Chapter 9 — What Sumire Wrote
The rain that came in overnight was the kind Sumire would have called a reader's rain.
I knew the phrase because I had, by four in the morning, found it. Volume two, March of 1964. The rain today is a reader's rain — the sort that keeps the regulars away and gives the proprietor an honest excuse to sit at the counter with a book and not feel that she is, by her sitting, neglecting anyone. I had marked the line with a sliver of paper torn from the till receipt, because I had not, in two years, been the kind of woman who underlines in books that are not hers.
I made hojicha at the irori at six. The rain on the eaves was steady enough that the koi, by the back-room shoji, had decided he was at the lily pad's underside for the morning. Pip was on the second tatami beam, threading a ribbon I had not given Pip permission to thread. The teahouse was in the posture it goes into when it does not, by its own wisdom, expect anyone for several hours.
I sat at the counter with volume two open. I did not, for the first hour, turn the page.
The brushwork of 1964 was Sumire's at forty — the brush of a woman who had been a year at the trade and was already, by the evidence on the page, no longer afraid of being wrong about a tea. The entries were short. Cabbage man Tuesday. Yuki Friday. He came in. The he was not annotated; the he did not need to be. The diary had, evidently, decided early which he did not require a name.
I read forward.
I read the first month at a pace that was not, by any honest description, reading. It was a kind of slow listening — the way one listens to a room one has only just understood was, all along, more than one room. Sumire had begun the diary as a ledger of teahouse minutiae — cup inventories, the cabbage man's deliveries, the koi's appetite — and had let it become, somewhere between March and June of 1964, the diary of a woman who had begun to mark the days by which days he came. By June the entries were arranged around him without saying so. The cabbage came on Tuesday because Tuesday was the day he came; the koi was named in passing because he had asked after the koi the night before; the kettle's sound on Wednesday morning was not the kettle I remembered from Tuesday night because, by then, Sumire's ear had been bent to the kettle by his hearing of it.
I sat with this. The rain kept on. The kettle, at the irori, sang one phrase that I noted without addressing. Pip, on the beam, said:
"Pip is committed to not interrupting your reading."
"Mm."
"Pip would like the record to show that Pip is committed."
"Noted."
"Pip will, however, sit on this beam in a posture of availability."
"Pip can sit in a posture of availability."
Pip sat in a posture of availability. The ribbon in Pip's hand was the pale-grey one I had used, in October, to tie a packet of dried persimmon for Tanaka-san. Pip had retrieved it, by Pip's own resourcefulness, from a place I had not previously known Pip went.
I turned the page.
Friday. He came at the wrong hour. He came at nine. He did not, by his face, expect to come at nine. He sat. I asked him if he wanted hojicha. He said he wanted what I was already making. I was already making the midnight blend, because I had been about to set it aside for myself at closing. He drank a cup of mine. He said it was the better cup. He bowed and left at nine forty. I sat with the half-cup he did not finish and I did not, by the rule I had set myself in February, finish it for him.
I read the entry twice. I had not, at the bottom of the page, intended to read it twice. The brush had a small wobble at the close of the kanji for better that read, to a hand that knew Sumire's hand, as the wobble of a woman writing past her usual hour. The diary had been written that night, after closing, in the front room, by a forty-year-old woman who had set a rule with herself in February and was, by April, keeping it.
I closed volume two.
The bell at the front rang.
It was Tanaka-san. He was, by the watch I had not in two years stopped checking, four minutes early.
"Tanaka-san."
"Hana-chan."
He sat. He did not, by the kindness of his nature, look at the volume on the counter. He looked at the irori. He looked at the kettle. He looked at the rain on the door-stone in the way an old tanuki looks at a rain that has nothing in particular to do with him.
"My cousin," he said.
"Mm."
"My cousin Hiroshi. Not the Otsu one. The other one. The persimmon one."
I had not, in the three years I had known Tanaka-san, met any of his cousins, of whom there were, by his own running census, eleven. The persimmon cousin had been mentioned in the spring of last year and the spring of this year and was, by my private theory, the cousin Tanaka-san invented when he wanted to share something he was not sure he was permitted to share.
"The persimmon cousin," I said.
"He sent me a thing. A bag of dried persimmon, from his tree, which is the tree that — you remember — was struck by lightning in 2009 and which has, by some grace I do not pretend to understand, kept fruiting. He sent it with a note."
"What did the note say."
"It said: the tree is, this year, fruiting too much. I am sending you a portion. Share it."
"And."
"And I am, hana-chan, here to share it."
He set on the counter a small paper bag tied with brown twine. The paper was the kind of paper you wrap a school child's lunch in. The twine had been knotted twice and the second knot, by the angle of it, had been tied by hands that wanted the recipient to feel the knotting.
I bowed. He bowed. I poured him his usual. He drank.
"Hana-chan."
"Mm."
"I will, with your permission, eat one of these persimmons at the counter."
"You have my permission."
"I will, with your permission, leave the rest."
"Thank you, Tanaka-san."
He ate one. He ate it the way a tanuki eats a thing he has carried across a river — by which I mean, without speed, with a kind of internal grace that comes of having known, since one's youth, that the food was going to arrive. He chewed for a long minute. The kettle sang its three-note phrase a half-step lower than it had yesterday. Tanaka-san noted it with one eyebrow and did not, by the kindness of his policy, address it.
"The persimmons," he said.
"Mm."
"They are, this year, sweeter than last year. My cousin attributes it to the lightning."
"That seems generous to the lightning."
"My cousin is, in the matter of his tree, generous in all directions."
I laughed. It was a short laugh. It was, by any honest count, the first laugh in two days. Tanaka-san pretended not to notice in the careful way of a man whose pretending-not-to-notice is its own form of acknowledgment.
He left at eleven. The bell rang on his way out. The persimmon bag on the counter sat in the rain-grey light and was, by its bag-nature, more cheerful than I had been about anything since dawn.
I opened volume three.
I read until two. The rain did not, by any change in the eaves' drumming, indicate it was thinking of leaving. Yuki came at two-fifteen, which was an hour earlier than her standing Friday, because the snow-woman keeps better hours in a reader's rain. She brought no ice flower. She sat at her usual table by the koi-door shoji.
"Yuki-san."
"Hana-chan."
"You are early."
"The rain has tired me."
I poured her cup. She did not drink it. She watched the steam come off it for a while.
"Yuki-san."
"Mm."
"May I ask you a thing."
"You may ask."
"Did Sumire-obaba ever speak to you about a man who came in at closing."
Yuki was quiet. Yuki has, by her nature, two registers of quiet — the one in which she is composing her next economy of words, and the one in which she is deciding whether she will speak at all. This was the second.
"She did not," Yuki said, "speak to me. She did not need to speak to me."
"You knew."
"I saw."
"For how long."
"Forty years."
I sat with that. I did not, on the cedar counter, do anything else for a moment. I tied and re-tied the cotton of the apron string, twice, neither time tighter than was necessary.
"Yuki-san."
"Mm."
"Why did you never tell me."
Yuki looked at me. She has, in the matter of her looking, the smallest range of motion of anyone I know — a single half-degree shift of the eyes that, by its smallness, says what other people's whole faces say.
"You did not ask," she said.
"That is not a reason."
"It is a yuki-onna's reason."
"You could have offered."
"I could have. I did not, by the discipline of my nature, offer. The diary, hana-chan, is for you. The diary is for the one in whom Sumire's hand will be useful. The diary would not have been useful to you a year ago. The diary would not have been useful to you in March. The diary is useful to you, by your own readiness, today."
"How did you know I was ready."
"You opened it."
I bowed to Yuki. It was a deeper bow than I had given anyone in some weeks. Yuki accepted the bow in her usual fashion, which is to say she did not return it but did, by one degree, soften the corners of her mouth. She took one sip of her tea and set the cup down. She left at three. The cup on the table was still, in the rain-grey light, full.
I did not, by my own rule with Yuki's cups, clear it.
I opened volume four.
By four in the afternoon I had read across to volume six. The light in the front room had thinned in the way light does in a rain that is not, by any forecast available to a witch with no business consulting forecasts, planning to clear before evening. Pip had come down from the beam and was, in the back room, doing a thing with the spice shelf that I was not going to permit myself to look at.
The diary had, by 1965, fallen into a quiet rhythm. Sumire wrote three or four entries a week. The man came one to two nights a week. He bowed to Toki — Pip's predecessor — when she was visible. He bowed to the cabbage man on Tuesdays. He paid in old coins which Sumire, by 1965, had begun keeping in a small lacquer box in the back room and which she did not, by any entry I could find, ever attempt to spend. The box was, by Sumire's own one-line annotation in volume five, the savings of a woman who has decided what she is saving for, even if she will not, on this page, write it down.
I read volume six until the end of June 1965. Sumire was forty-one. The brush had become a hand I knew the way one knows a voice on the telephone — by its silences as well as its sounds.
I closed volume six.
I sat at the counter with my forearms on the wood. I sat for a long minute. The rain on the eaves was steady. Pip in the back room had stopped doing the spice-shelf thing.
The bell did not ring at eleven.
The bell had not, by any rule I had set with the universe in the last two weeks, been obligated to ring at eleven. The bell had rung at eleven oh-two on the catalyst night, and then at eleven oh-three the next night, and then on the next two nights at eleven oh-two and eleven oh-four, and I had begun, against my better judgment, to keep an interior watch on the small frame of two minutes between eleven oh-one and eleven oh-five.
It did not ring at eleven.
It did not ring at eleven oh-two. It did not ring at eleven oh-four. It did not ring at eleven oh-six.
I sat at the counter. I tied the apron string. I did not, in the matter of the bell, do anything else.
By eleven fifteen I had begun to understand that the bell was not going to ring. By eleven twenty I had begun to understand a thing I had not, in two years of teaching myself not to want, understood about wanting — which was that the absence of a thing one has been refusing to want is, when the thing does not come, exactly as loud as the presence of the thing would have been. The wanting did not, by his not coming, become smaller. The wanting became, by his not coming, audible.
I noted the audibility.
I did not, by my old rule, address it.
I closed the noren plaque from inside, at eleven thirty, by reaching up and turning the small wooden tag from open to closed the way I had turned it ten thousand times before. The plaque swung once. The lantern on the entry stone, which Sumire had not, in her diaries, ever managed to keep lit through a steady rain, was — tonight — keeping itself lit. It was a thing I noted and did not, on the page of my notebook, address.
I went to the back room.
I did not, tonight, go down to the cellar. The cellar had given me what the cellar was, this week, willing to give me. I would, by the diary's own evidence, need to be in the cellar again. I would not be in it tonight.
I laid out the futon.
I had not, in nine days, laid out the futon by lantern light alone. I had been keeping a small evening light on in the kitchen against the new arithmetic of the night — the arithmetic in which the front bell might, at some hour I had not earned the right to know in advance, ring. The small evening light had not, until tonight, been a thing I had needed to admit to myself.
Tonight I did not turn the small evening light on.
I lay down. The futon under me was the futon Sumire had bought from the futon-man at Demachi in 1979, which I knew because Sumire had written, in volume sixteen, the futon-man brought the new futon today. He says it will outlast me. I told him it will outlast me by a factor of at least two. He bowed, by which I gathered he understood I had not been speaking, exactly, about the futon.
I lay down on Sumire's futon-by-a-factor-of-two.
I closed my eyes.
I dreamed.
I dreamed, for the first time in two years, in classical Japanese.
I dreamed it the way one dreams a language one has had, in waking, no occasion to think in: which is to say, easily. The dream was set in a room I had not been in. The room had four mats and a kettle and a low writing desk and a paper screen on which a fox had been painted by a hand older than mine. The fox in the painting was a small fox, painted in three strokes — head, back-haunch, tail — in an ink that had, by the dust of the dream, browned at the edges. The fox was looking past me at someone who was, in the dream, in the doorway behind me.
I did not turn around.
A voice said something to me in a register of Japanese I had last heard in graduate school. The voice said: the rain has been steady. I came as far as the door. I did not, by the courtesy of an hour, enter. The voice did not, by its grammar, name itself.
I said, in the same register, without turning around: the door is the door. The door is, in this house, the door whether one enters it or not.
I had reached, in the dream, for the address-mood — the small grammar one used to speak to a person of rank rather than merely near them — and had, in the dream as in waking, declined it; I had not, since the casting, let that conjugation past my teeth, because it was the most expensive of the small grammars and a witch who could not afford a price did not, by habit, spend in it. The plain form was cheaper. I used the plain form.
The voice was quiet for a long minute. The fox in the painting blinked one eye. I did not, in the dream, find this remarkable.
The voice said: thank you for the cup that was not poured.
I woke.
The rain on the eaves was still steady. The lantern on the entry stone, by my read of the under-shoji light, was still keeping itself lit. The kettle in the front room, which I had not put down to bed, was, by the small hiss carrying through two paper walls, still warm.
I lay on the futon a long minute. I did not, by any waking-grade discipline, address the dream.
I addressed, instead, the small clean fact at the center of it.
The voice in the dream had not been Sumire's voice. The voice in the dream had been a man's voice, in a register of Japanese a hundred years older than any I had been taught, in a grammar that I had not, by my own reading, been able to invent on a sleeping mind alone.
I sat up. I did not, by lantern light, turn on the small evening light. I went to the front room. The kettle was at the lowest hiss a kettle can sustain without going cold. The rain on the door-stone was the rain of a city that intended to be a reader's rain tomorrow as well.
I went back to the futon.
I lay down again.
I did not, in the second hour of the night, dream a second time. The first dream had been the only dream the rain was going to give me. I lay with my eyes open and listened to the kettle and to the rain and to the small unobtrusive working of a teahouse keeping itself warm around a woman who had been told for two years that she lived alone and who was, by every honest accounting of the last nine days, beginning to suspect she did not.
In the kitchen, the small unmarked cup on the third stool from the left — which I had, at closing, not set out — was, somehow, on the counter.
I had not, by my own hand, set it out.
Pip had not, by the rule of the wards, been in the front room since I went to bed.
The cup was unmarked. The cup was clean. The cup was, by its placing, at the third position from the left, where it had been on the catalyst night, and on the next night, and on the next.
I did not, by lantern light, lift it. I did not, by lantern light, ask the room who had set it out. I left it where it was. I went back to the futon. I closed my eyes.
I lay in the dark a long time and let the wanting be audible. The wanting was, by being audible, no smaller. The wanting was, by being audible, the shape of a person who had stood at the door in a rain and had, by the courtesy of an hour, not entered.