Chapter 11 — A List of Possible People
The morning after the Tuesday inari was the colour of a hand-washed cotton shirt that had been hung indoors too long. There was no rain. There was no real light either. Somewhere west, beyond the river, a single train horn went off at six and then there was nothing for a while except crows.
I sat at the cedar counter with a fresh page open in front of me and a brush that needed more water than it had asked for. The page was the back of a tea-merchant invoice from 2019. I do not, when I am thinking, use the notebook. The notebook is for the things I have decided.
At the top I wrote People who could have told a kitsune, in 2024, that I had stopped casting. Underneath, in the order they came to me, four names.
Akiko.
Master Saitō.
Tōru.
The executor.
I looked at the four names for some while. Outside, the crows talked the way crows talk when they have agreed something and are now repeating it for the slow members. The list looked, in lantern light, like the kind of list one writes when one has decided to be honest. I had not written this list before; I had been, for fourteen days, hoping I would not need to.
I put a small dot beside Akiko. I put two small dots beside Saitō. I put no dot beside Tōru — I had a feeling about Tōru that did not, yet, want a dot. Beside the executor I drew a small fox. The executor of Sumire's affairs had been, since 2018, a man whose name I had only ever read on letterhead. Kawasoe, Mitsuhide. He had sent me, at thirty-eight, a sealed pouch and three forms. I had not, in seven years, met him. I had a feeling he was not a man one met.
I sat with the four names. I refolded the apron string. I did not, this time, untie and retie. The morning did not want that gesture from me.
Pip, I said. I am thinking aloud.
Pip came down from the rafter and sat on the counter at a respectful three handspans from the page. Pip did not read upside down. Pip looked up at me with the absolute attention of a creature who has, by long custom, never asked what a thing was for.
Of the people who knew I had stopped casting, I said, four are alive. If Kuzunoha was told in 2024, it was one of those four, or it was a fifth I have not thought of.
Pip's small head tilted. Pip will not, by Pip's own rule, name anyone. Pip will, however, listen.
Akiko knew. Saitō knew. The Hand knew, after a fashion — Tōru learned through Akiko's report. Kawasoe-san knew because he had to handle the standing instructions in the estate. I paused. That is four. There is no fifth that I can —
I stopped.
There was a fifth. I had not, before this morning, counted her, because she had been a child of nineteen and the youngest niece of a numismatist and she had been, at the time, weeping into a Pontocho doorway in the rain on a Tuesday afternoon in March 2024 because her uncle had decided she could not, in the manner of his ledger, be trusted to total the receipts. I had given her hojicha. I had told her that her uncle had been kind to my line for many years and would, by the long arithmetic of his temper, come around to it. She had asked me, when she was halfway through the cup, why I was no longer in the trade. I had told her. I had told her because she had been nineteen and weeping and because I had not, at the time, expected to ever see her again.
Her name was Mochizuki Eri.
I added her to the list. I did not put a dot.
I did not, for a long time, look at the list.
Tanaka-san came in at his usual. He was wearing a cardigan I had not seen before — a brown cardigan with a green stripe in it, ill-suited to him in the way a coat one's daughter-in-law has bought is ill-suited.
Hana-chan.
Tanaka-san. New cardigan.
A gift.
From —
From my daughter-in-law. Her name is Hisako. She has, by every meaning of the verb, given up on me as a man with taste, and has decided that the only solution is to dress me herself. He sat down. Her opinion of my old cardigans was, this Sunday, expressed.
Was it.
It was. With a paper bag.
I poured. He drank. He looked at the new cardigan on the arm of his sleeve as one would look at a small misbehaving dog one has been required to walk in public.
Hisako-san is a strong-willed woman, then, I said.
Hisako-san, he said, is the only person who has not, in forty-one years of marriage to my son, ever once asked me about my cousin.
He said this with no apparent thematic content. He said it the way a man tells one a piece of family weather. He stirred his tea once, by habit, although he does not take anything in it. He said, almost to himself, her sake-warm is, on balance, slightly too warm. I have not told her. I would not, for the world, tell her.
I did not say anything. I poured him a second cup. He drank the second cup at the pace he drinks a second cup. The persimmon-cousin lay, for the morning, undisturbed.
When he stood to go, he paused at the door and turned back. Hana-chan.
Yes.
If you are, this week, writing letters, do not write the one to Akiko-san first.
I felt my hand go still on the cloth I was wringing out.
Tanaka-san.
Write Saitō-sensei first. Akiko-san, by the year I have known her in this teahouse, will hear what is being asked of her in the silence between the two letters. The silence is a kindness she is owed.
He bowed. He went out into the not-light of the morning in his daughter-in-law's brown cardigan. He did not look back.
I stood at the counter with the cloth in my hand a long while. I am being read, I thought, by a tanuki in a cardigan. The thought was not, on balance, a complaint.
I wrote Saitō first.
I wrote it in the smallest neat hand the brush would give me — and then, halfway down, without deciding to, I wrote the next page in a hand that was not small at all, that was the hand my grandmother had used when she was angry, sloping a half-degree forward, slightly larger than my usual. The brush appreciated the change. The brush had been bored, I realised, of my smallness.
Saitō-sensei,
A kitsune of long acquaintance with this teahouse mentioned, in passing on Tuesday evening, that he had been told in 2024 that I had ceased to cast. He did not say who told him. I would like, before Friday, to know whether the telling came from your house.
If it did, I have no quarrel with the telling. I would like, however, the name of the person told, and the date.
If it did not, I would like that to be on the record between us.
With respect,
Hana
I sealed it. I addressed it to the temple at Kibune. I would, when the post office opened at nine, send it next-day.
I did not write Akiko.
I sat with the unwritten letter to Akiko for two more cups of midnight blend, lukewarm because I had stopped reheating the kettle when I am working. Tanaka had been right. The silence between the letters was a kindness Akiko was owed. The silence said: I have not yet decided whether to ask you. I am being slow about it on purpose. I am being slow because you and I have been a thing that is older than the guild that has, for fifteen months, made you choose.
I drafted a different letter, the third one. To Kawasoe Mitsuhide, the executor of my great-aunt's estate, at the address that had been on the bottom of every form I had signed since 2018. I had never written to him. I had only signed forms he had pre-printed.
Kawasoe-sensei,
I write at the address listed for you in the standing instructions of the estate of Sumire Aoba. I am the named beneficiary, and the present tenant of Kogitsune-an.
I would be grateful if you could tell me, at your convenience, whether the standing instructions include the periodic notification of any third parties as to the status of my work in the kotodama trade. If they do, I would like to know which parties, and on what dates such notifications have been sent.
With respect,
Aoba Hana
I did not, in this letter, say kitsune. I did not, in this letter, say the eaves of the long roof, which is the old way of saying the listeners at the boundary. I did not, in this letter, mention 2024 at all. The letter would mean, if Kawasoe was the kind of man one suspected, exactly enough. It would mean, if he was not, almost nothing.
I sealed it. I addressed it to the second-floor office in Sanjō-Higashi where the letterhead said he kept his hours.
I did not draft a letter to Tōru. There were no good ways to draft a letter to Tōru that did not also draft a letter to a particular self of mine I was not yet willing to be on paper.
I did not draft a letter to Mochizuki Eri. She was on the list because I had told her, in the rain, in a moment of unguarded kindness, the one thing I had not told anyone else. If she had told her uncle, her uncle had told a numismatist of his acquaintance, and that numismatist had told — a customer with a kan'ei tsūhō — then the line of telling went through Mochizuki-sensei, and Mochizuki-sensei was not, by anything I knew of him, a man who told. I would, at some point this week, walk to Teramachi and look at him over the loupe and decide. The walking was the letter.
Pip approved of the project. Pip approved of it in the form Pip approves of things: by behaviour, not by speech.
When I went to the post office at nine, Pip rode my apron pocket without being asked, a small warm pressure that was not, by any account I had given Akiko at twenty-two, possible. (Pip is invisible to most adults; Pip was once invisible to me. Pip became visible the month I moved into this teahouse and has been, since then, an arbiter.) When I dropped the two letters into the slot — the Kibune one in the next-day box, the Sanjō one in the regular — Pip patted my pocket once with a small flat hand and said, Pip thinks both letters were necessary. Pip thinks the silence to Akiko was also necessary. Pip is, generally, committed.
Pip, I said, very quietly, into my collar, do not tell anyone you are riding in this apron.
Pip is, hana-chan, not visible to anyone but you. Pip's discretion is, by Pip's nature, an architectural fact.
I bowed, slightly, to my own pocket, which got me a look from a woman in line who was trying not to look at me.
On the way home I walked past Mochizuki-sensei's shop. The brass plate said the same as it had always said. The shutters were down. I did not knock. I made a note, in the part of myself that takes notes in lantern light, to visit on Friday morning before the day got long. The note was already written before I knew I was making it.
In the afternoon Pip went into a phase. Pip is, by Pip's nature, prone to phases. The phase this afternoon was receipts.
I had on the counter the running tally of the week's purchases — the dashi, the kelp, the rice from the place by Demachiyanagi where the old man does not say good morning until you have come in three weeks running. I had Tanaka's morning chit and Goro's stone. I had a single receipt from the chemist for the eye drops my left eye does not, in dry weather, do without anymore.
Pip folded every one of them into foxes.
Pip folded them into foxes of a very small size — three centimetres at the spine, four at the tail. Pip arranged the foxes in a row on the spice shelf. Then Pip moved them, one by one, with the gravity of a magistrate, until they were arranged in the rough outline of a fox tail along the wall. Five foxes for the inner curve. Eight for the outer. One — slightly larger, made from the chemist's receipt — at the tip.
I watched this from the counter for some twenty minutes.
Pip, I said.
Yes.
That is a fox tail.
Yes.
It is on my spice shelf.
Yes.
Pip.
Pip is, hana-chan, expressing an opinion.
I did not, by any rule of my counter, dismantle the fox tail. I made a note to take a photograph of it before Yuki came on Thursday. Yuki would, on Thursday, in the manner of a yuki-onna who has seen everything, say nothing about the fox tail except by looking at it for one and a half seconds longer than was necessary.
At three I went to the back room and looked at the two drones in their small uncomfortable shrine. They had not moved. They had not, by any test I had applied, gotten any more alive overnight. I made a tea — not for anyone, just for the back room, the way Sumire's diary said one made tea for a back room that had been working hard — and set the cup on the low shelf next to the drones.
Back room, I said. Whoever has been undoing these has been working at a rate of twice a week. I am, this morning, asking you four names. Tell me if any of them are wrong.
I said the names aloud.
Akiko.
The back room was still.
Saitō.
The back room was still in a slightly different way — the way a room is still when it has heard a name it knows but did not expect.
Tōru.
The lantern in the back room flickered. The flicker was the kind of flicker that is, by Goro's reading, fluid response — air moving where there should not be air. It was the back room twitching. Tōru, I said again, slower. The lantern did not flicker the second time. The back room had reset itself. I underlined Tōru on the page.
Kawasoe.
The back room was very still. The stillness was a stillness I knew. It was the stillness of the back room saying I do not, in the matter of this name, have an opinion to offer. The back room had not, in any of Sumire's volumes from 1968 to 2018, mentioned Kawasoe. He had been, to Sumire's back room, a typewriter and an address.
I added a small mark beside Kawasoe: unknown to the back room. Then I added beside Tōru: the back room reacted on the second pass.
I did not say Mochizuki Eri aloud. I had a feeling about Mochizuki Eri that I wanted to take to Mochizuki-sensei himself on Friday before I made the back room do its small twitching for it.
At five Goro came up the alley wet — wet, today, from a hose rather than from a river, which is the wetness Goro has when he has been in the koi business of a neighbour rather than his own. He brought no drone. He brought a slim flat bundle wrapped in waxed paper.
From a friend, he said.
The friend, I knew, was Kuzunoha. The friend, in Goro's vocabulary, is always Kuzunoha when the friend will not be named.
I unwrapped the paper. Inside was a single page, folded once, a black-ink hand I now knew by sight. The page said: I have begun the asking. I am, by the inner courtesy of my line, at the second of three roofs. I will know by Friday. Until then I will not, by my own rule, come in. I will be at the alley mouth at midnight and will sit on the third stone. — K.
I read it twice. I folded it. I put it in the apron pocket Pip had vacated, and Pip — who had, in the half-second between reading and folding, climbed back onto the counter — looked at the apron pocket and did not, by any rule of Pip's discretion, comment.
Tell your friend, I said to Goro, that the third stone is colder than the alley wall, and that I would prefer he sat against the wall.
Hana-chan, my friend is in the matter of stones an old-fashioned man.
Tell him.
I will tell him.
He took up his hojicha and drank it slowly. He looked, for once, like a kappa who had been carrying something on the underside of a shell all day and would, when he set it down, like to know I knew he had been carrying it.
Goro-kun.
Yes.
Tell me one thing about your friend that he has not, in eleven days, told me himself.
Goro looked at the koi pond a long while.
He is, when he is afraid, quiet. He is not afraid in the way the rest of us are afraid. He is afraid in the way the back room is afraid, which is to say he does not, on the outside, move.
Is he afraid now.
Yes.
Of what.
Goro looked at me, then at the kettle, then at me again. Hana-chan. If I knew, I would tell you. He has, on this, not told me either. He has told me only that he has, in two days, an old hour to spend with someone he has, by long custom, avoided. He has told me to tell you, if you ask, that he is sorry he cannot come in.
I bowed. He bowed. He left. The hose-water dripped at the threshold a small while and then stopped.
I lit the irori at seven and the entry lantern at six-thirty as I had every night, and I did not put the third-stool cup out, and I made the midnight blend in Sumire's blue pot, and at midnight I went to the door and looked out, and at the third stone — cold, I had been right about the third stone — was, against my recommendation, a man in a charcoal coat with his shoulders dry, sitting cross-legged on the stone with his back perfectly straight, looking at the entry lantern.
He did not look up. I did not call out. The wards between us were the wards. The bell did not ring.
I closed the door. I took the kettle off the irori, set it back on, and made a small new cup of midnight blend, which I carried to the threshold and set on the inside of the noren. I went back to the counter.
When I came out at twelve-twenty, the cup was gone. The third stone was empty. On the threshold was a single dry leaf — gingko — that had not, this morning, fallen anywhere on my approach. He had brought a leaf back. The leaf was the receipt.
I took the notebook out of my apron. I opened it. I wrote, in a hand that was, deliberately, a half-degree larger than my usual:
The list has five names. The back room reacted on Tōru. He is at the second of three roofs. He brought back the cup.
I closed the notebook.
I went to bed.
The kettle, behind me on the irori, sang the two-note phrase from Tuesday, and then it sang it again, and then it stopped.