this noise and bustle went no farther than Kototoi. The teashops disappeared once the embankment split off from the river and turned away from the Chōmeiji Temple corner toward Shirahige Shrine. There the visitors were people of taste, come to enjoy the blossoms in peace. With paddies on the right, and on the left that long, marshy stretch of reeds, the gay flower-viewing pandemonium faded away.
The Shigure Teahouse, an elegant inn and restaurant, had been built there among the reeds. The inn-restaurant combination was still unfamiliar in those days, although no one was likely to complain if a restaurant guest somewhere spent the night. A sign to the left of the embankment announced, “This way to Shigure Teahouse.” If you went down there, you came to a tasteful, wattled gate with the name “Shigure Teahouse” written in white letters on natural wood, hanging above it in a formal frame. From there a winding path cut through the reeds led you to the teahouse itself, with its thick, thatched roof.
From the outside the place looked like a farmhouse, but the inside was done in a luxurious sukiya style of restrained elegance. There were eight tatami-floored rooms, large and small. Behind the main building stood four smart annexes. No meat figured on the menu, nor sea fish; only loach, carp, whitebait, and other small fish caught in the Sumida River itself. The closing dish to every meal was chazuke, green tea over rice, served here with clams brought in from Kuwana on the Ise coast, and prepared in the shigure style, boiled down in tamari soy sauce and flavored with ginger and pepper. Those clams were Oriku’s pride. She had them sent once a month from Kuwana, and she made sure they were of a quality unavailable anywhere else in Tokyo.
Shinkichi had tasted them, too. The shigure clams, as big as your thumb, were served on freshly cooked rice, sprinkled with flaked nori seaweed. You could eat them just like that, or you could pour tea over them and turn the dish into a rich, clean-tasting chazuke.
Shinsuke had eaten that sort of chazuke at Kuwana as well, but the clams there kept getting smaller with the years, until overharvesting made them harder and harder to find. The clams at Oriku’s Shigure Teahouse, however, were famous among all those who came from afar to enjoy the pleasures of Mukōjima, and her extraordinary success in so isolated a spot shows just how delicious they were.
“People nowadays don’t even know what good food is anymore. They have saké with some tuna sashimi, then some shrimp tempura with their rice, and they think they’ve eaten well. I don’t care how good all that may be, you can’t eat sashimi and tempura three days in a row. At my place, though,” she declared proudly, “you can eat clam chazuke three hundred and sixty-six days of the year and never get tired of it.” It was just like the irrepressible Oriku to add an extra day to the year’s regular three hundred and sixty-five.
“And that,” she went on, “is why people come from everywhere to enjoy it. Statesmen, industrialists, kabuki actors, samisen masters—they all used to come. Everyone who’d had their fill of fancy cuisine.”
Her pride swelled visibly as she spoke. The wealthy, the powerful, the idly elegant: her Shigure Teahouse attracted the cream of them all. When you poured hot tea over those big, beautiful clams—still sizeable despite the boiling-down process they had been through—resting on their bed of warm, cooked rice, they would plump up again, delicate, succulent, bursting with flavor, color, and fragrance.
“Eating shigure clams at Kuwana is what got me into this business. I was amazed. I could never have started up this restaurant if I hadn’t known that taste. There are more than enough restaurants in this world already, and you get nowhere if you don’t try something different. At the time I’d decided not to make my move until I’d found a signature dish, something people would talk about. So those clams that time in Kuwana were, as they say, like the Buddha turning up in hell—they were a friend in need.” She was extremely grateful to those clams.
Until Oriku set up her restaurant she had run a Yoshiwara establishment named the Silver Flower. In short, she had been a brothel madam. This is what she had to say about that.
“I was on my way to becoming a courtesan, you know. I was born a long way from here. I may look like a native of Edo, but actually I’m from the country, from Kōzuke Province. I was sold to the Silver Flower when I was eighteen. I’m an old woman now, as you see, but in those days I was just too pretty to be a farmer’s daughter. Don’t laugh! It’s true, it’s true!”
“You still are, you know.”
“Oh no, I’m not! People can flatter me all they like, but when I sit in front of the mirror, the truth is there to see. That’s all there is to it. In my late teens, though, I had a small, neat figure, with bright eyes and a cute nose. My family was so poor they sold me off to the Yoshiwara, and when I got there I was as naive as you can imagine. They couldn’t just set me on my own, entertaining customers, so the owner and his wife had me stay in their own room at first and do the chores, to learn a bit of the business.”
Soon enough the owner took a liking to Oriku and more or less raped her; and since the rules strictly forbade a brothel owner to carry on with one of the women of the house, she never became a prostitute at all. Instead she ended up as the owner’s mistress.
“His wife was jealous, you know. I myself had no idea what to do, but he was slick, and he managed to talk her around. ‘At my age I can’t really see anything wrong with a man keeping one mistress, anyway. This place takes up your time,’ he’d tell her without a qualm, ‘and I don’t see why you should complain if I amuse myself a little elsewhere. Oriku is just a girl, as innocent as she could possibly be—surely that’s a lot better than some woman or other from who knows where!’ And he just set me up as his mistress in a house at Hashiba. He was over fifty, and his wife was about the same age, so four or five years after I arrived she died, and he moved me straight from Hashiba to the Silver Flower. That’s how I came to help run a brothel. Not long after that he died, too, and I became the proprietor. They had no children of their own, and their adopted daughter, Oito, became quite attached to me.”
That was how she spent the next fifteen years. Then, when she turned forty, she found Oito a husband, let the couple have the business, and started the Shigure Teahouse on her own, right here at Mukōjima.
“The land was practically free, but the area was more or less a marsh, and whenever it rained for a while, water seeped up from everywhere. What a mess! I had to have earth brought in and the whole property built up higher, and that did cost a bit! It might look a little lower when you come down to it from the embankment, but actually it’s at nearly the same height. If it wasn’t, it would be waterlogged all year round.” There was pride in her voice, too, when she described all the trouble she’d had when she built the place.
“Oito was dead set against it, you know, and she tried to talk me out of it. ‘What’s the point of setting up a restaurant in a solitary spot like that?’ she’d say. ‘You’ll never get anyone to come! Stay with us here, instead, please!’ She’d be almost in tears. But at the time I was fed up with the world. I’d been a man’s mistress at eighteen, I’d worked like mad as a madam till I was forty, and the thought of doing that for the rest of my life made everything seem completely pointless. All I wanted was a quiet life, you see, somewhere away from people. I couldn’t afford just to amuse myself as I pleased, though. So I set up this place. In the beginning, no one thought it would last. The times weren’t what they are now. I knew nothing about publicity, I just went around to everyone I knew, giving away hand towels printed with the name and location, and asking them to give the place a try. I knew a lot of people, thanks to my job all those years, and other tea-house owners—the ones who’d send clients on to the Silver Flower—might bring their customers out, but the place was just too isolated, and they felt as if they’d come to some distant province. There wasn’t much transportation in those days, and once you crossed the river you felt that you’d arrived at the back of beyond. That sounds crazy now, doesn’t it, when it takes less than ten minutes by car!”
She laughed a man’s full-throated laugh. The world was so different now from what it had been back then, she could hardly believe it.
“I’d had to ignore everyone’s opinion to go ahead, and I was really worried about whether there would be any customers.