Chapter 3: Silk and Ordinary Things

He was awake before the birds.

That wasn’t unusual. Reggie had been waking before birds since he was twelve years old and discovered that the world was easier to manage if you got to it first. What was unusual was lying in a borrowed room in a villa on the Sumida River listening to Japan wake up around him and feeling, for the first time in longer than he could remember, that he was exactly where he was supposed to be.

He had no logical basis for this feeling. He had a woman sleeping somewhere on the other side of a paper wall who had agreed to nothing except a bowl of eel and a cup of tea. He had a translator who thought he was insane. He had a ship in Yokohama harbor that was supposed to be loading silk for the return voyage to San Francisco in three weeks.

He stared at the ceiling and made a list of things that needed to happen and in what order.

By the time Kenji knocked at seven thirty he was dressed and had been for an hour.

She was in the garden.

He found her standing at the garden wall looking at the river, still in the blue and silver kimono, her hair repinned with the careful precision of a woman who had managed her own appearance without a servant for the first time and done it perfectly anyway. The morning light was soft off the water. She had a cup of tea she’d apparently made herself, which meant she’d found the kitchen, which meant she’d been up even longer than he had.

She heard him and turned. The slight tilt of the head. Something in her eyes that was almost — not warm exactly. Adjacent to warm. The door from last night still open that inch.

He said, in Japanese that he’d been rehearsing since five in the morning, “Good morning.”

She looked at him for a moment. Then, in English, equally careful: “Good morning, Reggie-san.”

He felt sixteen years old again and didn’t particularly mind.

Kenji appeared behind him with the expression of a man who had made his peace with the situation.

“Tell her,” Reggie said, “that we’re going to the silk merchant today. She needs clothes.”

Kenji translated. She listened, looked down at the blue and silver kimono, then back at Reggie with an expression that said she was aware of this.

“Also tell her,” Reggie said, “that she should choose whatever she likes. Whatever she wants. No limits.”

Kenji translated. Something shifted in her face — not the composure, that was permanent architecture — but something underneath it. The particular expression of a woman who had never once in her life been told there were no limits.

She set down her tea cup on the garden wall.

“Tell him,” she said to Kenji, “that I am ready.”

Tanaka’s shop was three streets into the merchant district, a place Reggie had done enough business with to walk in without ceremony. Tanaka took one look at the situation — the American, the translator, the woman in formal palace kimono — and became immediately and professionally blind to all implications. He opened the shop wide and stood back.

Reggie gestured at the walls. Floor to ceiling bolts of fabric, every color the world had assembled. He said through Kenji, “Choose what you like.”

She looked at him. Then she turned to the fabric.

And became someone slightly different.

The composure was still there — it was always there — but something underneath it came awake. She moved through the shop slowly, touching bolts with her fingertips, holding colors against each other, her eye working through calculations that went beyond preference into something professional and deep. This was not a woman shopping. This was a woman who had governed the aesthetics of the most sophisticated household in Japan for years, now turned loose in a room full of raw material.