Chapter 5 — Akiko Calls
Monday came in on cicada noise that was three weeks too early.
Cicadas in Kyoto, in an ordinary year, started in mid-June, hesitantly, one or two voices in the upper cedars at Yasaka or in the small green pockets along the river, and built across two weeks into the dense rolling chorus that became, by Gion Matsuri, the city's actual weather. Cicadas in Kyoto, on the twenty-sixth of May, did not start. I heard them at six-fifty as I crossed the Pontocho lower end on my way back from the river — a thin papery rasp, three voices, somewhere up in the old zelkova along the south embankment — and I stopped on the wet stones and listened, with the same patient attention I had given to the empty book-shaped stone of the herons last Wednesday morning.
The cicadas, on the wrong week of the wrong month, were not omens. They were weather.
I was, by Monday morning at six fifty-three, beginning to suspect that my weather was being made elsewhere.
I lifted the shutter at seven. I rinsed my hands at the genkan basin. The water, this morning, was the exact temperature of the alley, which was, despite the cicadas, still the temperature of an alley that had not yet decided whether it was late spring or early summer. I tied the apron. I lit the irori.
The kettle, set over the coals, sang at me.
It sang twice. The two notes were a third apart. They were, in their small impertinent way, a phrase. I lifted the kettle, set it back, did not scold it, and sat down on the lower step of the genkan for the kind of minute one sits, in a one's own teahouse, when one's kettle has begun to be a kettle that knows its own mind.
Pip was on the counter. Pip was wearing, today, the unfaded red kimono with the pale ribbon at the wrist and, in addition, a tiny indigo cloth tied at the throat in the small precise fold of an Edo-period messenger sash. The sash was, I noted, the cloth I used to wrap small important things. Pip had, in the night, taken it from the drawer below the till.
"Pip."
"Pip."
"Pip is wearing the indigo cloth."
"Pip is wearing the indigo cloth."
"It is not yours."
"It is Pip's, since this morning. Pip is committed."
"Pip is committed to what."
Pip considered. Pip arranged its small face into the patient look of a six-year-old who has thought about a question all weekend and has, only now, been permitted to deliver an answer.
"Pip is committed to being a messenger."
"You are."
"Pip has decided. Pip is going to deliver messages. Pip has, on consideration, no good messages of Pip's own to deliver. So Pip will deliver, for the moment, other people's."
"Whose."
"His, when he sends them."
"He has not sent any."
"He will."
"Pip."
"Pip is ready."
I poured Pip the morning thimble. Pip drank ceremonially. The kettle, on the irori, sang a third note, a fourth above the second, which made the phrase a small ascending major triad. I did not, on a Monday morning at seven, have the energy to develop opinions about a triad. I lifted the kettle. I set it back. The kettle stopped.
The morning conducted its ceremonies.
I served three tourists at noon. One was British, two were Spanish; the British one explained the Spanish ones' Japanese to me in English, badly, with the unshakeable goodwill of a man who had been doing this kind of explaining since the war. They drank genmaicha. They photographed the irori. They left.
At one o'clock, the phone rang.
The phone was a rotary phone, an actual rotary phone, black bakelite, that had been wired into the wall of the teahouse in 1962 and never once replaced. It rang in the way only this kind of phone rings — like an alarm clock at the back of a butcher's shop, with such unapologetic mechanical conviction that there was no possibility of letting it ring once and reconsidering. You picked it up. You always picked it up. The phone had decided.
I picked it up.
"Kogitsune-an, please."
"Hana."
I held the receiver. I did not answer. I had not heard the voice in two years and four months. The voice had not, in the interim, aged. The voice was the voice of a woman who had taken care of her voice the way professional singers take care of their voices, because — and I had teased her about this in 2017 when we were twenty-two and sharing the eastern dorm room at the Library — Akiko had decided at fourteen that her voice was her best weapon and had developed, over the subsequent sixteen years, the kind of relationship with her larynx that other people had with their dogs.
"Hana, please."
"Akiko."
"It is me. I am sorry for the formality. I did not know whether you would —"
"You are calling me here."
"Yes."
"Not on the LINE."
"Not on the LINE. Hana, please."
"You are calling me on the landline at lunchtime on a Monday because you do not want this conversation to be on a device that the guild can subpoena."
A long beat. I heard, through the bakelite, the small careful inhale of a woman who had been my best friend for four years and a stranger for two, and who had, in the inhale, decided which version of herself she was going to be on the phone today.
"Hana."
"Yes."
"I am calling on the landline because I would like, if you will permit it, to be your friend on this call."
I did not answer at once. The kettle, on the irori, sang. I lifted the receiver away from my ear. I covered the mouthpiece with my palm. I waited two breaths. I put the receiver back.
"Akiko."
"Hana."
"You can be my friend on this call. Friends, in the matter of this teahouse, do not get to be working for the Hand at the same time."
"I am not working at this moment. I am at home. I have not put my hair up."
This was, in the strange grammar Akiko and I had developed at twenty-two, a real declaration. Akiko at the office wore her hair in the low ponytail that she had developed during training and which the Hand had, by the end of our first year, decided was hers; Akiko on her own time wore her hair down, loosely, with the small grey clip she had been given by her grandmother. I have not put my hair up was an oath, of a kind.
It was an oath whose grammar we had built in a sun-warmed dorm room on the east side of the Library precinct, in the autumn of our first year, when we were both twenty-two and neither of us had yet learned to be afraid of anything. The room had two desks under one window, and the window faced a stand of zelkova, and in October the zelkova turned the color of a thing one had no honest word for and dropped its small dry leaves against the glass for three weeks. We studied at the desks with our knees touching underneath. Akiko had her hair down in that room always — she put it up only when she crossed the precinct wall to a class, and she took it down again the moment the door closed behind her, and the taking-it-down was the sound, to me, of the day's work being over.
She had taught me, in that room, the paper crane.
Not the children's crane — the binding crane, the one a witch folds when she wants to put a small piece of her own steadiness into a thing too far away to touch. Akiko's hands were faster than mine and her folds were truer, and she sat behind me one November evening with her chin on my shoulder and her hair falling against my cheek and walked my hands through the eleven folds, valley, valley, mountain, the reverse, the head is always last, until the crane in my hands held, faintly, the small warm hum of a binding that had taken. I had kept that crane for nine years. I had lost it, with the rest of the things I had lost, on the night of the casting. I had not, in two years, folded another.
I have not put my hair up meant: I am, on this call, the girl in that room, and not the woman the precinct wall made of her.
"All right," I said.
"Hana."
"Mm."
"The guild is concerned about a series of incidents in Pontocho."
"I haven't seen any incidents."
"That's the concern."
We both, on opposite sides of an analog wire, breathed.
"How many incidents, Akiko."
"Three."
"Since when."
"Since the third week of May."
"Located."
"Sanjō. Shijō. The lower end of Pontocho proper."
"Type."
"Three Hand operatives. Each, in his own way, has stopped reporting."
"Stopped reporting."
"One was found at Sanjō Bridge with his throat opened cleanly. The second was found at Shijō, also cleanly, three days ago. The third —" Akiko paused. She paused the way a Hand operative pauses when she is about to disclose, on her own non-pay-time, on a landline her department had not approved, a fact that exceeded her clearance. "The third has not been found. He has gone. He was last logged at the alley mouth of Kogitsune-kōji at nineteen oh-seven on Friday evening. There is, of him, no body, no scent trail, no signal. He has not gone home. He has not, by any system we have, been taken. He has simply, Hana — he has unhappened."
I did not move my hand. I had practiced not moving my hand. I had practiced it for a Friday wind from the north, and for a man saying good evening, Hana, and for a great-aunt's brushwork on a folded receipt, and now I practiced it for a Hand operative who had unhappened at the mouth of my alley on the Friday before the Saturday I had served the midnight blend to a man who had told me the wind was going to change.
"Akiko."
"Hana."
"You are telling me that a Hand operative was at the mouth of my alley on Friday evening at seven."
"At nineteen oh-seven."
"At nineteen oh-seven."
"Yes."
"He was watching me."
"He was watching the alley. He was a junior officer. His remit was — Hana, please understand, his remit was light surveillance. A walking presence. He had no instruction to enter or approach. He was a — Tuesday, you would have called it."
"It was Friday."
"It was Friday. They are scheduling them at intervals you would not have recognized. I am telling you this, also, off the record."
"Akiko."
"Yes."
"You are telling me, off the record, that the guild has been performing surveillance on my teahouse for three weeks. That three of the operatives performing this surveillance have stopped reporting. That two of them are dead and one of them has unhappened. And that none of this," I said, very quietly, "is, by your department's grammar, my fault."
A long beat.
"Hana."
"Akiko."
"It is, by the department's grammar, not your fault."
"By any other grammar."
"By any other grammar." She paused. I could hear, through the bakelite, the small sound of her grandmother's clip being set on a table; she had taken it out at some point in the conversation and was, by now, doing the small absent gesture of running her thumb over the wire-frame. "Hana, by any other grammar, the question is not whose fault. The question is who has been at your counter."
"Akiko."
"Yes."
"You can be my friend on this call. You cannot be my Hand on this call. The question of who has been at my counter is the latter."
"Hana."
"Yes."
"I am asking, as your friend."
I held the receiver. I looked, across the front room, at the still life on the counter — the coin, the empty cup, the white camellia in the small celadon — and I looked at the third stool from the left, and I looked at the lantern at my left, the one tilted two degrees east-northeast since 2017, and I looked at Pip on the highest beam, where Pip had relocated at the first ring of the rotary, in the way Pip relocated in the presence of telephones, which Pip did not trust.
"Akiko."
"Yes."
"As my friend."
"Yes."
"Come for coffee. Not the LINE. Not the office. Pick a kissaten you have been to with your grandmother. Next Wednesday. Three in the afternoon. Tell me what you can tell me. I will tell you what I can tell you. We will both leave with less than we came with, which is the kind of friendship we appear to have, and the world will continue."
A long beat.
"Hana."
"Akiko."
"Yes. Wednesday. The kissaten near Yasaka is the one. It is called Sarutahiko. My grandmother went there in the seventies."
"Three o'clock."
"Three o'clock."
"Akiko."
"Mm."
"Don't put your hair up."
A small wet sound through the bakelite. Akiko was, on the other end of the wire, almost laughing in the way Akiko almost-laughed when she was, in fact, almost-crying. She mastered it. She mastered it the way she had been mastering it since 2018 when her father had died and she had been required, that same day, to file a routine paper report.
"I will not."
"Wednesday."
"Wednesday."
"Goodbye, Akiko."
"Goodbye, Hana."
I hung up. The receiver clicked into the cradle with the small bakelite precision of a phone that had been doing this since 1962 and was extremely good at it. I stood with my hand on the receiver for one long beat.
The kettle, on the irori, sang.
I lifted it. I set it back. The kettle stopped.
Pip, from the highest beam, said: "Hana-chan."
"Mm."
"Pip is going to deliver Pip's first message."
"Pip."
"Pip's first message is: Pip will not, on Wednesday, fold any foxes out of receipts. Pip will be respectful. Pip understands."
I did not respond. I did not need to. I went to the small drawer below the till. I took out the indigo cloth — the one from Pip's neck, which Pip had, in the time it had taken me to walk three steps, returned to the drawer with no acknowledgment. I held the cloth. I held it for one long minute. I refolded it. I put it back.
I went, very slowly, to the genkan. I sat on the lower step. I did not, for a long while, do anything else.
The afternoon, I had to make myself live through.
I served two more tourists. One was Korean and asked, in careful English, whether the teahouse was very old; I said, in careful English, that the teahouse was as old as it needed to be, which made her laugh in the way Easterners and Westerners alike laughed when they suspected I had used the sentence before. They paid in yen. They tipped. I gave the tip to Pip. Pip put it in the rice jar.
At three I lit the wagashi steamer and made, slowly, four small bean-paste sweets in the shape of half-opened irises, which I had been planning to do since I had cut the iris stem for the tokonoma yesterday and which I now did, mostly, because I needed both hands to be busy. The bean paste was the new bean paste from the Nishiki tofu woman, who had told me, three weeks ago, that this year's reds had been disappointing and that I should compensate with an extra eighth of a measure. The wagashi came out the color of the inside of a peach.
At four I opened the back-room ward.
The fudasetsu hummed. The seven papers were all, today, in tune, in a way they had not been in two years. The new flat-note paper at the back-right — the one that had been tuning itself since Friday — was at a pitch I now recognized as the correct pitch, the pitch the wards had wanted to settle to before I had hung them three years ago and which I had, in my exile-grade caution, set a quarter-tone below.
The wards had, in three nights, corrected my own setting upward by a quarter-tone.
I sat on the lower step of the irori for a long minute and considered this.
The thing about kotodama wards is that they were, very specifically, the witch's own voice held in paper. The seven papers along the rafters of the back room were paper I had folded, in the autumn of 2023, with my own hand, having spoken into them the seven binding phrases I was permitted to bind with after my exile — the small phrases, the household phrases, the door is closed, the door is open, the threshold is patient — and the pitch of the wards' hum had been the pitch of my own voice in the autumn of 2023, which had been the pitch of a woman who had been twenty-six and exhausted and had set the wards as low as she could and still call them wards.
The wards, on a Monday in May in 2026, were humming at the pitch of a woman who had, on Saturday, been admired and who had, on Sunday morning, been told by a yuki-onna that the white in her hair was on the same side as his.
The wards were, in other words, tuning themselves upward toward the pitch of a woman I had not yet given myself permission to be.
I sat with this for a long minute. I did not, at four-fifteen on a Monday, write any of it down.
I climbed back up. I made the back-room tea station ready. I set out the cup with the chipped lip, even though Yuki was not coming today. I set out the cup with the deep glaze, even though Tanaka-san was not coming today. I set out the third cup, the small unmarked one I kept for unexpected regulars, even though I was not, on a Monday evening at four-fifteen, expecting one.
The bell rang at four-thirty.
I was, by four-thirty, not surprised by the bell. The bell, this week, had rung on Wednesday and Thursday and Friday and Saturday and Sunday, and the bell had — by the small mathematics of the bell — earned the right to ring whenever it wanted to. I went, anyway, to the front.
The man in the doorway was not the man I expected.
Goro had pushed the noren aside with the brim of his cap. He had not, on consideration, come in yet. He stood on the genkan stone with the rain — there was, again, rain, having come from somewhere over Higashiyama in the last ten minutes — beading on the cap and on his shoulders and on the small bundle of newspaper he held in his left hand.
"Hana-chan."
"Goro."
"The river is shouting."
"What is the river shouting."
"The river is shouting Pontocho, Pontocho, Pontocho, which is the only thing the river does when the river is, frankly, agitated. I have come, hana-chan, to deliver."
He stepped up. He did not, today, take his cap off. The bundle of newspaper, when he laid it on the counter, was the size of a small loaf. It was, by smell — wet ink, river silt, something faintly metallic underneath — not a loaf.
"Goro."
"Open it."
"In here."
"In the back room. With the wards up."
I took the bundle. I went to the back room. He followed. He stopped at the threshold curtain, as he always did when he was making a delivery rather than visiting; kappa, even one as casual as Goro, had a specific protocol about the deeper indigo. He pressed his palm to the seam in the kappa way, three fingers, the small webbed gap between the second and third. The wards welcomed him. He stepped through.
I unrolled the newspaper on the low table by the koi door.
Inside was a small mechanical thing. It was the size and approximate shape of a sparrow, which is to say it could have sat on the palm of my hand if I had been willing to let it; its body was a matte black ceramic the color of fish-skin in dim water, and its wings were folded along its sides in two layered carbon-composite panels with hairline edges, and there was, along the underside of its breast, a small paper seal in classical brushwork that I recognized.
It was a Hand drone.
It was a light surveillance Hand drone. It was the third generation; I had used the first generation in 2022 for a job in Fushimi, and the third generation had been deployed in 2024 according to a colleague's offhand mention I had not, at the time, been listening to. The paper seal under the breast had, on it, the small precise classical brushwork of an Elder's binding. I did not need to read the brushwork to know which Elder.
The drone was dead.
It was dead in the specific way Hand drones became dead, which was not exactly off — the kotodama-bound systems did not run on batteries; they ran on a small daily memory the operator surrendered into the seal at deployment — but quieted. Its small eyes, two pinpricks of glass on either side of the beak, were dark. Its breast did not, when I held the back of my hand to it, vibrate with the faint hum of a live binding.
"Where did you find it," I said.
"Lower river. Caught in the willow roots below Shijō. Maybe in the water since Friday night. The water did not — hana-chan, the water did not damage it. The water settled it. It was put in the river, very carefully. By somebody who knew exactly how to deactivate a Hand drone and place it in willow roots so the river would hold it."
"Goro."
"Yes."
"You did not, on your own, find this drone."
"No."
"Somebody told you where to look."
"Yes."
"Somebody who knew, with extreme precision, the timing of a Hand drone's hydrodynamics in the Kamogawa."
"Yes."
"Somebody who was, on Friday night, between nineteen oh-seven and twenty-two, at the lower end of Pontocho."
"Yes, hana-chan."
I stood with the drone in my palm. I looked at it. I closed my hand around it, very gently. It was cool. The ceramic did not, like the kan'ei tsūhō, warm to my skin.
I uncurled my fingers. I set the drone on the table. I turned it over. The paper seal under the breast was, on inspection, not only an Elder's binding but a broken Elder's binding — the brushstroke of the central kanji had been, very precisely, bisected by a single fine cut, the kind of cut a thin nail would make, drawn down the centerline of the character with a steadiness that no human hand of any training I had ever encountered would, by my estimation, be able to produce.
A claw. A single, careful, kitsune claw.
"Goro."
"Hana-chan."
"Who told you."
"You know who told me."
"Goro."
"He sent a message by the river. He did not give a name. The river knew the message. The river is, by way of explanation, fond of him. The river does not have to read names."
"You came to me before going to anybody else."
"Yes."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me."
"I thanked you."
"Hana-chan."
"Drink your water."
I went to the front room. I came back with a glass of water. I added a slice of cucumber from the small dish under the counter. I gave it to him. He drank, the cucumber slice bobbing once, the way it always bobbed.
He set the glass down. He left a small wet ring on the table beside the drone, which was Goro's particular signature — I was here, I drank, you are not alone, see you tomorrow. But the ring was, for the first time in seven years, not next to a cup of tea. It was next to a thing that should not have been on my table.
"Hana-chan."
"Goro."
"The river says, also: be ready for Wednesday."
"Wednesday."
"Wednesday is, by my reading, a day on which something happens."
"You have a coffee appointment on Wednesday I have not told you about."
"I have many things I have not told you about. I am, hana-chan, a small black market."
"Goro."
"Mm."
"Goro, somebody at the mouth of my alley on Friday evening at nineteen oh-seven was killed. Or unhappened. Or both."
"Yes."
"Goro, somebody disabled an Elder's binding on a third-generation Hand drone with a claw."
"Yes."
"Goro."
"Yes."
"You and I both know who that somebody is."
A long beat. Goro did not, on the matter of who that somebody was, answer. Goro and I had known each other a long time and there were questions to which I did not ask him for answers because the answers, when he gave them, would close a door I would have to live with closed. He scratched the rim of the sara under his cap. He set the cap back down.
"Hana-chan."
"Goro."
"He is not telling you, on purpose."
"I know."
"He is, however, telling Goro. By the river. By the willow roots. By the broken seal which is, hana-chan — I want you to hear this — displayed. He has placed this drone in your hands by means of me. He is asking you, in the only grammar he is permitted by his nature to use, to know."
"To know what."
"That he is, on your behalf, attentive."
I held very still.
"Goro."
"Yes."
"The other two drones."
"There are no other two drones, hana-chan. Yet. The river will, on inspection, surface another. The river is thorough. I will bring you the next one when it surfaces. I do not, at this time, know when."
"Goro."
"Yes."
"Thank you."
"You said that."
"I am saying it again."
"Hana-chan."
"Drink your water."
He drank. He left the small wet ring. He went. The bell, on the way out, did not ring.
I stood at the low table in the back room with the dead Hand drone on it. Pip, who had crept up the rafters of the back room without being announced, was sitting on the central beam with both small fists wrapped around the embroidered hem of the unfaded red kimono and was, on inspection, not breathing — Pip did not, in fact, breathe — but performing the precise stillness of a small ghost-child who had decided to be invisible.
"Pip."
"Pip."
"Pip is invited."
Pip slid down. Pip arrived on the table beside the drone the way Pip arrived on tables. Pip considered the drone. Pip looked at the broken seal under the breast. Pip looked at me.
"Pip wants to say one thing."
"One."
"The thing under the seal."
"Yes."
"It is the same kind of cut that Pip's noren string was cut with, by you, on the day Pip was bound to this house."
I held very still.
"Pip."
"Pip."
"Pip is correct."
"Pip knows."
I sat down on the floor beside the table. I did not, immediately, do anything. The Hand drone, broken-sealed, sat on the newspaper bundle. The koi, in the pond outside, surfaced once, audibly. The fudasetsu hummed. The cicadas in the wrong week, somewhere up in the plane trees three streets over, kept on rasping their thin papery rasp.
I had been told, when I was twenty-two and the youngest member of my year at the Library, that there were two kinds of broken bindings. There were bindings broken by force — by a stronger binding, by counter-spell, by what we had called, with the dry shorthand of trainees, yelling louder — and there were bindings broken by precedence. A binding broken by precedence was a binding undone by another binding whose authority over the bound object was older. The way to undo an Elder's binding by precedence was to be a being whose claim on the binding's substrate — the paper, the brush, the ink — predated the Elder's claim. The way to undo it cleanly, with a single fine cut along the centerline of the central kanji, was to be a being whose claim predated not only the Elder's claim but the paper's, which is to say: a being for whom the substance of the binding was a piece of his own century.
The kanji on the seal of a Hand drone was bound in 9th-century brushwork.
He had been alive in the 9th century.
He had not killed the operative. He had killed the drone. Quietly, in the river, by the only means a being of his kind had: precedence.
The killing of the operative — the killing at Sanjō Bridge, the killing at Shijō, the unhappening at nineteen oh-seven on Friday — was a separate matter.
I sat with this.
I sat with this for a long time.
Pip, on the table, did not say anything. Pip, in fact, had nothing to add. Pip had said the thing it had been holding since the morning, and Pip was, in the matter of further commentary, going to be a small ghost-child for the rest of the evening. Pip slid off the table and went, in a small flutter of unfaded red, to the back garden, where Pip and the koi had, by Sunday afternoon, developed a private friendship I would not investigate.
I rewrapped the drone in the newspaper. I put it in the small lacquer chest under the back-room altar, the chest I had not opened in two years. I locked the chest. I did not, in the chest, put my hand on the small sealed talisman I knew was at the bottom of it.
I closed the cellar door.
I went to the front room. I sat on the third stool from the left, the one that was his stool, and I held my hands flat on the hinoki counter. Then I rose, and rinsed the one cup in the basin, and dried it, and set it on the rack, and wiped the koi's stone at the lip of the pond with the pad of my thumb until the thumb had nothing left to do.
I did not write anything in the notebook. There was — for the first time in two years — too much, on a Monday evening at five-fifteen, to write down.
He did not come at eleven.
He had said he would not. He had told me, on Sunday night, in the small ceremony of the still life on the counter, that he was not in Kyoto on Monday. He had told me he would return on Tuesday. He had said it the way one says a polite social fact whose actual content was not, by his own choice, to be elaborated.
I had not, today, been listening for the bell.
I had, in fact, been listening. I had been listening from approximately ten thirty-five. I had been listening with the small attentiveness one pretends one is not paying. The bell did not ring at eleven. The bell did not ring at eleven oh-two. The bell did not ring at eleven oh-five, at eleven ten, at eleven fifteen. The bell did not, in fact, ring at all.
This had, until a week ago, been an entirely ordinary thing for the bell to do.
I cleared the front room. I rinsed the cups. I rinsed the warming pot — which, despite myself, I had filled at ten thirty with the midnight blend, in the way a person on whom a small soft thing has tipped, in a small chamber of herself, by an unmeasurable fraction further toward open, fills warming pots by reflex at ten thirty. I poured the cold midnight blend into the koi pond. The koi surfaced twice. Pip, on the back beam, made the very small contented sound.
I lifted the warming pot. I set it back. I lifted it. I set it back. I left it off.
I went to the noren. I drew it in. I hung the small wooden plaque on the hook. I slid the outer door three-quarters shut.
I undid the apron strings. I retied them. I went to the small drawer below the till. I took out the notebook. I opened it to a fresh page.
I held the brush over the page.
I did not write I do not want to forget that he did not come tonight.
I did not write I do not want to forget that I have stood in this room at eleven oh-two for seven nights.
I did not write I do not want to forget that Akiko's voice has not aged.
I did not write I do not want to forget the cut along the kanji.
I held the brush over the page for one long minute. Then I set the brush down. I closed the notebook. I put it back.
I went upstairs.
At one in the morning I lay in the dark and considered, with the part of myself that I had been keeping carefully sealed in a small lacquer chest for two years, the following thing:
That on Friday night, between nineteen oh-seven and twenty-two, while I had been making the midnight blend on the irori downstairs and Pip had been clenching its small fists on the highest beam and the wind had been changing in the alley, a man — a being — had been at the lower end of Pontocho, doing something with a Hand drone and a Hand operative and a stretch of willow roots below Shijō. He had done it with the carefulness of a being who did not enjoy doing it. He had placed the drone in the river gently. He had — by Goro's reading — attended to me, by ways of an artifact and a river and a friendly small black-market kappa, instead of telling me, the way other men would have told me, by the way, this happened.
He had done all of this and then he had come at eleven, and he had sat at the third stool, and he had asked me about the koi.
He had asked me about the koi.
The koi did not have a name.
The koi had refused all the names he had been offered.
I lay in the dark with my hands folded on my stomach, the way one lies when one is being very careful about one's breathing, and I thought, with the part of myself that I had been keeping in the lacquer chest for two years, that I had — on a Sunday in late May, on a Monday morning, on a Monday afternoon with a Hand drone in my back room and an old friend's voice in my rotary phone — begun, without permission, to want a particular thing.
The thing I had begun to want was not, by Tanaka-san's grading scale of small-first-then-large, a small thing.
I lay in the dark and counted my breathing. The kettle, on the irori downstairs, did not sing.
At two it sang once.
I did not get up.
At three the rain in the alley began again, in the particular Kyoto drizzle that does not fall so much as hang, suspended, a held breath of water, and somewhere over the lower river the cicadas, three weeks too early, kept on rasping their thin papery rasp.
I closed my eyes. I did not sleep. I did, however, very gently, allow myself, in the small chamber of myself, to know — as Goro had said the river had asked me to know — that somebody had been attending.
In the back of my apron, on the hook by the door, the notebook lay quietly beside the small folded receipt with the brushwork from a hundred and fifty years ago. The brushwork that had called me Sumire-no-imōto. The brushwork that was, I now knew, the same brushwork as the cut along the centerline of an Elder's kanji on the breast of a Hand drone in a lacquer chest in my cellar.
There would be more drones. Goro had said as much; the river was thorough. I did not, on the Monday night, let myself count them.
I knew only that I had begun to want a particular thing, and that the thing was not small, and that on Wednesday I was going to drink a cortado in a kissaten near Yasaka, with the woman who had been my best friend at twenty-two, who had not put her hair up.
I closed my eyes.
I let the rain in the alley keep its small water-breath.
I did not sleep.