13.
Three Tulips in a Boat

IMMEDIATELY AFTER returning home Tsune and Manjiro had to leave again. They knew perfectly well (said Masako) that they were expected to attend Keiko’s dance recital, which had been scheduled for months, and was to begin in the entertainment district at four that afternoon. Everyone had waited at the house, but if not for the fact that Keiko’s teacher, a retired geisha and dancer of the Fujima school, had already been told how many family members would attend, they would not have done so. Masako was adamant on her sister’s behalf. “I’m no admirer of Keiko, but even I understand the meaning of family obligations,” she said.

Fumiko was angry, too. It was true that she was exhausted from the difficult family dynamics of having both Manjiro and Tsune with them at the same time, as well as from constantly having to think about this impending trip back to Odawara, but she would have been angry anyway. She could forgive anything in those she loved except thoughtlessness, and though thoughdessness had been an occasional visitor to Tsune since childhood, she was worried now to see it rubbing off on Manjiro. If he was dedicated to one member of her family over the others it was to Keiko, and this was Keiko’s day!

Keiko herself tried not to show her disappointment, but she didn’t succeed very well, and once Lord Okubo saw the face of worry through her dance makeup, even he grumbled. Only Einosuke, who had waited all day to hear what had happened at the Barbarian Book Library, was easy on his brother and sister-in-law.

“You know these Edo crowds,” he told the others. “Sometimes it is hard to be on time.”

Four o’clock was the last hour that it was possible to schedule recitals in the entertainment district, for by six the geisha houses opened to their nighttime customers and the teaching geisha, who were almost always retired, had to be out of sight. It was a common belief among working geisha and their maiko apprentices that men did not like to see old faces among the younger ones any more than they liked viewing cherry blossoms the week after the first flush of beauty had spread across the trees. It was too reminiscent of life’s brevity, of the walker’s shadow passing by him as the sun sets on his walk.

“I wanted to be here to watch the smaller children dance, too,” Masako said, when they all stepped out of their palanquins in front of a house called “The Thousand Cranes.” She had ridden across Edo with her Aunt Tsune and Keiko, and had lost most of her anger during the ride, but it came back now. The Thousand Cranes sat on the edge of the Sumida River where it wound through Asakusa. It was a part of town she rarely got to see, and the famous street, lined as it was with closed building fronts and mysterious mauve walls, would have supplied her with daydreams for months had she been allowed to walk along it at leisure, as she surely would have had they arrived on time. Even now her eyes were wide as they took in the building and the river behind it and the other guests who milled about in fine kimonos.

“Come,” said Tsune, touching Masako but speaking to Keiko, “there is still almost an hour remaining, is there not, before you perform? Let’s go in and watch the others, see if we can spot their mistakes.”

The schedule was such that during the early morning hours the beginners had performed, then from after lunch the professionals who had studied with the teacher and come back to honor her. In the late afternoon the teacher herself was to dance with an ex-student who was now a famous Kabuki actor, and the final dance was to be by a select group of her best students, with the seventeen-year-old Keiko as the principal dancer.

When Fumiko and O-bata, who held onto the squirming Junichiro, stepped from the second palanquin, the five of them hurried into the geisha house without waiting for the men, who, at the time the women had left the house, had still not found palanquins.

“If anybody misses my dance I will never forgive them,” Keiko said, but when she heard the music she followed the others inside.

“Listen, my dear,” said her mother, “I can hear the summer rain in the shamisen. Can’t you hear it, too? Can’t you, Masako?”

Because the partitions had been removed to make the room large, they were easily able to join the audience. Keiko’s teacher, in a pure white kimono, had just finished her individual dance. Keiko and Masako and Fumiko feigned disappointment at having missed it, but all three had seen it enough in practice and were secretly glad. When the teacher looked their way Fumiko bowed and then sat with her sister and younger daughter while Keiko hurried off to join the other students, all of them sitting together across the room. O-bata had stayed at the back with the baby, standing among a scrubby forest of maids.

The recital was well attended, with most of the children from the morning still there, no doubt because their mothers and fathers wanted to see the famous Kabuki actor, Morita Kan’ya, who was scheduled to dance with the teacher next but had not arrived. As the musicians continued their interlude the teacher suddenly left her spot in the middle of everything, threading the same careful path the five family members had just found when coming into the place. “I hear a palanquin,” she said, as she passed Fumiko. “Morita’s lateness can only be forgiven if it is he who is inside.”

It was a family joke that when Keiko’s teacher had been young enough to work as a real geisha even Lord Okubo had been a boy, and now, as Fumiko followed her back out of the building, to apologize for their own lateness, it was not the famous Kabuki actor, but that very same Lord Okubo, who stepped with his sons from the three arriving palanquins.

“We haven’t missed it,” he announced, “or if we have surely you can do it again.”

“Do you know the difference between an actor and a dancer?” the old teacher asked him in a wretched voice. Lord Okubo said he did not, and when Fumiko said that the answer must be that an actor retains the vanity necessary to forget a promised appointment, the teacher bowed her head. “That is correct. He was my student as a boy some forty years ago. When dance was his first love there was no vanity in him, but now…” She sighed. “To dance with him today would have been the highlight of my season.”

Fumiko believed it was a shame, too, but anger over the earlier lateness of her sister and brother-in-law had used up her store of energy for such things. The teacher might have been forgotten by the famous actor, but she would make it her job to see that Keiko was not forgotten by this teacher in turn. After all, with most of them leaving for Odawara shortly and with everything else in constant turmoil, who knew when her eldest daughter would return to such a study?

“Ah, but the program can be salvaged, can it not?” she asked. “It still has dancers, a final performance, a climax?”

“Yes,” said Tsune, who had come back outside, too, “it’s a shame he hasn’t come but to turn a climax into an anticlimax because of it would be a second shame.”

Lord Okubo was embarrassed. He thought the two young women were being too direct with the teacher, too stern, but when he looked past them into the recital hall where Keiko was standing in the wings, the expression on his granddaughter’s face made him add his own admonition. “No matter how beautiful a flower is when cut, it will still wilt quickly if it doesn’t find some water and a vase,” he said. It was uncharacteristic of him, but accompanied as it was by a quick jerking of his head toward the girls, it served to wake the dance teacher up. “Of course,” she said. “Oh my! Yes! We must proceed.”

There were now a few empty spaces on the floor of the recital hall for the adults. Lord Okubo sat directly in front with Fumiko and Tsune, while Einosuke and Manjiro sat behind them. The teacher whispered to the members of the orchestra, but when she turned to the audience her voice rose, cracking out toward them like a sudden rent in her gown.

“Ladies and gentlemen, students new and old, we will move now to our recital’s final dance, ‘Three Tulips in a Boat,’ on which my most accomplished students have worked so exceptionally hard these past weeks and days.”

Lord Okubo grew attentive when the music started and he saw Keiko disappear behind a screen. Three Tulips in a Boat? He hadn’t known the name of the dance when he made his earlier aphorism about cut flowers, but now a certain pride in its appropriateness served to make him relax for the first time since his arrival in Edo. If things could still go on like this, if girls could still dance at their recitals, then maybe the American presence did not mean so much, maybe change of the very worst kind was not inevitable.

After the orchestras opening strains, when one of the musicians sang, “Three tulips grew down by the river, red, yellow, and white, lips pursed, necks craning toward the sky, “the screen seemed to depart under its own power, exposing Keiko and two other girls. Keiko was the tallest tulip. Her face was fine and bright, her red kimono the tightly pursed mouth of an unbloomed flower, and she kept a perfectly taut neckline.

“The three tulips grew in a bed of a thousand, but one day a boat came by…”

Masako, who had stayed with the other students even after Keiko stepped behind the screen, now went to sit by her uncle. She whispered, “Keiko’s tulip has had this idea of leaving the flower bed in her head for ever so long. She can’t get rid of it, can’t stop wondering what it might be like in the world at large. Look, she is leading the other two tulips astray.”

It was true that as the three tulips got closer to the river their lips seemed to un-purse, their mouths part in what Manjiro thought of as a particularly erotic way, but otherwise leaving the tulip bed seemed to do them no immediate harm. People in the audience could see for themselves how wonderful the new wind must feel, how fresh the river water and how tempting it would be to step off the bank, into the calmly bobbing boat. Manjiro was watching the back of Tsune’s neck, wishing to place his fingers upon it, but the dancers’ delicate movements soon drew his attention again. They seemed to interpret nothing but a safe journey and a safe return. Everything was in favor of it, even the music, which had none of the crescendo that might indicate an approaching storm. When the girls actually took the fateful step, however, showing the audience their legs as they tried to maintain their balance in the boat, the music suddenly changed.

“A wind came up and the three tulips realized that the boat was leaving the shore. They also knew, too late, too late, that their roots had left the soil.”

Keiko was the best dancer by far. The other girls were not only followers as tulips, but in the intricate steps of the final root removal as well. Masako told her uncle, “Now they’re in for it. There is a danger in leaving your home, you know. There is a lot in this dance that is really perfect for Keiko.”

The river got rough so quickly that the members of the audience understood its earlier calmness had been a ruse, a trick perpetrated on the tulips by the evil river god. For a full minute the dancers were yanked around so violently that they seemed about to dance, not only out of the boat, but right out of their kimono. Keiko was especially expert at jerking this way and that, especially practiced at making the outer layers of her gown come undone, so innocently amorous, as if, ready or not, a tulip’s breast were about to pop out. The two brothers looked at each other. The children in the audience, all the dancers from the earliest part of the morning, seemed to sit up straight and watch.

“Oh, who will help the tulips once they have left the shore?”‘asked the singer from the orchestra.

The answer, quite to the delight of everyone, was that one of the tulips, Keiko, of course, would find a way to save them. The other tulips were too terrified to act, but Keiko stepped over the side of the boat, even though it appeared to be too late, not knowing as she did so whether she would meet her death instantly or find the river shallow enough for her to stand upon its bottom and pull the bucking boat to shore.

For another few minutes it was difficult to tell what the outcome would be. Keiko fought for her footing and pushed against the depth and strength of the water and against the other forces of the awful river god. But then, very slowly, she began to make some headway, to pull the other two terrified tulips home. The audience could see them leaning, yearning, pushing their roots toward the lost safety of the tulip bed.

It was a perfectly performed dance, Keiko did better than she’d ever done in practice, but perhaps because it was expressed so well, its ending bothered Masako like it never had before.

“Well fine for the two whose disruption was small,” she said. “What will happen to Keiko’s tulip, though? She’s been very badly roughed up. She is wet and disheveled. What are we supposed to think about her prospects, that she just got up and planted herself back into the dirt as if nothing at all had happened? I don’t think so, Uncle. You can’t just return to a normal life after a trip like that!”

Masako’s questions were good ones, but the rest of the audience got up and went to congratulate the teacher and the dancers, and Manjiro wanted to be among the first to reach Keiko. So he somehow ignored Masako, while at the same time pulling her with him to the front. “Such a tulip!” he said. “Such perfection. My, how your practice has paid off!”

Keiko was still on the floor, exhausted and kneeling where the tulips had finally reached the shore, but she was smiling. The other girls, as Masako had predicted, seemed far less affected by the adventure, and had left with their families immediately after getting out of the boat.

“It’s a shame about teacher’s duet with what’s-his-name,” Keiko said, feeling it necessary to deflect the attention from herself, but her grandfather said, “Nonsense.” He did not mean, of course, that it was not a shame, but only that he was proud, too, and that not a word should be spoken, not even by Keiko herself, to take away from such a fine performance.

“A dinner!” he said. “Einosuke, Fumiko, invite the dance teacher, too. We must all go out together, to some fine establishment to celebrate!”

Again, since Fumiko had reserved a room at a nearby fish restaurant weeks before, and since there was no question but that the teacher would dine with them, Lord Okubo’s bombast was misplaced. The spirit behind it, however, greatly pleased everyone, especially Manjiro. This was the father that both he and his brother remembered from before the rotten seed of the American arrival had been planted in his mind, this was the father-in-law Fumiko had learned to admire when her marriage was new and her children were small. And her grandfather’s exuberance so pleased Masako that she forgot, for a while, the nagging questions she had had about the resolution of the dance.

“Get up, Keiko,” she said. “Drowned or saved you should straighten your kimono now. Don’t show your body so much, we are going to eat, did you not hear? Get up and thank Grandfather before he changes his mind.”

Keiko didn’t want to straighten her clothes, nor did she want to leave her place on the floor while there was still a chance that someone else would praise her dancing, and she was irritated with Masako for saying she should. From where she sat she could see the entrance of the geisha house, where her teacher was standing again, looking down the road. She could see the lovely maiko now, too, the youngest of those working after six o’clock, coming in from outside in twos and threes, turning left and walking down the hall.

Peace and harmony. Calm before the fall.