The Teahouse Fire

by Ellis Avery

What I asked for? Any life but this one.

“Aurelia Bernard. Who is this Bernard, tell me? The Church hates truth, and the nuns hate it most of all.”

tonsured

torii,

You’ll see five castes here: warriors, or samurai, at the top, then farmers, craftsmen, merchants, and the unclean. They all have to follow the caste laws about every little thing: what kind of clothing you can wear, what kind of roof you can put on your house. Pay attention to the merchants; they’re hungry for change. Officially they’re low caste, which means they have pots of money and aren’t allowed to spend it on anything. ‘All men are brothers in Christ’ appeals to them, because it puts them on equal footing with the samurai. Not a lot of samurai converts; they’re the toughest nuts to crack.”

shoji

I felt nothing. Not the distracted, evasive, playing-house nothing of the past two months, where my prayers were really stories I told myself, but a square-on nothing, a blank mirror inside. The animal of my body wept and I felt nothing.

palanquins:

sere

The woman blanched a little, and persisted. “Your mother?” Now I flinched. I didn’t want to say it. “None,” I repeated. The two women glanced at each other. I felt queerly translucent. Saying the thing for the first time made it more real, but saying it in this language abstracted it from me, as if the moment were happening to someone else.

I did not know I was witnessing the ritual known in Japanese as Chanoyu, Hot Water for Tea; or Chado, The Way of Tea; or Ocha, simply, Tea. I did not know that the Shin family had been teaching tea ceremony to the most powerful men in Japan for three hundred years.

Yukako’s father, I slowly learned, was the adopted patriarch of a merchant-caste family whose head had served for twelve generations as tea advisor to three of the Shogun’s underlords. The post, like that of the keeper of a castle wine cellar, made the Shins both the servants of their liege lords and the masters of a body of art.

pother

Yukako said the night she found me, she’d gone to sleep in the teahouse knowing the Mountain had planned a Sighting with one of his apprentices’ fathers, but not knowing whose: in the face of having family chosen for her, that night she chose me for herself.

Yukako soaked in water only her father had used. When their water was a few days old, Chio boiled it down and used the fluid left to polish the wooden verandas and corridors: thus every inch of the Mountain’s house was oiled with his skin.

“After all, we had never seen a real one before,” Chio told me some years later. “But we had seen pictures, and everyone knew foreigners were huge, piggy people with very long noses, very red hair, and very green eyes, so you obviously weren’t one. Clearly someone was playing a trick on us with that clothing.” “Well, then, what was I?” “We thought you might be from Yezo or perhaps you were the child of

some girl in the water trade.” She meant a prostitute or a singing-girl.

“They thought my mother was a prostitute but they didn’t think maybe my father was a foreigner?” “Don’t be ridiculous; even a whore wouldn’t sink so low. And besides, we all knew what foreigners looked like. You just looked a little deformed. We all knew foreigners couldn’t speak Japanese. You could; you just sounded like you’d been dropped on the head as a baby.”

semaphore

Rikyu,

moue

bijin,

WHEN I FIRST LIVED in Miyako, now called Kyoto, brides were carried down the street in sumptuous palanquins, as they had been for centuries.

I never learned the Emperor’s name until I left Japan; it wasn’t for the public to know. We called him the Emperor. But the following year he changed the name of the era from Keio, Great Joy, to Meiji, Enlightened Rule. Until Meiji, Japan had seen so much fire, famine, and cholera in such a short time that the court astrologers kept changing the era name every few years, in a vain attempt to dodge bad fortune. None of the past six eras had lasted more than six years. As part of his Enlightened Rule, the new Emperor silenced the court astrologers, announcing that henceforth the era name would change only with the Emperor. So today if you want to refer to him, you say the Meiji Emperor: the one who reigned from 1867, the year before Meiji One, until his death in Meiji Forty-five.

A year later, in Meiji Two, I turned thirteen. The Emperor went to Edo again, and for a third time we lay prostrate in the street. When I looked, I gasped. Yukako kicked me, and gasped herself. In the year between these two processions, we had heard that Buddhism was illegal; all priests and nuns were to leave their temples and go back to lay life. All Buddhist images were ordered out of Shinto shrines; all Shinto images were ordered out of Buddhist temples. The priests and statues had

charily,

they were all wearing Western clothes. In the sweet May air of the Third Month, this company of men with hair oiled back in topknots marched in bright striped trousers and swallowtail coats, their shoulders built up with absurd epaulets, their chests made over into pincushions for sashes, medals, and braid. I had not seen trousers in three years and they seemed to me like stalks, like stems: travesties.

AMID ALL THE UNREST of those years when I was ten, eleven, twelve, and thirteen, the meaning of comfort became for me Yukako’s blended scents as we slept on her floor: the beeswax in her hair, the minerals from her bath, the cedar-and-geranium smell of the herbs she used to ward moths away from silk, and fainter smells, too, incense and powdered tea. Yu-ka-ko meant Evening Fragrance Child: her compounded smell was sweet and sharp, like fresh earth.

Just so, Yukako read richly illustrated books written in both Japanese alphabets: the ideographic Chinese characters, or kanji, that men used, and the simpler phonetic kana used by women.

Taking in pictures, kana, and kanji, Yukako came away with a story because she expected a story. She could read a sentence aloud and explain it in detail, but if I pointed to a kanji, she became flustered and irritable; she couldn’t tell me what it meant on its own, even though she had just used it in context to explain the sentence. She understood far more kanji than she could write. Perhaps because there were so many words in Japanese with the same sounds, and because words were written withoutspacebetween-them, kanji traveled alongside kana as a sort of silent archeology, the way our spelling gives clues to a word’s origin.

An ordinary speaker of English knows what a conversation is, a literate person can spell the word, an educated person will know it comes from Latin through French, and a specialist will know that con means with and verse means turn. A poet will hear conversation as a turning together. All the layers are there in English too. The Japanese had a few proverbs that broke down kanji—Sumie’s demonstration of the woman and child in the word for to like; men in the bathhouse grumbling about their mates by noting the threefold repetition of the kanji for woman in the kanji for clamorous, kashi-mashi—but mostly I had to learn to see the cl...

One autumn day we stood at the temple before solemn Kannon, the goddess of compassion, paying our morning call. Though Kannon was the Buddhist face of the Shinto goddess to whom I had prayed my first night in Miyako, I found the first stop on our daily pilgrimage—before Benten-sama, the golden goddess of the lute—more jolly.

The Emperor was still in Edo, newly named Eastern Capital, or Tokyo, just as Miyako had been newly renamed Kyoto, or Capital City. “I don’t know,” Yukako murmured.

I was used to Yukako’s crisp waterbird motions, the way her long body took all the space it needed on the host’s mat. But I saw the Mountain make tea only when the whole household gathered for holidays, his temae quiet as spilt water spreading on a wood floor, natural as Chio cooking rice. Not effortless like sleeping, but effortless like walking, both awkwardness and fanfare long forgotten. How beautiful, to see something done simply and well.

“It was good you bought that fish,” he said. She flinched. I never heard a Japanese parent say, I am proud of you, but Yukako’s father added, “Your mother was good with money too.”

We packed our showy robes in herbs and cedar and wore only dull, practical garb, while all around us merchants’ daughters wore brighter colors than we’d ever seen, thanks both to the end of the Shogun’s sumptuary laws and the influx of new British dyes.

Though she indulged me if I pestered her, a birthday just wasn’t something people fussed over: every year, no matter what month we were born, we all ate toasted soybeans on New Year’s Eve, a number equal to our age plus one—and suddenly we were all a year older. I knew vaguely that little Zoji had been born in the winter, but there was no way I could have missed Boys’ Day, with its irises and carp-shaped streamers, considering the little god Chio and Kuga would make of him each year in early summer. And both Yukako and I were cosseted and plied with emperor and empress dolls on Girls’ Day, fed sweets in our very best silks.

“Mukashi mukashi,” she began, which is how Japanese fairy tales begin: Long, long ago… “I know you remember the picture in Koito’s alcove,” she prompted me.

You might as well give gold to a cat, it took so long for Japanese music to grow on me. I had grown up on Latin hymns and New York street music—the accordion, the fife and drum, the Irish fiddle—and my mother’s craggy French alto, her love songs and lullabies. These had not prepared me for the meowl, the twang, the start-and-stop of Japanese music. I sat in the packed-earth cloakroom at Koito’s as I did when Yukako practiced at home, alternately bored and grated upon, happiest when Inko appeared with tea and treats, a glint in her eye. “Your Young Mistress is good, huh?” Japanese is fraught with little crises of etiquette: say yes and risk the rudeness of bragging about your own household, or say no and risk the rudeness of disloyalty? “She’s trying,” I offered.

This was the bright blade in her voice: she would practice tea, she would teach it, she would be her father’s son and not wait to marry him, and if this life offered only her old rival to stamp her will on, then stamp she would.

attention. That day in Koito’s garden room, not being critiqued, for the first time I felt while performing temae something of the solemnity and grace that I felt watching it. I felt the austere precision of the choreography, and my voluptuous surrender to it. I felt the desire to give something precious, this bowl of tea. I felt this one moment in all the world, three women in a room, doors thrown back to the bright day, the drunk bees in the purple flowers. I felt the alchemy of food made flesh. We were candles that burned on rice and salt.

I had no hope of impressing her, but she liked me anyway. “Namiko’s pretty,” I said, looking away. “Inko too.” I still wore my hair in a knot held up with a pin: a style for girls past childhood but too young to be worth spending money on a hairdresser. At that moment my bun gave itself up to gravity and the sticky heat that weighed on the city. I took down my hair and Inko reached for it. Lifting my hair with one hand, she fanned the back of my exposed neck as I sat limp-armed and grateful. “Soft,” she whispered.

“NO, THEY’RE NOT SISTERS,” Inko told me as we walked side by side to the bathhouse. We were the same age, but I felt so much younger. “Little Mizu’s her maiko—her apprentice,” she explained. “She came from

Madam Suisho’s house next door. They have so many maiko and we have none, so.” Even though people often didn’t finish their sentences—as a way of showing respect to both listener and subject matter—Inko’s voice was so frank and emphatic that it always surprised me when she broke off like that.

my back—they looked blocky in kimono. I envied those taut cylindrical girls at the bathhouse who wore their robes so effortlessly, envied Inko her loud, flat ease in the world: she wasn’t pretty—neither was a crow—but she was as buoyant and raucous, as matter-of-factly unaware of her body. I envied Mizushi the beauty that gilded her ambition with charm. I didn’t envy Koito, though all the teeth felt loose in my head when I looked at her: how can you envy an ideal?

“Because that’s what you were like, floating,” she whispered, cupping my breast by way of explanation. Her palm was so soft, holding me the way the water held me. She murmured something to me, half-asleep: “I would have had the best poem.”

bowl. Grief, weariness, and grace radiated calmly from her as she followed Yukako’s maxims: “Make heavy things look light; make light things look heavy.”

“Mukashi mukashi, there was a woman of the floating world who loved a man of tea.”

Koito’s phrase floating world, like Inko’s more matter-of-fact phrase water trade, described the nighttime world of men’s pleasures—gambling, singing-girls, prostitutes—but it was a pun on the Buddhist idea of the world of human grief.

This world of suffering is a transitory illusion, teaches Buddhism, so we should detach from it. This world of sin is an evanescent dream, the pleasure seekers counsel—replacing the kanji for suffering with one of its homonyms, the kanji for floati...