Chapter 20 — The Yellow Receiver
I slept.
I had not, in any reading of myself since 2018, slept on the first try in any night since the casting. I slept on the cottage futon at six in the evening with the rice-paper window open a fingerbreadth and Pip on the corner of the diary and the small candle gone out of itself at six-twelve. I slept for eight hours. I woke at two in the morning to the second island thrush in the cypress hedge giving, in a register the daytime thrushes had not, the small low murmuring phrase a thrush gives on a moonless night when the thrush has decided that the moonless night is a thing one murmurs for. I listened to the thrush a while. The chamber of the chest, where the resentment had been until four-twenty-three this afternoon, was empty in the clean way it had become. I did not, by any small habit of the body, attempt to put anything in it. The body had agreed, in some long quiet way I had not been consulted about, that the chamber was, for some long while, a thing to leave open.
I slept again.
I woke at five-twenty to the kettle in the cottage having, by no hand I had brought to the burner, not sung. The kettle on the cottage burner was an island kettle of the kind one set on a portable burner and lit oneself at six in the morning if one wanted tea. I did not, at five-twenty, light the burner.
I sat at the table.
I drank, instead, a single small cup of cool water from the brass kettle at the corner of the sink and washed the face with a cloth from the basket on the floor.
At six I dressed.
I put on the same clothes I had been in for two days, because the bag had not, in any reading of itself, packed a second outfit. I tied the apron string twice. The body had agreed, on some level the body kept, that the third tie was for the morning after this morning.
At seven I went to the porch.
Mariko was on the porch with the yamabuki tray. She had it for two cups. The crane, this morning, was on the slope behind the kitchen — I could see him through the cypress hedge at the slope's lower edge, a tall pale shape in the half-light, one-footed, looking at nothing. He had not, by the clock he kept, come up to the porch. He would not, while I was there. He was — in some small kindness of his eleven years on this property — acknowledging that the witch's daughter had been at the inner grove yesterday and that the senior of the line had returned with the form finished.
The crane, in his small disciplined acknowledgement, was the only creature on the property who had not, before this morning, been told anything.
I bowed to the crane through the cypress.
The crane did not, by any movement of his head, return the bow. The crane did not bow.
The crane, in some small slow turning of his long throat in the half-light, tilted, a quarter-degree, the angle at which he was looking at nothing.
The tilt was, in the line's old grammar of cranes, acceptance of the daughter as a creature of the property.
I sat on the cushion.
Mariko poured.
We drank.
The yamabuki this morning was the yamabuki of the porch on the morning after the form. The cup was not the cracked cup from the grove. The cup was a fresh cup of country make. The tea, by the second sip, was — half a degree of an internal temperature only the porch could read — the answer.
When she had finished her cup she set it down at the angle of a Mariko-cup-down. I set mine at the angle of an Aoba-cup-down, which was, this morning, a quarter-degree less differently angled than it had been on Saturday at six-thirty.
She bowed.
Aoba-san.
Ono-sensei.
The ferry from Miyanoura at eleven-twenty.
Yes.
The eleven-thirty-five from Uno to Okayama.
Yes.
The Shinkansen from Okayama. You will be in Kyoto by four-twenty.
Yes.
The teahouse, she said, will, by the keeping of the kettle, be open for guests at five.
I closed my eyes for one count.
Ono-sensei.
Yes.
By whose hand.
By the cousin of Tanaka-san, she said. By Tanaka-san himself. By the honbun's sister at the Kawaramachi shrine, whom Pip had told on Friday afternoon along a route Pip had used in 1894 and had not, in any subsequent year, allowed to be forgotten. By Yuki of the Kiso valley. By a kappa with a small import-export. By a young woman in a Doshisha sweatshirt who had, at the kissaten of the geraniums, ordered a black coffee at nine on Sunday morning and not — the cardigan told you this — been an operative.
Akiko was at the kissaten.
Akiko was at the kissaten, Mariko said, because by noon yesterday she was no longer on the operational roster. The cardigan was, at the kissaten, on the back of the chair. The kissaten owner — a witness of two-witch meetings, by long habit, since 1991 — had been told by Akiko-san at nine and a quarter that the meeting at the kissaten this morning was not, this morning, a meeting of two witches. It was a meeting of one witch. Akiko-san was the witch. The other was the small clay cup of the cortado.
I sat with this.
Akiko, I said, was at the cedar counter of Kogitsune-an on Saturday at five.
Akiko-san, Mariko said, was at the back door of Kogitsune-an on Saturday at five. She did not enter. She had no rights, at five on Saturday, to enter. She left a folded letter at the threshold lantern. The letter was, in her own hand in the small operatives' cipher she had used in 2015, a single line: I will, by the discipline of the long walk from Demachi to Sanjō and back, hold the alley. By the count of one operative. Pip had read it as expected on Friday afternoon. The lantern took the letter into its keeping.
I bowed my head a quarter-degree.
Ono-sensei.
Yes.
The kettle has been singing.
The kettle, Mariko said, has been singing since four-twenty-three yesterday afternoon.
By whose hand.
By no hand, she said. The kettle is — by the long arithmetic of a teahouse that has been waiting since 1888 for the form to be finished by a daughter of the line — now permitted to sing. It will sing when it is moved to. By the long custom of the honbun it will sing chiefly when the honbun's witch is in the front room. Since four-twenty-three yesterday it has sung four times. The last singing, by Pip's reading, was at five-twelve this morning — the time you woke to it not singing in the cottage.
The not-singing in the cottage.
The cottage kettle, Mariko said, is, by the discipline of an island, not, in the matter of singing-on-its-own, eligible.
She bowed.
She rose.
She picked up the tray.
She paused, at the screen door.
Aoba-san.
Yes.
The bowls.
The bowls of the upper two shelves of the kitchen cupboard.
Yes.
They are, she said, the bowls Sumire left at this kitchen in the summer of 1979 after the porch.
Why did she leave them.
She said, Mariko said, that they were not, in 1979, going to be the bowls she used at Kogitsune-an again. She said the bowls were, by some long arithmetic, for the daughter. She left them with me to keep. She said she would, in a subsequent year, send for them.
She did not send for them.
She did not send for them. I have kept them, this summer, for forty-six summers.
I closed my eyes.
Ono-sensei.
Yes.
Send them now.
By what route.
By the route, I said, the cousin of Tanaka-san is, I think, using now.
By a young woman in a brown cardigan with a green stripe in it, who will be at the kitchen door of Kogitsune-an at five this evening with a wooden box.
Yes.
The box, Mariko said, will not, by any rule of mine, include my own bowl from the upper three shelves.
Yes.
The bowl, she said, is mine.
Yes.
She bowed.
She went in.
The screen door closed at the speed it wanted to be closed.
I sat on the porch a long while.
The crane did not come down to drink at the trough behind the kitchen. The crane had, in the small disciplined acknowledgement of his quarter-degree tilt, already given the morning what the morning required.
At seven-thirty I went to the cottage.
I packed the bag. I packed it in the order Pip had agreed: the apron's spare (which I had not, in two days, used), the notebook, the two folders Akiko had given me, the page Kuzunoha had folded in the noren (which, at the cedar bend on Saturday at four, I had granted the cedars the reading of — and which the apron string had, in its long keeping, retained), the silver coin (which was not now in the inner pouch of the apron, because the form's finishing at four-twenty-three yesterday afternoon had left it on the flat stone in the inner grove, where it would remain until Mariko at sundown took the cup), the list of five names from the cedar counter, refolded, the small wooden cup with the single sip of Mochizuki-sensei's sake, capped now with a square of waxed paper — and, in place of the silver coin, in the inner pouch of the apron, two new objects the cottage had — by some careful arrangement of itself between five-twenty in the morning and now — put there.
The two new objects were:
A single pressed yamabuki flower, on a square of red washi, of the colour of the yamabuki in volume seven of the diary on the page facing 1994.
A single empty honeycomb cell, on a square of waxed paper, of the kind I had eaten yesterday evening on the corner of the table at five.
The pressed flower was, I saw at the bag, a flower Mariko had pressed in 1994.
The empty cell was a cell of the bee-boxes of the slope.
The two new objects were the yamabuki answered and the yamabuki lived-on-after, on the second-degree larger scale of the small handwriting on the previous page. Mariko had put them in the apron pouch at — I judged — three-twenty this morning, while I slept. Mariko had — across forty-six years and one ferry from Miyanoura and a small clay cup of yamabuki at four-twenty-three at the cedar grove of seven — answered.
The answer was — by the second cell of empty comb — lived on after.
I closed the apron pouch.
I picked up the bag.
I picked Pip up. Pip went into the apron pocket.
I left the cottage.
At the porch I bowed to the closed screen door of the house at the angle of a head of the line acknowledging the appointed senior of the line on the morning the senior had — across her own forty-six years of waiting and one summer's slope of bee-boxes — been.
The screen door, by no hand, did not open.
The screen door — by some small reading of itself at the moment of the bow — was, on the inside, open.
I went down to the harbour.
The eleven-twenty ferry from Miyanoura to Uno was, by the standard of the woman at the ticket office at the other end, the ferry of the post-tourist Monday morning, which is to say the deck was empty. I sat on the upper deck. I did not, this morning, take out the diary.
I took, instead, the notebook out of the apron pocket.
I uncapped the small brush.
I wrote, in the second-degree-larger hand the brush had given me on Sunday morning at eight, four lines.
The form finished at four-twenty-three. The kettle has been singing on its own since. Sumire's bowls are coming home by Hisako-san at five. The chamber is, by the line's own grace, empty in the clean way.
I capped the brush.
I did not, after the fourth line, write a fifth.
Since 2018 I had been writing in the small hand of things I am afraid I will forget. Since Friday I had been writing in the half-degree-larger hand of the things I have, in my line's grandmother's anger, the right to remember on a page. Since Sunday morning I had been writing in the second-degree-larger hand of the cadence of the appointed senior of the line not-answered for forty-six years. Across three hands and one notebook, I had been learning to write the notebook.
I did not, on the upper deck, attempt a fifth hand.
The four hands of the notebook were enough.
I closed the notebook.
I put it back into the apron pocket.
I watched the small islands of the Inland Sea rise out of the sentence of the water at the rate the ferry between Miyanoura and Uno permits.
At Uno I called.
The yellow receiver was, as Akiko had said, the second telephone from the soft-drink machine. The receiver had not, by the look of the small dust at the seam, been used by anybody since Friday at four. The number plate above the dial was of a kind one had not seen on a public telephone in Japan since 2008. The dial was, in the long absence of wires, not the dial of a payphone with a wire to a tower.
I picked up the yellow receiver.
I dialled the home number Akiko had given me in 2015.
I dialled it slowly, one digit at a time, the way a daughter of the line had once learned the digits of a friend's home phone in the year the friend had moved into the apartment in Shimogamo with the upstairs window that faced the river.
The line clicked at the second digit. The line picked up.
The voice was Akiko's.
Hana.
Akiko.
You are at Uno.
Yes.
The eleven-twenty came in at twelve-five.
Yes.
You are, by the schedule I have, on the eleven-thirty-five.
Yes.
Hana.
Yes.
The form.
Finished.
She did not, for one breath, answer.
Hana.
Yes.
Both of you.
Both of us.
She breathed out.
I heard, through the line — through the wire that had not, by any reading of any operative's office since 2012, gone to a tower — the small slow exhalation of a friend who had, in fifteen years of my knowing her, only made the sound once: at four-twenty-three on a Saturday morning at twenty-two in 2018, in a hospital corridor in Osaka.
Hana.
Akiko.
The kettle —
Has been singing.
Since yesterday at four-twenty-three.
Yes.
I have been at the kissaten of the geraniums since Sunday at nine. The kissaten owner has, for the first time in his fifty-three years at the kissaten, sat down at the second table with me at intervals of an hour. He has — by my reading of his last sit at four-twenty-five — heard the kettle from the kissaten.
From the kissaten.
From the kissaten. The kissaten is, by the streets, a hundred and seventy metres from Kogitsune-an. No kettle of Kyoto carries a hundred and seventy metres. The kettle carried a hundred and seventy metres yesterday at four-twenty-three. The kissaten owner did not, by any expression of the face, say anything to me. He sat down at the second table. He sat for one minute. He left an ice cube in my coffee. He went back behind the counter.
I bowed my head against the yellow receiver.
Akiko.
Yes.
Tōru.
Tōru, Akiko said, received my letter of resignation at ten-fifteen on Saturday morning. He read it. He did not, by old habit, respond. At eight on Sunday morning, by the route only the elders of the guild take, he had a courier come to the kissaten. The courier delivered a small wooden cup of matcha usucha in a furoshiki of dark grey silk. The cup, as I read it from his desk, was the cup Tōru-sensei had been using since 1962. The matcha in it was, by the colour, the matcha from his hand at six that Sunday morning. The furoshiki was the furoshiki of his late wife's house. The cup had on the inside, at the bottom, a single character in the careful brushwork of an eighty-two-year-old man. The character was —
Ma.
Ma.
The interval.
The interval. The character means — by the long old reading — wait. In the kotodama's own grammar it means: I have been a fool for sixty years and the discipline is to acknowledge the interval that ends the foolishness. And in the furoshiki of his late wife's house it means: I will not, in the matter of your line, send another writ.**
I sat with this against the yellow receiver.
Akiko.
Yes.
The alley.
The alley is, since four-twenty-three yesterday afternoon, open. Pip's honbun-sister at the Kawaramachi shrine has re-set the wards. Tanaka-san's daughter-in-law Hisako is, this morning, at the cedar counter of Kogitsune-an with a stand mixer she has decided you require for the warabi mochi. Yuki of the Kiso valley is at her usual table. Goro of the river has, this morning at the back garden, dropped off six cucumbers — three of which, he insists, are spares. The kettle is on the irori at the simmer. Pip's honbun-sister has hung a small fresh fudasetsu on the central beam, with apologies for the irregularity of the hand.
I closed my eyes.
Akiko.
Yes.
You have been at the back door.
I have, she said, been at the third stone of the alley since Saturday at six-twenty in the morning, with the cotton bag at my shoulder and the cardigan over my arm — one operative becoming, across nine working days, no longer an operative. I have been at the third stone for the hours my body has not been at the kissaten of the geraniums. I have not, in fifty-six hours, been further from the third stone than the kissaten. I have read the alley's wards in the close patient way you taught me at twenty-two. The wards have, since four-twenty-three yesterday afternoon, been —
Singing.
Singing. By that close reading of the wards.
Akiko.
Yes.
Thank you.
She did not, for the count of one slow breath, answer.
Hana.
Yes.
The cardigan.
Yes.
The Doshisha sweatshirt.
Yes.
I had, by the discipline of the long walk, decided on Saturday that the resignation was going to cost me the right to wear the Doshisha sweatshirt at the cedar counter on a Saturday morning at six.
Akiko.
Yes.
The Doshisha sweatshirt, I said, is yours to wear at the cedar counter at six on any Saturday morning of the rest of my life.
Hana.
Yes.
The cardigan.
The cardigan, I said, is, by the same custom, also yours.
She breathed out.
Hana. The eleven-thirty-five is, by the schedule, leaving in seven minutes. You will be at Kyoto Station at four-twelve. You will be at Kogitsune-an at four-forty.
Yes.
Tanaka-san has, by Hisako-san's reading at eight this morning, decided that he will be — at four-thirty — at the third stone of the alley, in the brown cardigan with the green stripe, with his persimmon-cousin in mind. Hisako-san will be at the cedar counter with the stand mixer. Yuki of the Kiso valley will be at her usual table. Goro of the river will be at the back garden, with the cucumbers. Pip's honbun-sister will, by some discretion of Pip's, not be at the threshold; she will have left at four. And Akiko-san —
Yes.
Akiko-san, she said, will be at the back door at six.
Six.
Six.
Yes.
At the second stool from the left at the cedar counter, by the long custom.
Yes.
Hana.
Yes.
Bring me back a stone.
I closed my eyes.
Yes.
I hung up the yellow receiver.
I did not, on the small dust at the seam of the receiver, leave a fingerprint.
I bowed, very faintly, to the soft-drink machine.
I went to the eleven-thirty-five.
The Shinkansen at the noon-going Monday was the Shinkansen of the noon-going Monday — a carriage of a businessman in a grey suit with a tablet and an old woman with a knitted bag and a child of seven and a child's mother and one tourist in a windbreaker the colour of the inside of a ripe melon. I sat in a window seat on the right side, because the right side at the noon-going was the side that looked out across the rice fields of Okayama as the train climbed up the long slow approach to Himeji. The fields, in mid-July, were the fields of rice that had been planted in June and that had not, by mid-July, gone to head. The fields were the colour of a folded indigo apron held up to the light of a kitchen at two in the afternoon on a Monday in summer.
I did not, on the right side, take out the diary.
I did not, on the right side, take out the notebook.
I sat at the window. I rested my forehead against the glass. The glass was the temperature of the air-conditioned carriage on the inside and the long fast slipstream of the line at the noon-going on the outside. I let the glass cool the small chamber at the temple.
I closed my eyes.
I did not, by any reading of the long quiet sleep of the cottage at six last night, sleep on the Shinkansen. I let, instead, the body have the small slow rest of a body which had been, after three days of an island, very tired in a way it had not, in six years, allowed itself to be.
At three-thirty I opened my eyes.
I had, by Akiko's accounting, forty-two minutes to Kyoto.
I took, then, in the slow deliberate unfolding of a witch who had not been, in two years, the kind of witch who unfolded things on a train, the cotton handkerchief out of the apron pocket. I unfolded it. I had folded it into the bag at six-thirty this morning at the cottage; it had on it, at the corner, a small spot of the yamabuki tea from yesterday morning's cup at the porch, which I had not, in any care I could take in the morning, washed.
I had not been able to wash because — by Mariko's quiet keeping — the spot on the corner of the handkerchief was the spot of the yamabuki tea of the morning of the form. It was the only yamabuki the form's long custom would ever let me take back to the mainland.
The spot was, after three days, the answer of Mariko.
I refolded the handkerchief.
I put it back into the apron pocket.
I sat with the eyes open the rest of the way.
The fields gave out at Maibara. The fields became the hills and the hills became the Yamashiro plain and the Yamashiro plain became the slow approach to Kyoto Station, by the route the right-side window had been showing me since I was fourteen.
At four-twelve the train pulled into Kyoto Station.
I stood up.
I picked up the bag.
I got off the Shinkansen at the central platform.
I walked, a daughter of the line who had been away for sixty-six hours, to the station entrance.
At the central concourse I did not take a taxi.
I walked.
I walked up through the broad north-south street, past the Higashi Hongan-ji's south wall and the Karasuma corner and the long block of the modern banks and the small lane between the second bank and the small green tea-house at Shichijō — the long route the white-gloved driver of the 1996 Toyota Crown had taken at six on Saturday morning, in reverse, on foot.
I walked it slowly.
I did not hurry.
The route took thirty-two minutes.
At four-forty-four I was at the alley mouth at Pontocho.
Tanaka-san was at the third stone.
He was, as Akiko had said, in the brown cardigan with the green stripe in it. He had on his left arm a small wicker basket. The wicker basket had, very faintly, the smell of the inside of the cottage at the back of an unidentified persimmon tree in October.
He was, this afternoon, crying.
He was crying very quietly, in the patient way Tanaka-san had cried — as I had read the man — exactly twice in the years I had known him: once in 2019 at the back-room kotatsu when his apparent son-in-law had been promoted at the bank, and once in 2023 on the day I had reopened Kogitsune-an and he had been the first person to come through the noren in the dark blue of the long-rolled cuff.
He was crying the second of those two kinds, the kind that says I have been waiting at the third stone since four-thirty in the afternoon on a Monday in July and the witch has come back from an island.
He did not, in the apparent-sixty-something voice, say anything.
He bowed.
I bowed.
I came to the third stone.
He held out the basket.
In the basket were three persimmons.
They were small. They were green at the upper edge. They were not, by the calendar of the persimmon tree of his cousin in Shiga, the persimmons of October.
Tanaka-san. It is July.
Hana-chan.
The persimmons.
Are early, he said. They are, by the cousin's tree this year, the first. The first persimmons of his tree have, since 1991, been the first persimmons of his tree.
Tanaka-san —
Hana-chan.
Yes.
The cousin, he said, is, by a custom forty-one years long at your cedar counter of my saying so, not a real cousin. The cousin is the cousin-by-form of the honbun of the threshold of a teahouse opened in 1888 in Pontocho. The tree stands in the honbun's garden. Since 1888 the tree has given one basket of persimmons to one honbun in one teahouse on one Pontocho alley once a year, in October. This year — since four-twenty-three yesterday afternoon — the tree has given a first basket, in July, early.
I closed my eyes.
I had not — by any reading I had of Tanaka-san in three years — known that the cousin was the honbun's cousin-by-form. I had not, by any reading I had, known that the persimmon tree was the honbun's tree.
I had been told, at the cedar counter, of the cousin's marriage and the cousin's wife and the cousin's wife being increasingly tall, and I had — across three years of listening — heard the cousin-talk as the thematic delivery vehicle of a tanuki regular's affection.
The cousin-talk had been, across Tanaka-san's three hundred and forty years, the quiet kept reporting on the keeping of the honbun's tree.
The tree had, on July twenty-first of 2026, given a first basket in July, because the honbun of the threshold had — Pip on the windowsill of the upstairs room of Kogitsune-an behind the indigo curtain at sunrise on Saturday morning — seen the kitsune at the third stone.
The tree had not given a first basket in July since 1888.
I bowed my head against the brown cardigan with the green stripe in it.
I did not allow myself to cry against Tanaka-san's brown cardigan.
I let, instead, the body have the small slow lowering of the shoulders by a quarter-degree.
The shoulders agreed.
Tanaka-san.
Yes.
The persimmons.
Yes.
Thank you.
He bowed.
He turned. He walked, in the small slow walking of an apparent-sixty-something tanuki in his daughter-in-law's brown cardigan, three paces toward the noren of Kogitsune-an, which had — at some point in my absence — been re-hung.
He paused at the noren.
He turned back.
Hana-chan.
Yes.
Hisako-san is —
The cousin-by-form, I said, of Tanaka-san. Of the honbun's line.
Of the honbun's line. Yes.
She is in the kitchen.
She is in the kitchen.
With a stand mixer.
With a stand mixer.
Tanaka-san.
Yes.
I do not need a stand mixer.
Hana-chan, he said, in the apparent-sixty-something voice he used when he was about to be most useful, the stand mixer was, by Hisako-san's standing instructions to her husband since 2019, the cousin's wedding gift to the daughter of the line whose teahouse she had been told, by Tanaka-san at every wedding she had been to in twenty-six years, was the kind of teahouse she would not be permitted to set foot in until the day the kettle sang on its own. The wedding was in 2019. The kettle had been, in the keeping of the honbun, waiting. The stand mixer had been waiting. The stand mixer is, this afternoon, no longer waiting.
He bowed.
The stand mixer is here.
Tanaka-san.
Yes.
Tell Hisako-san —
She is, Hana-chan, in the kitchen. You will tell her yourself.
He lifted the noren.
He went in.
I went in after him.