The House of Kazemori

Chapter 1: Not Wanted on Voyage

The cedar ball over the kura door went brown in the second week of October. In March, the morning after the first new sake is pressed, we hang a new one, green, made of cedar tips bound into a ball the size of a child's head. It tells the town the new sake has been pressed. By autumn it has turned the color of strong tea, and that tells the town something too. The summer's sake has rested long enough. It is ready to go out cold, in bottles, to the shops along the canal. The Hachiman shrine had its autumn festival the week before. The floats went past the kura with the brown ball over the door, as they do every year, and nobody looked up at it but me.

The ball is called a sugidama. Ours is lopsided this year. Mio made it. Nobody has mentioned this to her.

The kurabito came in from Ōkuradani on the twentieth. Kurabito are the brewery workers. They come down from the mountain village when their own rice is in, live in the rooms above the kura until spring, and go home to plant. Four came in one car. Oda-san came in his own truck, as he has for twenty-eight winters. He is seventy-one. He set his boots and a sack of his wife's red turnip pickles, the Hida kind, sliced thin, inside the kura door before he said good morning to me. That is correct. The kura first, then the toji.

I am the toji. That means I am the head brewer of Kazemori Shuzō, the sake brewery of the House of Kazemori in Kiriyama. I have held the job since 2008. Before me it was my father. Before him, my grandmother's brother, and before him two more men of her family, back to 1872. I am the first woman in any of those lines to work inside the kura rather than at its door.

---

Ōokusama had a dizzy spell on the eighth. She was reaching for a scroll box on the second floor of the family house and sat down on the stairs instead. Eriko found her there. Nothing was broken. The doctor said "blood pressure" and "age," in that order, and the family moved her bedding to the ground-floor room that looks onto the garden.

Ōokusama is Kazemori Sayo. She is eighty-six. She is the widow of Tadatsugu, whom my family called Waka-sama, the young lord, from the winter he came to us at six until he died at seventy-four. The title should have changed. Ours never did. She is the mother of the man I call Shachō, the company president. "Ōokusama" means the elder lady of the house. Titles in this house move up a step when someone new arrives beneath them. Ours do not move.

With his mother downstairs, Shachō decided the dozō should be cleared while she could still say what was in it. The dozō is the family's storehouse. Thick clay walls, a heavy door, built so that a fire in the town would pass it by. His daughter Rina came up from Kyoto for the work. Rina is twenty-three and conserves old textiles and armor for a living. She brought gloves and a headlamp. I brought a ladder.

The upper floor took us two days. Armor boxes first: one plain black lacquered set, made for Tono-sama, the lord, the year he succeeded to the domain in 1858, and never worn in battle. Rina handled it the way I handle a starter tank. Then eleven scroll cases. Behind the scroll cases, against the north wall, under a cotton cloth gray with dust, was a steamer trunk.

It was Western. Canvas over wood, leather corners, brass locks. A paper label had been pasted on the lid a long time ago. The ink had faded to brown, but the printed words were clear: NOT WANTED ON VOYAGE. Under them, in a careful hand, someone had written a cabin number and the name Kazemori.

"It went to England," Rina said. "With my great-grandfather. I think."

She meant Tadanori, the last viscount. She was right. I could see it from the label. A trunk not wanted on voyage goes in the hold. Someone else carries it on board, and someone else carries it off.

We brought it down between us. Twenty-two kilos on the kura scale.

---

The key was in the obi drawer of Ōokusama's tansu, on a red silk cord. Rina did not know it existed. Neither did Shachō. Ōokusama knew exactly where it was, which is not true of most things for her now.

We opened the trunk in her room with the garden doors shut. I counted. Counting is my job.

Photographs: about nine hundred. Glass plates in wooden racks, prints on card, loose snapshots with deckled edges. Letters: three bundles in Japanese, one in English, one thin packet in Portuguese, and one in English in a different hand, with Indian stamps. Account books: seven, bound in blue thread, which I knew on sight as my great-grandmother's. Telegrams: fourteen. A child's calligraphy practice sheets, the same four characters again and again. A tea scoop in a silk bag. A photograph of eight young men in a rowing boat, mounted on card, with a college crest. A catalogue from a horse show, London, 1936. A notebook of cooper's sketches, barrels and hoops, with Portuguese words penciled in the margins. A lacquer document box, with a smaller lacquer case inside it, which I did not open that day.

The contents weighed nine kilos. The trunk was thirteen.

Almost nothing had a label. A few photographs had a date. None had all the names.

Ōokusama turned the prints over in her lap one at a time. Some she knew at once. "Father-in-law." "The bridge, before the flood." Many she held a long while and set down without a word.

Then she put her hand on my wrist. "Not Tadahiro," she said. "You. Your family was standing behind the camera."

Shachō was in the doorway. He did not argue. He said, "She's right," and went to make tea, which is his way of agreeing to something he has not yet thought through.

That evening the family office sent a notice to my phone. Shachō had added me to the house's private family network, with the role of keeper of records. Rina entered the trunk in the heirloom collection the same night. Under contents she wrote: unknown.

---

My grandmother Fumi taught me to name the two families when I was six. She did it the way you count rice bags at the door.

The lords first. Tono-sama, Kazemori Tadamasa, the last daimyo of Kiriyama. One. Tadaaki, his son, the second viscount. Two. Tadanori, the third and last viscount, who went to England with the trunk. Three. Waka-sama, Tadatsugu, who grew up beside my father. Four. And Tadahiro, who was then a boy of sixteen with a bad haircut. Five. There were wives and younger sons too, but the count was always five.

A daimyo was the lord of a domain. A domain, a han, was measured in rice. Kiriyama was thirty thousand koku, which is small. Fumi gave the figure the way a farmer gives the size of a field. Not proud. Exact.

Then she would say, "Now ours. One step down and to the left."

That is where we stood in the photographs. Tsuchida Gonbei, the steward, who stayed in Kiriyama when the lord left for Tokyo. His son Yasuke, also steward, and Yasuke's wife Tsuru, who kept the kura's books. Their son Kiyoshi, my grandfather, the last steward of the house. Fumi herself, born Kubo. My father, Isamu. My mother, Kazuko. And me.

Beside the Tsuchida there is always the Kubo line. They were mountain brewers from Ōkuradani. Kubo Sennosuke came down to this kura in 1872, and one of his blood has stood at its head ever since. Tsuru was his daughter. Fumi was his granddaughter, and my grandfather's cousin. Cousins married often then, in brewing families most of all. It kept the hands in the kura. I am in that line through her. It is why the elders allowed me into the kura at all. It is also why they objected so loudly.

I asked her once why we stood to the left. She said, "So the lord's sleeve doesn't cover you." I was thirty before I knew it was a joke.

---

This book is about what we carried.

I mean the keys and the account books and the rice. I mean coats on a riverbank in England, and a horse across an ocean, and a steward's seal handed back. I mean the brewing, every winter, for a hundred and fifty years.

I should say now that not all of it was carried willingly. Some of it was put on us. Some of it we set down and were told to pick up again. I will write those parts plainly. I will not make them worse than they were. I will not make them better.

My father read my first page over my shoulder in the kura office the next morning. He said, "You count well. Keep counting." Then he went to check the boiler.

When we closed the trunk that first night, Ōokusama asked for the key. She held it in her palm a long time with her eyes shut. I thought she had fallen asleep. Then she opened her hand and put the key into mine, cord and all.

It was warm.

Chapter 2: Fifty Bags of New Rice

The rice came in on a Tuesday. Fifty bags, thirty kilos each, Hida Homare from the terraces above the river. The truck backed up to the kura door at seven. Oda-san and the four younger men carried. My father stood in the doorway in his cardigan and counted aloud, as he did for forty years.

"Ichi. Ni. San."

I stood beside him and counted silently. I have done it that way since 2008. It is the only change I have made in the kura that he has not forgiven.

At fifty he stopped. I had stopped at fifty too. He looked at me as if I had cheated on a test.

Kaito was on the step behind us with a notebook. Kaito is twelve. He counts everything: stairs, crows, the cars at the crossing. He had counted fifty as well, and he had written down the farm name printed on each bag. Seven farms. He showed me the list without being asked. Two of the farm names were spelled wrong on the bags. He had spelled them correctly on his list, with a small star beside each. He underlined the farm with the most bags. Then he underlined it again.

---

On the shelf in the kura office, above the kettle, there is a wooden measure. It is square, about the size of a small box of tea, bare cypress inside, worn pale, and lacquered black outside. On one side, branded and then gilded, is the Kazemori crest: three cedar leaves in a ring.

It is a masu. Before 1871 it measured tax rice at the castle granary. A farmer's bags were opened, the rice poured into measures like this one, leveled with a straight stick called a tokaki, one stroke, never two, and counted. The domain was assessed at thirty thousand koku. That was what its fields were reckoned to grow, not what came in. Perhaps four parts in ten came to the castle granary, measure by measure. A koku is roughly what one person eats in a year.

My father uses the masu to measure katsuobushi, dried bonito, shaved for the kurabito's soup. He says that is the most honest work it has ever done.

---

The domain ended quietly. I want to put down how quietly, because people expect otherwise.

In 1868 the shogun's government fell and the new government in Kyoto began to demand that every domain declare for the court. There was fighting in the north and east that year. There was none in Kiriyama. Tono-sama, Kazemori Tadamasa, was thirty. His senior retainers argued for weeks in the castle hall. Some wanted to hold out with the northern domains. Some wanted to wait. Tono-sama listened to all of it. Then he sent word down the valley to Takayama, where the new government had placed its officials, that Kiriyama would follow the court. Kiriyama was the only domain in Hida. The rest of the province had belonged to the shogun and was run from the office at Takayama, and in 1868 that office was the first thing the new government took.

The man who carried that message was Tsuchida Gonbei. He was twenty-eight, a foot retainer of the lowest rank, chosen because he was fast on mountain paths and read so slowly that nobody could accuse him of having read the letter at all. He made the trip eleven times that year. He wore out three pairs of straw sandals and kept the fourth. They are not in the trunk. My father says they were burned for warmth in 1945, and that this is also an honest use.

In 1869 the lords returned their domains to the emperor. Tono-sama stayed on as governor of what had been his own han, now under Tokyo's orders. In 1871 the domains were abolished altogether. The former lords were told to move to Tokyo. Tono-sama went in the ninth month, with his wife, his son Tadaaki, aged five, and most of his household.

Gonbei stayed. He was thirty-one and had been made steward, karei, of the house's property in Kiriyama, because the senior men were going to Tokyo and someone had to stay. He stood at the gate of the residence with the keys on a ring. Tono-sama stopped his palanquin, got out, and spoke to him for some time. Nobody wrote down what was said. Gonbei told his son only that the lord had asked him the price of rice, and that he had known it.

Then the palanquin went down the road, and Gonbei went back inside and counted the storerooms. There were nine. He wrote the count on a board and hung it by the gate, where anyone coming in could check him. My father still says that is how a steward should begin.

---

The castle did not last as long as the steward.

In 1874, after the castle abolition order, the keep was dismantled and sold for its timber. A keep is the main tower, the tenshukaku, the part people mean when they say "castle." The stone walls were too heavy to sell and stayed where they were. The residence below, the goten, became a school, then offices, then a museum in 1953. In 1994 the city rebuilt the keep from the original drawings. My father went to the opening and said it smelled of new cedar, like a kura in its first year. He meant it as a compliment.

Hirano Kenji is the curator at the castle now. He is fifty-eight and very precise. When I said once that the keep was sold for eighty-five yen, he said, "Eighty-five yen and forty sen." When I said it was sold to a timber merchant, he said, "To two timber merchants, jointly, one of whom later defaulted." He is always right. It is restful, in its way. You do not need to remember anything near Hirano-san. He remembers it for you, with the sen.

This month he found the bill of sale in the city archive, folded inside a tax ledger where it had no business being. He brought a copy to the brewery in a plastic sleeve. He and Shachō sat in the office with it for an hour. By the time they stood up, the castle had a page among the house's places of importance, and the bill of sale was on it, with Hirano's note about the second timber merchant.

Shachō looked tired and pleased. Hirano looked as if he had been allowed to correct someone at last.

---

After counting comes polishing. We have our own polishing machine, an old one, in the shed behind the kura. It runs day and night for three days on each lot. Stones grind the outside of each grain away and leave the center. For our everyday sake we take the rice down to seventy percent of its weight. For the ginjō tanks, fifty. For the best tanks, forty.

The outer layers hold the protein and fat. They make sake heavy and coarse. The center holds the starch. That is what the koji works on, and that is what the yeast eats in the end.

Mio asked me once whether it was wasteful, grinding away a third or more of what the farmers grew. I told her what my father told me. "The heart is the part that matters. The rest is paid for anyway." The bran is not wasted. The coarse outer flour goes to feed. The fine white flour from near the center goes to a cracker maker in Takayama. Nothing leaves the shed that someone does not use.

I have thought since that this is not a bad description of a domain. The heart is the part people photograph. The rest is paid for anyway.

---

On Sunday evening Kaito sat at the kitchen table with his list of seven farms and my phone. He dropped a map pin on each set of paddies the rice had come from, the house's own map, so the farms sat on it beside the castle and the shrine. He checked each one against the satellite view. One farm had moved its drying racks since the picture was taken. He wrote that down too.

"The biggest one is up near Ōkuradani," he said. "Did you know that?"

I did. I did not say so.

He moved on to counting the pins on the castle side of the river against the pins on the brewery side. Sōta, who is his father and a science teacher, told him that was not a meaningful comparison. Kaito wrote that down as well.

Later, when the house was quiet, I went to the kura office for my glasses. My father had left the masu on the desk instead of the shelf. Someone had filled it with polished rice, from the first lot out of the machine, and leveled it with a ruler.

Seventy percent. White all the way through. I put it back on the shelf without spilling a grain.

Chapter 3: Water from the Shrine Spring

Polished rice must rest for some weeks before it is washed. It comes out of the machine warm and dry, and it cracks if it meets water too soon. So in November we wait. Then we wash.

We wash in small lots, ten kilos at a time, in shallow tubs. The rice goes in, the cold water goes in, and four hands move through it until the water clouds and clears. Then it soaks. For the everyday rice, an hour or more, by the clock on the wall. For the forty-percent rice, the heart of the heart, we count in seconds.

Mio held the stopwatch this year. Two minutes and forty seconds for the first lot of the best rice. She called the time and Oda-san lifted the basket out of the tub at the word, not a breath after. Then the rice hung dripping in its cloth while Mio weighed it. She wrote down how much water it had taken. If the rice drinks too much, it steams soft and the koji runs wild. If it drinks too little, it steams hard and nothing works at all.

"Thirty-one percent," she said.

"Again," I said, and she weighed it again. Thirty-one. I nodded. She looked at the stopwatch for a moment as if it had done something kind.

---

The water is the reason the kura is here.

It comes from a spring on the hill below the castle, behind the family's Hachiman shrine. It is soft water. It has very little iron and not much of anything else. Soft water makes a slow ferment and a gentle sake. It is also very cold. It comes out of the rock at eight degrees, August or January. In August that is cold. In January it is the warmest thing on the hill. A pipe brings it down to the kura now, underground, along the line of an older bamboo pipe that ran on the surface.

On the first washing day each year, the toji fetches one bucket from the spring by hand. Nobody remembers when this began. It is not written down. It may only be habit. I do it anyway, because my father did, and because the bucket is still here.

The bucket is cedar, bound with three iron hoops. It holds one *to*, about eighteen liters, the old measure. The hoops have been replaced at least twice, but the staves are old. Inside the rim someone cut the character for water and the name Gonbei, small, with a knife. It hangs on a peg by the kura's kamidana, the little shelf shrine above the door where we keep the talisman from the Hachiman shrine, beside the one from Matsuo in Kyoto that every kura keeps.

Eighteen liters of water weigh eighteen kilos. The path from the spring to the kura is six hundred and twenty meters, downhill. I carried it this year without stopping. Last year I stopped twice. I do not know what that means and have decided not to think about it.

---

In 1872, the year after Tono-sama went to Tokyo, he turned the domain kura over to private brewing. The new government had just thrown brewing open to anyone who bought a license and paid the tax.

Before then the kura had brewed for the castle. Sake for the lord's table, for the shrine, for the New Year gifts to retainers, for guests. With the domain gone, there was no castle table to brew for. Tono-sama could have let the kura close. Many did. He wrote instead that it should continue as a brewery in private hands, under his steward, and sell to the town. The house would own it. The steward would run it.

Gonbei could write well enough, by then. He had learned to keep accounts the year he became steward. He could not brew. The domain's old toji had died in the spring, and his men had gone home.

So in the tenth month of 1872 Gonbei walked to Ōkuradani. It is about twelve kilometers northwest, up past Furukawa and over a ridge. There was early snow on the ridge that year. He went to the house of Kubo Sennosuke, who was twenty-seven and had brewed ten winters in a kura at Furukawa, the last two as head of its koji room. He asked him to come down and be toji in Kiriyama.

Sennosuke said no. Gonbei slept in his kitchen. In the morning he asked again. Sennosuke said no again. Gonbei walked home. A week later he walked back. The third time, Sennosuke came.

My grandmother Fumi told it this way, and it is the only story I know in which my family is stubborn and wins.

Tono-sama wrote a letter about the kura that same year. A letter about shares, which no one in my family had seen for a hundred years. I mention it here because it belongs to 1872. I did not know yet what was in it.

---

In 1889 a letter came from the house office in Tokyo. A silk-reeling company wanted to build a mill on the river. A mill needs water, a great deal of it, and clean. The company had offered to buy the rights to the shrine spring. The house had agreed. The steward was instructed to complete the sale.

The letter was signed by the house's Tokyo agent and sealed with Tono-sama's seal. Tono-sama was fifty-one and living in Tokyo. We do not know whether he read it.

Gonbei was forty-nine. He read it twice. Then he walked to the town office and had the spring and the strip of ground around it entered in the new land register as one lot with the kura, which was legal, and which meant the water could not be sold without the brewery. Then he wrote back to Tokyo. His letter is lost. One sentence of it survived in the family, because my great-grandfather Yasuke repeated it to Tsuru, and Tsuru wrote it in the margin of her account book the year Gonbei died:

"The spring belongs to the brewing, not to the house."

This was the first time my family told the house no. It would not be the last. I have heard that sentence quoted at weddings. I have heard it quoted in a dispute about a parking space.

The mill was built farther down the river, on another stream. Nothing came from Tokyo for a year. Then a parcel arrived for Gonbei. It held a wataire, a cotton-padded winter coat, in good gray cotton, and no letter. My family has argued for a hundred and thirty years about what the coat meant. My father thinks it meant "well done." My mother thought it meant "you will need this." Fumi said it meant the lord was cold in Tokyo and was thinking about weather.

---

Once a month, after the morning shift, I climb to the shrine. It is a habit, not a duty. I take the talisman down from the kamidana when it needs replacing and bring the new one back. I bow at the shrine. I walk around behind it to the spring, where the water comes out of a crack in gray rock into a stone basin, and I put my hand in it.

There are two stone lanterns by the basin. Moss grows on the north one and not on the south. It has done so all my life. This month the moss had spread around the lantern's base to the east side. I took a photograph and logged the visit in the house's sacred places watch, with a note: north lantern, moss now on east face, basin clear, flow normal. Hirano-san will read it. He will want to know the exact date the moss turned the corner. I have given it to him.

The same week, the family network's weekly question was "What is the coldest you have ever been?" Rina answered from Kyoto in one line, about a bus stop. Kaito answered with a temperature. My father wrote three paragraphs. The winter of 1945, the nagaya, the long servants' wing where we lived, with no charcoal, his mother putting hot water in a bottle and wrapping it in his padded jacket, and the walk to the spring at dawn with his uncle Shigeru, who had told him the water was warmer than the air. It was. It was the first time he understood that a brewer must trust the water when he cannot trust the weather.

He typed it with two fingers. It took him most of an afternoon.

---

By the end of the washing my palms were numb. They always are. Eight-degree water, ten kilos at a time, all morning. The feeling comes back slowly, from the wrist out.

Mio came into the office with her stopwatch in one hand and her other hand tucked under her arm. She sat down across from me and did not say anything.

I held out my hands. She put hers against them, palm to palm. Neither of us could feel the other at all.

Chapter 4: The Koshiki and the First Lamp

Steaming begins at five. In December that means dark, and cold enough that the steam is the only warm thing in the building.

The boiler is lit at four. By half past, Oda-san has the soaked rice loaded into the koshiki. A koshiki is the steaming vat. Ours is a tall cedar tub with a slatted floor, set over an iron pot on the boiler. Steam comes up through the rice for an hour. It goes in loose and comes out as a single damp mass, heavy, smelling of chestnuts and hot cloth.

Oda-san tests the rice the old way. He takes a pinch from the top of the vat and rolls it between his palms until it is a flat gray cake. Brewers call it hinerimochi, the twisted cake. He holds it up to the lamp. If it is right, it is firm on the outside and soft in the middle, and the light shows through the edge. He does not look at the thermometer. He looks at the cake.

"Yoshi," he says. That is all. Good.

Then the young men dig the rice out with wooden shovels and carry it on their shoulders in cloth to the cooling floor. Steam pours off them. In the dark they look like men on fire. Every year at least one of them burns his neck. This year it was the tall one, Kenta. He did not mention it. Oda-san put a wet towel on the back of his neck without breaking step.

---

The lamp over the koshiki is the oldest working thing in the kura.

It is a single bulb in a tin shade, painted green on the outside and white inside. It hangs from a beam on a cord. The wire is covered in brown cloth, braided, the way wire was covered in 1912. The bulb has been changed many times. The cord and the shade have not. An electrician from Takayama inspected it in 2015 and told Shachō it should come down. Shachō asked him to inspect it again in 2020. It is still up.

It was the first electric lamp in any kura in Kiriyama. The power came from the Viscount's own plant on the river.

---

The Viscount was Tadaaki, Tono-sama's son. He was five when the family left for Tokyo and grew up there. He came back to Kiriyama perhaps a dozen times in his life. The other viscounts elected him to the House of Peers, twice. In his photographs he is tall and wears his mustache clipped short, and he looks straight at the lens. He is the only one of the lords who does.

He was an improver. That is my father's word, and he does not mean it unkindly. In 1912 the Viscount built a small hydroelectric plant on the river below the town. It was paid for partly with house money and partly with a loan from a bank in Nagoya. For the first time Kiriyama had electric light in its streets. The kura had it at the same time, because the Viscount wished to show the townspeople that the house's own business ran on the house's own power. In 1919 he gave the town its first public library, a two-story wooden building by the canal. It is a noodle shop now, but the sign over the door is still his.

I want to be exact about this. The plant was good. The library was good. My grandfather Kiyoshi learned English there from a shelf of donated books. The town was better for both.

They were also paid for. Not all of it from the house's land.

The Viscount kept a large house in Tokyo, at Kōjimachi, and a manner of living that went with the peerage. He entertained. He invested in a mining company in Kyushu that failed and in a shipping venture that did not fail but did not pay. The house's rents from Kiriyama shrank every year as land was sold. The kura's profits were the one steady thing.

My great-grandfather Yasuke was the steward then. He had followed Gonbei in 1904. Twice, in two bad harvest years running, when the rice came in thin and the price went up and the town went hungry, Tokyo still asked for money. Yasuke sent it. He carried it himself to the Nagoya bank's agent in Takayama, in a cloth belt under his shirt, because he did not trust a messenger with it. It was a long walk then. The railway did not come up the valley until 1934.

He sent it, and he kept the kura brewing, and he cut his own household's rice by a third to do it. That last part I learned from the account books.

---

My great-grandmother Tsuru kept those books from the kura doorway.

Women were not allowed inside the kura then. The old belief was that a woman's presence would sour the sake. The usual explanation was that the god of the kura is a woman, and jealous. Tsuru was the daughter of a toji, and then the sister of one. She knew more about brewing than most of the men inside. She was not allowed over the sill.

So she stood at it. There is a photograph in the trunk, which Ōokusama found for me in the first week. A wide doorway, dark inside. Steam. A woman in a plain kimono with her sleeves tied back with a tasuki cord, standing just outside the threshold with a ledger open on her arm and a brush in her hand. She is looking into the kura, not at the camera. Her feet are exactly on the line where the floor changes from earth to stone.

Her father or her brother called the numbers out to her. Rice in. Water taken. Temperatures. Tanks started. She wrote them down. She also wrote down the money. She did it for fifty years. For fifty years nobody inside the kura needed to do a sum.

---

I have been reading her account books at night, after the steaming crew goes up to sleep. Seven survive. The paper is soft and brown, the thread is blue, and her hand is small and very regular. It changes only twice in all those years. Once in 1912, when it gets larger for a few months. Once in 1920.

In the book for 1920, on the page for the eleventh month, below the rice figures and above the wages, there is a line by itself. It is not in a column. It is not a sum.

"From this month, our third is gone. We continue."

That is all. The next line is the price of charcoal.

I read it a dozen times. I did not know what "third" meant. A third of what? It was not a third of the rice. The rice figures go on as before. It was not a third of the wages. Those are the following line and they are not cut. Something that had been ours, a third of something, was gone, and my great-grandmother had written it down in one line and gone on to charcoal.

I put the book back in the trunk. I did not show anyone. Not my father. Not Sōta. I am not sure why. I think I wanted to know what it meant before someone told me what it meant.

---

This week Rina began writing the house's historical figures, one entry for each of the five lords. She started with the Viscount Tadaaki because his papers were the tidiest. She sent me her draft before Shachō saw it. The power plant, the library, the House of Peers, the date of his death. It was accurate and fair.

I wrote back that it was good. Then I asked whether I could add something later. "What it cost below," I wrote. "When I know."

She answered with a single line. "Of course. Leave a space."

The same evening my father sent a voice message to the family network. He does not type if he can help it. The transcript came up under it.

"The lamp in the kura. My father Kiyoshi used to say the Viscount came in to see it lit. Stood under it in a white suit. Asked how many bags we had steamed. Nobody had told him we stopped counting aloud when he was there. That is all. Good night."

I listened to it twice. Then I went out to the kura.

The steaming was long finished. The koshiki stood empty on the boiler, still warm to the touch. Nobody had turned off the lamp. It hung over the vat on its brown cord, and the last of the steam drifted up through the light and disappeared into the dark under the roof.

Chapter 5: Thirty-Six Hours in the Koji Room

The koji room is the warmest place in the kura and the smallest. It is lined with cedar on every side, floor and ceiling too, and kept at about thirty degrees. The air is wet. The smell is chestnut again, and something sweeter under it, like bread left in a cloth.

Koji is a mold. We grow it on steamed rice. It turns the rice's starch into sugar, and the yeast turns the sugar into alcohol at the same time, in the same tank. Brewers call it parallel fermentation. No other drink is made that way. Without koji there is no sake. With bad koji there is sake nobody should drink.

For our everyday koji it takes about thirty-six hours, which is short, from the moment the spores go onto the rice to the moment the koji comes out. For the best tanks we give it two days. In that time the rice is spread, heaped, wrapped in cloth, broken up again by hand (the kirikaeshi), and finally divided into cedar trays. It grows its own heat as the mold spreads. Too much heat and it runs. Too little and it sulks. Someone has to check it every hour, through the night.

This year that was Mio and me, turn and turn about.

---

At two in the morning on the second night, I went in for my check. Mio was asleep on the bench outside the door, sitting up, her head against the wall and her phone in her lap. I left her there.

Inside I unwrapped the cloth and put my hand flat on the heap. Then the thermometer, to confirm what my hand had said. Thirty-four. I opened the heap a little to let it breathe and wrapped it again. I wrote the time and the figure on the board. Then I stood for a minute in the warm, because the corridor outside was four degrees.

That is when I read Tsuru's books, most nights this month. In the koji room, in the one minute after the check. You cannot read for long. The paper goes limp in the damp. You learn to read one page and close the book.

---

The books are what I want to describe in this chapter. They are not what you would expect a household's records to be.

Every page has two parts. In the middle are the columns: rice, water, charcoal, wages, sales, tanks. Down the margins, in smaller writing, is everything else.

"Kubo's second boy, fever. Sent rice gruel."

"Snow to the eaves, the second time in my life. Roof men paid in sake, two shō each."

"The cooper's wife delivered a girl. Sent a bolt of cotton."

"Thanks owed: the Furukawa carter, who came back for the dropped bag."

That last kind appears again and again. Thanks owed. She kept a list of people the kura had not properly thanked. When someone was thanked she drew a thin line through the name. Some names have no line through them. Most do.

Her own name is nowhere in the books. Not once in fifty years. My father pointed this out to me when I was a girl, as if it were a fact about the weather. I did not think about it again until this winter.

---

In 1920 the house asked Yasuke to mortgage the kura.

I can tell this only from Tsuru's margins, because that is all there is. The Tokyo letters from that year are not in the trunk. Yasuke never spoke of it. Fumi knew only the outline.

---

In the book for 1920, in the margin of the seventh month: "Letter from Tokyo. The kura to be pledged to the Nagoya bank. Y. will not."

Y. is Yasuke. The Nagoya bank is the one that had lent the Viscount money for the power plant. The Viscount wanted more, and the kura was the one property the house still held free of debt. If he pledged it and could not pay, the bank would take it. Then there would be no brewing, no kura, no wages for the men from Ōkuradani, nothing for Kiriyama to sell to Takayama in the spring.

Yasuke was fifty-two. He had already sent the house money through two bad harvests. He had already cut his own family's rice. This time he wrote back and said no.

The ninth month: "Second letter. Y. answers the same."

The tenth month: "The Viscount writes himself. Y. answers the same. He did not sleep."

That is the second time my family told the house no. Gonbei had refused to sell the spring. Yasuke refused to pledge the kura. Neither man thought he was being disloyal. I think they both believed they were the only loyal people in the matter. I think they may have been right.

The Viscount's answer came in the eleventh month.

Tsuru wrote the steward's stipend in the column as she always did, and it was half of what it had been. In the margin, very small: "By order."

Below that: "K. to Tokyo, to serve the young lord. Leaves after New Year."

K. was Kiyoshi, her son. He was seventeen. He had been working in the kura since he was twelve, and the men said he had his grandfather Sennosuke's hands. He was taken out of the kura and sent to the Kōjimachi house in Tokyo to be attendant to the Viscount's son, Tadanori, who was twenty-one and was going to England.

And below that, by itself, the line I copied in the last chapter. "From this month, our third is gone. We continue."

All of it, the same month. The half stipend, Kiyoshi, the third. I still did not know what the third was. I knew now that it had gone at the same time as the others, and for the same reason. A punishment for a refusal.

The twelfth month's margin says only: "K.'s winter clothes. Sewn at night."

The first month of 1921: "K. gone. Thanks owed: no one."

There is no line through that one.

What I notice, reading it now, is what is not there. There is no complaint. There is no word about the Viscount at all, good or bad. The columns go on. The rice comes in. The wages are paid, the men's in full and the steward's in half. The tanks are started on the usual days. In the spring the sake is pressed and sold. Tsuru writes the figures down and they balance.

"We continue."

Some people in my family call that loyalty. My father does. I do not think it was loyalty, exactly. I think they had nowhere else to go, and I think they would not let the kura fail, and I think those two things together look like loyalty from a distance. From the doorway, they looked like a woman sewing her son's winter clothes at night so that he would not be cold in a house he had not chosen.

---

Mio, Kaito. A short thing, and then I will go back to the rice.

Your great-great-great-grandfather refused to sell the spring. Your great-great-grandfather refused to pledge the kura. Both of them were told no in return, one with a coat and one with a punishment. Neither of them stopped working.

Refusing a lord is not disloyal when the thing you refuse would ruin what you both serve. It is sometimes the most loyal thing you can do. It is not always rewarded. Do it anyway, and keep good books.

---

Before dawn on the third night I copied Tsuru's koji figures into the house's recipe keeper. She wrote them down from the doorway in 1913, a winter her brother called the best koji of his life. Hour by hour, thirty-six hours, every temperature called out to her across the sill. I put her name at the top. Kubo Tsuru, later Tsuchida, from the kura door. Under method I wrote: as called to her by Kubo Tōkichi. Then I wrote a short memoir entry for that night, the night of the third turning, about Mio on the bench and the four-degree corridor and a ledger that has her name nowhere in it.

At six the koji came out. We carried it to the drying shelves in cedar trays. It was white and dry and it smelled exactly right.

Mio woke on her bench when the door opened. She looked at the board, at my figures in chalk, and then at the open account book on the shelf beside them, where I had left it.

"Whose writing is that?" she said.

I told her. She looked at it a while. Then she took the chalk and, under my last temperature, wrote the time in her own hand.

Chapter 6: The Eight on the Isis

On the last morning of the year I climbed to the Hachiman shrine before the kura opened and brought down the new paper for the kamidana. Four hundred and twelve stone steps. My father says four hundred. He has never counted them. He has only climbed them.

The kura does not stop for the New Year. Oda-san's crew took the night of the thirty-first in two shifts, and the second shift ate their soba standing up. I changed the paper strips on the god shelf at six, set out the rice, the salt, the water and a cup of our own sake, bowed twice, clapped twice, and bowed once. Mio clapped beside me. She clapped a little too hard. It is a thing you learn.

At the gate of the omoya, the main house, Shachō's gate pines were up, cut bamboo at three heights and pine bound in straw, and a shimenawa over the door with its paper and its bitter orange. At our own door Sōta had tied a smaller set. The bamboo was crooked. He said it was wabi. I said it was crooked.

On the second of January my father opened the port.

He has done this every year since 1959. The crate comes from the Douro in December, packed in straw that smells of somewhere else. There are twelve bottles and one card in Senhor Rui Valverde's hand. My father cuts the capsule with the same small knife, pours five glasses, and drinks his own standing, facing west, though Portugal is not exactly west. Kaito has pointed this out. My father says it is close enough for a man of his age.

He drank. He said, "Good year." He says that every year.

---

The photograph was on the table between the port glasses and the tangerines. Ōokusama had asked for it.

It is a mounted print, about thirty centimeters wide, on heavy gray card. Eight young men sit in two rows in front of a boathouse, in white sweaters with a crest on the chest. A ninth, small, sits cross-legged on the grass at the front with a megaphone in his lap. That is the coxswain. Under the photograph, in white ink on the card, someone has written the names and the seats in an English hand. Christ Church, Summer Eights, 1924. At the end of the second row, the seat called five, is Hon. T. Kazemori. Two places down, at seven, is Kunwar Prithvi Singh.

The mount is good card. It was made to be kept.

Under the mounted print, loose, was a second one. Same day, same lawn. The men have stood up. Two are turned away. The coxswain is a blur. Whoever took it pressed the shutter a moment too late or too early, and it was never mounted. It was folded once, then flattened again.

At the right-hand edge of the second print, half cut off, a young Japanese man in a dark suit stands on the bank with four sweaters over one arm and a fifth over his shoulder. He is not looking at the camera. He is looking at the boat.

Ōokusama took the second print first. She held it close, then far. She did not look at the rowers.

"Kiyoshi-san," she said. "He held his arms like that at the gate. As if something might fall."

Then she put it down and picked up the mounted one, and found her husband's father, and the prince.

She did not need to name the rowers. Somebody had seen to that in 1924.

---

My grandfather Kiyoshi sailed from Kobe in the spring of 1921. He was eighteen. Six months before, he had been in the kura, scrubbing tubs. Then Viscount Tadaaki moved him to Tokyo service, and from Tokyo to the young lord's side. His father had refused the mortgage, and he was the price. I have told that already.

His notebook from the voyage is small, cloth-bound, the size of a hand. The first pages are not kind.

"Hong Kong. Hot. The young lord sick in the cabin. I am sick in the passage."

"Colombo. Bought nothing. Money is for home."

"Port Said. Wrote to Mother. Did not say what I think. She knows what I think."

Tsuru's account book has the matching line, three months later: "Letter from Kiyoshi, from Egypt. He is well." That is all she wrote. She was not a woman who copied out feelings.

In Oxford, the young lord had rooms in college. Kiyoshi did not. He had a room in town over a bootmaker's, and he walked to college every morning before seven to lay out clothes, fetch letters, and stand where he was told. The English had their own servants in college. They were called scouts. Kiyoshi was not one of them and not one of the gentlemen either. His notebook calls himself "the extra."

He was homesick in a precise way. He wrote down the price of rice in English shops, and it was always wrong. He wrote down the temperature of the river. He did not write the word angry. He wrote, "Again no letter from Tokyo regarding Father's stipend."

---

Rowing, from the bank, is mostly waiting. The men go out on the water and come back wet and hungry. Someone has to hold the coats.

In the May of 1924 the college raced in the Eights. Boats start in a line, one behind another, and try to catch the boat ahead. Kiyoshi ran the towpath with the sweaters over his arm. On the third day, he writes, the boat caught the one in front, near the barges. The young lord came out of the water laughing. Kiyoshi had never seen him laugh like that.

That evening the prince came down the bank. Kiyoshi notes that he was "the Indian one, the youngest, seven seat, very good shoes." The prince took his own sweater from Kiyoshi's arm, said thank you, and said, "Tsuchida, isn't it?"

The notebook line is the shortest on the page. "Indian prince knows my name."

I read it four times. Then I went back through the notebook to see who else had used it in three years. The young lord called him Kiyoshi. The bootmaker called him Mister. The college porters called him nothing. The prince had asked somebody, or listened. Either way he had bothered.

Kunwar Prithvi Singh does not appear in the notebook again. I know only that he rowed at seven, that his shoes were good, and that he crossed a lawn to say a few words to the man holding his coat. That is enough to put him in this book.

---

Something else changed in England. It is small and I will not make it bigger.

In the second winter, Tadanori learned that the steward's stipend had been cut in half. I do not know who told him. Perhaps Kiyoshi. I do not know what else he learned. In Tsuru's account book, in the spring of 1923, there is a new line: "Ten yen, from the young lord's allowance, by his order, through the Tokyo office." It comes again in the summer, and again at the New Year. It is not the third. It is not the stipend. It is ten yen from a son who could not undo his father's decision and sent what he could from his allowance.

The notebook from that year is different too. "The young lord asked how Mother keeps the books. I told him. He listened." And later: "Walked to the river with the young lord. Talked about rice. He does not know anything about rice. He wants to."

I would not call them friends. In 1923 a viscount's heir and his attendant were not friends. But they were two young men from the same snow country in a wet English town, and one of them had started sending money home to the other's mother. That is the first crack I can find in the wrong. It did not mend it. It showed that someone above had noticed.

---

That afternoon Sōta sat at the kotatsu with his laptop and drew the voyage. He made a globe journey arc from Kobe to London, with the ports in my grandfather's order: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Penang, Colombo, Aden, Suez, Port Said, Marseille. Forty-six days. He put a pin at each port and typed Kiyoshi's line beside it. At Colombo, "Money is for home."

Then I opened the Story Web on the family network and found Kiyoshi's card. I made a new card for Kunwar Prithvi Singh, with the one fact I had. I drew a thread between them and wrote on it, "1924; he knew my name."

It looked very thin on the screen. I left it.

In the evening my father finished the first bottle, which is also his custom. He held the second print to the lamp for a long time.

"Look at the sweaters," he said. "Five. He was carrying for the boat ahead as well."

He was right. Two of the sweaters have a different crest. My grandfather was holding coats for the men they had just beaten.

I put the second print in a clear sleeve and stood it on the shelf where the port bottle had been.

Chapter 7: Waiting on the Starter

The coldest weeks belong to the shubo. The starter mash. Steamed rice, koji, water, yeast and lactic acid in a small tank, sour enough that nothing else can live in it and kept cold so that it goes slowly. It takes about two weeks the quick way, the way we do it. My great-grandfather's men made it the old way, kimoto, poling the rice to a paste in shallow tubs and singing to keep time, and it took a month. You cannot make it faster. You can make it fail in an afternoon.

The kura in January is four degrees at dawn. The starter tanks sit in the north room, where the wall is thickest. I check them at five, at eleven, at five again and at eleven at night. I put my hand on the side of the tank before I look at the thermometer. My hand is wrong by about half a degree. The thermometer is right. I still put my hand there first.

Mio does the eleven at night. She writes in the log in pencil, because pens skip in the cold and ink runs on a wet page. I did not tell her that. She found out.

"Nothing in the kura can be hurried," Kubo Shigeru told my father in 1956. "Everything can be ruined." My father told me in 1998. I told Mio in October. She nodded the way you nod at a thing printed on a calendar. Then in her second week she lifted a lid to look, twice in an hour, and the temperature dropped a degree. Now she nods differently.

---

The tapes were in a shoebox, not in the trunk. They had never been in the trunk. They were in my mother's wardrobe, behind her summer kimono, and I found them when we cleared the wardrobe in 2021. I put them on a shelf. I did not play them for four years.

There are six cassettes. On each, in my grandmother's hand, a number and a date: 1994, the third month. That spring the city ran an oral history project before the residence passed to them. A young woman from the city office came with a recorder and a microphone on a stand. She spoke to eleven people from the old households. My grandmother Fumi was eighty-four. She talked for six hours across four afternoons. The city kept one copy and made a transcript of about a third. My grandmother asked for her own copy, and paid for the tapes herself. That is like her.

Sōta found a machine that still plays cassettes. We set it up in the kura office on a Sunday afternoon in the second week of January, between the five o'clock and the eleven o'clock checks. My father sat in his chair. I sat on the step. Mio sat on the floor with her back to the heater. Kaito wrote the time each tape started.

The first sound is the young woman saying the date and testing the microphone. The second sound is my grandmother saying, "Is it on? Then I will begin with the water."

My father laughed out loud. "Of course," he said.

---

My grandmother Fumi was born in the Kubo house at Ōkuradani in 1910, the year her father Tōkichi became toji. She was the first of five. She came down to Kiriyama in the winters from the age of eight, to work in the kitchen of the brewery house, which fed the kura, with the other daughters of the toji line. Not in the kura. Inside the kura the cooking was a boy's job.

On the tape she describes it by the hour. Up at three. Rice for fifteen men and the household. Miso soup in a pot she could not lift alone. The men ate first, the toji first of all. The kitchen girls ate standing, after. "We ate what was left in the pot," she says, "and what was left was always good, because my mother made it."

She describes her aunt Tsuru, who was not allowed past the kura door. Tsuru sat on a stool just outside it with the account book on her knees. Women were kept out of the brewing in those years. It was believed we spoiled it. "My aunt never spoiled anything," my grandmother says. "She only counted it."

She married Tsuchida Kiyoshi in the autumn of 1930. He was twenty-seven and back from England six years. On the tape she says, "He was serious. He had very good English and no one to speak it to. He spoke it to the horse later." She laughs and says, "I am getting ahead."

She does not describe the wedding. She describes the kitchen of the brewery house, which she ran from 1951, when the Kazemori family moved in after the castle grounds went to the city. Okusama Yae came from the residence to a house with a smaller kitchen, a smaller garden and a brewer's wife in the next room.

"For one year," my grandmother says, "Okusama spoke to me through her maid. Then the maid went home to marry. And one morning Okusama came into the kitchen herself and said, 'Fumi-san, thank you for the rice.' She had never said my name before. When she had needed me, I was Tsuchida's wife. Now I was Fumi, and san. I had cooked for her for twenty years, counting the visits."

She stops. The tape runs on. You can hear the city woman's pen.

"After that she said it every day. Every day. I did not know what to do with it."

My father was looking at the floor.

---

On the fourth tape, near the end, the city woman asks about hard years. My grandmother talks about the war first. Rice rationed by weight. The kura brewing a quarter of its old volume. The kurabito who went and the two who did not come back. She names them. Kaito wrote the names down.

Then the young woman asks, carefully, if there were difficulties between the household and the family.

There is a long pause.

"We did not talk about the third," my grandmother says. "We talked about the rice."

Then, at once, in her ordinary voice: "The rice in 1946 was very bad. Half chaff."

That is the only time she says it. I played the rest of the tape and the two after it. She does not come back to it.

I looked at my father. He was looking at the machine.

"What third?" he said.

I had Tsuru's line from 1920 in my notebook. "From this month, our third is gone. We continue." I had not shown it to anyone. I did not know what it meant either, not exactly. I knew it was money, or a share, or a part of something. I knew it was taken.

"I don't know yet," I said. That was true.

My father was quiet. Then he said, "She knew something. My mother knew something and I was in the house sixty years." He said it without anger. He said it the way he says a tank has gone too warm. As a fact you deal with in the morning.

Mio got up and went to do the eleven o'clock check. It was nine forty.

---

It took me most of January to write my grandmother's Story Teller biography. I wrote it from the tapes, in the order she told it, starting with the water. I did not start with her birth. She would not have. I put the kitchen at three in the morning, Tsuru on the stool, the wedding in one sentence, the thank you in the brewery house kitchen. I put the war and the two names. I put her line about the third in her own words, with the date and the tape number, and nothing after it. It is hers. It is not mine to explain.

Kaito wanted the length of each tape at the bottom. I let him.

Rina read it in Kyoto and called me. She was quiet at first. Then she asked if she could set the weekly family question. That week it went out to everyone on the network, both houses: "What did your grandmother never talk about?"

Usually the weekly question gets twenty answers, some of them jokes. This one got nine. None were jokes. Eriko wrote about her grandmother's first husband, who died at sea. Sōta wrote about his grandmother's brother in Manchuria. My father wrote one line. "My mother never talked about the third. I am asking now." Shachō read it. I know because it showed that he had. He did not reply.

---

The starter was ready on the twenty-ninth of January. You can smell it before the numbers tell you. Sharp, a little like green apple, a little like yogurt. Oda-san put his nose over the tank and said, "Yes." He does not say more than that about a starter.

We moved it to the big tank that afternoon for the first addition, the hatsuzoe. Mio carried the log.

That night I took the sixth tape out of the machine and put it back in its case. My grandmother's handwriting on the label is small and slanted to the left. Under the date, which I had read many times, there is a second line I had not noticed, in pencil, very faint.

"For Isamu. When he asks."

I gave it to him in the morning, in the office, before the five o'clock check.

Chapter 8: A Mare Called Chandrika

The moromi, the main mash, is built in three additions over four days. First the starter goes into the big tank with a little rice, koji and water. A day to rest, which brewers call odori, the dance. Then a second addition, larger. Then the third, the largest. Each time the tank gets fuller and colder, and the yeast has to keep up. If you add too much too fast, the yeast loses. Nothing in the kura is a fight, but this is the closest.

After the third addition the mash rises. For three weeks it foams, then settles, then thickens. It makes a sound like rain on a far roof. You can stand at the edge of tank four at night and hear it.

On the second Monday of February, Mio worked her first full shift. Five to five. Steaming, cooling, carrying, the third addition into tank four, the long paddles. At the end of it she sat on the step and did not take her boots off for twenty minutes. Oda-san brought her tea. He has never brought me tea. I did not say so.

---

The catalogue is thin, cream-colored, with a red border. International Horse Show, Olympia, London, June 1936. Inside are the classes and the exhibitors, in very small type. Entry 41 is circled in pencil: "Bay mare, 5 yrs, Marwari cross, bred Kesarmer State, India. Shown by Thakur Ummed Singh." Beside the circle, in a different pencil, a price and a Japanese word, *kau*. Buy.

Viscount Tadanori was in London that summer on House of Peers business, a committee on something I have not traced. My grandfather Kiyoshi went with him. Kiyoshi was thirty-three, married six years, with no children yet. Tsuru's book shows Fumi had been ill that spring. He did not want to go. He went.

The viscount bought the mare on the fourth day, privately, at the stables, after she was shown. Her name was Chandrika. Tsuru's book, which recorded everything that cost money, records her this way: "A horse. From India. Kiyoshi to bring her."

He brought her. Six weeks by sea, London to Kobe, in a padded stall on the deck of a cargo ship, with a sack of feed that ran out off Ceylon. He bought more in Colombo. He did not write down what it cost. His notebook says only, "She does not like the sea. Neither do I. We agree."

---

Thakur Ummed Singh wrote eleven letters to Kiyoshi between 1936 and 1949. They are in English, on thin blue paper, in a careful upright hand. They are addressed to "Mr. K. Tsuchida, care of the Kazemori Brewery, Kiriyama, Japan." Not to the viscount. To the man who fed her.

The first letter arrived in the autumn of 1936.

"She will take jaggery from the hand, a small piece only, in the evening. Do not give it in the morning, she will expect it all day and become impossible. She does not care for cold. In your winter you must blanket her before she asks. She always turns left. Do not correct it. It is how she was made."

Kiyoshi did not know what jaggery was. His reply is not in the trunk, but the next letter answers it: "Brown sugar of the cane will do, if you cannot get ours." He found black sugar from Okinawa at a grocer in Takayama. Tsuru's book has it: "Sugar for the horse, from the south islands."

The letters are about hay, hooves, a cough in 1938, snow. There are none from 1941 to 1947. There could not be. The first letter also says, "The boy who will have my job sends his regards to the mare. He is eleven and thinks he knows everything. He is nearly right." Three letters later the boy has a name: Bhim. I do not know more about him. I know he was right about horses.

Viscount Tadanori added postscripts to Kiyoshi's replies. We know this because Ummed Singh answers them. "Please thank His Lordship for his note. I am glad he rides her. Tell him she does not like to be hurried at the gate." The viscount wrote to the stable manager through the steward. The stable manager wrote to the steward and sent thanks up. That is how it went for thirteen years. In 1938 the army's inspectors came for horses. They measured her and turned her down: too light, too foreign, and a mare who turned left. Kiyoshi wrote that down as if it were a prize.

Chandrika lived in the paddock behind the kura from 1936 to 1955. The kura children rode her. That included, in time, Fumi's first child, who was my father. Tsuru's book has his birth in 1940 on one line and, on the next, "Fumi well. Kiyoshi walked the mare round the kura twice to tell her." I do not know whether the horse was told. I like to think so.

She died in the paddock in the spring of 1955, at twenty-four. Kiyoshi wrote to Kesarmer to say so. There was no reply. Ummed Singh had died five years before, and no one in either house had told the other. The letter is not in the trunk. I hope it reached the boy who had his job.

---

The war years in the kura are mostly subtraction.

From 1939 the government controlled rice. Every grain the kura used was licensed. Each year the license was smaller. By 1943 the kura was brewing a quarter of its old volume, and what it brewed was thin, with distilled alcohol added by order to stretch it. My father says it tasted of paper. He was three. He says he remembers. I let him.

Of the eleven kurabito who came down from Ōkuradani in the winter of 1937, four were called up. Two came back. The two who did not are on the stone at Kōun-ji and in Fumi's tape. Their families still live in Ōkuradani. Oda-san's grandmother was the sister of one of them.

In 1943 the metal drive came. Temple bells, gates, pots, railings. The kura had a copper coil for the hiire and two copper kettles, put in by Tadaaki in 1913. A list came from the town office. Copper was on it.

My grandfather was steward by then. He made the inventory. He wrote that the coil was iron and the kettles had gone in 1941. He took the coil out himself, at night, with Tōkichi, and buried it under the floor of the koji room, under the cedar boards, with the kettles wrapped in straw beside it. He handed over the kura's iron pots, its brass fittings and the bell from the gate. The inventory was signed and accepted.

The copper came up in 1946. It went back into the hiire bath. Every May, when the new sake runs through it, it runs through what he hid. When I set the thermometer over the coil, I am watching it.

I asked my father if his father thought it was right. He said, "He never said it was right. He said it was his."

---

In the autumn of 1944 Waka-sama Tadatsugu came to Kiriyama. He was six. Children were being sent out of Tokyo, in school groups or, if they had somewhere to go, to relatives and old connections. He was sent to the house of his family's steward. He lived in the nagaya, in the room next to ours. The residence was shut and cold, and half of it had been lent to the town for evacuated schoolchildren. My father was four.

They were not supposed to play together. They played together. They were not supposed to go near the mare. By then she was thirteen, and gentle. My father says they rode her bareback, both at once, Waka-sama in front, round the paddock to the left, always to the left. Kiyoshi caught them twice. The second time he lifted both of them down and said nothing and went back inside. My father says that was worse than shouting.

There was a persimmon tree over the wall of the Hachiman shrine. That is all I am allowed to say about the persimmon.

---

In February my father recorded an oral history of that winter. Rina set it up in the omoya with a small microphone, and Shachō sat in. Before he began, my father said his name, the date, and that he agreed to the recording and to who could hear it. He said the evacuation winter could go to everyone in the family network, both houses. Then he said, "The part about the persimmon goes to Kaito only. When he is older." Rina asked how much older. My father said, "He will know."

He talked for an hour and ten minutes. Shachō did not speak once. At the end he bowed to my father, lower than I have seen him bow.

Mio's hours go up on the Energy Tree at the end of each shift, under the kura branch, beside mine and my father's old ones. My father checks them every morning in the office before he does anything else. He does not comment. He just looks, the way he used to look at the tanks. On the morning after her first full shift he looked a long time. Then he said, "Twelve hours. My first was nine."

Tank four was quiet that night, only the far-roof sound. Mio's boots were still by the door.

Chapter 9: The Steward's Seal

Pressing starts when the moromi tells you. Not the calendar. On the fourth of March tank one was ready: the right alcohol, the right acid, the right smell. We bagged the mash into the fune, the long wooden press, in cotton bags laid in rows, and let it squeeze slowly over a day. What runs out first is cloudy. Then it clears. The lees stay behind in white sheets, itakasu, and we sell them to the pickle maker on the canal street for his narazuke.

The first new sake of the year came off at four in the afternoon. My father tasted it in the office from a janome, the white tasting cup with two blue rings at the bottom, the snake's eye. He looked at the rings through the sake, then drank. He said, "Good." Not "good year." That comes later.

The next morning Oda-san and I hung the new sugidama over the kura door. Cedar sprigs packed into a ball the size of a child's head. It is bright green. It will go brown over the summer and by autumn it will match the old one we took down. People in the street look up when it appears. It means the new sake is here. It is the only advertising we do.

---

The seal was in its own box, in the bottom of the trunk. Black lacquer, the size of a thick book, with the Kazemori crest in gold on the lid, three leaves in a circle. Inside, on faded red silk, is the steward's seal: a block of boxwood with the characters for "Kazemori household steward" cut into its base. The base is stained red from seventy-six years of ink paste. The sides are worn smooth by thumbs.

Ōokusama watched me lift it out. "Kiyoshi-san's," she said. "He used it at the gate table every month for the rice." She was in her chair by the window in the ground-floor room, with the blanket Eriko makes her keep on.

Under the silk tray there was a space. I almost missed it. The tray lifted out on two cords. Beneath it was a sheet of heavy paper folded in four, with the edges browned.

It is a letter in brush, in an educated hand, dated the fifth year of Meiji, which is 1872, the eleventh month. It is signed Kazemori Tadamasa with his monogram and stamped with two seals, the house's and his own. It is addressed to Tsuchida Gonbei and Kubo Sennosuke.

I could read perhaps half of it at the window. The brush was cursive and the language was the old letter style. I read the rest over three nights, with the dictionary of cursive forms Rina had left in the dozō. Ōokusama's eyes are not good enough now to read brush at that size, and she did not ask.

It says that the domain's kura is placed in private hands for brewing. That the steward Tsuchida and the toji Kubo are to run it. That in return for their service, which "has kept this house when the house could not keep itself," one third of the kura and its yield shall belong to the Kubo and Tsuchida families together, "for as long as their hands brew in it." It says the lords of the house are bound by this. It says "my sons and theirs." It carries the lord's monogram and both seals.

"From this month, our third is gone. We continue."

Tsuru wrote that in 1920. I had carried that line in my notebook since December. Now I knew what the third was. It was this. It had been in the box under Kiyoshi's seal the whole time, under the silk, in the house of the family that had struck it out.

Ōokusama asked what I had found.

I said, "A letter of Tono-sama's. Very old." It was true. I put it back under the tray.

---

On 3 May 1947 the new Constitution took effect. Article fourteen ended the kazoku, the peerage. On the second of May he was Viscount Kazemori. On the third he was Mr. Kazemori. The same year, a long way west, a maharaja signed his state into India. I know that only because Rina told me. Two old houses, signing themselves into something ordinary.

What came with it was worse than the loss of a title. The capital levy of 1946 and 1947 took a large part of every big fortune in a single assessment, paid in cash, bonds or land. The land reform took the tenant farms. The Kazemori had land in eleven villages. By 1949 they had the residence, the kura, the paddock and some forest. In 1951 Tadanori gave the castle grounds to the city, and the family moved out of the residence and into the brewery house, a few steps from the door where my great-grandmother had kept the books.

My grandfather Kiyoshi had been steward since 1938. In the summer of 1947 there was no longer a household in the old sense to be steward of. He went to the residence with the seal in its box, knelt, and put it on the floor in front of Mr. Kazemori. He said the office was ended and the seal should go back to the house.

I have this from my father, who had it from Fumi, who was in the next room.

Tadanori looked at the box for some time. Then he pushed it back across the mat. He said, "Keep it as a brewer."

That is the whole story as my family tells it. It is told as a kindness, and it was one. A lord who had lost everything gave the last office of his house to the family that had served it. My father tells it with his hand flat on the table.

He said nothing about the third.

I have read the letter four times now. The seal box was Kiyoshi's. The letter was under the tray of the box. Who put it there? If it was Kiyoshi, then he knew, and he kept it, and he handed the box back to the lord with the letter inside it. And Tadanori pushed it back unopened, or opened. I do not know which. If it was Tadanori, before 1947, then he knew, and he gave my grandfather the box with his grandfather's promise hidden in it and called it a keepsake.

I do not know. I have tried each version at the press, at four in the morning, with my hands in the cotton bags. Each one is possible. None is proven. I will not write here what I do not know.

---

I did not sleep that night. I sat in the kura office with the letter in a clear folder on the desk and the lamp on. The new sake was settling in its tanks. You can hear nothing then. It is the quietest the kura is all year.

I thought about Tsuru on her stool for fifty years. About Yasuke, who refused the mortgage and lost his son for three years and never spoke of it. About my father's "gift" in 1962. About Ōokusama, who backed me in 2008 when the old men said no woman could brew in this kura. About Shachō, who is kind and overworked and did not do this.

I thought: if I raise it now, in March, the kura will feel it. The kurabito will feel it. Oda-san will feel it. We have sake in the tanks and two more presses to run, and then the hiire, and the summer. A house council in the middle of a brewing year is a storm in the middle of a ferment.

So I decided to finish the year. Then I would bring it. I wrote that down on the folder in pencil, with the date. So that I could not pretend later that I had forgotten.

---

The next week Shachō came to the kura office with his tablet and asked if I had time. He was writing his grandfather's entry among the historical figures of the house. He wanted it right.

He read me what he had. Born 1899. Oxford, Christ Church. Rowed in the eight in 1924. London, 1936. The last viscount. The castle grounds to the city. Tea scoops. The family moved into the brewery house. "He let go well," Shachō had written. I thought that was fair.

He asked about the seal. I told him the story as my family tells it. He typed it in nearly word for word. "Keep it as a brewer."

Then he added the seal to the heirloom collection. He photographed it on the office desk, on its silk. In the entry he wrote "Steward's seal, Kazemori household," and under the names, Tadanori's first and then Kiyoshi's beside it. He turned the tablet to show me. "Is that right?"

"Yes," I said. It was right. It was not all of it.

The letter was in the desk drawer by my knee, in its folder, with my pencil note. He did not ask, and I did not open the drawer. When he left I put the seal back in its box and the box back on the shelf. I left the space under the tray empty.

Chapter 10: A Tea Scoop Named "Late Snow"

The last press of the season ran on the eighth of April. After that the kura is scrubbed. Every tank, every hose, every board in the koji room, every bucket. Hot water, then cold, then hot. It takes nine days. The kurabito do it without being told, because they want to go home.

On the eighteenth Oda-san and his crew packed their bags into the back of the minibus. Rice planting in Ōkuradani waits for no one either. Oda-san bowed to my father, and then to me, a little less deep. That is correct. He said, "October." I said, "October." That is our whole farewell, every year. It is enough.

The kura is a different building when the men leave. It echoes. You can hear the canal through the north wall. My father still comes in at six and sits in the office. There is nothing to check. He checks it. On the last day of scrubbing he walked the length of the koji room in his socks, slowly, over the boards where his father buried the copper, and said the cedar smelled right. Then he went home for breakfast.

The cherries on the castle walls were late this year, then all at once. On the Sunday the town went up with mats and boxes. Sōta took photographs. Kaito counted the trees on the east wall, a hundred and twelve, and then the west wall, which he says has ninety-eight and one dead. Mio slept on the mat with her coat over her head. Her first season was over. I let her sleep.

---

The tea scoop is in a silk bag in the trunk, inside a narrow paulownia box no longer than my hand. A *chashaku*: a thin strip of bamboo, curved at one end, used to lift powdered tea from the caddy to the bowl. Inside the box the scoop lies in its bamboo tube. On the tube, in brush, is its name. *Zansetsu*. The snow that stays. In this house it has always been called Late Snow, and Ōokusama will tell you why. Below it, the carver's name and his monogram. Kazemori Tadanori.

He carved tea scoops from 1951 until he died. There are fourteen at the tea school. This one was in the trunk, which means he meant it for something else. I do not know what.

The bamboo has a mark near the bend, a pale patch where the skin of the cane was left on. That is the snow. It is very small. You have to be told it is there.

---

Okusama Yae opened the tea school in 1952, the year after the family moved into the brewery house. The teahouse, Kiun-an, was built that year at the back of the garden from timber out of the residence. Four and a half mats. A low door, the nijiriguchi, that you have to kneel to go through. That door is the point. Everyone goes through it the same way.

Before the war, tea in the Kazemori house was for guests of rank. Okusama Yae opened it to the townswomen. The pickle maker's wife. The wife of the man at the rice shop. The schoolteacher. My grandmother.

Fumi talks about her first lesson on the fifth tape. She was forty-two. She says, "I had served tea to Okusama for twenty years. Now she served it to me. I did not know where to put my hands."

Okusama Yae showed her. Hands on the knees. Bow to the bowl and say, "I receive your tea." Turn the bowl twice. Drink in three and a half sips. Admire the bowl. Put it down where it was given. "She was strict," my grandmother says. "With everyone the same. That was the kindness."

My first lesson was in 1983. I was seven. Okusama Yae, Ōokusama by then to everyone but my grandmother, was seventy-eight, and very straight. My grandmother took me through the garden in my school skirt and white socks. I was afraid of the low door. I thought I would get stuck.

Okusama Yae made the tea herself. She whisked it, turned the bowl, set it in front of me. I bowed too far and touched my forehead to the mat. She did not laugh. She waited. When I drank, she said, "Haru-chan. What does it taste of?"

I said, "Grass."

She said, "Good. That is correct." I have been trying to taste more than grass for forty-three years. Some days I can.

---

On the twenty-second of April, Ōokusama fell.

She was crossing from her room to the bath in the night and caught her foot on the edge of the tatami. Eriko found her at five. Her hip was broken. The ambulance came up the canal street without its siren, because Shachō asked. She was in Takayama for an operation that afternoon and stayed in the hospital for a month.

I visited on Tuesdays and Fridays. I brought her the newspaper, which she could not read, and sweet bean paste, which she was not allowed. We looked at photographs from the trunk on my phone. She named nothing new. She was tired. Some days she called me Fumi-san. I answered to it.

On the second Friday she was sharper. She held my wrist and said, "You found something in the seal box." Not a question.

The letter was at home, in the drawer with my pencil note. I had the words ready. I had said them to myself in the car. It would have taken a minute. She was eighty-six with a pin in her hip.

I thought of Tsuru's line. I thought of Okusama Yae, who thanked my grandmother by name after twenty years and then every day. I thought of this woman after Yae died in 1990, when she took over my lessons. I was fourteen and difficult. She never once let me skip the low door. She corrected my wrist every Thursday for five years and never raised her voice. On the last Thursday she gave me a bowl to keep.

I said, "An old letter of Tono-sama's. When you are home, we will look at it together."

She let go of my wrist. "Good," she said. "Not here. Hospitals are for bad news."

I do not know if that was the right choice. I know it was the one I made. I wrote it down on the folder that night, under the first note. Two pencil lines now, in two months.

---

Mio. Kaito. This is the one place in this chapter I am speaking to you.

When Ōokusama came home, I made her tea. In the ground-floor room, not in Kiun-an, because she cannot kneel yet. I used Late Snow. Eriko lent me a bowl.

I knew what the house had done to our family by then. Not all of it. Enough. And I served her properly. I warmed the bowl. I measured two scoops. I whisked until the foam was fine. I turned it twice and set it down in front of her.

That was not forgetting. I have not forgotten anything. It was choosing who I am in that room. You will be wronged by people you serve, or work with, or love. You can still do your work well in front of them. Then you decide, separately and in your own time, what to say about the wrong. Do not let the wrong decide how you pour the tea.

That is all.

---

Ōokusama came home on the twenty-fourth of May. Shachō put it on the family's events page a week ahead: "Mother home. Tea at four. Quiet, please." Twenty-two people said they would come. Eleven came, which was right for the room. Rina came from Kyoto on the early train.

The week before, Eriko added Okusama Yae's spring wagashi to the recipe keeper. It is a small sweet made with sake lees, white bean paste and a little salt, shaped like a closed bud. Yae used to make it in April from the first lees of the year. Eriko wrote the recipe out from her own memory and her mother-in-law's card, and under the steps she put, "The lees come from the Tsuchida press. Ask Haru-san for the second week's, not the first." That is true. The first week's are too sharp.

We made forty. Mio did the shaping. Ōokusama ate two, which was not allowed.

When everyone had gone, I washed Late Snow and dried it and put it back in its tube, its silk bag and its box. Ōokusama watched from her chair.

"He carved that the winter the castle went," she said. "He said the snow was late that year. It came after he had already said goodbye."

She closed her eyes. Outside, on the castle wall, the cherry trees had gone to green leaf. The pale patch on the bamboo was the only snow left in Kiriyama.

Chapter 11: Cooper's Notes from Gaia

We heat the sake once, tank by tank, through May. The word is hiire, putting in the fire, though nobody has lit one for it in my lifetime. There is a coil of old copper pipe, tinned inside, in a bath of hot water. It is the coil my grandfather buried under the koji room in 1943. The new sake runs through the coil, comes out at sixty-five degrees, and goes into the storage tanks to sleep through the summer.

Sixty-five. Not fifty-eight, which leaves the enzymes awake, and by August the sake goes flat and sweet. Not sixty-eight, which cooks it. I hang the thermometer on a wire hook at eye level. My father keeps his eye on me.

He sits on an upturned rice crate by the door. He is not supposed to be in the kura during hiire. The floor is wet and he is eighty-five, eighty-six in two weeks. He comes anyway. He says nothing. When the needle touches sixty-six he coughs once.

"I see it," I said.

"I know you see it. I am coughing."

Oda-san and the others had gone home to Ōkuradani to plant. The kura was four people and an old man on a crate. Mio carried the hoses. We did tank nine on Monday and tanks ten to twelve on Tuesday. The steam smelled of pears and wet concrete. Kaito, home with a cold, counted hoses from the doorway.

---

The object for this month is not from the trunk. It is from my father's desk drawer in the kura office, where it lay under his seal and a box of toothpicks for sixty-seven years.

A school exercise book with a blue cover. The stationer printed the year on the front: 1958. My father wrote his name below it in brush. Forty-eight pages, all used, some from both ends. Japanese in hard pencil, very small, to save paper. Above many of the lines, in a softer pencil, a word in Portuguese. *Aduela.* Stave. *Arco.* Hoop. *Tanoeiro.* Cooper. *Pipa.* A cask, he notes, of about 550 liters. *Carvalho.* Oak.

There are drawings. A stave in cross section with the bevel angle marked. A hoop driver with its length in centimeters. A cask on its side with arrows for the way the wine moves in it in summer. On page nineteen: "A small fire inside the cask. Not to burn it. To bend it." On page thirty: "Senhor Abílio does not measure. He knows. I measure."

I asked if I could put the notebook in this book. He said it was already in a book.

---

In 1958 Waka-sama Tadatsugu was twenty. His father, the last viscount, was in the brewery house carving tea scoops. The business of the kura had passed to the son.

Our storage tanks then were cedar. Big round tanks, bound with split bamboo, made by a tank maker in Takayama who was seventy-four and had no apprentice. Enamel tanks were coming in everywhere. They were cheaper and they did not leak. Waka-sama did not want enamel. He wanted someone in Kiriyama who understood wood: how it breathes, how it swells, how to mend it when it splits in a dry spring. Our tanks are straight-staved and bound with bamboo. Theirs were bent with fire and bound with iron. My father says the wood is the same animal. There was no one in Japan who would take a boy from Hida for a season. So he looked further.

A trading house in Kobe shipped port wine to the hotels. A letter went from Kobe to a wine lodge in Vila Nova de Gaia, across the river from Porto. A letter came back in English. My father has it by heart. "Send the boy for one season. He will sweep."

The boy was my father. He was the brewer's son, seventeen, eighteen on the ship, out of high school in March. His uncle, Kubo Shigeru, who was toji, said a season away from rice would ruin him. My grandfather Kiyoshi said nothing and found him a suitcase. It took Waka-sama four months and a letter from the prefecture to get him a passport. Nobody went abroad for a season in 1958 without a reason written on government paper. My grandmother Fumi sewed banknotes into the lining of his coat. He found them in the Indian Ocean.

He sailed from Kobe in late April, when brewing was done. Hong Kong, Singapore, Colombo, Suez, Genoa, Lisbon. Thirty-eight days. He counted them. Then the train north to Porto.

The lodge in Gaia was long and dark and smelled of oak and old wine. The coopers worked at one end under high windows. The cellar master was Senhor Valverde, a cousin of the family that owned the quinta upriver. The family made the wine. He made it last. He gave the Japanese boy a broom. He gave him also his own son, Rui, who was ten, because Rui had learned some English at school and my father had learned some English at school. Between them they had about forty words.

Rui taught my father the parts of a cask by hitting them with a stick. My father taught Rui to count to one hundred in Japanese. Rui can still do it. He is seventy-eight.

My father swept for three weeks. Then he was allowed to carry staves. In July he was allowed to hold a hoop while Senhor Abílio, the master cooper, drove it down. In August he was allowed to light the small fire.

---

In September they went upriver by train to Pinhão for the harvest. The Douro valley is terraced from the river to the sky, in stone walls on gray schist, the way our hills are terraced for rice, except there is no water anywhere. My father had never seen land so dry used so hard. He wrote: "Forty-one degrees. No snow is expected."

The grapes were trodden at night in the lagares, the stone treading tanks, men in a line with their arms over each other's shoulders, stepping in time. My father was put in the line on the third night because someone was sick. He went in at ten and came out at four. His legs were purple to the knee for a week.

At the end of the harvest someone poured him a glass of new wine. He did not like it. He drank it. That night he wrote one line in the notebook that is not about casks: "The river is the wrong color." It is the only time in forty-eight pages that he says he was homesick. He does not say it that way.

He came home in November in time for the steaming, with the notebook, a hoop driver that Senhor Abílio gave him, a bad sunburn, and his forty Portuguese words. Shigeru looked at his hands and said they had gone soft. They had not.

In January 1959 a crate came from Gaia. Twelve bottles of port and a card in Rui's schoolboy English. A crate has come every New Year since. Kaito has counted them: sixty-eight. My father opens the first bottle on the second of January, pours a small glass for the kamidana, glasses for the family, and his own last, which he drinks standing.

The cedar tanks lasted until 1979. My father kept them alive for twenty years with what he learned in Gaia. Then the tank maker's grandson started making them again, and we have two new ones.

I asked him once what port and sake have in common. He said wine is made by the weather and sake is made in spite of it. I think both are made by people who are good at waiting, and both can be ruined by one hot week.

---

In 1962 Waka-sama made the brewery a company. He called my father, twenty-two, to the omoya and gave him a document. Fifteen percent of the shares, in my grandfather Kiyoshi's name, to pass down our line.

"A gift," my father says, every time it comes up. "He was my friend. We rode the horse together. He gave it to my family because he was my friend."

I have known since March what was promised in 1872. One third. Fifteen is not thirty-three. I said I would finish the brewing year before I said anything. It was June. The sake was in the tanks. I said nothing.

---

Sōta spent two evenings on the 1958 journey. He drew the globe journey arc from Kiriyama to Kobe, Kobe to Lisbon, Lisbon to Porto, and the short line up the river to Pinhão, then the long line home. My father watched over his shoulder.

"Not Aden," he said. "We did not stop at Aden."

Sōta took Aden out.

On the ninth of June, my father's birthday, Rui's voice message came in the morning with its transcript underneath. Rui spoke in Portuguese for a minute. Then he counted to ten in Japanese. The transcript did not know what to do with that and wrote it as a list of small Portuguese words. My father read it three times and laughed.

He answered slowly, in the Portuguese of 1958, holding the phone too far from his mouth. "Obrigado, Rui. The casks are good. The boy is old." Kaito says he paused nine times.

Then he put the phone down, put the notebook back in the drawer under his seal, and walked out to look at tank nine. It was at fourteen degrees and perfectly quiet. He looked at it anyway.

Chapter 12: Tea in Lisbon

The rainy season came on the twelfth of June. In the kura that means the tanks sit closed at fourteen degrees and I walk round them twice a day with a flashlight and a notebook. Nothing happens. I write down that nothing happened. The mold on the north wall of the koji room comes back every year. Mio scrubs it.

Shachō came to the kura office on a Thursday with his umbrella dripping on my father's floor. There was a heritage conference in Lisbon at the end of October. He had been asked to speak about the castle and the tea school. Rina was going to speak about the armor.

"Come with us," he said.

I said the rice. It would be in by then, and the kurabito.

"Oda-san can count the rice. Your father can watch him count." Then he said the thing he had clearly practiced on the walk over. "Come because you are writing it down."

My father, who was not supposed to be listening, said, "Go."

When he had gone I sat with the tanks. He was right. I could not write it down and keep the letter in a drawer. I turned to a clean page in the notebook I keep for this book. I wrote the date of the 1872 letter at the top. Under it, Tsuru's line. Under that: "Shachō. After Obon. Before the rice comes in."

So I went to Lisbon, at the end of October, with the new rice in and the polishing machine running. It was my first time in Europe. I was fifty years old and had never been farther than Seoul. I put it here, out of its month, because June is when I said yes.

---

The object for this chapter is small. A conference badge on a blue cord. White card in a plastic sleeve. It has my name in capitals, and under it: KAZEMORI SHUZŌ, TOJI.

I looked at everyone's badge for two days. That is what you do when you do not speak the language. Countess. Director. Archivist. Trustee. Head of Collections. I was the only person in the building labeled by trade.

I did not mind. I wore it straight. Rina said it was the best badge there and that she was going to steal it. She has not. It is on the corkboard above my desk.

---

The venue was an old building in Belém by the river, stone, with a cloister. It was as warm as September in Kiriyama, and much drier. I thought of my father's line: "No snow is expected." On the first morning I stood on the riverbank and looked at the water. It was the wrong color. I understood him better.

The talks were long. Shachō's was clear and short and the room liked him. He showed a slide of the 1994 keep, and a slide of the stone walls that had stood there without a keep for a hundred and twenty years, and said the walls were the more honest building. Rina showed the lacquered armor from Tadamasa's succession in 1858 and explained that it had never been worn in battle and that she was very glad. People laughed.

At the tea break on the second afternoon there was a long table with urns. Rina went for green tea and found a box of bags. She held one up like evidence.

A young woman beside her, in a linen shirt with her sleeves rolled up, was pouring milk into hers. Rina watched the milk go in. The woman watched Rina watch.

"You have an opinion," the woman said.

"It is not an opinion. It is a crime."

The woman's badge said TARA SINGH, KESARMER. She was a veterinarian, she said, not a historian. Her family had a hotel in a palace and a trunk of photographs nobody had labeled, and her cousin had written a book about it, and she had come to Lisbon because she was in Europe for a conference on camel diseases and her aunt had told her to.

Within ten minutes they were arguing about whether chai is tea. Tara said tea boiled with milk and ginger and cardamom and too much sugar is the most honest drink on earth, because it does not pretend to be anything. Rina said whisked matcha does not pretend either, it simply has standards. Tara said standards were how you made people feel bad about milk. They were both laughing. I drank my coffee and said nothing. Toji do not take sides in tea.

Then Tara asked where we were from. Rina said Kiriyama, in the Hida mountains. Tara put her cup down.

"There was a mare," she said. "Bhim Singh's book. He kept the bloodlines in a cloth book, all in his hand. There is one mare with a line drawn out of the page and the word Japan. Chandrika. I used to think it was a story."

I said, "She lived behind our kura until 1955. My father rode her. So did Waka-sama, when they were not allowed."

Tara looked at me, then at my badge. "Your family had her?"

"My grandfather fed her. Your stable manager wrote to him eleven times about jaggery."

She laughed so hard she had to sit down. Then she asked if there were photographs. I said there was one, of my grandfather in my grandmother's coat, holding her head in the snow. Ōokusama had named him at Obon. That night I sent it to Tara with his name under it.

They exchanged numbers, Rina and Tara. Rina says they send each other photographs of tea. It is a friendship. That is all it needs to be.

---

On the second evening there was a reception. A tall man with white hair came across the room to Shachō and asked, in careful English, whether there was a Tsuchida in the party.

I said I was a Tsuchida.

"Isamu," he said. "The boy with the broom."

He was Rui's nephew, a Valverde of the lodge side, and he had been told to find us. He shook my hand with both of his. He introduced me to a woman from the house of the quinta, small and quick, who was hosting a dinner the next night and who said my father's name as if it were a password. Shachō looked at me sideways. In Lisbon, my father opened more doors than the castle did.

I did not go to the dinner. I had a talk to listen to and a headache from the flight. Shachō went. He said it was very long and very good and that he had been made to try four ports and could not tell them apart. I told him not to say that to my father.

---

On the last morning I sat in the cloister because it was the only quiet place. A woman sat down at the other end of the bench, older than me but not by much, in a gray dress, with reading glasses on a chain. Her badge said HIRUT TESFAYE, ADDIS ABABA. She was reading the program and not enjoying it.

She looked at my badge for a long time. Then she said, "You are not of the family."

"No. My family served them."

"For how long?"

"Five generations. Since 1871."

She took her glasses off. "I have been asked to write my family's history," she said. "Some of the people who should help me were not treated well by my family. I do not know how to ask them. How does a family that served a house write that house's history?"

I could have said many things. I could have said loyalty and the rice and the snow. I had a whole book of it.

What I said was: "In March I found a letter from 1872. The lord promised my family one third of the brewery for as long as we brewed. Fifty years later his son took it away. My great-grandmother wrote one line about it in her account book. For a hundred years nobody in my family said it aloud. In August the head of the house read it to both families, wrote it into the house's records, and gave the third back." I stopped. "I have never said it to a stranger. Until now."

She did not say she was sorry. She put her glasses back on and looked at me over them.

"Then you must write that part first," she said.

She went in to the next session. I sat on the bench for some time. I had been writing this book in the order the year came.

---

On the plane I did not sleep. Somewhere over Central Asia I took out the notebook and turned back to my first chapter. Near the start I added a warning that not all of it was carried willingly. That was as near to first as I could put it.

Then I slept.

Kaito had followed us the whole weekend from home. When I got back to Kiriyama he had dropped a map pin on the building in Belém and written beside it, "Mother was here, 3 days, 2 talks, 1 headache." Sōta had added, "Tea argument: unresolved."

A week later, at the kura office, a voice message came from Liya, with its transcript underneath. One sentence.

"Thank you for telling me the hard part first."

I played it twice. My father, at the other desk, asked who it was. I said a woman I met on a bench. He said, "Good," and went out to look at the rice.

Chapter 13: Lanterns for Obon

Obon in Kiriyama falls in mid-August. The kura is closed and hot. The tanks are at fifteen degrees inside their jackets, and I check them at six in the morning before the town wakes, because after nine the street smells of ayu, sweetfish from the river, grilled on skewers, and I lose my concentration.

On the thirteenth we wash the graves. That is the rule in my family. The thirteenth, early, before the heat. A bucket, a brush, a stiff cloth, a bundle of incense, a bunch of chrysanthemums from the morning market, and a bottle of our own sake, the cheap one, because the dead in my family would be offended by the expensive one.

Kōun-ji sits on the hill above the station. The temple graveyard is in terraces. The Kazemori graves are on the upper terrace, behind a low fence; the oldest are five-tiered gorintō, the newer ones plain shafts, with the crest cut into each. The household graves are on the lower terrace. Ours are there, and the graves of the Kubo who settled in the town, and those of the families who kept the house's horses and gardens and kitchens.

I will say this once and then not again. Above and below. Even in the ground.

It is not said with bitterness. It is how the hill was laid out. I have washed both terraces since I was nine.

---

The object for this chapter is Yasuke's grave marker. My great-grandfather. The second steward.

It is a plain granite stone, about the height of my waist. The family name is cut in the front: Tsuchida. On the side, the names of the dead in that grave, with their dates. Yasuke's is the third line. 1868 to 1944. His posthumous Buddhist name is long and I cannot read all of it without the priest. Below his, Tsuru's. 1874 to 1951.

The stone was cut in 1945. Granite was not to be had during the war, or carvers. The old stone had been the small stone of Gonbei's time, and Tsuru had Yasuke's name added to a new one the year after he died, when the war had ended and there was a carver again and almost nothing to pay him with. Her account book says what she paid. It was the price of a month of rice.

I wash the stone with water from the shrine spring. I carry it up in a plastic bottle. My father thinks this is sentimental. He carries his own bottle.

That afternoon Kaito made the cucumber horse and the eggplant ox for the Bon shelf, so the dead come quickly and leave slowly. He gave the horse six legs. He says it is faster.

I wash from the top down. I scrub the moss out of the carved characters with a toothbrush. Yasuke's name always has moss in the second character, and I always get it out, and by next August it is back.

---

Ōokusama came home from the hospital in May and did not like it. She was eighty-six, she had a pin in her hip, and she had to use a stick. She called the stick "the new retainer." By July she had stopped using it inside. By Obon she was walking to the tea house and back each morning with Eriko half a step behind, pretending not to be.

On the eleventh she sent for me. Not for the trunk. The trunk had stood in her room since October, and it had been sitting there closed since her fall. She asked me to open it again.

There were thirty-one photographs left in the box with no names. I had put them in an envelope marked with a question mark. She went through them one at a time, slowly, holding each one close to the lamp.

She named twenty-six. The Bon dance of 1956. The kura roof being mended after the snow of 1963. Okusama Yae with the first tea students, all in a row, my grandmother Fumi on the far end with her hands folded. A boy on the castle wall she said was the stationer's son, who went to Brazil.

Then she held up a print I had looked at many times. A woman in winter clothes, standing in the paddock behind the kura, holding a horse's head. Snow on the ground. Snow on the horse.

"That is not a woman," Ōokusama said. "That is your grandfather. Kiyoshi-san. In Fumi-san's coat, because his was wet. And that is the mare."

Chandrika. Bay, nearly black against the snow, with snow on her back and her ears turned toward whoever held the camera. Kiyoshi was holding her headcollar with one hand and, now that I looked properly, eating something with the other.

"Who took it?" I asked.

"Otōsama. My father-in-law. He liked that horse more than he liked most people." She put it down. "Who is that?"

At the right edge of the photograph, cut by the frame, was half of a man. A shoulder, an arm in a work jacket, and the side of a face. He was laughing. Not smiling. Laughing so hard his eyes had shut.

She looked at it for a long time.

"I do not know," she said. "I should. I don't." She turned it over. Nothing on the back. "Something was very funny."

I put it in the envelope with the question mark. There were five left.

---

She did not give me back the envelope at once. She held it on her lap and looked at the lamp.

"When I was a young wife," she said, "the first year, perhaps 1961, I was in the kitchen of this house. The women were talking. The older ones. Someone said something about a third. 'The Tsuchida third.' And someone else said, 'Hush.' And they talked about the weather."

She was speaking quietly. Her hearing makes her speak too loudly, usually. Not that evening.

"I knew it meant something. I was twenty-one and new and I did not ask. Afterward I did not ask because it had been too long. Then I did not ask because I was afraid of the answer." She looked at me. "You have found something. You have been carrying it since March. You walk differently."

I had not told anyone. Not Sōta. Not my father. Rina knew there was a lacquer box and that I had taken a document from it to copy. Nobody knew what it said.

I said, "Yes."

"Is it bad?"

"It is a letter. From Tono-sama Tadamasa. 1872. And a line in Tsuru's book."

She nodded slowly. "Bring them to Tadahiro," she said. "Not to me. I am old and I forget things. He is the head of the house. Bring them to him." Then: "And tell him I said so."

She handed back the envelope.

---

The Bon dance is on the fifteenth in the castle square, under the stone walls. Lanterns on wires, a drum on a tower of scaffolding, a recording of the Kiriyama dance song played too loudly through speakers that were new in 1990. The dance goes in a circle round the tower, slow, with the same twelve steps over and over, until midnight.

Mio danced in a cotton yukata of her grandmother Kazuko's, indigo with white bush clover. It is too short in the sleeves for her. She danced for three hours. Her friends from school danced beside her and two of the young kurabito from Ōkuradani, who had come down for Obon, danced behind them very badly and very seriously.

I did not dance. I never have. I stood by the drum tower with Sōta and held Mio's bag and a paper cup of barley tea. My mother used to dance every year until she was seventy-five. She knew the old verses of the song, the ones that are not on the recording. Nobody wrote them down.

Kaito counted the circuits. He says forty-four.

---

On the morning of the sixteenth, before we sent the dead back with the lanterns on the river, I logged the visit in the sacred places watch. A photograph of the lower terrace, washed, the flowers in, smoke from the incense going sideways in the wind. In the note I named each grave on our row, left to right, with the names of everyone in it. It took me forty minutes. It was the first time anyone had written all of them in one place.

Shachō had put the Obon gathering on the family's events page in July: graves at seven on the thirteenth, the meal at the omoya on the fourteenth, the lanterns on the sixteenth. Under it, in the list of who would come, there were twenty-three names. Kazemori and Tsuchida and Kubo, mixed, in the order people had answered.

That evening we went down to the river. I lit a paper lantern for Yasuke and one for my mother. I set them on the water. Yasuke's went straight. My mother's turned in a circle twice, near the bank, and then went after his.

Chapter 14: The Third

At the end of August the kura is empty. The tanks are full but the room is empty: no steam, no kurabito, no radio. The koshiki is upside down on its frame to dry. The koji room door is propped open with a brick so the cedar can breathe. You can hear the canal through the wall. In winter you cannot hear anything through that wall but the boiler.

I like it best like this. I have never told anyone that.

On the twenty-fourth I put three things in a cloth bag and walked across the yard to the omoya. The 1872 letter, in a folder of acid-free card that Rina had made for it without asking what it was. Tsuru's account book for 1920, with a paper strip at the page. And my own copy of both, typed, in case my hands shook. They did not.

---

Shachō was in his office at the back of the omoya with the window open and a fan going. He had papers from the city board on his desk. He moved them.

I said, "Ōokusama said to bring you this. And to tell you she said so."

I gave him the folder first. He read the letter twice. It is not long. Tadamasa's hand is a clear running script, upright for a cursive. He promised one third of the kura and its yield to the families of Tsuchida Gonbei and Kubo Sennosuke, "for as long as their hands brew in it." He signed it with his monogram and sealed it twice, with the house seal and his own.

Then I gave him the account book. I opened it to the strip. He read Tsuru's line. "From this month, our third is gone. We continue."

He did not say anything for a while. The fan turned left and right.

"My great-grandfather," he said.

"Yes."

"Because Yasuke-san would not mortgage the kura."

"Yes. And the stipend was cut. And my grandfather was sent to Tokyo."

He nodded. He put both hands flat on the desk on either side of the book, not touching it. Then he said, "Thank you for bringing it to me before anyone else." It was true. Nobody else had read it.

---

The house council met on the thirtieth in the main room of the omoya. It is not a grand thing. It has met since 1962, when the brewery became a company, once a year, to agree the accounts and anything else. Ōokusama at the head, on a zaisu, a cushion with a back. Shachō had put her there and sat beside her. I noticed. Eriko. Rina, who came up from Kyoto. Takumi on a laptop from Tokyo, his face too large on the screen. From our side: my father, and me. Sōta and the children waited in the kitchen. Sōta made tea for them and then for everyone.

Shachō read the letter aloud. Then he read Tsuru's line aloud. Then he said what he had found that week in the Tokyo papers that were moved to the dozō in 1944, in Tadaaki's hand, about the letter of 1872. "A courtesy of my father's, not a contract."

Nobody spoke.

Then Ōokusama spoke, too loudly, as she does now. She told the council what she had told me. 1961. The kitchen. "The Tsuchida third." "Hush." She said, "I was a young wife and I did not ask. Later I was the old wife and I still did not ask. That is my part of this. I want it written down."

My father had not known. I had not told him. I had decided the council should tell him, because it was the house's to tell. I am not sure I was right. He sat very still with his hands on his knees. He looked at the letter on the low table but he did not pick it up.

There was no speech. Shachō said what he would do, and asked if the council agreed, and it did.

He would write it into the records. Into Tadaaki's entry among the historical figures of the house, plainly: "He broke his father's word to the Kubo and Tsuchida families." And the Tsuchida share in the company would go from fifteen percent to one third, from the start of the next brewing year, in October. Recorded "in settlement of the promise of 1872." Not called a gift. The accountant said later that it could not be called a gift in any case. A gift is taxed. A settlement is a settlement.

Takumi asked about the Kubo family. Shachō said the Kubo line had married into ours, through Fumi, and the Kubo who remain in Ōkuradani would be asked, and he would go himself. My father said, "Oda-san is a Kubo on his mother's side." Nobody in the room had known that. I had not known that.

That was the council. It took fifty minutes. Then we had the tea.

---

After the others left, Shachō opened the family office on his laptop at the low table and found Tadaaki's entry. Rina had written it in December: the power plant, the library, the House of Peers, the debts. There was a line at the end that I had asked her to leave space for. "What it cost below: to follow."

He typed the sentence. He typed the date of the council and the settlement. He read it back to himself. Then he turned the screen so I could see it, and waited, and I nodded, and he saved it. It went into the house's records under Tadaaki's name, where anyone in the family who looks him up will find it beside the library.

That night I wrote a memoir entry. It is short. I wrote what time the council began and what time it ended, who sat where, what Ōokusama said, the sound of the fan, and that my father did not pick up the letter.

---

My father did not speak the next day. He came to the kura office at seven as always. He did not read the paper. He looked at tank nine. He went home at noon.

The day after, he came to the kura step, where I was cleaning the boots, and sat down beside me.

"Waka-sama knew," he said. "That is why he gave it. Fifteen. It was all the company could stand in 1962. He never said it was owed. He would have had to say why." He looked at the yard. "I thanked him for a gift for fifty years. He let me. That was hard for him also, I think."

Then he said, "My mother knew. My father knew. Nobody told me."

"Nobody told me either," I said. "I read it."

He nodded. "Good," he said. "Somebody had to read it."

---

What cannot be set right I will put down here, so it is not left out.

Yasuke lived twenty-four years after 1920 and was never told he had been right. He kept the books of a house that had cut his pay in half and sent his son away. Kiyoshi was sent away at seventeen for three years and came home a different person; Fumi said so on the tape. Tsuru kept the books at the doorway of a kura she was not allowed into, with a line in them she did not explain to anyone. The money of a hundred and six years is not coming back, and nobody at the council pretended it would. And the apology Yasuke did not get, he will not get.

On the first of September I went up to Kōun-ji alone and stood at his stone. I did not wash it. It had been washed two weeks before. I said aloud what the council had done. I said it in the plain way. Then I did not say anything else, because he would not have wanted me to make a speech.

---

I will put my own story beside his, because they are the same story at different temperatures.

In 1998 I was twenty-two. I tied on a hachimaki and went into the kura in November to work the season. Kubo blood, Tsuchida name, a toji's daughter. Two of the old kurabito from Ōkuradani went home. One said a woman in the kura would sour the moromi. The other did not say anything, which was worse. My father did not stop me and did not help me. He let me carry rice for ten years.

In 2008, when he was ready to stop, the elders of the brewers' association told Waka-sama that the kura could not have a woman toji. Waka-sama listened politely and said he would think about it. Then Ōokusama, who had said nothing at all for ten years, said one sentence at dinner, in front of all of them.

"Tsuru-san kept this kura's books from the doorway for fifty years, and none of you would be here without them."

I have been toji since that spring.

Tsuru stood at the doorway in 1924 and I walked through it in 1998. That doorway was a hundred years closing. Tonight it is closed. The kura is empty and cool and I am on the step with the boots, and the canal is loud through the wall.

Chapter 15: Cold Autumn Sake

The sugidama over the kura door is brown again. We hung it green in March, a ball of cedar sprigs the size of a child's head. It went pale in May, tan in July, and now it is the color of tea that has stood too long. That is the sign. The sake that slept through the summer is ready.

Hiyaoroshi is sake heated once, in May, not twice, and sent out cold in autumn. We ship it on the ninth of September, Chōyō, the chrysanthemum day, when most of the kura in Japan open their hiyaoroshi. Four hundred and eighty bottles this year, in wooden crates, on a small truck to the station. Mio loaded it. Kaito counted it. My father stood at the gate with his hands behind his back, the way his grandfather Yasuke stood in the one photograph we have of him.

On the twentieth of October the kurabito come back from Ōkuradani, when their own rice is in. The rice comes the same week. Fifty bags. I will count them silently. At the end of that month I go to Lisbon with Shachō and Rina. When I am home I will write that weekend into the June chapter, where he asked me.

---

The trunk is empty.

It is in Ōokusama's room, open, with the lid against the wall and the "Not Wanted on Voyage" label facing out. Rina relined it in August with acid-free paper. The photographs are in archival boxes on the shelf above, nine boxes, in order of year where we know the year. The letters are in folders. Tsuru's books are in the dozō again, in a box of their own. The tea scoop is in the tea house. The seal is in its case. The 1872 letter is with the house's papers, and a copy is with ours.

Every one of the nine hundred and six photographs has a name under it, or a question mark. There are four question marks left. One is the laughing man.

---

I want to write down what was lost, so that it is counted.

My mother, Kazuko, sang while she worked. The old verses of the Kiriyama dance song, and work songs from the paddies, and songs her mother sang in the kitchen of the nagaya that had no names. I heard them every day for forty-five years. She died in February 2021, during the second winter of masks, and we did not record one. I can hum three. I am not sure the words are right.

Kubo Tōkichi brewed through the war on rationed rice. He made sake out of almost nothing for eight seasons and kept the kura alive. He wrote nothing down. My father says Shigeru learned from him by watching and that some of what he did, with the koji in the coldest years, nobody has been able to do since.

Yasuke's voice. We have his handwriting, his seal, his grave. Nobody living remembers him speaking. My father was four when he died and remembers only that he smelled of camphor.

And whatever was so funny, in the paddock behind the kura, in the snow, with Kiyoshi in Fumi's coat and the mare's ears turned toward the camera.

---

And I want to write down what we did, plainly, so that you know what it was.

Shachō put the house and our family into one private family network, and everyone in it has a role, and mine was keeper of records. We named the faces. We put the places on the map. My father recorded the evacuation winter and the persimmon, and said on the recording that it was all right to keep it, and said who it was for. We chose who each memory was for, and some of them will wait. We wrote down Tsuru's koji temperatures under her name. And we wrote the wrong beside the kindnesses, in the house's own records, under the name of the man who did it.

That is all. It took one brewing year. It should have been done a hundred years ago, a little at a time, by people who were there.

---

On the twentieth Shachō came to the kura in the evening. I was sitting on the step with a cup of the hiyaoroshi, which I do once a year and not again. He sat down on the step below me. That has never happened.

He asked how the year had been. I said the rice was good, the shubo for tank four had been slow, the moromi had been fine, and hiire had been sixty-five degrees every time but once.

He said that was not what he meant.

I said I knew.

We sat. The canal was loud. The town was getting its autumn smell, of burning rice straw from the paddies.

"Ōokusama wants to give you the key," he said. "The trunk key. She says it should not go back in the obi drawer."

"Where does she want it?"

"She will tell you herself. She likes to."

I poured him a cup. He drank it and said it was good and that he could not tell it apart from last year's. I said not to tell my father.

When he stood up to go I said, "Good night, Tadahiro-san."

He stopped on the step. He did not turn round. Then he said, "Good night, Haru-san," and went across the yard.

I had called him Shachō since he took over the company, and Botchan before that, behind his back, and as a child I called him nothing at all, because my grandmother said a brewer's girl did not call the son of the house anything, and I took her literally. I am not sure what it means. I think it means we are colleagues. I think that is a good thing for a house to have.

---

Mio. Kaito.

This is the only letter in this book. It is short.

First. The house was kept by many hands. The lords are in the photographs. The rest of us are at the edge, holding the coats, the horse, the oars, the account book. Look at the edges. Write down the names.

Second. What is given to you in trust, you answer with work. Gonbei did. Tsuru did. Your grandfather did. And when trust is broken, the answer is not to break something back. It is the truth, written down where it will be found, by the people who should find it. It may take a hundred years. Write it down anyway.

Third. Ask now. Ask your grandfather while he is in the kura office every morning. Ask Ōokusama while she still knows the faces before 1965. Ask about the hard parts. The easy parts will be told at weddings. The hard parts are told once, quietly, to whoever asks, and then never again.

---

Last week I recorded a message for each of you, to open later. Kaito's is for when he is twenty, and is mostly numbers, because he will like that. Mio's is for when she is twenty-five. There is a third, for Mio's first season as toji, whenever that is. I do not know what will be true then. I said what I know now about the koji room at three in the morning, and that she should listen to Oda-san's grandson, whoever he is by then, and that she should count the rice out loud if she wants to. I counted silently to be different from my father. She does not need to be different from me.

For the last week of the brewing year Rina set the weekly family question. She attached the half of the photograph from the paddock: the shoulder, the arm, the shut eyes.

"Who is this, and what were they laughing at?"

There are eleven answers so far. None is right. Kaito says it was Chandrika, because she was eating Kiyoshi's lunch. That is my favorite.

---

On the last evening of September Ōokusama walked to the kura with Eriko half a step behind her. She had the key on its cord in her hand. It was warm from her hand.

She did not give it to me. She asked me to lift her to the kamidana, the god shelf above the kura door, inside, where the new rope and the white paper go every New Year. I did not lift her. I brought the step stool and held her elbow.

She hung the key on the nail at the end of the shelf, beside the sakaki branch. A god shelf is not for keys. Nobody said so.

"There," she said. "It belongs to the brewing."

Then she let me help her down, and looked up at the sugidama, brown over the door, and said it would be green again in March.

It will. I will be here.

Mother.