8.

Present-Day Japan

SATURDAY, MARCH 29

Tokyo

The rows and columns of Robin’s spreadsheet blur. It’s not yet JL dinnertime (her stomach is a liar), but deep in the window-less bowels of the university library where she still enjoys academic privileges, it might as well be midnight. Except for two bespectacled women and a skinny man who looks like his four straggly chin hairs could finally use a shave, she’s alone in the stacks on a Saturday night.

Pushing her laptop aside, she drops her head onto her folded arms. She’s not a numbers person. She’s never been a numbers person. So, how the hell did she wind up doing her dissertation on “Methodologies for Authenticating Edo-Era Ceramic Pieces Using Thermo-Luminescent Imaging”?

She rolls her stiff shoulders, stretches her back. Being on the team that authenticated the Yoshi Takamatsu tea bowl squirreled away in Jakkō-in’s treasure house for nearly three centuries is a respectable achievement, but her first love is literature, not art. Specifically, the poetry of Saburo, the only Japanese haiku master whose name had penetrated the Midwestern backwater where she grew up. The first Saburo poem she’d read in her World Literature class had spoken to her so powerfully that she’d gone straight to the high school library after class and binge-read everything he’d ever written. Everything that had been translated into English, that is. From then on, instead of devouring Sailor Moon comics still warm off the delivery truck, she began haunting online haiku forums and teaching herselfJapanese. By the time she submitted her masters’ thesis on “Mapping Traditional Buddhist Sins to Saburo’s The Eight Attachments,” she was living in Japan and hoping to turn her years of Saburo obsession into something that would earn her a living. The main reason she’d signed on to do a PhD with the research team studying the newly discovered trove of art at Jakkō-in was because it was rumored there were unpublished Saburo poems among the cache of scrolls.

Sadly, there had been only one, and it had been snatched up by a rival grad student with a degree from the same university as their thesis advisor. That poem ended up being merely “school of Saburo,” though, not an undiscovered gem written by the master himself. Last she heard, the doctorate based on that disappointing research hadn’t vaulted its author into anything loftier than an untenured assistant professorship in rural Ohio. Recalling this dodged bullet still fills her with half-guilty schadenfreude. At least her research had been conducted on a piece that was named a National Cultural Treasure within a year of its discovery, and had debuted with great fanfare in a blockbuster exhibition of convent art at the Tokyo National Museum.

For a few weeks, that had rekindled her enthusiasm for finishing her dissertation, but it didn’t last. The only thing that had ever really sparked her interest in authenticating the tea bowl was the growing evidence that the potter Yoshi Takamatsu and the poet Saburo had crossed paths, maybe even influenced each other. Scholars generally accepted that they had encountered each other on Saburo’s first poetry pilgrimage, and it was none other than her undergraduate advisor who’d discovered that the potter had given one of his tea bowls the same name as a poem in Saburo’s famous collection, The Eight Attachments. Robin had secretly hoped that the tea bowl lying unstudied at Jakkō-in would also turn out to be named after an Attachment. If there were two, it would bolster the theory that one artist had inspired the other. Unfortunately, it turned out that Jakkō-in’s tea bowl had never been known by any name but Waterlily, and it had been in the convent’s collection since before Saburo was born.

By then, though, she was helplessly ensnared by the sideways drift of academic research, which pushed her further and further from Saburo’s poetry. By the time she found herself scraping microscopic samples of clay from Waterlily and subjecting them to high heat in order to pin down age and origin, it was too late to steer her career back on course. Her experience fine-tuning thermo-luminescent testing as an authentication tool for Edo Period pottery had landed her the job at the Fujimori Fine Art auction house, but she’s stuck in the ceramics section, not the one that deals in literature. And finishing her dissertation will just propel her faster in the wrong direction. The only scholars who might invite her to join their research teams will be studying potters like Yoshi Takamatsu, not poets like Saburo Shibata.

But it’s no use crying over spilt milk, as her Missouri grandmother would say. And the father who gave her a loan so she wouldn’t have to shoulder another Sallie Mae would remind her that a PhD in the wrong specialty is better than no PhD at all.

Until a better option presents itself, she’d better get to work. She wakes her laptop. Scrolls. Counts how many rows of data still need to be uploaded into tables.

Ugh. Far too many.