Plum Wine: A Novel

Chapter 19

19 Chie’s journal, 1934 Michi is almost twelve years of age, but remains willful girl. She has blood of wild fox in her veins, from her grandmother Ko. This New Year I have told Michi-chan the story of my long-ago surprise meeting with Ko. As a child, I enjoyed to jump off the bridge into the river in the hot summertime. One day I hit my head on a rock and was unconscious. A pretty lady pulled me out, a geisha, who took me to my house. That was when servant Roku told me about my mother Ko who was a fox and had taken up guise of geisha. Roku said when geisha left house that day she could see a white tip of fox tail beneath her kimono. After the holiday was over and classes resumed in April, Barbara went to Seiji’s house every weekend. In the early afternoon of Saturday or Sunday—and sometimes, both days—Barbara walked through the 4 167 4 woods from the campus to Takanodai. During the first few weeks he would meet her at the front gate of his house and they walked through the courtyard to the teahouse. Often he had a new piece of pottery to show her, and she brought him examples of calligraphy she was learning from Junko—fire, water, tree—each character practiced over and over with her brush until she was ready to execute it on a large piece of rice paper. Bakeru—for possession—required only four strokes, but they were difficult ones, with angles and thicknesses of line that had to be exactly rendered. Junko told her that calligraphy when performed as an art may be interpreted by the individual—the important thing was to make each brush stroke using all her concentration of feeling. Barbara thought of Seiji, his breath against her ear, as she practiced bakeru; Junko had the final result mounted on a fine scroll bordered with handmade papers. Barbara gave it to Seiji with an awkward bow. “I don’t know if you can read it, but it means bakeru—because you are possessing me too.” “This is very excellent,” he said, looking suddenly shy; he hung the scroll in the tokonoma of the teahouse. Chie’s journal, 1935 One day when Fumio supposed us going out to do New Year’s errands, Michi and I made our way to the geisha quarters in Kamiya-cho. We went from house to house to find if anyone knows Ko, a beautiful woman from Izumo who may have become geisha. At each place I described her and told of the years-ago visit to my childhood home by a geisha who may have been a fox woman. Some laughed at my questions, I thought with some uneasiness. But at one house we met a geisha mother who invited us for refreshment. We looked to be weary, she said. We sat by the open shoji door looking out at the river. She seemed to draw me like magnet. Her face was that of an antique beauty, with a high brow and aristocratic 4 168 4 4 169 4 nose. I asked if she was from Izumo or some other distant province. She replied that all geisha are from some other place than Hiroshima. As she was showing Michi to play the shamisen, an eerie mournful tune, I slipped out and left Michi to return on her own. When she returned crying some hours after, she said to me that she had become lost and very frightened. I instructed her that she must recover her fox instinct for finding the way. She is almost thirteen, too big to rely on me always. During each visit Seiji prepared tea and Barbara took from her bag the paper she had brought. In April and early May these were all from Chie’s journal. After arguing in favor of going back to Michi’s papers—she was impatient to read the next California entry—she gave in to his wish to follow them in sequence. And then she was glad she had lost the debate; she was beginning to understand Michi’s history, and why she’d left her the papers. Both she and Michi had a fox mother in their lineage, an inheritance of absence. She and Seiji spent leisurely afternoons translating and drinking tea. When the light began to fade from the room, Seiji pulled their futon from the cupboard. “What...