De Waal measured how high other men’s ground stood above the water.
He had done it all his life. In Holland, where much of the ground lies lower than the sea, a man who could do it well was never out of work. That year the new government in Japan had hired engineers from the Netherlands for its rivers, and De Waal was one of them. Along the rivers east of the city they had set up posts with marks painted on them, so that the height of the water could be read every day, and they had given the lowest mark on one of them, at the mouth of the Edo river, a Dutch name: peil, the level.
He was thirty-four. His grandfather had been a clerk at the Dutch post at Nagasaki, in the years when the Dutch were the only Europeans allowed in Japan. Once, as a young man, he had gone to Edo with the chief of the post to bow to the shogun, and had lodged with the others at the Nagasakiya, a medicine merchant’s house in Nihonbashi, where Edo crowded in to look at them. He had come home to Leiden with a stoneware bottle with blue letters on it, and a story about a night in Edo that nobody in the family believed.
At his grandfather’s table the bottle stood at the head, at his grandfather’s right hand. It had come a long way, from Japan, his grandfather said, and it was not for boys. Willem sat at the far end, below his cousins, where nothing came at all.
When his grandfather died, the house on the canal went to pay what he owed, and the table went with the house, and the bottle with the table. The family went into rented rooms. Willem had eaten at other people’s tables ever since: landladies’ tables, the engineers’ mess, the table of a ship.
He lived now in a rented house in the foreign settlement at Tsukiji, and he wrote his letters home on a table that had come with the house. Every month he sent most of his pay to a bank in Yokohama. In his letters he called the money the house. He had not decided where the house would be. He knew only that it would have a table in it, and a chair at the head of the table, and that the chair would be his.
He had taken the level of some thousands of pieces of ground in Tokyo. Each of them had a name in the last column of somebody’s register.
That year ended early.
On the ninth day of the eleventh month the government decreed that the third day of the twelfth month would be the first of January, 1873, as it was in the West. So the twelfth month would have two days. The clerks at the land office, it was said, would not be paid for it. They were trying to finish a year’s work in what was left of the year.
That winter De Waal was taking the levels of the old aqueduct, which had brought the city its water from the Tama river since the time of the shoguns and ended at a water house at the eastern edge of Naito Shinjuku. To set a mark on a man’s ground he needed the man’s leave, and to find the man he needed the land office. That year farmland could be bought and sold for the first time, and every piece of ground was being given a certificate, with its measure, its price and the name of its owner.
On the last afternoon of the old year, the clerk who helped him at the land office turned a register round so that he could see it. The clerk was a careful young man called Ōno, who had learned his Dutch from a book, as every student of Western learning had before the English came, and who spoke it as if he were reading it aloud. The register was for the village of Tsunohazu, just north of the post town. Every line in it had a name. One line did not. In the column for the owner, somebody had let fall one drop of ink.
“The owner did that himself,” said Ōno. “He came to the office and paid in silver. When we asked for his name, he took the brush, and he did that.”
“Then we have no name.”
“The village has one,” said Ōno.
He had been out to the village. An old woman there had told him whose the ground was. She called the place the Shoyukan, and the man the Shoyuken, and Ōno had written both words down. He showed them to De Waal in his notebook.
“Shoyuken,” Ōno read out. He did not look as though he liked it. “She says that he is there only at night.”
The register closed that night, with the year. Ōno said that he would go out to the village in the morning. In the morning, De Waal pointed out, it would be next year.
So De Waal went himself. He took his level, his staff and his field book.
He walked west out of the city on the Koshu road, past the water house at the end of the aqueduct, and into the post town of Naito Shinjuku. Its inns were lit. At their doors men called out to travellers, a bed and a bath and the price of them, before anybody had asked. De Waal walked past them. He did not need a bed. He needed a name for a register.
North of the road the houses ended and the marsh began: reeds, frost, a path of planks. At the end of the planks stood a low shed without a light. Over its door a small dark drop had been burned into the wood. There was no name.
A man in a grey kimono was standing beside the door, as if he were waiting for somebody, and not especially for De Waal.
“Every piece of ground you have measured has belonged to somebody, De Waal-san,” he said. He said it in Dutch.
De Waal had not told him his name. He had the register under his arm and a question ready. Before he could ask it, the man in grey said, “The first drop costs nothing,” and De Waal found that he had followed him to the door.
The door was a small square, a hand’s width above the ground, like the door of a tea room. Nobody could go through it standing. On the boards beside it lay two long swords and two short ones, placed side by side, the way men leave them in a house. De Waal laid his staff beside them, painted red and white in centimetres, and knelt, and went through.
Inside, a stair went down. It was so narrow that he went down it sideways, with the register held in front of him, and so steep that he went down it as if it were a ladder. He counted the steps from habit. Thirteen took him to a landing, where a door was shut. Behind it somebody brought a dice cup down on a mat, and a voice said a word, and other voices groaned. Thirteen more took him to a curtain with one drop painted on it.
As he reached it, a man in a black Western coat came up through the curtain, a government man by his buttons. He stood aside on the bottom step to let the man in grey go by, and bowed to him, lower than De Waal had seen anyone bow to a minister.
Beyond the curtain the ground went on.
De Waal had measured enough ground to know what size a room ought to be. This one had no edge that he could see. One oil lamp burned in the middle of it, beside a block of cedar, and round the lamp were four benches and nine or ten men. Beyond them the floor went out into the dark on every side, dead level, and did not come back. There was a pillar. Behind the lamp stood a long shelf, and on the shelf were bottles and boxes, each with a wooden tag.
And it was loud. He had expected a temple. He had walked into a market.
The men were all talking at once: about the month the government had taken away, about the steam carriage that now ran from Shimbashi to Yokohama, about the price of rice, which was a scandal. A broad man in a good haori, gone thin at the elbows, was telling his bench that he had been a retainer of the shogun, which his bench knew. A small sharp man had lent money to the shogun’s retainers against their rice, before there was no shogun, and he told everybody that too. A thin man had a bamboo flute in a bag at his feet, and a face paler than his hands, where a basket had kept the sun off it for years, until last year. A man from the river boats smelled of the river.
“In my father’s time,” said the broker, to nobody in particular, “there were seven lamps, and the one in black came down at the New Year.”
De Waal understood one word in ten. He took a paddle from the rack by the curtain. It was black lacquer, with no number on it. He did not remember taking it. He sat where there was room, beside the man from the boats.
The man in grey went to the lamp. Before he did anything else, he turned to the dark at the far end of the cellar and bowed, as men bow at a shrine. Nobody stopped talking.
“What does he bow to?” De Waal asked the man from the boats, in his bad Japanese.
The boatman looked at him as if he had asked what the river was. “The Kuronushi,” he said, and went on talking.
“This is the tasting,” said the man in grey. He said it in Japanese, and then, for De Waal, in Dutch.
A small dish was set in front of every man. It was pale clay, unglazed, and new: nobody had eaten from it. Beside it were a little spoon, a cup of water and a cedar lid.
“At the emperor’s court, more than a thousand years ago,” said the man in grey, as the dishes went down, “every guest had four small dishes at his place. Salt, sake, vinegar, and the thing this came from. Here there is one.”
The bottle was stoneware, cream-coloured and round in the belly, with blue letters on it. De Waal could read them. They were Dutch. The man in grey went along the benches with it. At each dish he lifted the lid, let one drop fall into the middle of the dish from a height, and put the lid back. He sold as he went, in Japanese, and the benches argued with him, and with one another, and laughed.
Then he came to De Waal, and let the drop fall, and spoke Dutch.
“Why does the first drop cost nothing?” De Waal asked him.
“It is said,” said the man in grey, “that the first drop of all gathered at the bottom of a monk’s vat, in Kishu, six hundred years ago, and that he asked nothing for it.”
He set the bottle down by the dish.
“Lot seven. Koikuchi, the dark one. You will know the house, if you have been to Choshi. Yamasa. Its first master came by sea from Kishu, two hundred and twenty-seven years ago, and made his house at the mouth of the river.
“When the shogun first came to this city, its shoyu came to it by sea, from the west. Now it comes down the river from Choshi and Noda, darker and stronger, the way this city likes it. Eight years ago the shogun’s government ordered the merchants to cut their prices. Seven houses were spared, because their shoyu was the finest. This house was one. It keeps the character for above in its mark, so as never to forget.
“In the winter of the great wave, the master of the house was at home in Kishu when the sea fell back. He set fire to the rice sheaves in the fields, so that his village could see its way up the hill in the dark. They climbed to the fire, and the sea came in below them. This is from a vat laid down that winter. Eighteen winters.”
He turned the bottle a little, so that the lamp found the blue letters.
“In your grandfather’s time, shoyu went to Europe on Dutch ships, in bottles like this one. You will have seen one before.”
De Waal looked at the bottle. He had seen one before.
“And in it,” said the man in grey, low, “a table. You will know whose.”
De Waal held the dish up to the lamp. The drop was black in the middle and red at its rim, where it ran thin, like a window with a fire behind it. He tilted the dish. The drop ran out thin across the clay, and the red came up through it, and held.
He knew whose.
It was a Sunday, in the house on the canal, with the stove lit and the long table laid. The stoneware bottle stood at the head of the table, where it had always stood. The chair at the head was his. Nobody said so, and nobody needed to. He sat down in it. The bottle was at his hand. He took it up, though it had come a long way, from Japan, and was not for boys, and nobody stopped him. Down the length of the table the faces of his family turned to him and waited for him to begin.
He brought the dish to his face. It smelled of cedar, and under the cedar of something older, and under that of the room.
He drank the water. He took the drop up on the tip of the spoon, and tasted it, once. It tasted the way that room had smelled on a Sunday, with the stove lit and the dinner coming in.
“Nobody is poured a second drop,” the man in grey told the benches, and then told De Waal in Dutch. Then, to De Waal only: “The bottle is the second drop.”
The dishes were taken away. De Waal did not see who took them.
Then the talk stopped. It stopped all at once, as if a door had been shut on it, and nobody had asked for it to stop. The bottle stood on the cedar block, under the lamp.
“We begin, as always, with a sensible number,” said the man in grey, and said it again in Dutch. “One yen.”
1872 · Bid!
¥1De Waal
He had raised the paddle before he knew it. It seemed a fair price for a small bottle.
¥5the man with the flute
¥20De Waal
¥60the broker
The broker looked at De Waal as if he were adding him up. He knew to the coin what every man in the room was worth.
¥150De Waal
De Waal’s hand was lying flat on the bench beside him. It was how his grandfather had laid his hand on the cloth, before he said grace.
¥400the shogun’s retainer, in kind
The retainer had nothing else. His swords were on the boards at the top of the stair. The man in grey looked at him for a moment, and then up the stair, and took the bid with a small bow.
Under the lamp De Waal’s face had gone white, as white as the clay of the dishes. He could feel it, the way a man feels a draught.
¥900by the pillar
From habit, De Waal took a sight on the pillar. Nobody was standing there. Nobody else looked.
“Your grandfather kept it at his right hand, De Waal-san,” said the man in grey. “Not his left.”
That was all he said.
De Waal thought of the bank at Yokohama. He knew the figure. He had added to it every month for two years, and in his letters he had called it the house.
¥1,860De Waal
The mallet fell once on the cedar block, with a small dry sound.
“Shoyuken,” said the benches, quietly.
The bottle was wrapped in paper and put in a box of plain wood. The cloth to carry it in was free.
De Waal did not have one thousand eight hundred and sixty yen in his coat. “On the book,” he said. He did not know how he knew the words.
The man in grey opened the book on the cedar block, and its pages turned under the lamp. The first pages had no names in them, only drops, in brush, very old. After them came pages of crests, the round crests of great houses, one to a line, more than De Waal could count, with figures beside them. After the lords came names, in Japanese, page after page. Then, on a page gone brown at its edges, one name in Dutch, in a hand that De Waal knew from the backs of old letters, with a figure beside it in an old money.
He looked at it for a long time. The man in grey waited. Then he turned to the last page, and at its foot he wrote, in Dutch, in a clear round hand, W. de Waal, and then the figure.
“Whom do you serve?” De Waal asked him.
“The Kuronushi, De Waal-san.”
“What is it?”
“It was in your dish,” said the man in grey.
De Waal did not take the bottle home. He asked for the shelf, and did not know how he knew to ask for that either. The man in grey tied a wooden tag to the cord of the box, wrote on it, and set the box on the long shelf behind the lamp, among the others. De Waal could not read the other tags. He could read his.
When he came up, the swords were gone from the boards. His staff was where he had left it. In the post town behind him a temple bell began to ring, before any of the others, as it always had.
It was the first of January, 1873. It was the first of January in Japan too, now. From that morning the hours in Tokyo were all the same length, by day and by night, twenty-four to a day.
At breakfast, in the house at Tsukiji, he put a little shoyu from the market on his rice. It tasted of shoyu. The table had one chair.
At the land office Ōno asked whether he had found the owner. De Waal said that he had. He looked for some time at the drop of ink in the last column. Then he gave the register back. He set no mark on that ground.
That winter he went out to Tsunohazu after work, on the clear evenings. The shed was always there, with the drop over its door, and the door was always shut. He took the level of the ground round it. He took it four times. It was always the same height.
His tag is still on the shelf. It is the only one in Dutch.