Chapter 4 — Three Nights
Friday came in on a wind I did not like.
The wind in Pontocho in late May, on an ordinary Friday, came up the alley from the southwest. The wind today came from the north — down off Mt. Hiei, past the railway cuts at Demachiyanagi, along the upper river, into Pontocho from the wrong end, where it had no business being. The lanterns swayed wrong. The noren, twice, lifted in a way I had to fix with one finger.
I noted it. I did not address it. There are weathers a witch addresses and weathers a witch lives inside, and a Friday wind from the north was, at six forty-five with my hands wet from the genkan basin, a weather one lived inside. I tied the apron. I lit the irori.
The kettle, when I set it over the coals, sang at me.
It was a small song, one note long — less a song than a clearing of a copper throat, good morning, I am here, are you here — and the kettle had been doing this, in increments, since Wednesday night, and I had been letting it. At six forty-five on a Friday morning in late May I was a woman who had decided that the kettle was, after all, allowed to clear its throat in its own kitchen, and this was a thing that had happened to me without a formal vote.
I lifted the kettle. I set it back. I did not, importantly, scold it.
Pip was on the counter. Pip was, today, wearing the unfaded red kimono with a small twist of pale ribbon around its left wrist — Pip had decided, sometime overnight, that this was a thing — and Pip was holding the empty cup with both small hands and was, with the magisterial seriousness of small ghost-children playing tea, performing a private internal monologue I was being permitted to overhear.
"Pip is making improvements," Pip said.
"Pip."
"Pip has decided that the third stool from the left should have a cushion."
"It does not need a cushion."
"It is hard. Pip has been imagining sitting on it. The imagining is uncomfortable."
I gave Pip the morning thimble of hojicha. Pip lifted the cup ceremonially and drank, the way Pip drank, which was to pour it into a mouth that had not, since 1888, processed liquid in the manner of mouths that processed liquid. The hojicha had not, by any measure I could detect, decreased in volume. Pip considered the cup. Pip looked up at me.
"Pip is too excited about the third stool. Pip is going to calm down."
"Pip should."
"Pip will sit on the rafter today, only, and Pip will not, when he is here tonight, point at him with both hands and squeal."
"Pip will not squeal."
"Pip was going to squeal. Pip has had a conversation with Pip. Pip is not going to squeal."
We were quiet for a beat. The kettle, on the irori, made the small not-quite-song again. Pip's ears — the kind a small Meiji-era ghost-child kept arranged in a slightly cartoonish position on the side of its head — twitched. Pip looked at the kettle. The kettle looked at Pip. They had, I observed, an agreement.
"Hana-chan. Pip wants to look at him."
"I know."
"Pip promises not to squeal."
I considered. I poured myself a cup. I drank it. I lifted the kettle off the coals. I set it back. The kettle did not sing.
"Pip may sit on the highest beam. Pip will not come closer. Pip will not point. Pip will not squeal. Pip will not, in the matter of any signal Pip wishes to convey to me, use the word fox aloud."
"Pip can use fox in Pip's head."
"Pip's head is Pip's business."
"Pip agrees to terms."
The morning conducted its ceremonies. Two tourists at noon, a German couple, the man very tall and apologetic about it; one regular in the late afternoon, a small old woman from Nara who had been coming for two years and whose name, I had decided, I would not ask, because she had not given it and we were both, on balance, comfortable with this. She drank one cup of matcha usucha and ate a slice of warabi mochi and put two folded thousand-yen notes on the counter and one small white camellia wrapped in a paper twist. I had no vase out. I went to the back for one and when I came back, the camellia was in the small celadon cup beside the irori, where Pip had put it, and the woman was bowing at the noren on her way out, and we did not, again, exchange names.
At four I opened the back-room ward. The fudasetsu hummed. The flat-note paper near the tokonoma was, this evening, fully in tune. There was, however, a new note — high, faint, a quarter-octave above where I had hung the wards — coming from the fudasetsu at the back-right corner, the one above the koi door. I did not address this. I would, on Saturday, look at it.
Tanaka-san did not come. He sent, by Goro, a folded note that said only Friday is dentist, which was a lie in the way Tanaka-san's notes were sometimes a lie, and which meant he was at the Sanjō property reviewing tenants and would not be back until Sunday.
"The river is talking," Goro said, scratching the rim of the sara under his cap. "It is saying be ready for Saturday. I do not know what for. The river is being, this week, circumspect."
"You used the word circumspect."
"I have been around old men for forty years. Circumspect gets in."
He set down a single cucumber. He drank one glass of water. He left a small wet ring on the hinoki. He went. He did not, on his way out, comment on the third stool, though I saw his eyes flick to it and away.
At ten thirty I made the midnight blend, without examining why, and set the cup with the chipped lip on the counter and the warming pot on the side of the irori, and I went, at ten forty-five, to check that Pip was on the highest beam.
Pip was on the highest beam.
Pip had, in defiance of our terms, tied the small pale ribbon around the rafter beside the beam in a tidy small bow — a thing I had not, in the contract, forbidden, and which was, by Pip's lights, decorative. I let it. The bow was, in its way, a small kind brushstroke in a room that had been, for two years, very carefully not decorated.
At eleven the bell rang.
He came through the noren. He took off the coat in the genkan. He stepped up. He was wearing, this evening, the same dark henley I had now seen three nights in succession; I had decided, by the second viewing, that the henley was a piece of clothing that had achieved the kind of permanent settledness that suits a being who does not measure his wardrobe in seasons; I was beginning, by the third viewing, to suspect there was only one. The coat, however, was different. The coat tonight was a different charcoal. The cut was the same — 1989 — but the wool was new. Or new-to-the-coat. He had, between Thursday and Friday, changed coats.
I did not comment.
He sat at the third stool. He folded his hands in his lap. He looked at the camellia in the small celadon cup beside the irori. The camellia was white and was, in lantern light, the color of bone-warm porcelain.
"A guest brought a flower," he said.
"Mm."
"It is very fine."
"It is."
"The cup."
"Mm."
"The cup is older than the flower."
He said it the way a man says the rain has stopped. He had, by some method I would have to look at later, dated the cup — celadon, narrow-rim, 18th century, from the kiln my great-aunt had favored and which had closed in 1903 — from his stool, in lantern light, without picking it up.
"It is."
"My apologies. I am told it is impolite to comment on a host's furnishings. By my mother, centuries ago. I find the habit difficult to break."
The kettle, on the irori, sang. He did not, by any motion of his face, acknowledge it. He waited, with his hands folded, for me to pour.
I poured. The midnight blend rose in the cup with its dark color and its smoked cherry smell. I set the cup on the counter. He bowed. He drank. He closed his eyes for the fractional length of a blink and opened them again.
"Hana. Does the koi have a name."
It was a question I had not, in seven years of running this teahouse, been asked. The regulars had decided, by collective inarticulate agreement, that the koi was the koi and that this was sufficient. He was asking the way one asks a friend across the counter about a child one had not, the previous summer, known the friend to have.
I considered. I poured myself a cup. I drank. The cherry rose at the back of my throat.
"He doesn't have one," I said. "He has refused all of them."
He set the cup down very gently. He almost smiled. The corners of his mouth tipped, almost, but did not commit.
"Wise of him," he said.
We sat with this for a long beat.
The kettle, on the irori, did not sing. The fudasetsu, in the back room, hummed. Pip, on the highest beam, was a very small still red shape that, in my peripheral vision, was visibly clenching both fists against the unspoken cry the contract forbade. I did not look up at Pip. He did not look up at Pip. The room held the small geometry of three people who had agreed, by terms of varying explicitness, not to disturb the small geometry.
He drank the second cup. He set it down. He bowed. He did not, this evening, place a coin. He had, I was beginning to understand, decided that the coin was a thing he would place at intervals he was setting deliberately, the way one places stones across a stream in a garden.
"Hana."
"Mm."
"Tomorrow night, the wind is going to change again."
"Mm."
"It will not be tonight's wind. I tell you only because you do not, at present, have an apprentice, and the noren ought to be tied at the lower hook from tomorrow evening through Sunday."
"You are giving me weather advice."
"From my mother. Who had, for a long time, an opinion about Pontocho weather."
He said had. I noted this. I did not press. He bowed once more. He stood. He went to the noren. He did not, this evening, look up at the beam where Pip was sitting clenched-fisted, because we had all, by ten past eleven, agreed that we would not.
"Goodnight, Hana."
"Goodnight."
He went. The door slid shut. The bell, on the way out, did not ring.
Pip detonated.
Pip detonated quietly, in the way small ghost-children detonate, which is by emitting, all at once, a kind of psychic pressure wave that made the noren billow back inward for half a second as if a wind had come from the wrong direction. Pip slid down the rafter and landed on the counter and threw both small arms in the air and said, in a whisper that contained, by my estimation, the energy of three normal screams:
"Pip kept the contract."
"You did, Pip."
"Pip would like, in return, three thimbles of hojicha, all at once."
I gave Pip three thimbles. Pip arranged them in a triangle on the counter and drank, ceremonially, all three at once. The roasted-tea smell filled the front room. The kettle, on the irori, did not sing, and then it did, very softly, the small not-quite-song, and then it stopped.
I cleared the cup. I rinsed it. I wiped the counter. I did not move the camellia. I went up to bed. I did not sleep. I lay in the dark and listened to the wind in the alley — which had, at midnight, begun, in fact, to change — and I thought about a man's mother, two hundred years ago, who had once had an opinion about Pontocho weather, and about a koi in a moss-darkened pond who had refused all the names he had been offered.
At three the kettle sang once. I did not get up.
Saturday came in on the wind he had told me about.
He had been correct about it. It was not Friday's wind. It was a south-by-southeast wind off Lake Biwa, and the noren, by ten, had pulled twice against the upper hook so hard that the cedar of the rod creaked. I retied the noren to the lower hook. I bowed, infinitesimally, to the rod for putting up with me.
Tanaka-san sent, by way of Goro again, a small jar of pickled myoga. For inflammation, the small label read, in his careful brush. I had no inflammation. I ate the myoga at lunch standing in the genkan and was, for the duration of the eating, grateful.
I served fourteen tourists between eleven and four, and one regular came in at three thirty — a Middle Court tsukumogami from a paper umbrella that had reached its hundredth birthday in March and had begun, in May, to be visible to anyone who looked at it the right way. His name was Kasamoto; he was three feet tall and bald and folded himself into a careful seated posture on the second stool and ordered a small bowl of yuzu-mitsu warm water, which he drank in eleven precise small sips and tipped me, on the way out, a single brass button from his ribbing. I added it to the small lacquer dish where I kept the things the regulars left, beside two persimmon stones and a single grey heron feather and a slip of paper with one classical Japanese poem on it that Master Saitō had brought me, in 2023, in lieu of an actual conversation.
At four I opened the back-room ward. The fudasetsu hummed. The new flat-note paper at the back-right, above the koi door, was now a quarter-octave above where it had been on Friday — closer to true. Something in the back room was tuning the wards toward a frequency I had not, when I had hung them, known to set.
I sat with this. I did not, on a Saturday afternoon, address it.
The bell did not ring at eleven.
I had told myself I had not been listening for it. I had been wrong. I had been listening since dawn, with the small attentiveness one pretends one is not paying. By eleven oh-five I had begun to bargain with the kettle, which was a thing I had decided, at twenty-six, I would no longer do, and which I had now done twice in three nights.
At eleven twelve, the door slid open.
He came through the noren. He took off the coat in the genkan. He came up. He was wearing a different henley — pale grey instead of charcoal — but the coat was the Friday coat. He had switched the henley and kept the coat. This was a small grammar I would need a longer history to read.
He sat at the third stool. He folded his hands in his lap. He had been, I noted, moving more carefully tonight — not stiffly, but with the deliberateness of a man who had recently spent a portion of his evening doing something his body remembered better than he did.
"Good evening," he said.
"Good evening."
"I am late."
"You are."
"I apologize. The wind."
"The wind."
"The wind came down off Hiei this morning and then turned, at noon, off Biwa, and the change made a small thing in Sakyō ward unhappy. I have been consoling it."
He said consoling the way a man says a polite social fact whose actual content was not, by his own choice, going to be elaborated.
"Should I."
"You should not. It is consoled. I am only late."
I poured the midnight blend. He drank. He closed his eyes for the fractional blink. He opened them.
He looked, this evening, at my hands.
I did not look back at his. I poured my own cup. I drank.
"Hana."
"Mm."
"Your hands."
"What of them."
"They are chapped."
"They are."
"The water in your basin is too cold."
"It is May."
"It is May. The water in your basin is the temperature of February."
"It is the genkan basin. The genkan, in this alley, is the temperature of the alley. Which is, by the wind, the temperature of two-and-a-half-months-ago."
I did not look up. I did not need to. He had not said let me do something about it. He had, with the carefulness of a being who knew how I would receive let me do something about it, only made the observation. He was, I had begun to understand across three nights, a man — a being — who said the small thing and waited to see if the small thing landed.
The small thing landed.
I did not, however, give him anything to do about it.
"They will heal in autumn," I said. "They always do."
"Mm."
He drank. He set the cup down. We sat for a long beat. The kettle, on the irori, sang very softly. Pip, this evening, was in the back room with the koi, who — by the smell of smoked cherry on his lips at four o'clock this afternoon — was no longer sulking.
"Hana."
"Mm."
"The white in your hair."
I lifted my cup. I drank. I set the cup down. I did not look up.
"What of it."
"It is new."
"It is two years old."
"That is new."
"For you, perhaps."
"For me. I noted it the first night. I was, I confess, going to inquire then. I judged it discourteous."
"You are inquiring now."
"I am admiring it."
He had used the same verb he had used about the bell — a classical verb that carried both noting the thing with positive valence and not asking the thing to be anything other than the thing it is. He had reached for it the way a man reaches for a cup with a chipped lip.
I felt, in a small chamber of myself I had not opened in two years, a small soft thing tip very slightly to one side.
"Don't admire it," I said. "It is a streak. It is hair."
"It is the same side as mine," he said, very mildly.
"It is."
"That is, I think, only an accident."
"It is."
"All the same, Hana, I notice it."
We sat with this.
The kettle did not sing. The wind, in the alley behind him, had begun, infinitesimally, to drop. The lanterns were no longer pulling. The wards were settling. The koi, in the back room, surfaced once, audibly. Pip made a very small contented sound from the back room and was, by the sound of it, doing something quiet and improbable with the koi that I would not investigate.
He drank the rest of his cup. He bowed. He stood.
He produced, this evening, the coin, from a pocket I had not seen him reach into. He set it on the counter beside the camellia in the small celadon cup — exactly where I would have set it had I set it down myself.
"For the tea," he said.
"Yes."
"I will, with your permission, come tomorrow night also."
"You may come tomorrow night also."
"Hana."
"Mm."
"Thank you."
He went. The door slid shut. The bell did not ring.
I cleared the cup. I did not pick up the coin. I stood at the counter, alone, for a long minute, with both hands flat on the hinoki, and I did not, this time, count to thirty.
I went, very slowly, to the drawer below the till. I took out the notebook. I opened it to the next empty page. I held the brush. The brush did not, in my hand, shake. I wrote, in the careful brushwork I had been able to make since I was twelve and which I had not, in two years, fully trusted:
I do not want to forget that he asked.
I held the page. I looked at it for one slow beat. I felt, in the small chamber of myself, the small soft thing tip a fraction further. I picked up the brush again. I scratched the line out. The brush, doing this, shook for the first time tonight. I underlined the scratch. I closed the notebook.
I put it back in the drawer.
I went upstairs.
Sunday came in on no wind at all.
I had not seen this in Pontocho in May, in seven years, and one noted it by the absence — the noren did not lift; the lanterns did not sway; the wet stones stayed, all morning, the color of dilute ink. The herons were both on the book-shaped stone. The river was a flat plate.
I lifted the shutter at six. I rinsed my hands. I tied the apron. I lit the irori. The kettle, set over the coals, did not sing.
I did the small Sunday cleaning. I rotated the scroll in the tokonoma — the spring scroll out, the early-summer scroll in, a poem in Master Saitō's hand that read, in part, the kettle has been thinking about the river — and changed the small ikebana in the alcove to a single iris stem with one leaf. Pip, in the morning, would adjust it; Pip always did; the iris would be facing, by lunchtime, three degrees further toward the koi door, which was Pip's small standing instruction to the room.
Yuki came, unprecedented, in the morning. She had not come in the morning in three years and four months. I felt her at the noren two seconds before she pressed her palm to the second seam; the wards know yuki-onna the way a kettle knows a stove, by some long mutual habit. I parted the noren. She was already there, in the long pale-grey coat, the silk handkerchief in her left hand.
"Yuki."
"Hana."
"You are early."
"I am here on Sunday. I am also early."
She stepped up. She did not, this morning, go to the back table. She took the third stool from the left.
I did not, by any motion of my face, react. I went, instead, to the cabinet for her cup with the chipped lip. I made the kuromoji-cha. I served it lukewarm in the cup. She wrapped one cool hand around it. Condensation formed on the porcelain.
She drank.
We sat for a long beat. The kettle, on the irori, did not sing. The fudasetsu hummed faintly. Pip was in the back room with the koi.
"Hana."
"Yuki."
"Be careful what you pour him."
I lifted my cup. I drank. I set it down.
"Why."
"Because I have seen this story before."
"Whose story."
"Not this man's." She looked at me, and her eyes — the almost-colorless, the ones a person could fall into — held me, gently, the way she held the cup. "This kind of stillness. I have buried it once. I do not, with respect, wish to bury it again."
I held her gaze. I did not look away. I had learned, in three years and four months, that not looking away was, with Yuki, the only courtesy that mattered.
"You are not asking me to refuse him."
"I am not."
"What are you asking."
"I am asking you to know, while you pour, what you are pouring."
She drank. She set the cup down. She rose. She left, today, a single ice flower with twelve petals — the largest she had ever left — and a thousand-yen note, and at the noren she turned, very slightly, and met my eyes again.
"Hana."
"Mm."
"The white in your hair."
"Yes."
"It is on the same side as his."
"It is."
"You have noticed."
"I have."
"Good."
She went. The bell, on the way out, did not ring.
I cleared her cup. I rinsed it. I put the ice flower into the lacquer dish beside the other ice flowers. I stood at the counter with both hands flat on the hinoki and I counted, this time, to ninety.
At eleven, the bell rang.
He came in. He took off the coat. He sat at the third stool. The coat tonight was the Friday coat, the henley the dark one again. He folded his hands in his lap.
"Good evening, Hana."
"Good evening."
"There was, I think, a visitor this morning."
"There was."
"I did not interrupt."
"You did not."
He inclined his head. We sat for a beat. I poured the midnight blend. He drank. He closed his eyes the fractional blink. He opened them.
"I went to the back garden this afternoon by the alley path. I did not come in. I do not, in the matter of back gardens, enter without permission. I only looked. The koi surfaced for me."
"He does not surface for strangers."
"I am told he does not. I admit, Hana, that I was pleased."
He said pleased the way one says a word one has not used about oneself in a long time — the way a being who had decided, several lifetimes ago, that being pleased was something he had no further business with, and who had now, this Sunday in late May, been pleased, and was placing the word, the way he placed a coin, on the counter between us.
I did not pick the word up.
I did not, however, refuse it.
"Mm," I said.
He drank. He set the cup down. We sat. The kettle, on the irori, sang one soft note and stopped.
"The lantern at your left, by the noren. It is tilted."
"It has been tilted since 2017. Two degrees, east-northeast."
"May I."
"You may not."
He inclined his head. He did not argue. He drank. He tried again, very gently, the way a man tries the same door twice when he has been told it might be unlocked on the second turn.
"Hana."
"Yes."
"If you ever need a person to hang a lantern in this teahouse who is not yourself or Pip-san, I am, as a matter of standing offer, present."
"Tanaka-san hangs lanterns."
"Tanaka-san is, this season, sixty pounds and a cardigan."
"Tanaka-san does not appreciate being weighed."
"I am, I assure you, only being useful."
"You are being forward."
"I am being careful," he said, "not to be. I do not, in the matter of doorways and lanterns, advance by more than two degrees a night."
I almost laughed. I did not laugh. The almost was, by lantern light, visible. He saw the almost. He did not, importantly, press the almost. He let the almost sit, and then, with the small efficiency of a man closing a small ledger he had been keeping all evening, he changed the subject.
"You said the koi has refused all the names he has been offered. Did you offer one."
"I did. Years ago. I offered him kaze. Wind."
"He refused. Why."
"He is not a wind. He is a koi."
"Yes." He almost smiled. The corners of his mouth tipped, almost, but did not commit. "Quite so."
We drank. The kettle did not sing. The fudasetsu hummed. Pip, in the back room, was very quietly humming a tune I now recognized as a Meiji-period children's song. The wards were entirely in tune, all seven papers, for the first time in two years. I did not need to walk the room to confirm. I felt it the way one feels, in one's own house, that all the small doors are closed.
He drank the rest. He bowed. He stood.
He took out the coin.
He set it on the counter beside the cup. The coin, the cup, the camellia in the celadon vessel beside the irori — they were, on the counter, an arrangement. He had, with the carefulness of a being who had been moving objects on counters for a very long time, made a small still life. The still life said, in objects: I will continue to come here. You may, if you wish, continue to let me.
"For the tea," he said.
"For the tea."
"Hana."
"Mm."
"Tomorrow I am not, regrettably, in Kyoto. I will return on Tuesday. I tell you only because I have been here three nights and I would prefer not to leave you to discover my absence at eleven oh-two without warning."
I held very still. I did not, importantly, breathe out. I felt — in the small chamber of myself, the chamber that had tipped a fraction further on Saturday night and another with Yuki this morning — the chamber correct itself by half a fraction back toward center.
"Tuesday," I said.
"Tuesday. With your permission."
"You have."
He bowed. He went. The door slid shut. The bell, on the way out, did not ring.
I stood at the counter and looked at the still life — the coin, the cup, the camellia — for one slow beat. I did not disturb it. I went, very slowly, to the drawer, took out the notebook, opened it to the page where I had written, on Saturday, I do not want to forget that he asked, and scratched it out, and underlined the scratch. I held the brush over the page. I did not write anything. I closed the notebook. I put it back.
I cleared the cup. I left the coin and the camellia. I went upstairs.
At three the kettle sang once, very softly, on its own. I did not get up.
In the back of my apron, against my hip, the small folded receipt with the note in old brushwork — Sumire-no-imōto, the bell will ring tomorrow — had been, for three days, pressed against the notebook. I lay in the dark and I thought, for the first time, that the brushwork on the receipt and the brushwork on the celadon-cup-and-coin still life on the counter downstairs were, in their shared archaisms, the same hand.
I did not get up to check.
I let it.