up in the corner to see if it has spread with the rain. A little, but not too much. Good. Roof repairs are the last thing she can afford right now.
She sets the wet bag on the low, lacquered table that serves for eating, TV watching and—before she’d quit school—homework, then kneels in front of the tokonoma niche. Framed in peeled cedar saplings, the floor-to-ceiling alcove designed to display a seasonally rotating collection of scrolls and vases is the only reminder of the more gracious building that stood here before the war. Not that any valuables survived the firebombing—the vase she now shifts to the tatami is a cheap design that failed to sell in the shop downstairs. It’s filled with a spray of dusty fake cherry blossoms that are only in season once a year.
Feeling around under the lip of the polished hardwood shelf, she snaps aside the hidden latch and uses both hands to dislodge the slab. Dragging it onto the floor, she peers into the shadowy well beneath. There’s the other bundle, pushed into the far corner.
She lifts it out. It certainly feels heavy enough to be a kimono, but as she pulls apart the knot, she discovers it’s not. Just ordinary workman’s clothing—a pair of cotton tie-waisted trousers, a jacket that crosses left over right, and a head wrap, all dyed indigo, so blue they’re almost black. But as she unfolds each piece, hoping there might be valuables sandwiched between the layers, she finds they’re not as new as the dark color led her to believe. Fabric this patched and threadbare ought to be faded nearly white. Why had someone taken the trouble to redye them? Out of pride, to hide the wear?
She sits back on her heels, wondering who they’d belonged to. Holding up the jacket, she measures a sleeve against her arm. It’s a little too big. Since the style dates from the time before milk drinking made the entire Japanese population taller, it had probably belonged to a man. Her grandfather? Her great-grandfather?
The bigger mystery is why ’Baa-chan had kept them. The clothes are old, but not the least bit valuable. Why would she hide a pile of worthless rags in the most secret place in the house?
7.
Feudal Japan
DECEMBER, 1680
Jakkō-in Convent, Kyoto
Yoshi waits by the back gate with his possessions in hand and traveling cloak on, but Sachi arrives alone, her voice tight with worry.
“They called the doctor and he gave her some herbs, but every hour she grows worse.”
“Worse?” He stiffens with alarm.
“We’ve been chanting the sutras for her, but what if she dies? What will happen to me if—”
“Did you tell her I was waiting for her?” he interrupts, cutting her off before she names his worst fear. “Did you remind her that she can spend the rest of her life living it, not just praying for others?”
“I told her your words exactly, Takamatsu-san.”
“And what did she say?”
“I’m . . . not sure she heard me. When she speaks, she makes no sense. If she . . . what if she . . . what will happen to me if she . . .”
“Don’t say it!” Yoshi barks, his fear making him harsher than he means to be. More gently he adds, “I’ll see what I can do.”
But what can he do? The next day, he visits the apothecary, but there are no herbs in his storeroom that haven’t already been sent to the convent, no remedy that hasn’t been tried. Helpless to do anything but hope, he pays a scribe to write Kiri a letter, urging her to fix her eyes on the future, to find the strength to do what her heart desires, hoping it will lend her the strength to get well.
He delivers the note into Sachi’s hands that night, then spends the next day making offerings at every shrine and temple within walking distance.
But the next night, Sachi’s news is worse, her voice edgy with fear and exhaustion.
“I’ve barely slept for days,” she whimpers. “When she’s awake she has trouble breathing, and when she’s asleep, she tosses and moans.”
“Did you give her my letter?”
“Yes, but she was too ill to read it, and I—” Sachi can’t read.
All he can do is increase his prayers, double his offerings.
The next night, pacing back and forth before the gate, he hopes for good news, but as the snow hardens to ice, and the maid still doesn’t come, he fears the worst. Is Kiri dying? Is she already dead?
For three nights, he keeps his vigil under the steadily waning moon. Hunched against the cold, heart filled with dread, he stamps his feet and shivers until the clack of the night patrol’s sticks warns him that early morning deliverymen will soon begin to arrive. He spends his days tossing coins and praying fervently at the shrines and temples. The traveling money he’d scraped together by pawning his fine clothing and the two dusty ink paintings he’d spirited from his family’s treasure house is dwindling, but he dares not give up.
On the fourth day, he has to know. He rises early, goes to the public bath. Then he dons his last silk kimono and visits the barber to have his tonsure shaved and his topknot oiled.
He hammers on the front gate of Jakkō-in. The gatekeeper tells him that men aren’t allowed past the entry hut, but he refuses to take no for an answer.
“I’m the son of Honzaemon III and this is a matter of great urgency,” he insists, mustering the voice his father uses for uncooperative tradesmen. “I need to see a woman who’s staying here. Her name is Kiri.”
“I’m sorry,” says the porter, a veteran of such demands. “The nuns aren’t allowed any contact with the outside world.”
“She’s not a . . . never mind. Let me speak with the abbess, then.”
“I’ll find out if she’ll see you. Wait here, please.”
Yoshi takes a seat on the hard bench provided for visitors. He leaps to his feet twice, thinking he hears footsteps, but it’s some time before the gatekeeper returns with the abbess. Hearing them stop before him, he rises.
“This is the gentleman who asked to see you, Your Reverence.”
He bows and introduces himself, adding that he’s from Sasayama.
If that means anything to the abbess, she doesn’t say.
“I understand you have a message for one of our nuns.”
“She’s not a nun. She just arrived a week ago. But she’s been sick, and—”
“Ah. Are you referring to the postulant we’ve been petitioning the blessed Jizo-sama to deliver from her grave illness?”
“Yes. That’s her. Her name is Kiri.”
“I’m afraid it’s not,” the abbess says, in a gentle voice. “Not anymore. This morning she received a new name.”
“She’s . . . dead?” He sways, gropes for the gatepost. It can’t be true. But it must be—they’ve already given her the name she’ll use in the afterlife.
“No young master, I’m afraid you misunderstand,” the abbess replies. “All our nuns give up their old names and receive new ones when they take their vows.”
8.
Present-Day Japan
SATURDAY, MARCH 29
Tokyo
The rows and columns of Robin’s spreadsheet blur. It’s not yet JL dinnertime (her stomach is a liar), but deep in the window-less bowels of the university library where she still enjoys academic privileges, it might as well be midnight. Except for two bespectacled women and a skinny man who looks like his four straggly chin hairs could finally use a shave, she’s alone in the stacks on a Saturday night.
Pushing her laptop aside, she drops her head onto her folded arms. She’s not a numbers person. She’s never been a numbers pers
on. So, how the hell did she wind up doing her dissertation on “Methodologies for Authenticating Edo-Era Ceramic Pieces Using Thermo-Luminescent Imaging”?
She rolls her stiff shoulders, stretches her back. Being on the team that authenticated the Yoshi Takamatsu tea bowl squirreled away in Jakkō-in’s treasure house for nearly three centuries is a respectable achievement, but her first love is literature, not art. Specifically, the poetry of Saburo, the only Japanese haiku master whose name had penetrated the Midwestern backwater where she grew up. The first Saburo poem she’d read in her World Literature class had spoken to her so powerfully that she’d gone straight to the high school library after class and binge-read everything he’d ever written. Everything that had been translated into English, that is. From then on, instead of devouring Sailor Moon comics still warm off the delivery truck, she began haunting online haiku forums and teaching herselfJapanese. By the time she submitted her masters’ thesis on “Mapping Traditional Buddhist Sins to Saburo’s The Eight Attachments,” she was living in Japan and hoping to turn her years of Saburo obsession into something that would earn her a living. The main reason she’d signed on to do a PhD with the research team studying the newly discovered trove of art at Jakkō-in was because it was rumored there were unpublished Saburo poems among the cache of scrolls.
Sadly, there had been only one, and it had been snatched up by a rival grad student with a degree from the same university as their thesis advisor. That poem ended up being merely “school of Saburo,” though, not an undiscovered gem written by the master himself. Last she heard, the doctorate based on that disappointing research hadn’t vaulted its author into anything loftier than an untenured assistant professorship in rural Ohio. Recalling this dodged bullet still fills her with half-guilty schadenfreude. At least her research had been conducted on a piece that was named a National Cultural Treasure within a year of its discovery, and had debuted with great fanfare in a blockbuster exhibition of convent art at the Tokyo National Museum.
For a few weeks, that had rekindled her enthusiasm for finishing her dissertation, but it didn’t last. The only thing that had ever really sparked her interest in authenticating the tea bowl was the growing evidence that the potter Yoshi Takamatsu and the poet Saburo had crossed paths, maybe even influenced each other. Scholars generally accepted that they had encountered each other on Saburo’s first poetry pilgrimage, and it was none other than her undergraduate advisor who’d discovered that the potter had given one of his tea bowls the same name as a poem in Saburo’s famous collection, The Eight Attachments. Robin had secretly hoped that the tea bowl lying unstudied at Jakkō-in would also turn out to be named after an Attachment. If there were two, it would bolster the theory that one artist had inspired the other. Unfortunately, it turned out that Jakkō-in’s tea bowl had never been known by any name but Waterlily, and it had been in the convent’s collection since before Saburo was born.
By then, though, she was helplessly ensnared by the sideways drift of academic research, which pushed her further and further from Saburo’s poetry. By the time she found herself scraping microscopic samples of clay from Waterlily and subjecting them to high heat in order to pin down age and origin, it was too late to steer her career back on course. Her experience fine-tuning thermo-luminescent testing as an authentication tool for Edo Period pottery had landed her the job at the Fujimori Fine Art auction house, but she’s stuck in the ceramics section, not the one that deals in literature. And finishing her dissertation will just propel her faster in the wrong direction. The only scholars who might invite her to join their research teams will be studying potters like Yoshi Takamatsu, not poets like Saburo Shibata.
But it’s no use crying over spilt milk, as her Missouri grandmother would say. And the father who gave her a loan so she wouldn’t have to shoulder another Sallie Mae would remind her that a PhD in the wrong specialty is better than no PhD at all.
Until a better option presents itself, she’d better get to work. She wakes her laptop. Scrolls. Counts how many rows of data still need to be uploaded into tables.
Ugh. Far too many.
9.
Feudal Japan
DECEMBER, 1680
Kyoto Prefecture
Yoshi staggers against a rough-barked tree trunk and slides to the ground, sinking into knee-deep snow. Behind him, his zigzags between the cedar trees, plowing a tumbling line down steep wooded slopes, punching through the thin ice of countless ice-cold streams, and up the other side. His feet stopped hurting hours ago, reduced to numb stumps at the end of his stumbling legs.
Night is falling, and he’s deep in the mountains, far from any road. He’s a full day’s walk from Jakkō-in now, but he doesn’t know where. And he doesn’t care.
Kiri took her vows. He still can’t believe it. How could she? They must have forced her. Or tricked her. Took advantage of her weakened state and—She never would have become a nun of her own free will. She loved him. She wouldn’t have agreed to run away with him if she didn’t.
He’d refused to believe the abbess, demanded to speak with Kiri’s maid. But the abbess told him Sachi was gone. When it came time for her to take her vows along with her mistress, she was nowhere to be found. Yoshi searched the town for two days, asking at every inn and shop, until the pickle-seller finally told him she’d seen a nun among Lord Matsubara’s retinue two days ago, and wondered how a camp follower had acquired a postulant’s robe from Jakkō-in.
He lets his bundle slump down beside him and leans back against the unforgiving bark. He’s tired. Bone tired. Too tired to think. And, finally, too tired to feel. It’s quiet here, amid the trees. Snow drifts unnoticed over his cloak and settles into its folds, as an unexpected warmth steals over him. He closes his eyes. If he and Kiri can’t be together in this life, maybe they’ll be luckier in the next. He drifts off.
And wakes up in hell.
It must be hell, because everything hurts. His toes, his fingers, his ears. His bones ache, his skin is on fire, his whole body cries out in agony. This must be the torment reserved for unfilial sons, the hell so vividly described to him as a child after he’d knocked over one of his father’s vases in a fit of pique.
He’s desperately thirsty, but his mouth is too parched to call out. Struggling to sit, he feels a hand on his back, helping.
“Here,” murmurs a steadying voice.
The smooth rim of a cup presses against his lips. He drinks. The water is cool, fresh.
“Where am I?” he croaks.
“Just a moment.”
The water-dispenser disappears and the quiet settles around him like a winter quilt. The room feels small, but it must be deep inside a larger building, because he can’t hear the wind whistling through the eaves. The mingled fragrances of fresh straw and incense tell him that the tatami mats in this room are new, and his futon had been aired somewhere that’s perfumed with devotion.
Footsteps whisper toward him across the mats, and a new presence kneels beside his pallet.
“Where am I?” he asks again.
“In a better place than you were.”
The newcomer is an ancient pine, his voice as deep as the waters of Lake Biwa. The fragrance of sandalwood drifts from his robes, which rustle with the stiffness of silk.
He says, “You’re lucky you chose to die near the hot spring we use for bathing, or you’d have been a Buddha before your time.”
“It was my time,” Yoshi replies bitterly.
“Apparently, the powers-that-be decided otherwise,” the voice corrects him, with a touch of asperity. “Fortunately, you were not allowed to rush into another cycle on the Wheel of Rebirth still bearing such a heavy burden.”
The cup returns to his lips. He drinks. Lying back, all he wants to do is sleep, but the old pine isn’t finished with him yet.
“What attachment is tormenting you so much that it drove you to that place, my son?”
“‘Attachment’?”
“‘Life is suffering, and the end
of suffering. Suffering is caused by attachment—attachment to what we desire, and to that which we wish to avoid.’ Which is it, young man? What drove you to try to flee your fate?”
Suffering. Attachment. Now he knows where he is. “Is this some sort of temple?”
“Yes. A monastery.”
“And you’re some sort of priest?”
“Yes. My name is Rinkan, the abbot of Sengen-in.”
“Sengen-in?”
“You haven’t heard of us?” Dry laugh. “I’m not surprised. Our founder set us apart intentionally.”
“Why?”
“Worldly pleasure is the first attachment most of our monks must give up when they arrive. Greed, ambition, lust—it’s easier to let go of them when the nearest temptations are more than a day’s hike away.”
In the silence that follows, Yoshi shifts his aching limbs, feels himself being studied.
“I don’t believe worldly vices are the source of your despair, though,” the rōshi reflects. “If you want to live without the kind of pain that drove you here, I suggest you work on giving up love instead.”
Yoshi is shocked out of his misery for a moment. How did he know?
“You were delirious for a day and a night,” the abbot explains. “Her name is Kiri, isn’t it?”
10.
Present-Day Japan
MONDAY, MARCH 31
Tokyo
In the waiting room at the Immigration Bureau, Robin glances at the nearest monitor glaring down on the ranks of airport-like seating. Now serving number twenty-three. She sighs, tucking the slip of paper bearing number fifty-one into her coat pocket. Unwinds her muffler. Getting in line twenty minutes before the door opens usually lands her in the first thirty, but the god of visa renewal is not smiling upon her this morning.
The Last Tea Bowl Thief Page 5
