Robin rings the bell. As a tractor rumbles past on a nearby road, the heavy wooden door slides open a crack and a foxy puppy head pokes out at knee height, barking a welcome. Just as quickly, a hand grabs its collar and hauls it away, a woman’s voice calling, “Just a minute.”
An interior door slams, and a moment later, the owner of the voice appears, opening the door wide enough to give Robin a view of her harried face. It’s haphazardly smeared with something greasy and white. The streaks match those covering the toddler she balances on one hip, who had apparently applied it with a liberal hand to her own face, clothes, and hair before sharing with her mother.
“Sorry, the last time the puppy got out—Oh!” Her face radiates dismay as she realizes her visitor is a stranger. And a foreigner. “I’m so sorry. You’re not . . . I mean, I was expecting—”
“My name is Robin Swann,” Robin says in her friendliest Japanese. “I was hoping to walk through your museum, but it looks like I caught you at a bad time. Should I come back later? I guess I should have called first.”
“No, no, please come in,” says the woman, obviously relieved that she won’t have to dust off her middle-school English. She opens the door wider to invite Robin into the stone-paved entry. “I’m so sorry, I—” She winces as her daughter grabs her hair in one chubby cream-covered fist. “Never fall asleep when you think your toddler is napping.”
Robin laughs in sympathy as the girl squirms, wanting to be let down.
“I’m sorry my English isn’t as good as your Japanese,” Mrs. Hayashi apologizes, shifting her daughter to the other hip. “Did you say you’re interested in the museum? My son’s out back helping my husband with next week’s firing, but I can get him to show you around, if you like.” Her brow furrows. “I’m afraid the signs are all in Japanese, though—will that be a problem?”
“No, that’s fine.” Robin had learned to read Japanese before she could speak it.
“Just a minute, Babylump,” Mrs. Hayashi chides the toddler, now kicking her hip. “If you don’t mind waiting here a moment, Miss Swann, I’ll go find my son, Mamoru.”
Robin has just finished idly translating a framed Ikkyu poem hanging crookedly above the shoe cupboard when the woman reappears with a boy in a Hanshin Tigers t-shirt. His hair sticks up in tufts, as if he’d been a moving target while it was being cut. Catching sight of their visitor, he darts his mother an uncertain glance.
“Hajimemashite.” Robin bestows the most respectful of greetings on him with a small bow. “My name is Robin Swann. I hear you’re the local expert on pottery, poetry, and baseball cards.”
“This is Mamoru,” his mother says, propelling the boy forward and clearing her throat in a hinty sort of way.
Reminded, the boy bows.
“Hajimemashite.”
Pleasantries observed, his mother says, “Can you please take Miss Swann out to your museum now, and answer any questions she has?”
“Hai.”
He slides his feet into a pair of mud-flecked boots. Not bothering to zip them up before hunching into his parka, he clomps outside. Then he turns and fixes her with a solemn gaze, extending one skinny arm. “Right this way, please.”
He leads her around the house and up a well-worn path into the woods. Shy at first, he warms up as she peppers him with questions. Yes, he’d been to a Tigers’ game. Last year, for his birthday, when he turned eleven. The new puppy’s name is Hanako. She’s only six months old but he doesn’t think she’s as smart as their old dog. They can’t let her out without a leash, or she might run onto the railroad tracks. His sister’s name is Sakura, but everyone still calls her Babylump.
“Is that the museum, up ahead?” Robin asks, spotting a building through the trees.
“No, that’s the New Kiln, where my dad works.”
The long, low structure rambles down the side of the hill they’re climbing, its thick walls punctuated by tiny blackened windows, through which the flames are fed day and night during a firing. All along the side, split logs are stacked waist-high under waterproof tarpaulins. The tang of wood smoke lingers in the air.
“Why is it called the New Kiln?” she asks. “It doesn’t look that new to me.”
“It’s not, really. It was built by my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Hattsan, the one who took over from Yakibō himself. We just call it that, because it’s newer than the Old Kiln.”
“This isn’t the one Yakibō used? What happened to that one?”
“It’s still here,” says Mamoru, looking slightly uncomfortable. “It’s just that, well, it’s haunted.”
“Haunted?”
“Yeah. That’s why my dad let me make the museum in its storehouse. But don’t worry,” he adds quickly, “the ghost doesn’t come out during the day.”
“Have you ever seen it?”
“Well, no,” he admits.
“So how do you know it’s haunted?”
“Because that’s the reason the New Kiln was built. My granddad told me that after Yakibō died, every pot they tried to fire in the old kiln exploded. For no reason. They asked the Shinto priest to come out and bless it, but it didn’t help. Then they asked the Buddhist priest to come, and he couldn’t help either. The o-bōsans ancestor said that Yakibō’s spirit was refusing to move on to the next life.”
“Why?”
“Dunno. I guess you could ask him.”
“Ask who?”
“The priest. He lives at the temple outside town. It was his ancestor who couldn’t get rid of the ghost. O-bosan knows a lot about the olden days.”
“What’s his name?”
The boy stops, forehead wrinkled in thought.
“Dunno. We always just call him O-bosan. But you’ll know him when you see him.” He starts walking again. “He used to be a sumo wrestler before he was a priest.”
Huh. Robin had never met anyone with a calling to be both. As they reach the top of the New Kiln, she spies another building through the trees.
“Is that it?”
“Yeah.” The boy flicks it a nervous glance. “Um, could you wait here just a minute while I, uh, get things ready?”
He runs off before she can answer. She watches him stretch up toward the door lintel of the long shed behind the kiln, then jump a couple of times until his hand brushes something off the top ledge. It falls to the ground and he digs it from the bushes, then wipes it on his pants and jiggles it in the lock. When the boy doesn’t reappear within a few minutes, she wonders if he’s forgotten about her, so she walks to the open door and knocks on the frame.
He looks up guiltily, a grubby feather duster in his hand.
“Sorry, I’m supposed to clean the museum every week, but . . .”
“That’s okay,” she says. “I can see things just fine with a little dust on them. Why don’t I tell you if I need to look at something special, and you can clean it off for me?”
A table with baskets of curling postcards and a cash box faces the entrance, flanked by board and brick shelves set up as a “gift shop.” She politely glances at the modern Shigaraki-ware teacups and sake sets lined up like soldiers, then raises her eyes to what’s beyond.
The room’s shelves are laden with cracked and broken Shigaraki-ware of all shapes and sizes. Her breath catches. Is it possible that . . .?
“Ahem,” the boy hints. A sign taped to the front of the table reads, “Admission ¥500.”
“Oh, sorry.” She digs in her purse and hands over a big golden coin. It clinks into the box.
“Also,” she digs deeper, “I stopped by the museum in Shigaraki to see the poems you donated, and the curator asked me to give you this.” She hands him another ¥250.
The boy thanks her with a small, pleased smile and sorts the coins, diligently locking them in the box. Then he drags the table aside, unblocking the entrance.
“This way, please.”
But the pottery on the shelves is a disappointment, once she gets close enough to read the i
nkjet-printed tags taped in front of each grouping. It had all been made by Mamoru’s ancestors. Three broken water jars and a cracked grinding bowl are all that’s left of Yakibō’s original apprentice’s work, but the collections increase in quality and quantity as she makes her way around the room, finishing with an array of impish raccoon-like tanuki figures, representing Mamoru’s father’s take on the legendary trickster.
After politely admiring the display, Robin says, “Thank you for showing me these fine pieces made by your ancestors, Mamoru-kun. But I’m curious—do you have anything made by old Yakibō himself?”
“Of course!” Mamoru replies, then admits, “At least, they might be. They’re in the next room.”
They? He has more than one? Could the rest of the tea bowls that inspired Saburo be here, in this amateur museum in the middle of nowhere? Undiscovered, unstudied . . .?
She dashes to the door, then stops, confused. All that’s displayed on the tables that line the walls in the next room are baseball cards. Lots and lots of baseball cards.
Except for one nearly bare card table, set by itself in a corner. Atop it sit some color copies in plastic sleeves and five small shards of pottery. She crosses to get a closer look.
The smallest fragment is no bigger than the coin she paid for admission, the largest nearly the size of her palm. Three of the pieces are crossed with swashes of gray-green melted ash on both sides, one is bare clay that shades from red to ochre and is studded with “dragonfly eyes.” The last is iced with deep glassy green.
Even someone with no experience identifying Edo Period pottery could see that these are different from the pottery in the first room. Thinner, finer, the glaze applied with an abstract, almost modern, sensibility. But Robin is an expert, and she’d spent hours examining Hikitoru just yesterday. She’d bet her dusty bottle of Dom that these had been made by the same hand.
“Where did you get these?” she asks the boy.
“Found ‘em.”
“Where?”
“Out back. In the woods.”
“Are there more?”
“Dunno. Might be.”
“Can you show me?” She senses his hesitation. “I know they belong to you and your family. I promise not to take any or tell anyone where they are. I just want to see.”
“Okay. This way.”
Mamoru pulls up his hood as he heads out the door, with Robin close behind. Swishing through the wet bushes overhanging the path, the boy follows a faint trail that’s little more than a tanuki track. He stops only once, before the shell of an ancient gingko tree girdled with a fresh straw rope and paper charms. Robin joins him to pay her respects, then Mamoru leads her a few steps further and stops.
“Here,” he says. “This is where I found them.”
Fat raindrops plop onto her head from the overhead branches as she regards the small clearing. There’s no excavation, no cave of wonders, just a carpet of moss, surrounded by cedars, with a table-sized hunk of the local granite peeking out from the bracken on the far side.
“Where, exactly?” she asks.
“Here.” He waves his hand vaguely at the clearing.
“They were just lying on the ground?”
“Yeah. I mean, when I saw a corner sticking up I had to dig a little, but yeah.”
Where there were five, there would be more. She advances slowly toward the big rock, eyes avidly scanning the velvety green, but spots nothing. Which, she tells herself, is a good thing. Until a proper excavation can be organized, it would be best if those precious fragments stayed buried, undiscovered, beneath centuries of pine needles and moss.
“Would you like to find out for sure if Yakibō made the pottery shards in your museum?” she asks the boy.
“Yeah! But . . .” he squints at her. “How are we going to do that? The lady at the museum told me you need special machines and stuff to test them.”
“Well, guess what?” Robin says. “It so happens that I work in a place with those machines, and I know how to use them. If you let me borrow those pieces, I can return them to you with an answer by the end of the week.”
Robin solemnly stamps her name seal on the “loan agreement” that Mamoru’s mother helped her son compose on the family computer. Ceremonial signing completed, she wraps the Yakibō shards in a Hello Kitty handkerchief loaned by Mrs. Hayashi, and tucks the precious package into her purse, promising to send them back as soon as she’s completed the tests.
Walking back to town, she barely notices her surroundings. How many broken tea bowls lie beneath that clearing in the woods behind the Hayashi kiln? And how did they get there? If the fragments in her purse really were made by Yakibō, the site behind the kiln would become a significant archaeological site. The clearing would be laid out with a string grid, serious-faced graduate students crouching with paintbrushes, logging each piece into a site map before transferring them to experts who would put the puzzles back together. Papers would be written, grants would flow in from—
BEEEEP! A turning bus startles her, and she jumps back onto the curb just in time. How could she already be back in town?
And what’s that delicious smell? Suddenly ravenous, she backtracks to a noodle shop. Taking a seat at the counter, she inhales a bowl in less time than it took them to make it. Washing it down with near-scalding tea, she calls up the train schedule. Time to hightail it back to Tokyo and get to work.
Well, shit. She’s just missed the poky local train, and there won’t be another for an hour. How’s she going to kill an hour in a small town in the middle of nowhere? The only thing they seem to sell in the nearby shops is those lucky tanuki figures, and her apartment is cluttered enough.
Maybe she should try to find the priest the boy mentioned. Ask him about Yakibō’s ghost. Colorful tales sometimes hold a grain of historical truth, and maybe he’ll tell her something that helps tie the potter to the poet.
Waiting for her change, she asks the gap-toothed proprietor how to find the local temple. The wizened auntie drags her to the door, wordlessly pointing. Across the bridge spanning the river is an imposing gate, marked with carved and gilded characters that read “Heizan-ji.”
Built of cedar beams that interlock like a massive wooden puzzle, the portal is as tall as a two-story building. Generations of pilgrims have stickered the gate with samurai-era graffiti—small rectangular patches of washi paper, printed with quaintly old-fashioned names. Passing beneath, she cranes her neck toward the ceiling and wonders how three enterprising sojourners had managed to tag the underside of the roof.
The temple beyond isn’t especially large, but looks prosperous and well kept. Its gold-leafed roof carvings gleam in the midday sun, the path is swept, the gravel freshly raked. Weeping cherry trees flank the entrance to the main sanctuary, with its red-lacquered beams and spreading, upturned eaves. Nearby, a stout tower with a tile roof supports an enormous bronze bell, with a suspended log striker. Racks ten-deep in prayer plaques surround a venerable ginkgo tree, greening with the spring, and family graves stretch out behind the main building, sheltered by old-growth cedars. The complex is bounded by an administration building—its wood pale and new, but built in the traditional style—and a gated garden with housing for resident priests. Midday on a Saturday, multiple plumes of smoke rise from the temple’s great bronze incense urn, and there’s a line at the offering box.
Robin joins it. When the requisite coin has been tossed, prayer offered, etiquette observed, she angles back toward the stand that sells everything from protective amulets to wooden prayer plaques.
“Excuse me,” she says to the priest manning the counter. “The son of the potter at Hayashi Ceramics mentioned that one of the priests here might be able to tell me about the ghost that haunts their old kiln. I believe he used to be a sumo—”
“Are you looking for me?”
Robin turns. Beaming down at her is the only Japanese man she’s ever had to look up to. The priest wears simple linen robes, but they must have been custom ma
de, because even though he’s no longer as mountainous as a ranking sumo wrestler, he’s still boulderishly huge. Beneath his priestly shaven head, a smile broadens his high cheekbones and crinkles his eyes into half-moons. She finds herself smiling back.
He introduces himself as Uchida. She explains why she’s here, and he invites her to accompany him to his office. They stroll toward the administration building, exchanging pleasantries—the fine weather, the beauty of rural Shiga—as he swings a knobby wooden cane, favoring a stiff left leg.
When he mentions the unusually large amount of snow still on the ground in the mountains, Robin replies that even Tokyo had suffered a multi-day, traffic-snarling snowstorm in January.
He gives her a wry smile.
“That’s something I don’t miss about city life. The snow covers up the dirt and ugliness for a while, but it shows through again all too soon.”
“How long did you live in Tokyo?”
“Only long enough to get this.” He flourishes his cane. “Thankfully, I blew out my knee within a year.”
“‘Thankfully’?”
“Keeps anyone from expecting me to kneel during long services,” he confides. “I get to use a chair.”
“You weren’t sorry to turn your back on a sumo career?”
“Quite the opposite,” he says with a short laugh, “since it wasn’t me who wanted one. If I hadn’t been twice the size of every kid in my class since kindergarten, I wouldn’t have taken up wrestling at all. I’d have preferred sitting with my nose in a book, to tell you the truth.”
She gives a snort of sympathy. “I know what you mean.”
“Let me guess . . . basketball?”
“Yeah.”
They share a moment of companionable bitterness, then he ushers her into an office noticeably warmer than the rest of the temple. A small space heater purrs in the corner, and religious texts line the walls. His desk is pleasantly messy.
Once she’s seated in a far more comfortable chair than she’d enjoyed at Senkō-ji, with a fragrant cup of roasted green tea steaming before her, Uchida asks her to say more about the reason for her visit. He listens, gazing into his teacup, while she explains her scholarly interest in the poet Saburo—specifically, in his poem cycle, The Eight Attachments. How she’d gone to Hayashi Ceramics in search of evidence connecting the poet to Yakibō, because a piece made by the potter had recently been brought to her for authentication. She’s sure that the existence of the tea bowl he’d named Hikitoru indicated a—
The Last Tea Bowl Thief Page 20
