Chapter 2 — What the Notebook Holds
I had not slept, but I had lain in the dark in a posture that, from any reasonable distance, would have passed for sleep, and at five-thirty I gave up the impersonation and went down to the genkan.
The alley was the color of an oyster. The rain had stopped at some hour I had not been awake enough to mark, and what remained in its place was that particular post-rain Kyoto stillness in which every surface has been polished and is now, faintly, gloating about it. The stones underfoot were the color of wet ink. The lanterns along Pontocho had been switched off; their paper husks hung damp and slightly sagging from the eaves, the way old men's faces hang in the morning before they have remembered to be old men.
I crossed Shijō Bridge at six. The herons were not there. This was unusual enough that I stopped, halfway across, and looked twice — there is a particular stone in the shallows below the eastern pier that the eldest of them favors, a flat grey stone shaped like a closed book, and the stone today was empty. I have lived in this city long enough to know that herons are not omens. They are, however, weather. Their absence was a weather I was being asked to notice.
I noticed. I kept walking.
Nishiki Market opens to vendors at six-thirty and to humans at nine, and the half-hour I had to myself in between was the closest thing in my week to a private chapel. The arcade lights, when they came up at six forty-five, threw the long covered street into a yellow-and-bone color the kind of which interior designers will spend their careers and several other people's money trying and failing to reproduce. The fishmongers were arranging mackerel. The tofu woman, whose name I had been told once and had spent on a binding eighteen months ago, was unstacking her boxes with the patience of someone whose great-grandmother had unstacked the same boxes in the same place in 1932. She raised her chin at me. I raised mine. The morning conducted its small ceremonies.
I bought myoga and three eggplants and a paper twist of yamasansho. I bought a bundle of mitsuba from the vegetable stand at the eastern end, where the owner, a man my father's age, had been trying to flirt with me for two years with the patience and lack of forward motion of a man who had been told, somewhere in his courtship education, that persistence is romance and had not subsequently been corrected.
"Shirakawa-san," he said. "Still no boyfriend, eh."
"Three eggplants, please."
"You should eat more. You're getting thinner."
"You can tell that through the apron."
"I have an eye."
"I will give you the eye if you charge me for three eggplants and stop telling me about my apron."
He laughed. He gave me four eggplants and charged me for three. This was, I had come to understand, the entire architecture of the flirtation; the fourth eggplant was the love letter, and the love letter would, in the fullness of time, become a stewed dish in my kitchen that nobody but me would eat. I bowed. He bowed. The arcade lights, somewhere above us, hummed.
Two stalls down, a man in a black North Face windbreaker was buying a single onigiri he was not going to eat.
I noticed him because of the windbreaker. North Face is a fine windbreaker. It is not, however, what one wears at six fifty-five in May in Nishiki unless one wants to look like the kind of person who wears North Face — which is to say, a tourist, a hiker, or someone who would like to be mistaken for one of the above. He had the wrong shoes for it. The shoes were black, lace-up, the kind of black that is not the easy black of a sneaker but the hard black of a service shoe that has been issued, not bought. The sole, I did not have to see, would have a particular stitch.
I made my hands continue putting eggplants into the cloth bag.
He did not look at me. He looked, very carefully, at the rice display. He picked up an onigiri. He turned it over. He put it back. He picked up a different one. The choreography of a man who has been taught to blend and is performing, in a market on a Wednesday morning before nine, the precise idea of a tourist that a man who has never been a tourist has constructed from training videos.
I paid the eggplant man. I bowed. I walked, at a pace I did not change, past the rice stall and out the eastern arcade door into the small wet morning.
The man did not follow.
The man did not need to. The man was a placeholder. The man was, I understood as I reached the end of the arcade and the bag of eggplants began, very faintly, to feel heavier than four eggplants had any right to feel, a courtesy. A courtesy from the guild. We're here. We want you to know we're here. We don't want anything yet. We're just standing in the rice aisle so you'll think about us at breakfast.
I had been a Hand operative for four years. I knew the choreography from the inside. We used to call this kind of placement a Tuesday — a man in a windbreaker, a coffee in a window, a delivery scooter that idled too long at a corner. Just a Tuesday. You did them on rotation. You did them to remind the local witches that the alley had a back wall.
It was Wednesday. They were ahead of schedule.
I walked home along Sanjō. I did not cross at the bridge. I told myself this was because of the eggplants; the bridge was longer; the alley route was shorter. This was a lie I let myself have. It was a small, three-eggplant lie. I had begun, over the past two years, to grade my lies by produce weight, and three eggplants was a perfectly survivable size.
Tanaka-san came in at eleven thirty. He had brought a small paper bag.
"Dentist?" I said.
"Bath house. The dentist gives me anxiety. The bath house unfastens it." He set the paper bag on the counter with the air of a man making an offering at a shrine. "I bring you a thing."
"What thing."
"A thing-thing." He opened the bag. Inside, wrapped in twice-folded newspaper, was a single very small cucumber, twisted into the shape of a comma. "From the bridge stand. Goro told me to bring it. He said you would understand."
I did understand. I did not say so. I took the cucumber out of the newspaper, sliced it into four neat coins on the cutting board, and put one into the small dish I kept under the counter for kappa visitors. The other three I put into a glass of water and set in front of Tanaka-san, who, like the man he was, did not eat cucumber but did, on occasion, drink water that had been touched by it.
"Goro is well?" I said.
"Goro is well. Goro is, however, busy. Goro says: the river is not telling him things this week."
"Mm."
"He says it the way a butcher says the meat is not behaving. He says it as a man who suspects he will be eating less."
I poured Tanaka-san his first cup of genmaicha. The toasted rice smell came up and the steam over the kettle, on the irori, did its small considered dance. Pip was not visible this morning, which usually meant Pip was sulking in a beam, which usually meant Pip had heard about the man last night and was waiting, with the patience of a six-year-old who is also a hundred and thirty-seven, to be asked a question.
I did not ask.
"Hana-chan," Tanaka-san said.
"Mm."
"You look tired."
"You said that yesterday."
"I will say it tomorrow. I will say it every day. It is my second-favorite remark."
"What is the first."
"The cousin in Shiga is taller."
I almost laughed. He saw me almost-laugh, and his face arranged itself into the small bow-shape that means a tanuki has won a small victory and is going to be modest about it for thirty seconds before reminding you. He sipped. He sighed. The cardigan, this morning, was a slightly more aggressive beige; he had, I noted with the part of me that always noted these things, washed it.
"The man at closing," he said, into his cup.
"Yes."
"He came."
"He came."
"And." He tipped his cup, watched the leaves drift, did not look up. "And he sat at the counter, and he did not give a name, and he paid in old coin."
"Goro told you."
"Yuki told Goro. Goro told me. Pip told everyone in a six-block radius which is why I am here at eleven thirty instead of one." He drank. "Pip is agitated, hana-chan. Pip has been making origami foxes in the rafters for three hours. Pip ran out of receipts and is now using my old grocery list, which I left on the spice shelf last Tuesday, and which is, frankly, an invasion of privacy."
"What was on the grocery list."
"Cigarettes."
"You don't smoke."
"I do not. I write cigarettes on the grocery list every Tuesday because my late wife used to write it, and I find that crossing it out, on her behalf, every week, is a kind of small accompanying I do for her. Now Pip is folding cigarettes into a fox face and the joke has gone out of it."
"I'll talk to Pip."
"Don't. Pip is not the question." He set the cup down very gently and folded his thick hands on the counter, and I felt — because I had been watching the tanuki's hands across this counter for seven years and knew their grammar — the conversation arrive at the question he had walked through rain to ask.
"Hana-chan."
"Mm."
"The cost of refusing to want anything," he said, in the slow voice of a man who has earned the right to repeat himself, "is also a price. It just gets paid slower."
"Tanaka-san."
"I have said this before."
"You said it last spring."
"I will say it again next spring. I will say it in the autumn between. It is my third-favorite remark. I save it for occasions."
"It is not an occasion."
"Mm."
He drank. He drank with the small completeness of a man who has set a small thing down and would now like the small thing to be picked up by whichever party had been left it. I did not pick it up. I poured him a second cup. I refilled the cucumber-water. I lifted the kettle off the coals, set it back, lifted it, set it back, in the small busywork choreography of a woman who is being careful with her own hands.
"There was a man in the market this morning," I said. "Wrong shoes."
"Naa."
"A Tuesday."
"On a Wednesday. They're not subtle anymore."
"They have stopped being subtle."
"Hana-chan." He was looking at me now, fully, the small black tanuki eyes in the apparent face of a sixty-something man, and what was in them was the particular tenderness that very old beings reserve for very young ones who are about to make a hard decision. "If they come, the regulars will come. Goro will come. Yuki will come. Pip will be very loud. I will, regrettably, also come."
"You don't fight."
"I do not. I will, however, stand in the doorway."
"That is more dangerous than fighting."
"Naa. It is more useful, also."
He finished his second cup. He did not order a third. He never ordered a third anymore, since last summer when he had stopped ordering a third for reasons neither of us discussed. He paid in yen, which he sometimes did, and he left an extra five-hundred coin, which he always did, and he stood at the noren and turned, in the way Tanaka-san turned, like a small grey hinge.
"Eat lunch," he said.
"I'll eat lunch."
"That is what you said yesterday."
"It is what I will say tomorrow."
"Good. Predictability." He pressed his palm to the doorframe, an old man's pause, the kind one builds into one's life when one has known it might be the last frame one touched in a particular doorway. "Hana-chan."
"Mm."
"If you must want a thing, want a small thing first. Want a particular tea. Want a particular fish. Build up to him."
"Tanaka-san."
"Yes."
"Goodbye, Tanaka-san."
He laughed, and the laugh, as always, made the steam over the kettle rearrange itself, and then he was through the noren and the door slid shut with its cedar tok, and I stood alone in the front room with my hands flat on the counter, and I counted to thirty, and at thirty I went, against my better judgment, to the small drawer below the till and took out the notebook.
The notebook was the size of a postcard. Brown leather cover, the corners blunted from two years of being sat on. A thin silk ribbon for a bookmark, blue, frayed at one end where Pip had once, in a sulking phase, chewed it. I had bought the notebook in November of the year I came back to Kyoto, at a stationer on Teramachi who had given me a small bow because he had recognized me from somewhere and had been too polite to ask from where. The notebook had ninety-six pages. I had used twenty-three.
The first entry was dated 11 November, and it said, in my handwriting, in the careful brushwork I had not been able to do badly even in despair:
My mother liked the small dish with the cracked rim. The one with the blue glaze. I do not know why she liked it. I do not know which dish it was. — I am writing this so that, if the dish is in the house, I will not throw it away.
I had circled the word dish. I had drawn, in the margin, a small clumsy approximation of a dish, in case I should one day look at the page and not remember what the word meant. The margin-dish was the kind of object a five-year-old draws when a five-year-old has not yet seen a real one. This humiliated me less than it should have. It was, I had decided, the dish a person who could not remember dishes would have to draw.
I turned the page.
My father said her laugh was loud at restaurants. He said this in the kitchen on the morning of the funeral. I am writing this in case I forget what kind of laugh my father said she had. — I think loud. I think she laughed loud. The verb is loud. The shape of the laugh is not in my mouth.
I did not turn the next page. I closed the notebook. I put it back in the drawer. I went to the irori and rebuilt the small triangle of charcoals, even though they did not need to be rebuilt, because rebuilding small triangles of charcoal is what a person does, in this house, when a person needs to give one's hands something to be busy with that is not a notebook.
Pip, from the beam, said: "Pip is sorry about the receipts."
"Come down."
Pip came down. Pip looked, in the unfaded red kimono, slightly thinner than yesterday. This may have been a trick of the morning light. It may have been the wards. It may have been Pip absorbing what had passed between me and Tanaka-san in the way Pip absorbed all the feelings in the building and was, I had decided long ago, not to be soaked.
"Pip."
"Pip."
"Pip will not fold cigarettes into a fox face anymore."
"Pip has had the conversation with Pip."
"Good."
"Pip wants to say one thing."
"One thing."
"The man last night."
"Pip."
"Pip liked him."
"Pip."
"Pip will be quiet now."
Pip sat on the counter with both hands wrapped around the empty cup that was the joke about being a ghost. The cup, in Pip's hands, was the cup with the chipped lip that Yuki preferred — Pip had taken it from the rack without permission, which was a small theft Pip got to commit, on Pip's birthday, which Pip had decided was every day. I poured Pip a thimble of hojicha. Pip raised the cup, ceremonially, and pretended to swallow, and the roasted-tea smell filled the front room again, and the kettle, on the irori, sang very softly, the way kettles sing when they have not been asked to.
The kettle had not been asked to. I had not put my hand on the irori. I had not spoken.
I looked at Pip. Pip looked at me.
"Pip didn't do it," Pip said, very quickly.
"I know."
"Pip can't."
"I know."
"It did itself."
The kettle was singing. The kettle was singing the way kettles sing in a house where someone has crossed a doorway. I lifted it off the coals. The singing stopped. I set it back. The singing did not resume.
I stood very still and counted to thirty.
At thirty I went out the back door into the small garden. The koi, in his moss-darkened pond, surfaced once and looked at me with the particular disapproval of an animal who has been a participant in this household since 1907 and has opinions about the management. I bowed to him. He sank.
In the back of my apron, against my hip, the small origami fox folded from yesterday's receipt was making, very faintly, the shape of pressure that a thing makes when it has stopped being inert. I took it out. I unfolded it. The receipt, on the inside, had a note I had not written:
Sumire-no-imōto. The bell will ring tomorrow. — K.
The brushwork was old. The brushwork was very old. The strokes had the slightly-too-fat heads of an ink loaded by a person trained on Kamakura-period brushes — narrow handle, short bristle, a wrist that broke at a different angle than a modern wrist. The phrase Sumire-no-imōto, Sumire's little sister, was not a kinship I had ever heard spoken about myself. It was, however, a kinship I had no way to refute. Sumire had been my father's aunt, not mine; the closer Japanese would have been Sumire-bachan no magomei, grand-niece. Imōto was wrong. Imōto was wrong by exactly the amount that a man writing in a Japanese a hundred and fifty years out of date would get wrong.
I refolded the receipt. I did not refold it into a fox. I folded it into a small flat square, four-by-four, and I put it in the back pocket of the apron, in the slot next to the notebook, where it sat, very lightly, against the leather.
The kettle did not sing.
The koi did not surface.
Pip, in the front room, was very quietly humming a tune I did not know — high and reedy and old — and I stood in the doorway between the garden and the back room and I thought: The bell will ring tomorrow.
The bell almost never rang for the regulars. The bell was for strangers.
The day went on the way days do, and faster than I had wanted it to.
I served three tourists at one o'clock — Australian, polite, the kind of polite that has been instilled by a guidebook — and they took photographs of the noren and the lantern and the kettle and one, when she thought I was not looking, of my hands. I let her. My hands are not photogenic; my hands are a working person's hands; I do not, on balance, mind being a small part of someone else's vacation if it gets her home to Sydney with a story.
At three, the rain started again — light, the lateral drizzle that comes in off the river when the wind shifts at the lower bend — and at four, by the small temple bell three streets over I cannot hear and always know, I went to the second noren and pressed my palm flat to its center seam and felt the wards open. The back room received its evening breath. The fudasetsu hummed. The koi did a slow silver arc. The seven small papers along the rafters settled into their hum, and one — the one nearest the tokonoma — had a slightly different note than the others, a half-tone flatter, the way a piano string sounds when it has lost a fraction of its tension.
I noted this. I did not address it. There would be a time for addressing it. The time was, by the look of things, going to be Saturday.
Yuki did not come. Yuki had told me on Tuesday that she would not come this Wednesday, because she was visiting a cousin's grave in Otsu, and she had said it the way Yuki says things, which is to say once, and quietly, and never to be repeated.
Goro did not come either. Goro had said, through Tanaka-san's cucumber, that the river was not telling him things.
I closed the front room at ten. I cleaned. I rinsed. I wiped the wet ring off the counter from a tourist's beer, the one she had brought in herself and which I had not had the heart to refuse her because she had been crying about a thing she had not told me. I refolded the noren. I checked the irori. I stood, for one slow minute, with the lantern in my hand, and I thought about my mother's laugh, the loud one, the one whose shape was not in my mouth.
At ten fifty-eight I undid the apron strings. I retied them. I went to the front to draw down the outer shutter.
At eleven the bell rang.
Once. Clear. A single brass note. The kind of note the bell made when it was used by a stranger.
I turned, because turning is what one does.
He was already through the noren. He had taken the coat off rain in the genkan, and it was folded over his forearm with the unconscious grace of a man who had been folding coats for a long, long time, and his geta, with the worn teeth he would not replace, were neatly placed on the stone. He was wearing, beneath the coat, the same dark henley, which was something I noticed and chose not to ask about — the henley was, in any case, not the kind of henley a man bought new every day; it was an article of clothing he had decided suited him sometime in the early twenty-first century and had carried, with kitsune-grade indifference to fashion cycles, into the present.
His hair was tied back. The white strand at his left temple caught the lantern light. He had not, I noted, gotten any older overnight; though I have learned that this kind of thing is, with his kind, not a thing one ought to expect.
"We're closed," I said.
"I know," he said.
His Japanese was the same as last night. Too formal. Slightly off. Heian-era polite. He sounded like a man translating, in his head, from a language whose grammar had been perfect three hundred years ago and which he was, as a courtesy to the modern ear, carefully filing the corners off.
"Then."
"I would like a cup of tea," he said. "The same as last night, please."
"The midnight blend."
"That, if it is permitted."
He sat at the counter. The third stool from the left, the same one as last night. He did not place his hands on the counter; he folded them in his lap. He held himself with the still-water composure of a man who had been sitting in tea-houses since before tea-houses had been invented and was, on balance, comfortable in the form.
I put the kettle back on the coals. I added a piece of cherry to the charcoal. I went to the small cabinet under the counter and took out the second jar, the one with the smoked cherry bark, and the third jar, the one with the thing I did not name. The smell came up. It was a smell I had built, in two years of slow weekends, by trial and embarrassment and one disaster involving a teaspoon of nutmeg in 2024 that I would carry to my grave.
I made the tea.
I poured it.
I set it on the counter between us.
He bowed, very slightly, the way one bows over a cup that has been handed by an equal. He did not touch the cup. He sat with his hands folded and the cup steaming and did not, for a long moment, do anything at all.
"Bell rang," I said, because I had to say something or count to thirty.
"Yes," he said.
"It does not, usually."
"Yes," he said. "I am, I think, a stranger."
"You came last night."
"That does not make me, by your house's logic, no longer a stranger. The bell is, if I may observe, very precise."
"You're commenting on my bell."
"I am admiring it."
I poured myself a cup. I did not drink. I stood, with the kettle still hot in my left hand, and I looked at him across the counter, and the rain in the alley behind him hung in the lantern light and was, as I had noted yesterday and now noted again, not falling on him.
He took out, from a pocket I had not seen him reach into, a single silver coin. He set it on the counter. Kan'ei tsūhō. The same coin, or another, or — and this was a possibility I would have to look at later — the only coin, which had been with him for three hundred and fifty years and had been spent, exactly twice now, in this teahouse.
"For the tea," he said.
"I cannot."
"You can."
"Last night I let you."
"And I would prefer," he said, with the kind of formality that was not formality at all but a man laying down a small precise truth, "that you let me, again, tonight."
I did not pick up the coin. I did not refuse it. I left it on the counter, the way you leave a thing that has been placed by a guest who has not yet earned, but is asking for the chance to earn, the right to leave a thing on your counter.
He lifted the cup. He drank, very slowly. He closed his eyes for one small instant, the way a man closes his eyes at a sound he has not heard in a long time, and then he opened them again, and they were brown — they were brown the way the kettle was brown, that particular almost-brown that was not, I now understood, a color so much as a register he had chosen to dial his eyes to so that they would not, in lantern light, in front of a woman who knew what to look for, slip the other way.
"It is the same blend," he said.
"Yes."
"You have not altered it."
"No."
"Thank you."
He drank the rest in three swallows. He set the cup down. He bowed, again, slightly. He stood. He picked up the coat from the stool beside him, and as he did, the kettle on the irori began, very softly, to sing, and Pip, on the beam, made a small sound that was either a hiccup or a small ghost-child's restraint of a laugh.
He paused. He looked, very briefly, at the kettle. The kettle stopped singing.
"Forgive it," he said. "It has been polite for a long time. It is rediscovering itself."
"You are commenting on my kettle now."
"I am admiring it."
He bowed once more — to me, and then, infinitesimally, to the beam where Pip sat, which Pip, on the beam, would not be told about until the morning when I would have to admit to Pip that the man had seen Pip and that this was, by every rule of the house, significant — and he went to the noren, and at the noren he paused, and without turning back he said:
"Tomorrow night, also, please. If you will."
"We're closed at eleven."
"I know."
He went out. The cedar door slid shut. The bell, this time, did not ring.
I stood with my hand still on the kettle. The kettle was, for the second time tonight, singing without my asking it to. I lifted it off the coals. I set it back. I lifted it off again. I left it off.
On the counter, the silver coin sat. Beside it, the empty cup, with the small ring of dark liquid in the bottom, the cherry bark settling slowly to the porcelain like fine silt at the bottom of a slow river.
I picked up the cup. I did not pick up the coin.
In the back pocket of my apron, against my hip, the small flat folded receipt with the note in old brushwork pressed, very lightly, against the notebook. I felt them together — the notebook of things I was afraid I would forget, the note from a man who had called me Sumire-no-imōto in a Japanese a hundred and fifty years too old.
The bell will ring tomorrow, the note had said.
The bell had rung tonight.
I went, very slowly, to the drawer below the till. I took out the notebook. I opened it to the first empty page. I held the small brush over it for one long beat, and then I set the brush down, and I closed the notebook without writing, because there was nothing yet I was afraid I would forget.
There was, however, a coin on my counter.
I went to bed and did not sleep, and when, at three in the morning, the kettle downstairs sang once more, on its own, without being asked, I did not get up to silence it.
I let it sing.