My dad phoned to chat: a rare treat. Sean got up eventually and we went to the post office and the dōgu shop with Anita. (Too poor to buy anything exciting, I just replenished my supply of kaishi paper.)

Later, Sean and Tanawat and I visited the dōgu storage area in the women’s dorm to get a sense of what all is there. Though we’d visited the room several times, we’d never really taken a thorough look around the place. We’re planning a farewell chakai for our senpai, and need to choose dōgu. And when our senpai leave, it’ll be up to us to know what resources we have available.

Szymon brought home four big chicken katsu bentō from the 250-yen place, and I bought curry roux from the grocery store. We microwaved the rice, reheated the katsu in the toaster oven, and put it all together in bowls with curry sauce for a cheap, easy, delicious meal. Meanwhile, Tanawat, who’d gotten inspired when we’d hatched the homemade katsu curry plan, made green Thai curry with chicken and coconut milk, which we ate with reheated rice from disassembled leftover onigiri. So we all ate two kinds of curry and then felt too full to breathe properly.

Later, Sean, Szymon, and I wandered around Video in America but didn’t find anything we felt like renting, so we returned home to watch the kooky show Sean and I had discovered on a previous Saturday, about the Japanese chess game called shōgi. I felt wiped out, though, and I had an ominously sore throat, so I checked out (relatively) early.

A sticky morning in samue, cleaning tatami and picking up leaves in the roji garden. We finished just far enough ahead of schedule to be able to watch one of the mizuya boys (ten-year apprentices to Oiemoto) rake the gravel garden outside Shinka no ma into shape, starting with long parallel sets of grooves, finishing with concentric rings radiating from the boulders on which he perched in his wooden geta sandals.

Home for the second shower of the day and the change into kimono. Then lunch and the sick last-minute realization that I’d made the rookie mistake of not bringing my fan; it was still in a pocket of my samue and I didn’t have time to go fetch it. I felt naked without it all afternoon, but at least I was able to borrow Sean’s for my aisatsu (greetings) with Verena, the chaji’s host, at the beginning and end of the function.

Verena’s chaji was a lovely thing. The afternoon was so dark that I could barely see across the room. The warm, wet, still air somehow seemed to me to confer an extra intimacy to the gathering, and heavy rain fell periodically to provide hypnotic background noise. In the machiai, we tasted hot water from kumidashiwan cups decorated with a tsubotsubo pattern and served on a tray with the “spinning top” koma pattern. As “last guest” (makkyaku) at the chaji, I was responsible for distributing and collecting the cups, as well as for working with the first guest later to return dōgu to the host after haiken. The first guest at a tea function has the hardest role, as I learned last month: besides having to make intelligent conversation with the host, he or she has to know what to do and when, without being able to just follow the example of the guest ahead, like everyone else can. The last guest is second-busiest, and also has to have a certain amount of tea know-how; he or she is the errand-runner in the group.

Verena chose for her tabakobon in the machiai a Finnish basket woven of birch bark, bearing a Chōsen Karatsu hiire. The tabakobon in the koshikake was handled, lacquered a deep red, round–but actually finely-faceted, not truly circular. Ichō leaf shapes were cut out of its high sides. Its hiire was a porcelain butter container from Germany.

We made our way through the roji during one of several fortuitously-timed breaks in the rain, and slid into the tea room to admire the scroll, an elegant piece of calligraphy by Daisōshō that referred to an old Chinese Rip Van Winkle-like legend. Verena used a tall unryū kettle on a ceramic furo, and a wooden mizusashi shaped like a square well bucket (tsurube) with hinged lid; these give a cool feeling for summer and are the appropriate vessel for temae using famous water like the kind we drank today, drawn in the morning from Nashinoki Jinja. She brought in her charcoal for the shozumi procedure in an aburakago basket, and used a little woven-bark incense box. Her habōki brush was made of owl feathers.

Then she served sweets she’d made herself: bean paste wrapped in folds of mochi that she’d named “White Night.” Their shape was reminiscent of the butterflies that grace Finland’s summers, when the sky stays bright throughout the night. She’d used a little brown sugar in the bean paste for a very nice flavor a little different than what we’ve gotten used to.

The rain stopped in time for our return to the koshikake-machai for a break, and resumed after Verena called us back for koicha. She’d taken down the scroll and hung a boat-shaped bamboo hanaire carrying a beautifully arranged white tessen blossom. All of the dōgu she used passed through my hands, but the room was so gloomy that I could tell very little about them. Verena made koicha in a Seto bowl and a colossal heavy beast of a red Raku with deeply scored sides; Sean observed that it probably could have held enough koicha for all the guests in attendance. The tea was scooped from an Oribe katatsuki chaire with a chashaku named “Kagura” (sacred dance), carved by Oiemoto. The tea itself was a Kanbayashi variety called “Ryū no Kage”–shadow of the dragon–that went with Verena’s dragon-patterned kobukusa.

Before moving on to thin tea, Verena served dry sweets she’d also made herself: fine sugar pressed into water shapes and rolled-and-cut green maple leaves flavored with a hint of ginger. She brought the tea, Yume no mukashi from Ippōdō, out in a funny little ceramic natsume in the shape of a miniaturized Korean kimchee jar. Its large loose lid made a nice tinkling scraping sound when it rubbed against the body of the vessel. The first chawan was a wonderful warped Shigaraki; following were a shallow red Raku hirajawan, a white idokatachi bowl by an American artist, an Iraho bowl that felt very nice in my hands, and a bowl with a Raku-like shape that I took a closer look at the next day, in good light, to discover that it was glazed in an unusually bright rainbow of colors–its interior was a beautiful shocking purple.

It was the third practice chaji for the April students, and for me the most enjoyable yet. Though certain points remained a little confusing, we seem to have grasped the general outline of the chaji, and so were able to make our way relatively smoothly through it, enjoying the tea, the toriawase, and the company. After concluding with our formal farewell to the host and a wrap-up session with Hamana-sensei and Gary-sensei, we switched on the lights, cleaned up, packed the dōgu and returned them to the women’s dorm to be cleaned and put away properly later.

Nobody seemed to have the energy for a dissolute Friday night, so we (shudder) watched, at Szymon’s request, the lousy “comedy” How High in Sean’s room and then chatted until a look at the clock made us think we should get some sleep.

I dragged myself out of bed early once again and rode into the mountains, this time straight up the promising road I’d identified the day before. Alas: it didn’t lead much farther than I’d already taken it, or reveal any more than I’d already found. Past a small remote cluster of houses, it narrowed to a gravel path forbidden to any but locals–and I’m the sort of guy who generally obeys signs, especially under circumstances like these. A small disappointment but a nice ride regardless. Now I have to decide on the next direction to explore.

The whole school dressed formally and assembled in the biggest of the second-floor classrooms to hear an address from the principal, who is of course Oiemoto. For me this was an exercise in patience, sitting up straight and looking alert for an hour and a half while not understanding a thing that was being said to me. Heck, I could barely hear any of it to begin with: Midorikai, typically, sat at the back of the room, and Oiemoto’s microphone didn’t compensate for my worsening hearing. Gary-sensei has promised to provide a rough translation when he’s deciphered his notes. Our senpai tell us that these lectures are usually pretty interesting. Oiemoto graduated from Dōshisha with a degree in psychology, and his interests extend far beyond tea.

A hot afternoon in the tea room despite the air conditioner running. Ro-sensei clearly felt the heat too, mopping himself frequently with a hand towel and opening every window he could find to open. Despite the air conditioner running. Another in the series of kazari temae today, this one showcasing the chaire.

Then I went to war with a bowl of ash, and lost. In 45 minutes, I started my haigata, got disgusted and destroyed what I’d done, started it again, gave up, started once more, and gave up for good. Threw around my haisaji a bit for good measure, and got worried looks from the Japanese students fighting with their own haigata. I might have calmed myself down and finished the job except that I knew it didn’t actually have to be done until Monday, so I’d have the opportunity to come back to it with a better attitude.

I walked out of school into the aforementioned downpour, ate quickly, still in a foul mood, and retreated to my Fortress of Solitude to pull myself together with the help of some strong air conditioning. Restored equilibrium and spent the evening quietly.

I got up early for the second day in a row and went on an aimless walk over to the Kamo river.

We met Matsunami-sensei in the Urasenke Center conference room. “I had a terrible stomachache yesterday,” he said. “And diarrhea.” Much lip-biting and staring hard at the table. “Many people suffer from diarrhea,” he added, and I almost passed out from holding in laughter. I fought hard to stay awake while he slowly reviewed the history of Daitokuji. Then he led us upstairs to the private Sen family Zen temple and eroded the last of my patience with Buddhism. (Apologies to the many good and sincere people who go in for it, of course.)

It was a long session this time; I meditated on how wretched it was to be sitting seiza in a stuffy room for untold minutes, sweating, wanting to clear my throat. At one point Matsunami-sensei rose to provide a Special Meditation Service: anyone who asked could be beaten with a stick. I am, as Dave Barry used to write, not making this up. Sensei walked slowly around the room with an enormous flat stick; if a student bowed as Sensei passed, he’d stop and give them a terrifically loud but reportedly not-so-painful shoulder-flogging. I chose not to take advantage of the offer.

The pain in my legs was just approaching truly intolerable when Sensei clacked his wooden clackers together to signal the end of the session. I pried myself out of the seiza position and used my handkerchief to blot the sweat from my hands that had collected in little beads on the polyester lap of my kimono. Then I realized that we weren’t done yet. Matsunami-sensei was leading us around the perimeter of the fifth floor in some kind of walking meditation: everyone single file, matching deliberate steps with the student in front of him.

After two or three circuits, we returned to the temple room. And sat down again. I’m not certain that Matsunami-sensei didn’t fall asleep at some point during all of this. I sat, and sat, and sweated, and hurt, and did not achieve enlightenment.

And then the session was over.

Of course my legs were no good for the rest of the day. On the upside, I managed to complete two not-completely-hopeless flower arrangements by myself, in time, and–I realize that no 31 year-old male should be proud of this–without losing my temper or almost crying with frustration, both of which have been the norm until now.

More kinin kiyotsugu koicha, but I was last in the practice rotation and we ran out of time before I ever got to make tea. Given my feelings on this particular temae, I didn’t feel too cheated.

Another aimless walk after dinner that took me again to Funaoka Hill, where I discovered on the north face a park that I’d missed on previous visits, with a curious little concrete amphitheater that would have looked desolate except that several of the many people enjoying the evening in the park were sitting on the benches, conversing. I wondered if the stage is ever used for performances of any kind. I thought that if I ever bought a cheap guitar here I could just show up and start playing.

There was just enough time between the walk and bed to check the email, talk over the next day’s temae with the boys, and have a beer with Sean on the roof.

Arguably not even a warm day, but as I’ve already established, with enough layers of polyester and a charcoal fire, the mildest weather can oppress! We’ve started burning mosquito repellent coils at the doors to the tea rooms. It does some good, but a few of the thirsty little bastards always make daring runs through the flak to torment us anyhow.

Gary-sensei stayed more or less on topic today; the topic was the chaji dish called mukōzuke: “(thing) stuck on over there.” As in, it’s on the far side of the tray set down in front of the guest. Rice and soup being on the near side. Even when he stays on topic, Gary-sensei’s encyclopedic knowledge within any given topic is enough to exhaust.

I came the closest I’ve come yet to keeping a cool head while arranging flowers for afternoon practice. Would have been positively frosty except that I was nearly finished with my arrangement when a Japanese student showed up to inform us that I was using a flower container that was needed elsewhere. Not that it had been set aside or marked in any way, mind you. I just narrowly avoided having a meltdown, got a new container, and started over again. Flowers looked atrocious, naturally, but I was cautiously proud of at least having arranged them atrociously all by myself. Progress!

Having actually practiced the day’s new temae in advance, I boldly volunteered to do it first in the afternoon. The gamble paid off. Hamana-sensei was clearly pleased that I more or less knew what I was doing, and I finished before I used up my daily allotment of seiza-sitting ability. Batting order in practice is something we all think about and negotiate over hard. Doing temae later means you get to watch and learn from other students’ performances, but it also means increased discomfort and less leeway from the teachers. Going earlier hurts less and gives you margin for error, at least on brand-new temae days, but it can still be a little scary.

Today we worked on a chabako variation called wakei, invented by Tantansai (Urasenke 14) for his son, who would go on to become Oiemoto and then Daisōshō, to be able to perform when he (the son) went off to war. It’s relatively simple, using two nested bowls to serve multiple guests quickly under almost any conditions–on the deck of an aircraft carrier, for instance. Daisōshō would apparently make tea for his kamikaze pilot friends as a farewell before they got into their planes, never to return. I don’t wonder that he dedicated himself so thoroughly to pacifism after he made it home alive himself.

Well, I just adore the tidy and efficient little chabako box. I love unpacking everything and making tea with a relative minimum of fuss and then repacking everything. (The next time I see you, reader, it will almost certainly be the chabako that I use to make tea for you.) So I had a fine afternoon.

Cleaning, supper, and what is rapidly becoming the new norm around these parts: homework. Evening preparation for the morrow. Our pace quickens, probably never to let up again.

Hamana-sensei in the morning, getting slightly ahead of himself to talk about the month of July–or more precisely, the ancient-calendar “month” of fuzuki, roughly corresponding to the modern July. The name is a contraction of fumitsuki, “month of letters,” because the Japanese tradition since way back when is to mail summer well-wishes to friends and family. This originally had something to do with the high occurrence of summer plagues and the corresponding likelihood that someone you knew really needed to be wished well. Or farewell.

The rainy season will end and we’ll enter the peak of the summer. July 22nd will officially start the 1/24th of the year called taisho, “big heat.” Of course, the profound unpleasantness will begin much earlier and end much later than that. But I’ll bitch about all of that when we get there.

Kinindate koicha again with Ro-sensei in the afternoon. More or less not-awful.

Tatami cleaning. This week and next, the five of us who started here in April are preparing for the departure of our senpai by taking responsibility for all the chores. The extra four bodies are still around to be pressed into service this way and that, but they haven’t been scheduled to do anything. They’ll be finishing here just about a month from now, and then we’ll be the senpai. I feel like we’re months, if not years, away from being ready for the responsibility. Something vaguely like parenthood, I imagine–ready or not, you’ve got to step into the shoes.

Evening in Szymon’s room, practicing another brand-new temae for the following day.

I switched on the air conditioner at bedtime, with the one-hour timer set to shut it off after I’d fallen asleep. The distinctive smell of an air conditioner running at full capacity makes me nostalgic (then again, what doesn’t these days?); it smells to me like summer vacation hotel rooms, which on general principal I always chill enough to keep meat from spoiling. I like to wake up uncomfortably cold, just because the technology exists that allows me to do so. And because it makes the first step out the door into the Southern California (or Florida, or wherever, as long as it’s hot) sun that much more of a sensation.

Hlwatsch-sensei made an appearance to continue his survey of the history of Japan, addressing this time roughly the same era as last time, but from a different angle. Previously, we learned about the first importation, adoption, and rejection of Christianity; today we got the story of the consolidation of power in Japan under Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu.

After lunch: flower-induced panic. If I haven’t mentioned it before: I’m terrified of arranging the flowers for the tea room. I feel like everyone else is able to look at the flowers and see things I can’t. By now the fear is just feeding itself, of course: I go into the task with an attitude that ensures I won’t be able to perform it. This time the attitude was compounded by my having somehow gotten behind schedule. Anita had to step in to do the arrangement in one of our two practice rooms, and Tanja had to help me finish the one I’d started, while reminding me to breathe deep and try to relax.

Then on to shozumi disaster. I’d only had time and energy enough the night before to practice either charcoal or tea, and I’d chosen tea. That might have been a mistake. Having watched Nadja do shozumi the previous day, I blithely volunteered to give it a go this time around. As I’ve written before, I can watch a process very closely and still be completely unable to replicate it; I have to physically do a thing to learn it. So Hamana-sensei, his patience sorely tried, had to talk me point by point through the charcoal-laying procedure.

You may be curious about exactly what’s involved. Or not; I’ll describe it anyhow.

Before a tea function gets underway, the host places three burning lengths of charcoal called shitabi (“under-fire”) in the furo (or ro, depending on season), and then sets the kama atop it. After the guests are seated, the host brings in a basket containing a particular selection of charcoal pieces, metal chopsticks for handling the charcoal, metal rings for lifting the kama, a cluster of three large feathers bound together for dusting the furo and kama, and the incense box. He sets the basket down and makes another trip out of the room for a basin containing a pile of white ash that supports an ash spoon. Then, as methodically as he’ll make the tea, he produces from the front of his kimono a thick folded pad of white paper and sets it on the tatami; he lifts the kama off of the furo and sets it on the paper; he dusts the rim of the furo with the feathers; he adds charcoal and uses the ash spoon to cut a tiny divot out of the front of the furo’s ash (I haven’t learned the significance of this yet); he dusts again; he adds incense and dusts yet again; he replaces the kama and dusts it; and he takes the basket and basin away, leaving the incense box for the guest’s inspection.

Done well, this is all very impressive–especially after you’ve tried manipulating charcoal with big metal chopsticks yourself. Of course, I didn’t do it well at all on my first try. Not to worry: I won’t lack opportunities to refine my technique.

With the fire going (or on its way to going, we hoped) properly, we moved on to tea. Everything we’ve done up until now has been foundational; now we begin tackling a set of sixteen procedures called the konarai: “small learning.” The first is kinindate: a method for serving tea to a person of noble rank. Needless to say, opportunities to use it practically rarely come up, but Rikyū wanted his students to learn it early so that they’d be able to treat all guests as if they were nobility. Kinindate uses a tana, a tea bowl on an unlacquered wooden stand, and a special pedestal for serving sweets; the guest sits on the “highest” tatami–usually reserved in our practices for teachers’ use; and a hantō (helper) shuttles the tea bowl and dōgu for haiken between the host and guest.

Since I’d started the afternoon by doing sumidemae, I didn’t get to try kinindate until everyone else had done it, by which point my legs were no longer playing nice. Happily, since the temae isn’t so different from the tana usucha we’d done previously, I didn’t make too abhorrent a mess of my first attempt.

The weather was cool and cloudy but without any threat of rain, so Noh was back on the schedule. I cleaned tatami in a hurry and bolted my supper, then changed clothes and hopped a train to Heian Shrine with Anita and Almerindo. We approached the enormous complex from the south, walking beneath the immense red torī straddling the street, and walked through the gate into a sizable crowd. The large gravel courtyard had been given over to the two days of performances: chairs on risers at the back, chairs on the ground to the sides, low platforms covered with blue felt in the middle–closer to the action, but less comfortable, so more available. At the north end, an open Noh stage, the top of its framework fluttering with folded strips of Shinto-paper. On the ground surrounding the stage, wood fires burned in iron baskets on stands, constantly tended by priests.

We arrived late, just as the evening’s second play was concluding. There was a shuffling of spectators and we were able to find ourselves some space on one of the blue platforms; we left our shoes on the ground and hunkered on down. A kyōgen comedy began. Like all the presentations on this year’s program (The 59th annual “Takigi Noh” function), it was a tribute to The Tale of Genji; some of the plays were traditional Noh-repertoire adaptations of episodes from the novel, but this was an original piece. Two Heian playboys competing for one woman, who turns out to be an ancient crone. Funny despite my not understanding the dialogue.

The sky darkened by and by, leaving the performers in the light of electric bulbs and the constantly-stoked fire baskets. We ate chocolate and senbei as the final play of the evening began. Genji’s lover (Wife? Do I care?) lies gravely ill; a shaman and a priest are called in to heal her. The source of her affliction turns out to be one of Genji’s former lovers, so jealous that her living spirit has possessed and sickened the New Woman. In the end, the spirit appears in frightening demonic guise and does battle with the old priest, whose only apparent weapon is a string of prayer beads that he rubs vigorously, desperately between his palms. Contrary to my expectations, this seems to do the trick in the end.

Since this was Noh, of course, all of the above took an incredibly long time while performers declaimed in funny voices and moved very slowly. I can’t claim to have enjoyed it, exactly, but I was glad to have gone. Pretty costumes, an ancient art form worth seeing at least once just to say you have, and a perfect setting: the cool night, the primal roaring fires, the buildings of the shrine otherworldly at the edge of the dancing light.

And then once again back to the century in progress, onto a train and up an elevator and into bed.

I kept all of the crammed quiz knowledge in my head long enough to ace the morning quiz, but I suspect Hamana-sensei dislodged some of it just afterwards with his information-dense lecture on the famous tearoom named Taian, which we’ll visit later this month. Built by Rikyū, the tiny garden hut is just a few feet of floorboards bigger than four tatami mats: two in the tearoom itself, one for the adjacent antechamber, and the last for the preparation area, the mizuya. Hamana-sensei showed us photos that didn’t, he insisted, communicate the room’s miniature proportions. That’s why we’ll take a field trip later this month to see the place with our own eyes. Or rather, we’ll take two field trips: one to Taian, and another the next day to a copy of the room that we can actually enter, being forbidden to do more than peep through a window of the original.

Afternoon practice up on the third floor, where rain streaked the windows and a cool breeze across the hall kept us comfortable as we resumed tana koicha under Murata-sensei’s supervision. Today we began with shozumi: the first charcoal-laying procedure of a chaji. Nadja, who’d done it before, stepped in first; for the next few days we’ll do it once a day. (Because after that, the charcoal’s on fire, of course.) More on shozumi after I give it a go. My koicha temae was something other than disastrous, I think.

Unfortunately, the rain that made practice so pleasant also scrubbed the evening’s plan to go see an outdoor Noh performance at Heian shrine, so we stayed in and got Szymon to help us prepare for the next day’s new temae.

Over-optimism modest chocolate?

Today I prepared for tsuyu by sharpening my holding-an-umbrella-while-riding-a-bicycle skills. Szymon and I pedaled out into a fine rain in search of June kimono. Not an easy mission, it turned out. June traditionally calls for a thickness of fabric between the lined fall-winter-spring kimono and the see-through summer kimono. Seems that the tradition is falling by the wayside–perhaps because the unlined kimono is only supposed to be worn two out of twelve months in the year. What the stores had in stock suggested that most of the people who still bother to put on kimono go straight for the summer material as soon as the season warms up.

We struck out at Daiyasu. No–not quite; we both found cheap used obi, and I bought replacement tabi. Then we ventured, against our better judgement, back into Mimuro, which was just as overpriced and high-pressure as we remembered. We ended up finally at friendly local standby Kimura, where the owner (who I’ve only ever seen wearing Western-style string ties, incidentally) had nothing ready-made to suit us but offered us a reasonable price on custom-made kimono. We both jumped at it, even though the kimono won’t be done until the 13th of June, when we’ll only have two weeks to wear them before switching material again. But they should fit beautifully, and we got to choose colors. And I’ll be able to use it again come September. It’ll be polyester still, but less of it.

I walked out of Kimura having spent a disheartening chunk of my June money before June had even begun. And I have yet to get a proper summer juban. Need to ask Hamana-sensei a few questions about that garment (color, length, material) before I buy anything else. In the meantime, I’ll be using the standard cheat: a strip of summer material fabric that you sew onto the collar of a juban so that it at least looks correct.

Because I could, I took a nap. Then I puttered. Then I went to a birthday party. Classmate Verena turned 21 this day, and we managed to coordinate a bit of a surprise for her on the 3rd floor of the girls’ dorm. Anita ordered a real monument of a cake, something that looked like a high-speed photograph taken a millisecond after a firecracker buried in a bowl of strawberries exploded. Tanja wrangled the birthday girl; the rest of us waited in a dark room to yell when the lights went on. We had the cake with ice cream, sat around and jawed and snacked for a while, and then let Verena get on to her original plan for the evening, which was to make pancakes. We got to try the results: the thin crepe-y kind, flecked with chocolate, served with red bean paste. Exquisite.

Finished the evening in front of Sean’s television, away from which I could not tear myself away, on account of a stunningly weird hour-long live-action drama produced with the visual style of anime. Had to do with some ancient board game, over which contestants grimaced and sweated between soft-focus flashbacks of ancient-board-game senseis in traditional rooms, and hallucinations of computer-generated anthropomorphic mushrooms. Also there was a girl who wore very professional business attire and no expression while watching the game in progress, but who wore a technicolor maid costume when visiting the protagonist at home. Apparently she became the property of the victorious challenger in this episode: a cruel and fey young man with long platinum hair and steely blue contact lenses. Breasts were central to the plot, but neither Sean nor I could figure out how, exactly.

I totally already know what I’ll be doing next Saturday night at 11:00.

I assume there’s a lesson here.

Anyhow, it was a troubled sleep followed by an early start: Oiemoto’s schedule required that he distribute our monthly scholarship money a few days early, so we lined up in Konnichian’s old kitchen at 8:15 in the morning, shifting this way and that to accommodate the dozens of other people going in and out and through on their way to and from formal morning greetings with the Head Dude. The 28th is the day each month on which all Urasenke employees are paid. In cash. From the hands of Oiemoto himself, so nobody forgets where it’s coming from.

I aced the morning quiz on koicha but struggled to keep my eyes open during Hamana-sensei’s lecture on the month of June in Japan and in the tea world. In the old Japanese calendar, the season during which June now falls ended in what is now dry, hot July; thus the oddity of one of its traditional names: “the green month of no water.” Odd because the modern calendar’s June sees the main thrust (here in the Kansai region, anyhow) of tsuyu, the rainy season. (Tsuyu means “plum rain”; the name comes from the fact that Japanese plums ripen around the time the rains begin.) Temperatures will vary dramatically for the next month; then July and August will arrive to oppress us.

Tea sweets for the summer use transparent kanten (seaweed gelatin) and translucent kuzu to evoke water and ice, hopefully giving guests a cool feeling in the midst of sultry weather. Plain wood and black lacquer dōgu are used in the tea room for the same reason; they are thought to feel cooler than many of the ceramics used in other seasons for flower containers and the like.

In the afternoon we staged the first half of a chaji in two downstairs tea rooms so that we could practice the eating of a kaiseki meal. Yesterday we had the food itself; today we had all the dishes, empty. As involved as kaiseki cooking is, actually serving and eating the meal rival the preparation in complexity. All the various dishes come out in predetermined order, are set down in specific places, are received with scripted words and movements. We pantomimed eating the foods and drinking sake from shallow red hikihai saucers. We learned how to use chopsticks properly in the kaiseki context: first pick up the bowl you’ll eat from, and hold in in your left hand; then pick up the chopsticks from the tray in front of you with your right, holding them from above; transfer them to the hooked little finger of your left hand so that the right can orbit the back ends of the chopsticks and grasp them again from beneath in order to use them.

Don’t ask me to explain the part of the meal when the host brings out the hassun tray and serves each guest in turn while also pouring sake for each and drinking a serving of sake poured by each. I participated in it and the procedure still has my head spinning. All I know is that this can be very dangerous for the host at a chaji with many guests. Hamana-sensei told the story of a chaji he’d helped to host, at which the host himself actually passed out after this portion of the meal, and had to be revived with strong tea and a walk around the garden.

After two long, painful, hot hours of pretending to eat, I had a crippling headache. We finished the practice with bowls of not-imaginary tea, and packed up all the dishes for transport back to their home in storage at the girls’ dorm. I pulled the large wheeled cart piled with dōgu up the street, feeling a little like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. In a polyester kimono. On the way back to school with the cart, I was spotted by an elderly lady on a bicycle whose face lit up at what was apparently a sight that took her back to the old days. “Pulling a cart–oh, the nostalgia,” she exclaimed in Japanese. I grinned and bowed low, and she greeted me politely before crying out again, “natsukashii”–a word that doesn’t slide comfortably into English grammar but that means, basically, “inspiring feelings of nostalgia.”

Cloudy skies and bruised dusk light threatened rain; by dark it was pouring down. A couple of ibuprofen from Anita, some caffeine, and supper soon had me feeling functional again, but still exhausted. I passed the evening quietly and went to bed early, thinking about starting to write a will of some sort.