Chapter 18 — The Hour Before
I did not sleep.
I do not mean by I did not sleep the polite Kyoto thing, which is to say that one slept for two hours and called it none. I mean the body did not, on the futon, lie down. The body sat on the futon with the back against the rice-paper wall, and the body kept the eyes open in the inkstone light, and at three in the morning the body realised that it had been, by some long discipline I had not been consulted about, listening for a kettle two floors below me that was, on this island, three hundred kilometres away.
The kettle on the table beside me was a kettle. It was not, to the body, the kettle.
I did not get up to make tea. I let the body stay with the absence. I had carried the absence in a bag from Pontocho to Kyoto Station to Okayama to Uno to Miyanoura, and the absence had earned, by the carrying, the small respect of being sat with.
At four I read the diary.
I had brought volume seven. I had been, on the ferry, sitting with the page in 1989 about the address-mood, and I had not, in the hours since, opened the book again. I opened it now. I did not go to the page I had read on the upper deck. I went to the end of the volume.
The last entry, in 1994, was three lines.
March 14, 1994. Mariko has, on this evening, written. The letter has been on the porch of an island for a long while before being sent. I have read it three times. I will not, by any discipline of my own, answer it before the autumn equinox.
She had not, in any volume I had read, written the answering letter.
I read the page again. Then I turned, in the small disciplined turning of a witch reading a hand of her own line, to the previous page. The previous page faced the last entry. It had on it — I had not, in the candlelight of a cottage at four in the morning, noticed it until now — a small dry pressed flower the colour of old parchment, taped at one corner with a piece of red washi.
The flower was a yamabuki.
I sat with this.
Yamabuki is, by the older reading, the flower of the answer one will not, in any matter, give. Sumire had pressed it, in 1994, on the page facing the last entry of the volume she had not, in any subsequent volume, ever named. She had not, between 1994 and 2018, written Mariko's name again. Across the long careful volumes she had not answered. The not-answering had been an answer. It had been the answer of a woman who, by 1994 at the age of fifty-six, had decided that the only honest thing she could do for a friend who had loved her was to keep the yamabuki on the page where the last letter had been read and never, on any subsequent page, to place another flower.
The not-answering was a kindness.
The not-answering was a kindness only if the friend understood it. The friend had not — the twenty-three years on this porch, the cedars at the third bend, the small fudasetsu at the cottage window I had just noticed in the candlelight, all said she had not.
The friend had been, for forty-six years, waiting.
I closed the book.
I put it on the corner of the table beside Pip and the honeycomb cell and the fudasetsu and the silver coin which I had, at three-twenty, taken out of the inner apron pocket and laid on a folded square of muslin because the warmth at my hip had become, by three-twenty, too much for the body to carry without the body asking the silver to be set down. The silver was, on the muslin, the colour of an old hand mirror in a 1971 lower right corner of an otherwise clean reflection.
I sat with the four objects in front of me on the table.
I had, by four-thirty, an arrangement of the four objects on the table that I had not consciously arranged. The objects were in a line. The line ran left to right in the order in which the objects had entered my keeping. The page Kuzunoha had folded — I had taken it out of the apron string and added it as a fifth object. The line was: the folded page, the silver coin on the muslin, the seventh fudasetsu, the honeycomb cell on the square of waxed paper, the diary's seventh volume open to the previous page.
The line was a reading.
It was a reading of the kind I had not, since 2018, allowed myself to do.
The reading was — I read it twice in the candlelight, slowly, in the order from left to right — a man's vow; an old coin of his hand; a creature of the doorway between us; a thing the appointed senior of the line has placed before us this evening; the kindness of a not-answering pressed in a flower in 1994.
I read the line a third time, in the order from right to left.
The reading was — a flower of the not-answering; an honest gift of an old witch; the soul of the threshold; the unhanded coin; the page he had not asked me to read which I had, against all my discipline, carried.
Both readings were true.
Both readings were the same reading. The reading was: the address-mood of the line, used in concert by two creatures of two lines in a cedar grove of seven trees at four in the afternoon, would split — by the line's old grammar — into a third price the line itself would not assign; and the third price would belong to the witch who accepted it as belonging to her.
I had been, on the futon since two, telling myself the third price was one further thing on the witch's list. The reading on the table corrected me. The third price was the witch's choice of what to give as the price.
I had read it wrong because I had been reading by Saitō's old reading in the back of volume nineteen, and Saitō's old reading was a reading of the form used by one witch, alone, on a senior. The form used by two creatures of two lines together had — the yamabuki on the page in 1994, the cedars in 2002, the apron string at the third bend all said so — a different grammar.
The witch chose the price.
The witch had to, by the form, know the price she was choosing.
The witch could not, by the form, lie to the kotodama about which price she had chosen.
I closed my eyes.
I sat with the four objects on the table and the open page and the candle at the table's corner and the rice-paper window open a fingerbreadth at the side. The fingerbreadth was Mariko's house acknowledging that the witch in the cottage was awake at four-thirty in the morning and that the senior of the line, on the porch of the house, had been awake also for the long while.
I did not ask Mariko to come.
I did not let Pip ask, either.
I sat with the reading and the four objects and the open book and at five the first thrush, somewhere in the cypress hedge between the cottage and the house, began.
The thrush was a thrush. It was not, by any reading I had of the thrushes of the Kamogawa, a Kyoto thrush. It was an island thrush, which is to say it sang at the cypress hedge in a register a Kyoto thrush would not, by Kyoto custom, allow itself to sing in. The register was lower. The phrase was longer. The phrase had, in the middle of itself, a small dropped note that the Kyoto thrush would not, by any habit, drop.
I listened to the thrush for some time.
The body, against the rice-paper wall, had — by the count of the thrush's third phrase — relaxed a half-degree at the shoulders. I had not asked the shoulders to relax. The shoulders had agreed, on some level the body kept without my permission, that the thrush was, on this island in this morning, a thing to relax for.
Pip, on the fudasetsu on the table, turned.
Hana-chan.
Yes.
Pip has been, for the last hour, listening to your reading.
I know.
Pip has not, until now, interrupted.
I know.
Pip will, now, in a small matter only, interrupt.
Yes.
Pip thinks, Pip said, that the woman is, in the matter of the reading, more careful than the line had asked.
I sat with this.
I did not, for one breath, answer.
Pip thinks the line had asked, Pip said, only that the daughter come up the road and read the cedars and the porch. The line had not asked the daughter to read by candlelight in a cottage at four-thirty in the morning the entire history of the not-answering in 1994.
Pip.
Yes.
The reading is the choice.
Yes, hana-chan.
The careful reading is the honest choice.
Yes.
And the choice, I said, is going to be the price.
Yes.
I opened my eyes.
The candle had, by five-fifteen, gone down some half a centimetre. The wax pool was the colour of old honey. The thrush, in the cypress hedge, had been joined by a second thrush who had — in the manner of the island thrushes — answered the first by dropping the middle note even further than the first had dropped it. The two thrushes were, by five-twenty, by some standing arrangement of island thrushes, agreeing.
I picked up the silver coin.
I did not put it back into the apron pocket.
I held it in my closed palm, at my chest, in the small inward gesture a witch makes when she is, at last, receiving a thing she had until this morning been carrying without receiving.
I had been, for fourteen days, the woman the coin sat on the counter for. I had not, in any reading of myself, picked up the coin. He had set it on the counter on the first night, and on every night after, and on the night I had not, holding myself back, been there, he had set it on the bamboo coaster and left, and on Saturday morning the coin had been on the counter and I had picked it up at five-twelve and put it in the inner pouch of the apron, and the coin had ridden the apron pocket against my hip — carried but not received.
I closed my hand on it. I felt the small flat shape of the kan'ei on the obverse press against the lifeline of my palm. I had read, in the trade gossip when I was twenty-two, that a kan'ei tsūhō turned over by the same hand for sixty-one years took, by the long arithmetic of the hand, the shape of a small flat something a hand had decided was the thing.
He had decided.
He had decided, on the inner stone of his line's grove at three in the morning on Saturday, that the coin was the unhanded thing. He had set it on the inner stone. He had walked west. The coin had — by the lantern's keeping, in the line's old grammar — been due to come down to my counter by sundown Saturday. Pip had said as much on Saturday afternoon at six-thirty: the coin should have been at Kogitsune-an by sundown. It had not arrived there, because by sundown I had been on a ferry between Uno and Miyanoura with the coin in the inner apron pocket against my hip.
The coin was at Naoshima.
The coin had been, by his decision in his grove, unhanded. The unhanding was a vow. The vow was that the carrying of the coin — sixty-one years of imo by anticipation — had been finished by him, on his stone.
The carrying was, by the unhanding, open.
I had been carrying the coin, in an apron pocket against my hip, since five-twelve on Saturday.
The carrying had been, by his unhanding, taken up.
I had not, until five-twenty on a futon in a cottage on an island in the Inland Sea, received the carrying.
I opened my hand. I looked at the coin. I closed my hand.
I had received.
I dressed at six.
I dressed in the same indigo apron and the wide-legged trousers and the white wrap top, because the bag held no second outfit. I tied the apron string twice. I did not, this morning, retie a third time. The body had agreed, on some sleepless level I had not been consulted about, that the third tie was, today, for a future morning.
I put the silver coin back into the inner apron pocket. The coin, this morning, was not warm; it was the temperature of my own hip.
I put the seventh fudasetsu in the apron pocket. Pip rode the fudasetsu. Pip had decided, days ago, that the talisman was a thing one carried in a pocket and not a thing one hung on a rafter. Pip on the talisman in the pocket was — in the small thoroughness of Pip's settling — a honbun who had agreed to be in the keeping of the witch for the day.
I put the folded page from the noren back into the apron string.
I put the seventh volume of the diary back into the bag.
I left the honeycomb cell on the corner of the low table. I did not, at any point in the morning, eat it.
I went out.
The slope of the bee-boxes at six-thirty was the slope of nine bee-boxes that had not, by six-thirty, begun the day. The bees were, by their twenty-three years of custom, going to start at seven-twelve. The slope was, before seven-twelve, a slope of cypress and clipped grass and the small white pebbles of a path that ran from the porch of the house to the bee-boxes and from the bee-boxes up to the small cedar grove at the back of the property.
The cedar grove was not, on the public path of the island, marked.
The cedar grove was, by the line's own custom, at the upper edge of the property, two hundred metres above the house, on a slope that went, after the upper edge, into a small unkempt thicket of low bamboo. The cedars were seven. They were not the cedars at the third bend. They were the inner grove. The cedars at the third bend were the outer grove. Mariko had planted the two groves in 2002 in the relationship of two groves of seven that held — by the line's old grammar — the inner and the outer responsibility of the property.
I walked up to the inner grove at six-forty in the morning.
I did not, in walking, allow myself to read the bees on the slope. The bees would, by the slope's clock, begin at seven-twelve. The inner grove would — given the slow road a kitsune of his rank walked west on foot — see him at four. Between seven and four it would be empty.
I came to the inner grove at six-fifty.
The seven cedars stood on a small rise. They had been planted in a circle, with a small flat stone at the centre. The flat stone was a stone of the kind one finds in the bed of the Yodo at the second turn south of Yamazaki — a flat sandstone the size of a small tea-tray, polished, by some long water, to the colour of an old tea-tray on which the tea has been spilt for a hundred summers. Mariko had, in 2002, brought the stone from the Yodo. The stone had been at the centre of the inner grove for twenty-three years.
The stone, at six-fifty on Sunday morning, was empty.
I knelt on the moss at the inside of the seven cedars. I did not kneel on the stone. The stone was not, by any reading I had of the form, a thing one knelt on. The stone was a thing one knelt at.
I put my two hands flat on the moss at either side of my knees.
I bowed my head.
I did not address the grove. I did not ask it anything. I had not come, at six-fifty on Sunday morning, to ask. I had come to be in the grove before he was. I had come — a woman who had spent the night in a cottage with four objects on a table and a reading and the song of two island thrushes — to give the grove the chance to read me alone first.
The grove read.
I felt it at the back of the neck first, as a slow lowering of the temperature of the morning at the side of the throat. The grove was not, by anything the trade knew of the cedars of his line, a cold grove. What it did was not cold. It was the patient attention of seven cedars planted by a witch in 2002 who had taught them the form of his line, so that on the day the daughter of the line came up to the grove with his line's coin in her apron pocket, the cedars would recognise the carrying.
The cedars recognised the carrying.
The lowering of the temperature at my throat went, by the count of two breaths, up by a half-degree.
The grove had — in the slow wooden reckoning of seven cedars in a circle at six-fifty in the morning — accepted me.
I did not, on the moss, allow myself a smile. I did not allow myself a relaxation. The outer grove at the third bend had accepted me on Saturday at four. The inner grove had accepted me this morning. The accepting was not, in any reading of the trade, a thing a witch took comfort from. It was a thing a witch took as the precondition for a thing she had come to do.
I knelt for a long while.
At seven-twelve the bees on the slope below began.
At seven-thirty, in the wind from the south-east at five knots and falling, the cedars at the inner grove tipped, by a quarter-degree all together, forward.
The grove had — by some standing arrangement of the line's old grammar with the bees of the slope and the wind from the south-east — witnessed the start of the day the form would be spoken.
I rose.
I bowed once.
I went down to the house.
Mariko was on the porch.
She had been on the porch since six, I judged; she had the yamabuki tea on the tray for two and she had — two cups set out and not three — expected me to come down from the grove without my having said I would go up. I sat on the cushion. She poured.
We drank.
We did not, in the matter of two witches on a porch on Sunday morning at seven-forty in July, speak.
When the cups were empty she set hers down on the floorboards at the angle of a Mariko-cup-down. I set mine down at the angle of an Aoba-cup-down, which was a quarter-degree differently angled and which she did not, in any tic of her face, acknowledge.
She rose.
She did not, this morning, bow.
Aoba-san. The cottage will, for the next hour, be available for any further preparation you require. The kitchen will, for the next hour, be open to you if you wish to take rice. The crane will, by the clock he keeps, not come into the kitchen. The bees will work the slope to the bee-balm hedge by ten. The wind from the south-east will, by the radio's seven-twelve forecast, drop to two knots by noon and be still by three.
Yes.
Your gentleman will — by my reading at the inner stone at six-thirty this morning — walk into the inner grove at four-twelve in the afternoon.
Yes.
You will be at the inner grove at —
Three forty, I said.
She looked at me for one beat.
Three forty.
Three forty.
She bowed.
She bowed at the precise angle of the appointed senior of the line bowing to the head of the line on the morning the head had decided the form of the day.
I returned the bow at the angle of the head of the line acknowledging the senior of the line who had — across forty-six years of waiting — been at last asked to be present at the form.
The arithmetic had, on this porch, agreed.
She went in.
I went to the cottage.
In the cottage I sat at the low table with the four objects on the table and the open page of the diary and the candle, which had — by the long six hours of the night — burned down to a small flat round of wax in the bottom of the brass holder. I did not light a new candle. The morning, by eight, had begun to come in through the rice-paper window at the side in the slow patient way the morning of an island in July comes in through a rice-paper window that has been open a fingerbreadth all night.
I took the notebook out of the apron pocket.
I uncapped the small brush.
I had, in three years of the notebook, written in the small hand of the older years until Friday of last week. I had written, between Friday and Saturday morning, in the half-degree-larger hand of my grandmother's anger. I had written, in the cottage at five last night, in the small hand again — three lines I had not, even by morning, finished deciding.
I did not, this morning, choose the hand.
I let the brush choose. I uncapped it. I dipped it. I held it above the page. I did not — by any review I had been carrying since 2018 — correct the hand the brush wanted.
The brush wrote, in a hand neither the small nor the half-degree-larger but a third hand I had not, in three years of the notebook, used: a hand of the second-degree larger, sloping slightly forward, the strokes wider, the brush at three-quarter pressure where I had been, for three years, using it at half.
The hand was the brushwork on the seventh volume of the diary in 1989.
The hand was Sumire's at sixty-three, the firmest year, the year my mother had been twenty-one and Mariko had been, in volume seven, the friend on the porch of the island whose answer I have not, in all my discipline, given.
I wrote, in the second-degree-larger hand of my great-aunt at sixty-three, six lines.
Sunday in July, the inner grove of Naoshima. Mariko has been waiting forty-six years. The man has been walking the western road since Saturday at midnight. The form will, at four-twelve, be a form spoken in concert by two creatures of two lines. The form will, by the line's old grammar, split the third price. The witch will choose the price. The witch will not, by the form, be permitted to lie to the kotodama about which price she has chosen. I will choose the regret of the binding that took my mother. I will give the regret. I will not, by the form, give the loss.
I capped the brush.
I closed the notebook.
I did not, in the small bare cottage at eight in the morning of a Sunday in July on the slope of the bee-boxes above the house of Ono no Mariko of the Inland Sea route, allow myself to be afraid.
I had been afraid since June. I had been afraid since 2018. I had been afraid since the night in the hospital corridor in Osaka in October 2020 when I had been twenty-four and the line of the casting had taken from me, without my asking, the only memory of my mother that I had not, by the time of the casting, written down.
The fear was a fear of the long-running kind that, after six years, became the fear of the body's weather. The fear was not, this morning at eight, new. The fear was not, this morning at eight, more. The fear was, this morning at eight, familiar in a way that allowed it to be set down beside the four objects on the low table and not, by any rule of the body, picked up again.
I set the fear down.
I did not, by any rule with myself, pick it back up.
At nine I went into Mariko's kitchen.
I made — at the small island stove with the brass kettle that had been the kettle of the kitchen for thirty years — a single bowl of rice. I ate it slowly. The rice was rice. The rice was, on the island, a slightly different rice from the rice I ate at the cedar counter at home; the grain was longer and the cook on Mariko's kettle had been a cook on the kettle for some long while.
Mariko was not in the kitchen.
The crane held to the same clock and did not come into the kitchen.
I washed the bowl. I dried it. I put it back in the cupboard at the height it had been at, which was the third shelf, fourth from the right. The cupboard held — I noticed, in the quiet attentive way of a witch washing a bowl in another witch's kitchen — the bowls of two witches. The lower three shelves were the bowls of Mariko's own custom. The upper two shelves were the bowls of another custom. The upper two shelves had on them — I could see, with the door fully open — eight bowls of the country potter at the southern slope of Mt. Hiei whose work my great-aunt had used at Kogitsune-an in the 1980s.
The bowls were Sumire's.
They had been at Mariko's kitchen since some date I did not know. They had not, by the look of them, been used in many years.
I did not, in the kitchen, ask Mariko about the bowls.
I closed the cupboard. I left the kitchen.
I went out to the slope of the bee-boxes. I did not go up to the inner grove. I walked, instead, along the lower path past the slope — the path the postman would have taken if Mariko had received post, which she did not — and I came, after a hundred paces, to a small stone jizō in the lee of a low cypress.
The jizō was not, by any custom of the island, here. It was a jizō of the Kyoto-region cut, the work of a stone-hand who had been working in the Yamashina valley in the late nineteen-sixties. The little stone bib at the throat was of a cloth I had seen on the jizō at the back of the temple at Mt. Kurama where my great-aunt had been examined in 1963.
The jizō had been moved.
Mariko, at some point between 1979 and 2002, had moved a jizō from a small altar of my great-aunt's line and placed it, on a path on her own island, in the lee of a low cypress at a hundred paces from her bee-boxes.
I knelt at the jizō.
I did not address it.
I put two fingers on the small stone shoulder.
I bowed.
I went back to the cottage.
By two in the afternoon the wind had, as the radio had said, dropped to two knots. By three it was still. The slope of the bee-boxes was a slope of bees coming back to the hives a half-hour ahead of their own clock; the bees had read the stillness as a thing that would, by four, not be the stillness it was now. The bees were preparing.
I went, at three-twenty, to the cottage door.
I had, on the low table, left the diary's seventh volume open to the previous page. I had left, beside the diary, the honeycomb cell on the square of waxed paper. The other three objects — the coin, the fudasetsu with Pip, the folded page — were in the apron. Across two hours of the morning I had decided what I was going to do with each.
I had not — by anything I had ever read in the line — decided what I was going to do with the fifth object, which was the second-degree-larger hand my brush had given me at eight.
The fifth object was not on the table.
The fifth object was in the apron pocket, in the notebook.
The fifth object was the hand my great-aunt had written in at sixty-three, the year of the yamabuki on the previous page, the year of the not-answering — and the fifth object was, after three years of small handwriting, the hand I would, at four-twelve in the cedar grove of seven, speak the form in.
The form would be spoken in the small voice of a woman in a kitchen in 2026.
The voice would, by the brush's choice at eight this morning, be in the cadence of a woman in a kitchen in 1989.
The voice was, by the line's old grammar, the daughter of the line speaking in the cadence of the head of the line, on the day the appointed senior of the line had — at her own asking — been brought to the cedar grove of seven trees at the inner edge of her property.
The cadence was a kindness.
The kindness was a kindness only if the appointed senior of the line heard it as one. Mariko had, on the porch, said that the answer to why was for the cedar grove. The answer would, by Mariko's own reckoning, be the answer of the form. The cadence, in the form, would be the cadence of the woman who had not, in 1979, given the answer. At the cedar grove of seven at four-twelve, the cadence would give the answer Sumire had not given.
I had not — across three years of review — known I had been carrying the cadence.
I had been carrying the cadence for three years.
I had been carrying it because Pip had, three years ago, hidden my notebook one Tuesday afternoon at three when I had been writing in it sadly, and Pip had, by the hiding, told me — without saying — that the hand I had been writing in was a hand I was never going to write the truth in.
I had not understood, until eight this morning at the brush, what Pip had been telling me by the hiding.
I had been hearing it for three years.
I opened the cottage door.
The slope was empty.
Mariko was not, on the porch, in view. The screen door of the house was closed. The kitchen door was closed. The kitchen window had on its sill the small pottery cup I had washed at nine and which Mariko had — by some movement of her own at some hour I had not seen — returned to the sill at the angle a senior witch returns a cup when she has decided that the cup is, this afternoon, the senior witch's again.
I closed the cottage door.
I walked up the slope between the bee-boxes.
The bees did not, by my passing, address me. The bees were busy with the four o'clock of the stillness. The slope smelled, at three-forty, of cypress and clipped grass and the slow late-July dust of a place that had not, in many days, rained.
I came to the inner grove at three-forty exactly.
The grove was empty.
I knelt on the moss at the inside of the seven cedars, at the place I had knelt at six-fifty in the morning. I put my two hands flat on the moss at either side of my knees.
I bowed my head.
I did not address the grove.
I waited.
The bees, on the slope, went on.
The wind, by three-fifty-five, was still.
At four-twelve precisely, at the upper edge of the cedar grove on the slope above the bee-boxes on the island of Naoshima at the back of the small house of Ono no Mariko of the Inland Sea route, a man in a dark grey kimono of one of the older sleeves came through the bamboo at the far edge of the inner grove and stopped.
He looked at the centre of the grove.
He looked at the moss at the inside of the seven cedars.
He saw me.
He went, by some small involuntary internal arithmetic I had not, in fifteen days at a cedar counter, ever seen on him, still in a way I had not, before this afternoon, known a kitsune of his rank could be still.
Neither Pip nor Mariko had told him to expect me here.