Chapter 21 — What I Chose to Remember
The front room at four-forty-five on a Monday in late July was the colour of the inside of a teapot lid that had been polished by a hand which had not been my hand and which had — by some quiet intuition of the polish — gone with the lid's own grain.
The room had been cleaned.
It had been cleaned by Hisako-san. I knew this because Hisako-san had, on the counter of unfinished hinoki cypress, set a single small bowl of cool water with a chip of fresh kelp in it — which is the kelp-water of a Kyoto kitchen's blessing of a counter — and Hisako-san was, by the small heel of a Birkenstock sandal of last year's model that was just visible from the kitchen at the half-open shōji, in the kitchen.
The kettle was on the irori.
The kettle was not, at four-forty-five, singing.
The kettle was at the slow simmer. The kettle was waiting.
I stood for a moment in the genkan.
I rinsed my hands at the stone basin. I tied the wide-brimmed straw hat by its drawstring to the cedar peg above the basin. I took the indigo apron off, very slowly, and shook the road-dust of three days out of it onto the genkan stones; the apron, on the second shake, did not give up any more dust than I had asked it to. I put the apron back on. I tied it twice. I did not, this afternoon, retie a third time.
Yuki was at her usual table.
She did not look up when I came through the genkan. Yuki had not, in eight years, looked up when I had come through the genkan. Yuki looked up at the people one wanted Yuki to look at, and Yuki did not look up at the people one had been, in some long discipline, waiting for.
The single ice flower on her table was the colour of the inside of the cedar grove at four in the afternoon in the slow light of mid-July.
The flower was — by some long arithmetic of yuki-onna and grove and the four-twenty-three of yesterday afternoon — not the ice flower of last Tuesday.
The flower was a yamabuki.
Yuki, of the Kiso valley, had — listening at her usual table since five-twelve this morning — heard Pip's honbun-sister at the Kawaramachi shrine reporting the kettle's first singing-on-its-own, and Yuki had, in her own long discipline of the shaping of cold things at a small wooden table in a teahouse in Pontocho, shaped the flower of the answer.
The flower was — I read it at the genkan — the yamabuki of the daughter of the line who has, after a long deliberate afternoon of an island, returned.
I came up onto the cedar floor.
I went to Yuki's table. I knelt — slowly, the body still carrying two days of an island — at the second cushion.
Yuki, very faintly, allowed a corner of her mouth to be a corner.
It was — I had read that corner for eight years — the smallest version of the private guarded smile of a yuki-onna who had been told, by a friend's listening at the cedar counter for some span of years, that the friend's friend had — at four-twenty-three on a Sunday in July at a cedar grove of seven on an island — lived.
She did not say anything.
I bowed.
She did not bow.
She lifted the cup of kuromoji tea at her right hand by no movement of the hand I could read and the cup — by some private discipline of cold things — set itself down again at the Yuki-cup-down angle.
I did not, on the cushion, allow myself to cry.
I let, instead, the chamber of the chest which was empty in the clean way acknowledge the yamabuki on the table.
The chamber, by the acknowledgement, did not fill.
It stayed open.
Yuki, after a count I did not measure, said:
Hana.
Yes.
The kettle, by what I heard, sang at four-forty-six.
By Akiko's count.
By mine. I have been at the table since two. The kettle has, to my ear, sung four times in two and a half hours. By Pip's honbun-sister's count it is six in the same span. We disagree. I will not take the honbun-sister's account against mine.
Yuki.
Yes.
The flower.
Yes.
Thank you.
She bowed, by a quarter-degree, her head.
She did not lift the cup again.
The cup — by the same private discipline — sat at the Yuki-cup-down.
In the kitchen Hisako-san was at the stand mixer.
She had, on the counter beside the mixer, a small bowl of warabi starch and a small jug of cool water and a length of cane sugar weighed out to the gram on an ordinary kitchen scale. She had — I read it at the door, in the precise arrangement of the items on the counter — not yet started. She had been waiting for me.
She was forty-one. She was wearing jeans and a clean white kitchen apron over a t-shirt of a band I had not heard of. Her hair was tied back with a length of pale grey cotton knotted in front, the way one tied if one tied the apron in front rather than behind. Her hands were the hands of a woman who had been working in a kitchen since she had been twelve.
She looked up.
Aoba-san.
Hisako-san.
She bowed.
She bowed at the precise angle of a younger woman who had — across forty-one years of her father-in-law's slow ongoing cousin-talk at a cedar counter — been brought to the kitchen of the daughter of the line on the day the kettle sang on its own.
I returned the bow.
I returned it at the angle of a daughter of the line acknowledging a younger woman of the line who had — by her quiet decision, by her seven years of waiting, by the stand mixer — come.
We did not, in the bow, allow our eyes to meet for the first count.
When we did meet on the count of three I saw, in the warm brown of her eyes, the same brown as Tanaka-san at the cedar counter in 2022 at twelve in the afternoon on the day I had told him I was reopening Kogitsune-an.
The eye was the cousin's eye.
The cousin-by-form's eye.
I bowed a second time.
She did not allow herself to be embarrassed by the second bow.
Aoba-san.
Yes.
The stand mixer.
Yes.
Forgive me —
Hisako-san.
Yes.
Do not.
She closed her mouth on the second half of the apology she had been preparing for seven years.
Hana, I said.
Hana.
Yes. By the kitchen.
Hana-san.
Hana. By the kitchen of the daughter of the line you have, through all your patient waiting, been brought to.
Her eyes filled.
She did not, by long kitchen discipline, allow the tears to fall onto the warabi starch.
Hisako, I said.
Yes.
By the kitchen.
Yes.
She bowed.
She turned. She put on the stand mixer at the lowest setting. The motor of the stand mixer, on the lowest setting, was the low even sound of a stand mixer set by a younger woman of the line in a Kyoto kitchen at the slowest speed. She began the warabi mochi.
I stood at the door a moment.
I watched her work.
She worked in the unhurried way of a cook who had been, since she was twelve, practicing for this. She did not, by any small kitchen-tic, allow herself to be uncertain. She knew — by some private sense of her own — that I was at the door. She did not look up. Nothing in her shoulders said she needed me to look up.
I bowed.
I went out to the front room.
Goro was in the back garden.
He was — when I came through the threshold curtain — sitting on the small wooden stool at the koi pond with his baseball cap in his lap and his head bare to the slow late-July afternoon. The sara at the crown of his head was, in the slant of the four-fifty light, the colour of the inside of a wet leaf at the bottom of the Kamogawa in late August.
He had, at his feet, the six cucumbers.
He had — by some river-bottom counting only a kappa would have made — arranged them on a flat stone at the lip of the koi pond from longest to shortest, with a small folded note of green paper at the corner of the longest.
He stood up when I came through the curtain.
He bowed.
I bowed.
Aoba-san.
Goro-san.
The cucumbers, he said, are six.
Yes.
Three are spares.
Yes.
By the way I count it, two of the spares are, today, not spares. For an emergent reopening of a Pontocho teahouse on a Monday in July with a daughter of the line returned by the noon ferry from Naoshima, the count of cucumbers required is, as I read it at the river at four-fifteen, five. Of which one will be the cucumber for the second stool from the left at the cedar counter at six this evening.
I closed my eyes a quarter-second.
Goro-san.
Yes.
The five.
Yes.
And the sixth.
The sixth, he said, is the cucumber I had, by long custom since 1979, not offered at a Pontocho cedar counter. The sixth is for the koi.
He bowed.
He turned. He did not, on the turning, allow himself to look at me. He went to the koi pond. He lowered, with the small care of a kappa of his rank, the smallest cucumber to the water at the edge of the lily pad the old koi had been, since the late Meiji period, in the habit of using as a small private shade.
The old koi did not, for the count of one breath, come to the cucumber.
He came to the cucumber on the second count.
He took, at the surface of the lip of the lily pad, one small slow mouthful of the cucumber.
He went back under the lily pad.
He had — after one hundred and thirty-eight years of refusing all the names — accepted, by no name, the cucumber of the kappa of the river.
Goro put the baseball cap back on.
He bowed.
Aoba-san.
Goro-san.
The kettle.
Yes.
Has, since four-twenty-three on Sunday, not needed the kappa's water-warming song that has, since 1962, been the kappa's water-warming song the river had been giving to the kettle of Kogitsune-an at three in the afternoon on the slow weekdays of July.
By the kettle's own keeping.
By the kettle's own keeping. The kappa's water-warming song, he said, is, as I read it, retired.
Retired.
Retired. The river will, in the kept rounds of a kappa of the Kamogawa, sing it instead, from now on, at the back of the Demachi heron's third stone, where no kettle will need it. It will be a song for the river. It will not be a song for the kettle.
He bowed.
The river, he said, thanks the daughter of the line.
I bowed my head against the back-garden curtain.
The chamber of the chest, by the river's quiet thanks, acknowledged.
The chamber stayed open.
Pip's honbun-sister did, as Akiko had said, leave at four.
I had not seen her. I had not, at the genkan, needed to see her. The fudasetsu on the central beam — the new one, the one she had hung this morning — was visible from the front room, and it was in a hand I did not recognise but which had, in some close kinship of paper-craft with the seventh fudasetsu in my apron pocket, the hand of a related honbun**.
The fudasetsu was hung at the angle of one and a quarter degrees off the vertical that the seventh in the apron pocket would, by Pip's own reckoning, have hung at if Pip had been at home this morning.
The quarter-degree-off was — I read it at the central beam — the small courtesy of a honbun-sister acknowledging that the honbun-of-the-threshold was, this afternoon, in the apron pocket of the daughter of the line in the front room and not, by any pretension of her own, at home on the beam.
I bowed to the fudasetsu.
The fudasetsu, by no movement I could read, acknowledged.
I went to the cedar counter.
I set the bag down on the second stool.
I took out, in the order Pip had agreed they should come out in, the objects of the bag.
The notebook went, in its inside pocket, into the inner pouch of the apron.
The two folders Akiko had given me went, refolded, into the kitchen drawer where I keep things I am not yet ready to act on, which was, by the count of the drawer's six years of weight, lighter by — I noticed in the closing — the two folders' worth of been-decided.
The page Kuzunoha had folded in the noren went, after the apron string's reading at the third bend on Saturday at four, back into the apron string. The string knew the page. The string had been carrying it for sixty hours. The string and the page had agreed, in some quiet arithmetic of cotton and ink, that the page would, by the equinox, stay in the string.
The list of five names from the cedar counter, refolded, went into the drawer with the two folders. The list, by Akiko at the third stone, was — for the moment — over.
The small wooden cup with the sip of Mochizuki-sensei's sake, capped now with a fresh square of waxed paper from the kitchen drawer, went on the second shelf of the small cupboard at the back of the counter, beside the chipped-lip cup Yuki always drank from, which I had brought back wrapped in a fold of muslin.
The sip would, by Mochizuki-sensei's instruction on Friday morning, be poured on the threshold at sundown. I had not poured it on Friday. I had carried it to Naoshima. I would, after three days, pour it on the threshold at sundown today.
The small black pearl earrings went, by an intuition of the body I had not allowed myself to read until I touched the earlobe, back on.
The pressed yamabuki on the square of red washi went, very slowly, between the pages of volume seven of the diary, on the previous page of 1994, beside the yamabuki Sumire had pressed there in the year of the not-answering. The two yamabuki sat, on the page, at the careful angle of the answered and the answering — a quarter-degree apart, which was, in the line's old grammar, the space the answer leaves for the question to be heard against.
The empty honeycomb cell on the square of waxed paper went on the corner of the cedar counter, at the small precise place where, since Friday at five-twelve in the morning, the silver coin had been.
The silver coin was not in the bag.
The silver coin was, by what Mariko had told me on the porch yesterday, on the flat stone in the inner grove. His line had placed it. And the form's finishing at four-twenty-three on Sunday afternoon had made the placing the line's.
The coin would, by the line's old grammar, remain on the flat stone for some long while. Mariko would not move it. The cedars at the inner grove would, by the quarter-degree tippings they had been taught, keep it.
In the place of the coin, on the cedar counter — at the small precise circular impression in the wood the coin had left in three weeks of nights at the third stool from the left — sat the empty honeycomb cell.
The cell was — I read it at the cedar counter at five o'clock on a Monday afternoon in late July — the answer, on the cedar counter, of the yamabuki.
It was the cell of the line lived on after.
I let it sit.
Pip came out of the apron pocket.
Pip climbed up onto the cedar counter. Pip sat down at the small place at the centre of the counter where, in three years of my keeping, the small space had been left for Pip on every counter-cleaning. Pip held, in its lap, the seventh fudasetsu. Pip had, by some private accounting of three days of an island, not yet put the talisman down.
Hana-chan.
Yes.
Pip.
Yes.
Pip is, this afternoon, at the counter.
Yes.
The counter is —
The counter.
Yes.
The counter is, by my reading, the same counter.
Yes, hana-chan.
The counter is more the same counter than it was on Friday.
Yes.
The counter is the same counter because it is, by the honbun's reading, the counter of a daughter of the line whose form has, by the line's own grace, been finished.
Yes.
Pip.
Yes.
The talisman.
Yes.
Will Pip, by Pip's own custom, hang it.
Pip turned the seventh fudasetsu over in its hands twice.
Pip, Pip said, will hang the seventh at the upper window of the upstairs room.
By the indigo curtain.
By the indigo curtain. Behind which Pip sat on Saturday morning at sunrise.
Yes.
Pip will, by the hanging, place the honbun-of-the-threshold's talisman at the threshold of the upstairs window and not at the threshold of the front door.
Why.
Because, Pip said, the threshold of the front door is, in the long keeping of the honbun-sister at the Kawaramachi shrine, covered. The threshold of the upstairs window is, in Pip's keeping since 1888, the threshold the honbun sat at when the honbun was —
Watching for the kitsune.
Watching for the kitsune. Yes.
Pip.
Yes.
Hang it.
Pip climbed down off the counter. Pip went up the cedar stairs in the light patter of its hundred and thirty-eight years of going up to the upstairs room. The patter, today, was the slow even patter of a honbun-of-the-threshold for whom the talisman was no longer a thing carried but a thing placed.
I stayed at the cedar counter.
I poured.
I poured for the four people on the floor of the front room of Kogitsune-an at five-twelve on a Monday afternoon in late July, in the steady pouring of a witch whom three days of an island had taught how to pour the cup of the line that had answered. It was a pouring of four cups.
For Yuki, kuromoji-cha — at the lukewarm temperature Yuki had drunk it at for eight years — in the chipped-lip cup I had brought back in the fold of muslin and which had, after muslin and ferry and cottage and three days, come out correct at the lukewarm.
For Tanaka, three cups of genmaicha in their unhurried succession — and a fourth cup I had not, in three years, poured: a small warabi mochi on a square of pale grey paper from Hisako-san's kitchen, set at the edge of the third cup, at the angle a daughter of the line who had — by Hisako-san at the stand mixer — received the cousin's wedding gift gave to the cousin.
For Goro, water with one cucumber slice — in the smallest glass at the back of the cupboard, which had on it, since Friday morning at six-twenty, the fine dust of three days, which I wiped, by some intuition of the body, with the dry corner of the cotton handkerchief from the apron pocket.
For Hisako, at the kitchen door, a cup of the yamabuki tea I had not yet, on the cedar counter, made — because Hisako had, by some quiet accounting of her household, brought into the kitchen at four-thirty this afternoon a small folded paper packet of the yamabuki I had not, by Friday morning, had in the cupboard.
The packet was — I read it at the kitchen counter — the yamabuki of the porch of Naoshima, sent by Mariko on the eleven-twenty ferry by the cousin of Tanaka-san along the route Pip had used in 1894 — the long quiet keeping of an island senior who had, since two-twenty in the morning by my reckoning of the apron pouch, decided that the daughter of the line would, by the equinox, have on the cupboard of Kogitsune-an yamabuki of her own.
I made the tea.
I poured it.
I brought it to the kitchen.
Hisako-san, at the stand mixer, took the cup with the two-handed care of a younger woman of the line.
She drank one sip.
She bowed.
She kept working.
At five-thirty I went to the threshold.
Mochizuki-sensei, on Friday morning at seven at his shutter, had instructed me to pour the sip of sake on the threshold at sundown. Sundown, on a Monday in late July, was not yet. Sundown was in two hours.
I would, on the body's instruction, pour at sundown.
I would, until sundown, pour for the four at the floor of the front room.
I would, after sundown, pour for the fifth.
The fifth was Akiko.
The fifth was, by Akiko's own reckoning at the yellow receiver of Uno, at the back door at six.
I went to the noren.
I lifted it.
I stood at the threshold and looked at the alley.
The alley at five-thirty on a Monday afternoon in late July was the alley of a thing that had been, for three days, quietly held in trust by a handful of creatures and an operative and a kissaten owner and a honbun-sister and a cedar counter and one ice flower and one fudasetsu and one yellow receiver and one stand mixer and a small unaccounted persimmon-by-form tree.
The threshold lantern was lit.
It had been lit, by Pip's clear and unspoken instruction at six on Saturday morning, since Saturday morning.
I let the noren fall.
I went back to the counter.
The sundown came in with the slow July sun at the slope of the western roofs of Pontocho, at seven-eighteen.
I went to the threshold at seven-fifteen.
I had — across three years of my own keeping, across one ferry and one Shinkansen, with the quiet kindness of Mochizuki-sensei in his Friday morning's take it; pour it on the threshold of your teahouse at sundown; the threshold will know what to do — uncapped the small wooden cup and held it in my open palm.
The single sip was the colour of the inside of a clean glass that had not, in some long while, been used.
I bowed.
I poured.
I poured in the slow even pouring of a witch who had, since four-twenty-three on a Sunday in July, learned how to pour the cup of the kindness one had been given by a numismatist's apology.
The sake landed on the threshold stone.
The threshold — by some private reckoning of cedar and stone and three years and Mochizuki-sensei's apology — accepted.
The cedar of the threshold went, at the place of the landing, by the smallest visible amount, darker.
The darker was — as I read it at the threshold — the line of an apology long held, at last received.
The threshold did not, by any small movement of itself, allow the darker to spread.
The darker stayed at the place of the landing.
The darker was a small dark circle the size of a kan'ei tsūhō.
I bowed.
I went back in.
Akiko came at six.
She came at six in the Doshisha sweatshirt. She came at six with the cardigan over her arm. She came at six by the back door, which had — one operative becoming, across nine working days minus four, no longer an operative — been the door she had used at six on Saturday morning and which Pip's honbun-sister had this morning, by Pip's instruction, left unlatched.
The kettle, at six exactly, sang.
It sang in the quiet private register of the kettle that sings on its own.
It was the phrase I had not, in three years of my keeping, heard the kettle sing on its own; the one I had not, in twenty-eight years of my life, heard a kettle sing.
The phrase was — after three days of an island and one ferry and one Shinkansen and one yellow receiver — the welcome of the kettle to the friend at the back door.
Akiko came in.
She did not, in the genkan, bow at the threshold; she had not, in fifteen years, bowed at this threshold.
She stepped up onto the cedar floor.
She came to the second stool from the left.
She sat.
I poured.
I poured for Akiko a single cup of kuromoji-cha at the lukewarm she had, with me at twenty-two in the dorm in Osaka, learned to take from me on the mornings I had been too tired to make the hojicha at the temperature I made hojicha. I had not, in fifteen years, poured Akiko the kuromoji-cha at the lukewarm.
I set the cup down.
I bowed.
She took the cup in both hands.
She drank one sip.
She bowed her head.
She drank a second.
She bowed her head.
She drank a third.
She did not, on the third sip, allow herself to cry. She let, instead, the body have the small slow lowering of the shoulders by a quarter-degree.
She set the cup down at the angle of an Akiko-cup-down — handle exactly perpendicular to the cedar's grain — and, by some private arithmetic of the cup-down, at a quarter-degree off perpendicular toward me.
The quarter-degree was — I read it at the second stool — the angle of a friend at the cedar counter who had, across nine days minus four, come home.
She looked up.
Hana.
Akiko.
The Doshisha sweatshirt.
Yes.
The Doshisha sweatshirt is, by the long custom of the cedar counter on a Saturday morning at six, here.
Yes.
The cardigan is, by the same long custom, also here.
Yes.
Akiko.
Yes.
Stay.
She did not, for one count, answer.
She lifted the cup. She drank the fourth sip. She set the cup down a fourth time at the same quarter-degree-off.
Yes.
We did not, on the cedar counter, say anything more for a long while.
We sat with the kettle on the irori at the simmer and the irori at the low coal and the fudasetsu on the central beam at the quarter-degree-off vertical and the empty honeycomb cell at the small precise place where, for three weeks of nights, the silver coin had been.
The other regulars — Yuki, Tanaka, Goro — were each at their place. Hisako, in the kitchen, had finished the warabi mochi at five-fifty and had — Tanaka watching at the threshold curtain at five-fifty-five — been allowed, in the quiet kindness of a senior who knew that some Mondays were Mondays of more arrivals than one, to take her bowl and her stand mixer and go home by the bus from Sanjō at seven. The bowl from the upper two shelves of Mariko's cupboard would, by Pip's reckoning, be at the kitchen of Kogitsune-an by tomorrow at five.
I sat with Akiko at the cedar counter.
The cedar counter at six-forty was the cedar counter at six-forty on the Monday a daughter of the line had come home.
At seven-thirty the back-door latch clicked.
I had been, since seven, expecting it. I had been expecting it not because Akiko had told me — she had not — but because the kettle, at seven exactly, had sung a single small phrase I had not, before this evening, known the kettle had — and the phrase was, to my ear at the cedar counter, the phrase of the second arrival of the night.
The back-door latch clicked.
The back door opened.
I did not, in that moment, allow myself to look at the door.
I waited.
A man in a charcoal three-piece suit stood in the genkan. He was tall for his generation. He was thin. His white hair was cropped short. He had, in his right hand, a black-lacquered fan he had not, on the threshold, opened.
Kanzaki Tōru.
He was eighty-two.
He bowed.
The bow was, by my reading at the cedar counter at seven-thirty in a teahouse in Pontocho on a Monday in late July, the bow of an Elder of the guild at the threshold of a teahouse of a witch he had — by the standing order of his own office on the third of May at four-twenty in the morning — sent a writ of binding and recovery for.
The bow was — one Elder of the guild and one Saturday morning at ten-fifteen at the kissaten of the geraniums and one furoshiki of his late wife's house and one character on the inside of the bottom of a wooden cup — the bow of an Elder who had, in his own time, withdrawn the writ.
He held the bow.
He held it for the count of one slow ten.
He raised his head.
He did not, at the threshold, step up. He had not, by any reading I had of him, been invited up.
I rose.
I went to the genkan.
I knelt at the second step. I bowed.
I bowed at the angle of a daughter of the line acknowledging an Elder of the guild who had — an old man at his desk at six on a Sunday morning — been a fool for sixty years and acknowledged the interval that ended the foolishness.
I held the bow for the count.
I raised my head.
Tōru-sensei.
Aoba-san.
Come in.
He did not answer at once.
He stepped up onto the cedar floor.
He took off his shoes very slowly. He did not, by any small kindness of his guild's old custom, allow the deliberate slowness of the taking-off to be a thing the cedar floor would have to wait for.
He placed the shoes at the angle of an Elder of the guild placing shoes at the genkan of a teahouse he had not, in fifty-three years, been in.
He had been in this teahouse, once.
He had been in it in 1972, when he had been twenty-eight and Sumire had been forty-five, and he had not — by some private accounting of his own — returned.
He came up.
He did not, at the central beam, look at the fudasetsu. He had read it, by the bow at the threshold, in the sideways glance of an Elder of the guild for whom the fudasetsu of a honbun-sister at the central beam of Kogitsune-an at the quarter-degree-off vertical was, in his line's long grammar, known.
He came to the cedar counter.
He bowed to Akiko.
Akiko did not bow back.
Akiko, in her own careful private discipline of nine working days minus four, was — at the cedar counter at the second stool from the left at six-forty on a Monday in late July — not a Hand operative.
Tōru-sensei did, in some quiet kindness of his own, not allow Akiko's not-bowing to be a thing his face acknowledged.
He turned to me.
Aoba-san.
Yes.
I have come.
Yes.
By the route only an Elder of the guild knows.
Yes.
Alone.
Yes.
Aoba-san.
Yes.
The bowls.
I closed my eyes for one count.
The bowls —
Are, by my reading at four this afternoon at the small altar in my office, on a slope of an island in the Inland Sea, in the upper two shelves of the cupboard of a senior witch of the Inland Sea route, the bowls of your great-aunt.
Yes.
They were left there, he said, in 1979.
Yes.
I had known of the leaving. I had not, in all my discipline, allowed myself to read what the leaving had been for.
Tōru-sensei.
Yes.
The leaving, I said, was, as I read it at the kitchen of Ono-sensei this morning, for the daughter of the line.
Yes.
The daughter has, by Hisako-san on a bus from Sanjō at seven tomorrow, the bowls.
Yes.
Tōru-sensei.
Yes.
Will sit.
He did not, for one beat, answer.
He bowed.
He sat at the first stool from the left.
I went round to the counter.
I poured.
I poured for Tōru-sensei a single cup of matcha usucha.
I poured it in the measured pouring of a daughter of the line who had been taught, at fourteen, by a man at the upper room of the temple at Mt. Kurama on a morning in 2012 when the man had been sixty-eight, to whisk the usucha at the temperature the bowl has been.
The bowl I poured in was the bowl Sumire had used at the cedar counter of Kogitsune-an for the usucha she had, in 1972, poured for a younger Tōru-sensei.
The bowl had been, since 2023, on the third shelf of the cupboard.
I set the bowl down in front of Tōru-sensei.
He looked at the bowl.
He did not, for one breath, lift it.
His old hands rested, perfectly still, on his knees.
He lifted the bowl with the two-handed deliberation of an old man at a cedar counter who had — after fifty-three years of not lifting the bowl — finally been given the bowl.
He drank.
He drank in three slow sips, the unhurried drinking of matcha usucha at the temperature the bowl had been.
He set the bowl down.
He bowed his head against the bowl for the count of one slow ten.
He raised his head.
Aoba-san.
Yes.
The bowl.
Yes.
It is hers.
Yes.
Aoba-san.
Yes.
I will, he said, withdraw the Hand from Pontocho.
Yes.
The Hand has been, by the writ I signed on the third of May at four-twenty in the morning, in error.
Yes.
The Hand, he said, will, by a second writ I signed at eight this Monday morning from the office at Mt. Kurama, not return.
Yes.
Aoba-san.
Yes.
Ono-sensei.
Yes.
Was, as I read it at three this afternoon in the courier's report from the Inland Sea, waiting on the porch of an island for forty-six years for the form to be finished.
Yes.
I had not, he said, until three this afternoon, known.
Tōru-sensei.
Yes.
She has, after three days, been answered.
Yes.
Tōru-sensei.
Yes.
So have you.
He did not, for one beat, answer.
He bowed his head a quarter-degree.
He sat with the bowl in front of him for a long while.
He did not, on the cedar counter, lift the bowl a second time.
The lifting of the bowl had been, after fifty-three years and one matcha at six on a Sunday morning in the furoshiki of his late wife's house, enough.
He rose at seven-fifty.
He bowed.
He went to the genkan. He put on his shoes very slowly. He stepped down.
At the threshold he turned.
Aoba-san.
Yes.
By the equinox.
By the equinox.
He bowed.
He went out.
The back-door latch clicked.
The latch clicked one second after the door, on its own time.
I did not, after Tōru-sensei had gone, sit down.
I stood at the cedar counter with Akiko at the second stool, the kettle on the irori at the simmer, the fudasetsu on the central beam at the quarter-degree-off vertical, Yuki at her usual table, Tanaka at the fourth stool, Goro at the back garden, and the empty honeycomb cell at the small precise place on the cedar where the silver coin had been.
I stood with my hands on the counter.
I let my hands be the counter.
I let the counter — across three years and three days and twenty-eight years and one hundred and thirty-eight years and forty-six years and sixty-one years and eleven hundred years — be a thing I no longer needed to be holding still.
The hands, on the counter, were the hands. The counter, under the hands, was the counter.
The hands were not, in any honest accounting, moving the counter. The counter was not, in any honest accounting, moving the hands.
They were, by some long quiet arithmetic, the same.
At nine-twelve Akiko went home, by the back door, in the Doshisha sweatshirt, with the cardigan over her arm.
She would, by the long custom of the second stool from the left at the cedar counter on a Saturday morning at six, be back.
At nine-twenty Yuki went home by the front door, with the yamabuki ice flower on the table un-melted, which it would never, while she kept it, melt.
At nine-thirty Tanaka went home by the front door, in the brown cardigan with the green stripe in it, with the persimmon basket — minus one — under his left arm. He had eaten one persimmon on the third stool from the left, in some private ceremony of his own, at the cedar counter on the day the kettle had sung on its own.
At nine-forty Goro went home by the back garden, in some careful slow swimming of his rank into the small bend of the koi pond at the lower lily pad.
The teahouse, by ten, was empty.
I cleaned.
I cleaned in the measured cleaning of a witch whom three days of an island had taught how to clean the counter she had been keeping for three years. The cleaning settled into itself. The kettle, on the irori at the dying coals, sang once more — the quiet good-night phrase of a kettle that had agreed, after the long day, that the day had been good.
I went upstairs.
Pip was on the small ledge behind the indigo curtain at the upper window, with the seventh fudasetsu hung at one and a quarter degrees off the vertical on the inside of the window's lower jamb. Pip was, in the still private posture of a honbun-of-the-threshold in the upper window, looking down at the alley.
The alley, at ten-fifteen, was the alley.
Pip looked up at me when I came in.
Hana-chan.
Yes.
Pip.
Yes.
Pip is, this evening, here.
Yes.
Pip will, as Pip always has, sit at the window until midnight.
Yes.
Pip will not, at midnight, see anyone.
No.
Pip will, with the patience proper to the honbun-of-the-threshold, sit at the window from now until the equinox.
Yes.
Pip.
Yes.
Thank you.
Pip bowed its small head.
I went to the low desk.
I sat down.
I uncapped the small brush.
I had, in three years of the notebook, written entries that began with I have lost and I am afraid I will forget and, on Saturday morning, I had lost the thing I had not yet asked for. In three years I had written no entry that was not, on some long interior of the notebook, a thing I was afraid I would forget.
I did not, on the Monday evening at the low desk, write in the small hand of those three years.
I did not, on the Monday evening at the low desk, write in the half-degree-larger hand of my grandmother's anger.
I wrote, in the second-degree-larger hand of my great-aunt at sixty-three, two lines.
Late July, Monday, the cedar counter at ten. The form has finished. The kettle has sung on its own. The bowls are coming home. Akiko stayed. Tōru came. The persimmons were early. Yuki shaped the yamabuki. Goro retired the kappa's water-warming song. Pip is at the window until the equinox. The chamber is empty in the clean way.
I had been telling myself it was nothing for two years. I had been wrong about the it, and I had been wrong about the nothing, and on a Monday evening in late July, at the cedar counter of a teahouse on the inside of Pontocho, I had — by the long careful arithmetic of three days of an island and one yamabuki on the previous page — chosen to remember that I had been wrong.
I capped the brush.
I sat at the desk a long while.
I did not, in the three minutes after the capping, close the notebook.
I let the page dry.
I let the page be the page.
Outside the upstairs window, on the small ledge behind the indigo curtain, Pip sat at the fudasetsu, looking down at the alley. The alley below kept its own counsel. The threshold lantern, by the standing instruction Pip had given since Saturday at six in the morning, was lit.
It would, with Pip's continued keeping at the window until the equinox, remain lit.
At midnight, in the quiet private listening of a witch at her low desk with her notebook open, I heard — very faintly, from two floors below — the kettle, by no hand, sing the private phrase of good night.
The kettle had agreed, after the long day, that the day had been good.
I did not, by any rule with myself, allow myself to say anything aloud.
I closed the notebook.
I lay down on the futon.
I did not, by any rule of the body, sleep at once.
I slept by twenty past.
In the night, on the cedar counter two floors below me, in the small precise circular impression in the wood the silver coin had left in three weeks of nights at the third stool from the left, the empty honeycomb cell sat at the angle the cell had been set at on Sunday morning at eight in a cottage on the slope of nine bee-boxes — waiting, a line lived on after, for the equinox.