yokan that has a slightly blue-green sheen, like a mixture of gemstones and alabaster—and this bluish yokan piled on the plate glistens as if it has just this moment been born from within the celadon, so that my hand almost twitches with the urge to reach out and stroke it. No Western sweet gives this degree of pleasure. The color of cream is quite soft, I grant you, but it’s rather oppressive. Jelly looks at first sight like a jewel, but it trembles and lacks the weightiness of yokan. And as for those tiered pagodas of white sugar and milk, they’re simply execrable.
“Mmm, that looks splendid.”
“Genbei has just brought it back from town. I imagine you’d be happy to eat something like this.”
Genbei appears to have spent the night in town. I make no reply but simply continue to gaze at the yokan . I have no interest in who has brought it or from where—I’m more than happy simply to be registering a beautiful thing as beautiful.
“This celadon plate has a very fine shape. A wonderful color too. It’s scarcely inferior to the yokan ,” I remark.
She titters, and a faint, contemptuous smirk plays for a moment on her lips. She must have interpreted my words as intended to be clever. Considered thus, my remark does indeed deserve to be despised—it’s exactly the kind of thing a stupid man will come out with in a misguided attempt to sound sophisticated.
“Is it Chinese?”
“What?” She isn’t aware of the plate at all.
“It certainly looks like it to me,” I say, lifting the plate to examine the inscription on its base.
“If you like this sort of thing, I can show you more.”
“Yes, please do.”
“My father loves antiques, so there are a lot of such things here. I’ll tell him you’re interested, and you can have tea together sometime so he can show you.”
I shrink a little at the mention of tea. No one is more tediously pompous than a tea ceremony master, who will fancy himself the quintessence of elegant refinement. Your typical tea master is deeply conceited, not to mention affected and fastidious to a fault. He ostentatiously clings to the cramped little territory he’s marked out for himself within the wide world of sensibility, savoring his bowl of foam and bubbles with a quite ridiculous reverence. If that abominably complex set of rules and regulations that makes up the tea ceremony contains any refinement, then a crack army corps must positively reek of elegant sophistication! All those “right about turn! quick march!” fellows must to a man be the equivalent of the great tea masters. The art of the tea ceremony is something that the common merchant and townsman, lacking any education in the finer matters of taste, dreamed up through their ignorance of how refinement really works, by mindlessly swallowing whole and in mechanical fashion the rules that were invented after Rikyu’s day. 7 Their pitiful conviction that it constitutes the height of refinement only makes a mockery of true sensibility.
“When you say tea, you mean the ceremonial sort?”
“No, there’s no ceremony about it at all. It’s the kind of tea you don’t have to drink if you don’t want to.”
“Well then, I’d be more than happy to have a cup while I’m there.”
She titters again. “My father loves to have someone to show his collection to. . . .”
“Does that mean I have to praise his things?”
“He’s an old man, so he’d be thrilled if you did.”
“All right, I’ll give them a bit of praise, then.”
“Oh, come on, why not make it a discount and praise them lots?”
It’s my turn to laugh. “By the way,” I remark, “you don’t use the language of a country girl, do you?”
“You mean, even though I have the character of one?”
“As to character, country people are better than city folk.”
“Well then, I’ve got the upper hand there.”
“But you must have spent time in Tokyo, surely?”
“Yes, and in Kyoto too. I’m a wanderer, so I’ve been all