The Bride's Kimono (11 page)

I
arrived close to one so, unlike the previous day, the museum lobby was filled. I stood in line behind a half-dozen tourists paying admission at the reception desk. The tourists right in front of me had heard about the kimono exhibition from reading
The Washington Post
that morning and were disappointed that the kimono couldn’t yet be seen.

“I’m sorry it’s not open yet,” I said, taking it upon myself to do a little public relations. “On Friday, when everything opens, I’ll be delivering the lecture. I hope you’ll come back.”

“We were planning on going to the Smithsonian Friday,” the first tourist said, still sounding annoyed.

“I think we can come back. Especially if it’s a free lecture,” her companion said.

After the two ladies had left, I heard Allison’s voice behind me. “Rei, you seem to be taking over our receptionist’s job.”

“I thought I should explain the correct time so they’d come back,” I said, my confidence suddenly faltering. “Was that wrong?”

“No, it’s fine,” Allison said, but from the way she was looking at me, I could tell I’d overstepped. I felt myself start to sweat under my tight-fitting vintage silk knit
Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress. I’d made an etiquette blunder in the country of my birth.

Upstairs in the curator’s spacious office, Allison sat down at her handsome mahogany desk to read the outline I’d brought. I sat on a more standard-issue business chair—black rubber handles and a wool-blend upholstery—that was pulled up to a computer workstation made of melamine. Computer furniture was comfortable, but usually so ugly—yet another reason for me not to turn my Tokyo apartment into an up-to-date high-tech office.

The computer was on, and the screen in front of me filled with a jumble of advertisements, some of which were even blinking. So this was what the Internet was about: advertising. Buying things. I wondered what possible role it could play in a nonprofit museum.

I turned when I heard footsteps. Jamie had clattered into the room wearing a short black dress. Her feet were shod in unsexy Doc Martens, but even that couldn’t disguise her long, beautiful legs. “Oh, hi, Rei.” She was acting friendly, as if there had been no tension the day before. “Do you want to check your e-mail?”

“I don’t have an e-mail address. Frankly, I don’t know how you navigate your way past these blinking advertisements to get to e-mail.”

Jamie laughed. “Funny that you say ‘navigate’—that’s the name of our software program. I could show you how easy it is.”

“Jamie, it would be better if you went off-line so we can go into Word and revise Rei’s outline,” Allison said.

I glanced at Allison, realizing that she really was in a bad mood that morning. Jamie’s face was pink with embarrassment, and I got up to let her have the chair in front of the computer. She moved about the plastic handle that I’d learned was called a mouse. Suddenly the
page of advertisements vanished, and the screen was filled with something called eBay. In the brief time that it was up, I saw that it held a list of various antique furniture pieces with prices next to them—as if it were an auction site. Now this was interesting—auctions on the Internet? But Jamie made the Internet vanish and got busy typing descriptions of kimono.

“How long are you planning to take questions, Rei?” Allison asked, breaking into my thoughts.

“As long as you’d like,” I said quickly. “I thought for the noontime session I’d talk for thirty minutes, and then spend about fifteen minutes doing kimono wrapping, during which time I could certainly answer questions. Does that sound good?”

“Sure. For the VIP reception, though, you shouldn’t speak so long—twenty minutes would be perfect, with ten for question-and-answer.”

“You both must be very busy with last-minute details for the reception,” I said, trying to finesse my way into some hard questions. “How late did you work last night?”

“Are you talking to me?” Allison asked sharply.

“Um, well, I was curious about you both. I’m interested in the contrast between Japanese museum culture and the culture here.”

“As professional employees, neither Jamie nor I clocks in.” Allison wrinkled her nose, as if I’d made her think of distasteful pink-collar jobs.

“So how late did you work last night?” I repeated.

“Jamie left at five-thirty and I was gone by six. We leave before the guard sets the alarm, just to make things simpler,” Allison said frostily.

Jamie bit her lip and said, “Allison mentioned that you were looking to do more research on courtesans and their kimono.”

“That’s true—and not only courtesans, but the
women who lived in the infamous Yoshiwara Pleasure Quarter.”

“I was just thinking about books. When I was in school, I read a really lively and detailed text about life in late Tokugawa Japan written by an Englishman—Dunstan or something like that. It might have been called
The Sun Sinks
or something similar.”

I paused and thought. It had been a long time since I’d read Tokugawa history. “It doesn’t sound familiar. Is it recent?”

“Not in the slightest. It was published in the 1850s, and what I saw was a photocopy of the original text, which makes me think there were no reprints. There was a lot about kimono design in there; that’s why we had to read it.”

“So you’re telling me about a good book that’s completely unavailable?” That, or she was making a point of showing off in front of Allison.

“I don’t know that for sure,” Jamie said. “You could always check at the Textile Museum down the street, or at the Library of Congress.”

“Perhaps I will. But can someone like me walk in and be allowed to handle the books?”

Allison sighed. “Rei, you’re a guest scholar at our museum. Of course other museums will let you do research, once you sign a visitor’s card. Just explain who you are.”

I left the Museum of Asian Arts not quite sure what had happened. Perhaps Jamie was trying to throw me off her trail by offering me a supposedly helpful tidbit for my research. As I thought more about the name Dunstan, something snapped into my memory. There was a tombstone in the Aoyama Foreigners’ Cemetery that belonged to Dunstan Lanning, an Englishman who’d somehow sneaked into Japan before the country
allowed foreigners and had been executed by the Shogun government for disrespect. I could guess that what he wrote was hard-hitting and far from the topic of textiles, but now that Jamie had mentioned him, and Allison had heard her, I felt obligated to follow up.

The Textile Museum didn’t have the book, so I decided to try the Library of Congress. It hadn’t looked that far away on the map, but by the time I got there, I was thoroughly confused. Again, I was in for some grand architecture—this was a conglomeration of grand white buildings that looked like the last place anyone could borrow a book. I found my way to the Jefferson Building, and as Allison had said, all I needed to do was fill out a brief form in order to gain entrée to the collections.

The Asian Division turned out to be a vast area containing all kinds of books relating to Asia, predominantly in Asian languages but also in English. Towering stacks surrounded a long, grand reading room where I saw just a couple of men reading Chinese-language newspapers at long mahogany tables that were lit by lamps with old-fashioned green reading shades.

A librarian whose name badge made me guess she was from Thailand listened to my request, then checked the library’s computerized catalogue.

“Yes, we have a book by Dunstan Lanning called
The Setting Sun,
as well as another book written twenty years earlier that is titled
A London Lad in the Tokugawa Court
. We also have a book written by a Japanese scholar in the 1950s that examines the life and death of Lanning.”

I told her that I wanted to see all three books and settled myself down at one of the long tables, under the glow of an old-fashioned reading lamp’s emerald-green shade. As tired and miserable as I felt about the missing kimono, opening these books, and reading quietly for a
few hours, was a bit of an escape. It was a gentle way of delaying the reality of my need to report the crime to the Morioka Museum.

I had perfected a sort of speed-reading style in college, and this was the method I hoped to employ, given that I had such a short time to read
The Setting Sun
. The problem was that I had to be very careful turning its fragile tea-colored pages. After half an hour I realized that the book was a straightforward account of the brutality of the Japanese Shogun system; no wonder Dunstan Lanning had lost his life. At the same time there was an element of entertainment to the book, with references to the spending habits of some of the lords, especially on clothing. Ryohei Tokugawa’s name appeared once, and it was mentioned that he received the bulk of his income from rice grown by farmers in the Kansai region. If Ryohei Tokugawa was a
daimyo,
as feudal landowners were called, he probably had lived in western Japan instead of Tokyo. I read on, but there were no further references to his life, and certainly none to his wife’s.

When I’d finished with
The Setting Sun,
I opened Lanning’s earlier book, which had a title that distinctly reminded me of Mark Twain’s
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,
although of course, this book had been written earlier than Twain’s—in 1830.

In this book, Lanning seemed more positive about the Tokugawas than he’d been in
The Setting Sun.
I read glowing accounts of splendid banquets and gentlemen’s and ladies’ robes, including a paragraph that nicely validated my theory that courtesans were the greatest fashion leaders of the time. Lanning wrote:

I paused, and then read the words over again. Love. The closest Japanese translation to that word was
ai
—could Dunstan Lanning have referred to a woman who was actually named Ai?

I read on.

I felt my heart begin to pound as I thought about Ai’s red-and-pink
furisode
that I’d brought to the Museum of Asian Arts. It was inscribed elegantly with several lines of calligraphy. I knew from the notes given to me
by the Morioka Museum the name of each noble who had signed the robe.

I stopped myself. I was stretching a guess into a theory—a risky thing to do. But I had to admit there were bits and pieces that matched up. Fact one: Ai-san was the possible name of a young woman who lived in Tokyo, where she created a fabulous kimono wardrobe that was bankrolled by a Tokugawa family member. Fact two: In 1830, a woman called Ai, who owned a kimono collection more appropriate for a courtesan than an upper-class virgin, married a tea-shop owner in Osaka, a city in the Kansai region—territory under the influence of Ryohei Tokugawa.

“We’re closing soon,” a voice said in my ear. “Did you find what you needed?”

“Is there a way I could borrow these books? I haven’t even gotten to the biography—”

The woman shook her head. “I’m sorry. But I think you might be able to find the biography of Dunstan Lanning at a good bookstore, since it’s still in print.”

“Thanks,” I said, and rapidly began copying down the terrific passage I’d read about Miss Love. Then I resumed my work, no longer speed-reading, because I was desperate to catch another reference to Miss Love.

Dunstan Lanning was a great raconteur, but his stories certainly meandered. It wasn’t until a hundred pages later that I found a reference to the Tokugawa lord’s final gift of clothing to Ai—a splendid
uchikake
patterned with a
tsujighana
design of mandarin ducks, for her arranged wedding to a commoner in a distant town. “It was not that the Lord had tired of the lovely Miss Love, who was just entering her twenties—in this gentleman’s opinion, the most graceful time in a woman’s life. It was that the wife had grown tired of hearing admiring gossip about a lovely, younger lady who had more splendid robes.”

This was it, I felt with a flush of excitement. Not only did I have a reliable account of Ryohei Tokugawa’s mistress wearing a calligraphy-inscribed robe, I now had the evidence of the wedding kimono patterned with mandarin ducks. Ai Otani was the character Dunstan Lanning called Miss Love. When I returned to Japan, I could tell Ai Otani’s great-great-great-grandson that he could be proud of his ancestor, indeed.

But just as I’d received the answer, I’d been given a new set of questions.

Why had Allison Powell selected a group of kimono belonging to two women who were rivals? If Allison actually knew the connection between Mrs. Ryohei Tokugawa and Ai-san, why hadn’t she made it clear to me? Was it some kind of test of my own research abilities? And finally, if the two women at the Museum of Asian Arts were harboring secret knowledge about the kimono, why had Jamie told me about the Library of Congress, thus leading me straight to the key?