The Teahouse Fire

by Ellis Avery

grumped. “He could still be a good man,” counseled Ryu. She was the sort of person who had nothing but compassion for people she didn’t know, and nothing but mockery for those she did.

he gave

why not she?

I took a step closer and saw a spare brushed rendering of a curved train track. “Ara!” I remembered something the monks on the ship had told me: when Admiral Perry’s black ships came to scare Japan into trading with the West, they brought a miniature steam train—with cars just big enough for a man to straddle and ride—and set it up on the shore to astonish the natives. Jiro pointed to the train track: “It looks like a long scar in the ground,” he said. “They call this kettle a servant, but I can see it’s one of their gods, look.”

He showed me a woodblock print of a bijin—a beautiful woman in a fashionable kimono—except there was something wrong with her face. What was it? “Why, she’s smiling!” I cried. I had never seen a print like that.

“Look at her eyebrows! Look at her teeth!” “Eh! Is it a little girl in a grown-up kimono?” “No, this is how barbarian women go about,” he said, shaking his head in horror. “And this is no woodblock artist’s fancy. The very Empress has started tricking herself out like this, and so now all Edo is full of these faces.” He groaned. “It’s a city of aging girls. And don’t they see?” He dotted his finger along the woodblock beauty’s smiling mouth, then along each white tooth of negative space formed by the curved train tracks and straight railroad ties. “Every time I l...

He sighed. “Bad enough to see what’s become of Edo. Bad enough that the foreigners have been granted a new settlement so close to us.” He was talking of Kobe, a not-too-distant fishing village where a new port had been built for Westerners en route to Osaka.

“They belong over there, we belong over here,” Jiro continued. “We need to learn how to build their cannons to protect our beautiful things. We don’t need to learn how to make our beautiful things ugly like theirs. Father says Shin temae looks frivolous when women do it, but I say a bijin would grace a tearoom better than some diplomat pig in a furokku koto.” A what? Oh, a frock coat.

There was a goddess to whom the sewing-girls offered a prayer when they made the first cut into a new bolt of fabric. Once a year when they held a funeral for their old needles, the girls sank the dulled and broken spines into a cake of tofu and left it at her shrine. As I rolled the inked cylinder of a sleeve slowly on the page, I said a small prayer: Please let this work.

interlocutors,

e

KENJI—NAMED VIGOROUS Second Son to make up for coming small and early—was born on January 24, 1873. I say this with authority because the Emperor moved Japan to the Western calendar that year, decreeing that the third day of the twelfth month in Meiji Five was now the first day of Meiji Six.

Like most Japanese girls, I did not relish the thought of leaving home and family to work for strangers and die in childbirth, but unlike most I had no parents who needed to dispose of me, no would-be parents-in-law eager for grandchildren with my features.

I was not unfeeling: at night sometimes I would long so much for someone to touch me that I’d bite the heel of my hand. But I wanted no one to take me from my bed beside Yukako, no one to give me children in place of those who were already dear to me. My dream, with Inko lost to me, was to care for those boys and their mother until I was so old they took care of me.

fought on the Emperor’s side against the Shogun. But he doesn’t like the way the new high-collar government’s been all sticky with the foreigners,” she said, using a word that actually meant sesame grinding as she ground sticky imaginary seeds in her palm. “So he’s gone back south and started training samurai in the hills, to fight the barbarians back to their boats. They blow up government offices to impress young men into joining them. They think if they bankrupt the rest of us by invading Korea, it will scare the foreigners away.”

hanabi,”

“There’s a certain wabi charm to using an apprentice’s tea bowl,” the Mountain reflected, using Rikyu’s word for humble or forlorn. “But the measure of a wabi tea person is his ability to make do with what he has, not his willingness to go out and buy what he’s told. As for Lady Kato, she should use her husband’s utensils; the man’s being unreasonable.”

three-card monte

Anachronistic?

fillip,

aside—only two kinds of Japanese women wore full Western dress: “sheep,” or mistresses of white men (who walked, the bathhouse girls whispered, side by side with their women! Opened their doors! Helped them into jinrikisha!), and teachers, of whom there were a visible few.

alike, was a plaid wool shawl called an ami, or net, because the crosshatched pattern looked like the mesh of a fishing net.

welter

But Yukako shook a little as she accepted his message, staring at the blunt club of the man’s fourth finger, at the gap between sleeve and wrist revealing a flash of red and green scrollwork down his forearm. A tattoo!

“Anyone can have an accident,” mused Yukako, reaching for her own fourth finger. “But only a few people have missing fingers and tattoos,” I said, shuddering. I had never seen a mobster, but who hadn’t heard of them? “Don’t say that word!” hissed Yukako. “Tattoo?” “Stop it!”

WE WENT TO THE TEMPLE every day that week, and we prayed for Tai’s safety. I had never noticed how Benten-sama, Yukako’s patron goddess, carried not just musical instruments but swords and arrows in her many arms: on one statue, her plump, mild face leered in victory.

Kaminari versus Shunrai, Thunder versus Spring Thunder, cherry leaves versus cherry blossoms. You couldn’t find a fussier, more hairsplitting lot than tea people, I thought, crowding in

toward the peephole I’d made thirteen years before.

“Everywhere I turn they’re knocking over lovely old homes and putting up brick boxes,” Jiro sighed. “Kato’s school, and so forth.”

A womb’s a borrowed thing, she’d say. We can just as well get others where you came from. I wondered, had Jiro ever felt that abject?

inchoate.

I wish I could have told myself this as a child in my uncle’s lap: if a man is menacing you, ask him something. I don’t know why it works.

Koito had told us long ago that there is nothing a man likes more than being invited to talk about even the slightest of his accomplishments.

“There are old men who ask, ‘Why should we educate them at all?’ You don’t need to read to give your father-in-law a grandson or obey your mother-in-law in the kitchen. But in the West a girl isn’t just a borrowed womb. She’s a good wife and a wise mother; she educates her sons and advises her husband.

The Christian Ladies’ School had glass windows, as did the other Western buildings going up in Kyoto, but Advisor Kato was the first Japanese person that any of us at the servants’ bathhouse had known to install garasu in his own home. Jiro had seen dozens of glass windows in Tokyo and had described them with a shudder, while Yukako and Tai had marveled about them to Kenji when they returned.

“What better way to show one’s commitment to a Civilized and Enlightened Japan than by bringing that Light straight into one’s own home? Why, imagine how beautiful this tearoom would be!” Yukako looked back and forth at the walls and windows of Baishian, the bright milky light softening her son’s face. “How interesting,” she said coolly. “You’ll have to give me the name of your glazier.”

cosset

That wasn’t what I’d meant, either. Where had she learned how to manage the outside world, and not be managed by it? Perhaps I was seeing the other side of the word shade. Yukako had no one to shade her: no father, no husband, no mother. And it turned out that she was no shy fern: the sun shone hard on her, and she’d grown straight and tall, a ridgepole pine, a mast.

“She can be disobedient,” said Kato, politely deflecting the compliment. “Obedience is a Christian and Confucian virtue,” he said warmly. “I’ve often thought of writing a little tract on the parallels. All this East-West nonsense! We’re more similar than anyone wants to say.”

gusted.

“No, no!” Tai insisted. “They’re importing an elevator machine from America! Have you heard of it?” I never had. While Tai explained how an erebeta worked, Yukako reflected on how, amidst the bright lights and skyscrapers, Tokyo was turning away from its initial giddy embrace of the West toward a more selective mode.

“Seems like a way to break up what little self-rule poor people have in their villages and suck them away to work in cities and factories,” Nao said bleakly. Tai stared. I did too; I had never heard anyone talk this way. I wondered again what Nao had done in his years away from home.

Yukako had a daruma, a doll so fat and round that when we made snowmen they were called snow daruma. When you buy them at the temple, they have one eye painted in, and when your wish comes true, you paint the other.

outré.

“She had no look of pollution, and Young Mistress took her in, didn’t she?” said Chio, surprising all of us. She spoke rarely now, and often seemed lost in her own mind: I bowed to her in startled gratitude.

hugger-mugger

Personally, I think the Buddhist gods returned so soon to the Shinto shrines in case someone needed, as I did when I heard Nao was staying longer, to say a prayer when the temples were closed. Before dinner, I rifled through the drawer in my wooden pillow and tucked the coin I found into my sleeve. I left early for my bath that night, the cicadas whirring in the summer dusk.

were half water-child,” she said, meaning a miscarriage, “or maybe half sheep.” My eyes widened again, to hear her use the slang word for women willing to sleep with foreigners: I’d never heard her say sheep, either.

Layered into the fold of each page was a loose sheet in Kenji’s lovely writing, rendered with great clarity, with explanatory characters beside each of his kanji. “I did this for Aki,” he said. “It was written in the Heian era, almost nine hundred years ago, so these pages,” he said, pointing to the printed book, “are written in the old style. And these,” he said, pointing to his own sheets, “I rewrote the way people talk now. All her lists. Adorable things. Depressing things. Things that gain by being painted,” he recited.

I added: The voice of a monk. A hand-shaped bruise. The word Eurasian. One learns the shallowness of water where lovers have failed to drown.

When had I ever heard a man and a woman conspiring together to give joy to anyone else? I savored the sight of them as much as I savored the sweets: dabs of white bean paste flavored with citron, each wrapped in a translucent case of kanten, a seaweed-based gelatin that made them look as if they were suspended in ice. What’s more, in the growing heat of morning, the sweets were cold, as if they’d been kept all night in a well.

Heathenish. I heard the word, and looked up. “Pardon?” “It’s one of our greatest challenges here. They won’t distinguish between the wanton and the pure. They just treasure things because they’re old, like those Heian poetesses.” he way Miss Starkweather pronounced the word, as if it were a disease, made me want to laugh. I felt brazen and worldly all day, acutely conscious of my body as I slid my door open that night.