Indigo Street

In the province of Awa, in the spring, the fields were green, and everybody knew that green was a lie.

Mara had grown up knowing it. The indigo plants stood in long, neat rows along the banks of the Yoshino River, knee high, then waist high, with small pointed leaves and little pink flowers like a weed's, and there was nothing blue about them at all. You could rub a leaf between your fingers and it came off green on your skin. You could chew it, which Mara had done once, at five, on a dare, and it tasted of nothing but grass. And yet every family on that river lived by blue. Every house, every boat, every temple roof had been paid for in blue. The green leaves were cut in summer, and dried, and piled in great dark heaps in the long sheds, and wetted, and turned, and wetted again, all through the autumn and the winter, for a hundred days, until they rotted down into something black and crumbling and hot that steamed in the cold mornings and stank so badly that the dogs would not go near it.

That was sukumo. Composted indigo. The finest in the land, everybody in Awa said, and everybody in the land agreed. And it went out from the sheds of the Yoshino in straw bales, a hundred bales to a boat, down the river to the sea, and across the sea to Osaka, and up the great Yodo River to Kyoto, to Edo, to every dyer in every city in the land. And in the dyers' vats, months later, hundreds of miles away, the black stinking stuff woke up, and turned the cloth blue.

Mara's uncle Jinbei sold sukumo. He had sold it for thirty years, from the big house with the white walls at the river mouth in Tokushima, with its warehouses and its counting room and its seventeen clerks. And he was the one who called Mara into the counting room, on a grey morning in the fourth month of the second year of Shōtoku, when the rain was falling on the indigo fields, and put a small heavy cloth bag on the low table between them, and a folded letter on top of it.

Uncle Jinbei was a broad, quiet man who never wasted a word or a coin. He had taken Mara in at six, when Mara's parents died of the coughing sickness, and had never once said he was fond of Mara, and Mara had never once doubted it. He liked Mara, Mara thought, the way he liked a good ledger. Because it added up.

"Kyoto," he said. "You will go to Kyoto."

Mara stared at him.

"There is a dyer there," said Uncle Jinbei. "On the street of the indigo dyers, by the Horikawa. His name is Tahei. He has bought our sukumo for sixty years. My father sold to him, and I have sold to him. And for three years now," he tapped the folded letter, "he has not paid. Not one coin. Three years of bales, delivered, used, unpaid." He put his hands flat on the table. "I have written. He writes back. Very politely. Next season. Next season. Always next season."

"And you want me to..."

"Collect it," said Uncle Jinbei. "Or, if he cannot pay, write down everything in his house that is worth money. His vats. His cloth. His tools. The lease on his house. All of it. And bring the list to me, and I will decide." He pushed the bag across the table. "Money for the journey. Count it before you go and when you get there, and write down every coin you spend. You are good with numbers. Better than my clerks. And you are young, so he will not frighten you with his age, and family, so he cannot bribe you." He looked at Mara. "And because, frankly, it is time you saw something other than this counting room."

Mara looked at the bag, and at the letter, and at the rain on the paper window. Kyoto. The capital. The city of the emperor, of a thousand temples, of the theatres, of silk and lacquer and actors and festivals. Mara had never been further than the next village.

"How long?" said Mara.

"As long as it takes," said Uncle Jinbei. "No longer." He paused. "Tahei is an old man. A great dyer, they say. The best in Kyoto, once." He looked down at the table. "Do not let that matter. A debt is a debt."

So Mara went up the river.

Down the Yoshino first, on one of Uncle Jinbei's own boats, sitting on top of a hundred bales of sukumo that stank so badly the boatmen tied cloths over their noses. Then across the narrow sea on a coasting ship, two days, sick as a dog the whole way, to Osaka, which was the biggest, loudest, busiest place Mara had ever seen or imagined, all canals and bridges and warehouses and shouting, where everybody seemed to be selling something to everybody else at the top of their voice. And then, at night, on the long riverboat up the Yodo to Fushimi, the gate of Kyoto, packed in with fifty other passengers, under a reed roof, while the boatmen poled and the little food boats came alongside in the dark selling rice cakes and sake and shouting, Won't you eat? Won't you eat? Too poor to eat, are you?

Mara sat at the edge of the boat, with the bag of money tied tight inside her robe, and could not sleep.

The old boatman at the stern had been poling since sunset, and his breath was coming hard. Mara watched him for a while. Then Mara got up, picking a way between the sleeping passengers, and asked if Mara could help.

He looked Mara up and down, and laughed, and handed over the pole. It was much heavier than it looked. The first time Mara pushed, the pole stuck in the mud of the river bottom and nearly pulled Mara overboard, and the boatman grabbed Mara's collar and laughed again, louder. But after a while Mara found the trick of it. Down, lean, push, walk, pull, and down again. Slow and steady, the boat moving against the current, a little at a time.

"Going to Kyoto," said the boatman. "First time?"

Mara nodded.

"Kyoto," said the boatman, and spat over the side. "They'll smile at you, and bow, and say how clever you are, and the moment you turn round they'll laugh at your accent. Awa, is it? I can smell it." He grinned. "Don't let them make a fool of you. Kyoto people are all manners and no rice."

Mara poled until the sky began to grey, and her arms ached, and her hands had two new blisters. It felt good. It felt like going somewhere by her own strength.

From Fushimi it was a long morning's walk north into the city, along a road crowded with carts and porters and pilgrims and oxen, between rice fields and then houses and then more houses, until without any clear moment of arriving Mara was in Kyoto.

It was not like Osaka. That was the first thing. Osaka shouted. Kyoto murmured. The streets were laid out straight, in a great grid, north to south and east to west, as neat as the lines of a ledger, and the houses along them were low and dark and narrow-fronted, with latticed windows and short blue curtains hung across the doorways, noren, flapping in the breeze, every one with a shop's name or sign in white on the blue. The mountains stood all round, green and close, on three sides. And everywhere, over the roofs, there were temples. Great curved temple roofs, grey tile and gold, and pagodas, and the sound of bells.

Mara asked the way four times. The fourth person, a woman selling pickles, pointed down a long straight street towards the west, towards a line of willows.

"The Horikawa," she said. "The river. Follow it north. You'll know Indigo Street when you see it." She looked at Mara's hands. "Or when you smell it."

Mara smelled it first.

A sour, sharp, rich smell, like old pickles and wet earth and something sweet underneath, drifting along the river on the warm air. The smell of sukumo, but changed: woken up. And then, round a bend of the narrow river, under the willows, Mara saw it.

The street ran along the bank, and the whole of it was blue.

Long strips of cloth, blue, hung from tall bamboo poles in front of every house, twenty, thirty feet high, flapping in the wind like the banners of an army. Blue so pale it was almost white. Blue like the sky at noon. Blue like the sea off Awa in winter. Blue so dark it was almost black. Dozens of blues. Hundreds. And down in the river, in the shallow, fast, clear water, men with their kimono tied up to their thighs stood up to their knees, rinsing long lengths of cloth, swinging them through the current, so that the river itself ran in streaks of blue down towards the city. Their arms were blue. Their legs were blue. Their faces were splashed with blue. Children ran along the bank with blue hands. A dog lay in a doorway, and even the dog was faintly, definitely, blue.

Mara stood at the end of the street, with the bag of money tied inside her robe and Uncle Jinbei's letter in her hand, and looked at it all, and for a long moment forgot entirely why Mara had come.