The Steaming Bowl, Passed from Hand to Hand

In this present age, tea is everywhere.

Put a coin into the machine standing in the corner of a station, and cold tea comes clattering down. Bottles of it, sealed with caps, stand in long rows on the shop shelves too. Hot or cold, just as you please, and the moment you feel like drinking, it is already in your hand. A remarkable thing.

But I know better. In the old days, tea was nothing so easy to come by.

It came, to begin with, from the far western land of Tang, the seeds and the manner of it carried across the sea by monks. It drove off drowsiness, cleared the head, even set the belly to rights — a blessed thing, they say, with the virtue of medicine about it. There is a tale that a monk by the name of Eisai left it written down: tea is a marvelous medicine for nourishing life. Though this, mind you, is hindsight I came by from a book in a far later age; the village folk of the day did not give a single thought to any such pedigree.

Only — it was bitter, and it woke the eyes, and it was somehow strangely good. That alone was enough, and tea seeped little by little, spilling over from the monks' temples into the towns, and from the towns into the village gatherings.

◇ ◇ ◇

The spring of 1432 (Eikyō 4). I was walking the road west along the shore of the lake in Ōmi, paper and combs on my back.

Past midday, a little stall roofed with reed screens had been set up by the roadside. Steam was billowing up thick. Beside a cauldron set over the fire, a man with a twisted headband was turning a small stone hand-mill, round and round with a grinding sound. What came out of its mouth, ground fine, was a powder of close grain, tinged with green.

"One serving, one coin. Will you take a bowl of tea, traveler?"

He said it without stopping his hands. One bowl for exactly one coin. My shoulders were burning under the pack on my back, and as luck would have it my throat was parched. I set a single coin down on the board.

The man, who gave his name as Mosuke, dropped a spoonful of the fresh-ground powder into a black bowl and poured a thin stream of hot water dipped from the cauldron. Then he took up a little broom-like thing of finely split bamboo and whisked briskly at the inside of the bowl. Foam rose in no time, until the surface of the bowl was covered close all over with fine pale-green froth.

"Drink it while it's hot."

Taking it, the bowl lay heavy and hot in both my hands. The steam stroked my face. A smell I had never met before, green and raw yet somehow fragrant, rose from it. I put my lips to it. Bitter. Bitter enough to make the root of my tongue clench tight. And yet, after that bitterness, something oddly clean slipped down and away through my throat.

"Ugh, it's bitter," I said honestly, and Mosuke laughed with the face of a man who had been waiting for just that.

"Isn't it, though. Everyone makes that face at first. But it's a strange thing — give it a little while, and you'll be wanting another. When the men who carry loads take a bowl of this, the ache goes out of their shoulders as if it were a lie, and their feet start forward again. The drowsiness flies off somewhere too. For the likes of us porters, there's no better medicine."

I looked hard at the powder falling from the stone mill. Mosuke told me he steamed the leaves he had picked and dried them, carefully drew out the tough stems, and ground it fresh like this every morning, each time a customer came. "Powder that's been ground and left standing is no good any more. The scent escapes, and it goes flat as stale sake. If it isn't ground fresh, I can't take your coin for it." Sure enough, the green smell in the bowl had the rising vigor of something newly ground. I set my pack down for a moment and, laying down another coin, asked for a second bowl. In the second the first bitterness had grown a little easier on the tongue, and the sweetness that had lain hidden underneath seemed to come forward first.

And true enough, when I had drained it, the hazy depths of my head cleared as though wiped once over. When I said as much, Mosuke grinned and dropped his voice.

"If it's to your liking, come to my lodging tonight. The village folk gather and hold a tea-guessing. It's good sport."

A guessing, I said back. What was there to be had in guessing at tea?

◇ ◇ ◇

When the sun had set and I stepped up onto the board floor of the lodging, five men, then six, were already seated in a ring. In the middle a cauldron sent up its steam with a low singing, and before it an old man in the host's part had set out, all in good order, a number of bowls and twists of paper folded around tea.

"Now today's," said the old man, holding up a twist of paper with great ceremony. "One is the true thing, from Toganoo. The rest are local stuff, picked off the hills hereabouts. Which is the true one — try telling it with your tongue. Guess right, and the coin you staked comes back to you doubled. Miss, and it's taken off you."

A burst of laughter went up. The men piled their coins, each before his own knee. The tea of Toganoo alone was the real thing — honcha, the true tea — and all the rest, it seemed, they called hicha, the false. To name the one true bowl at a single stroke out from among the cheap teas of elsewhere — on that alone, that and nothing more, the men fixed bloodshot eyes and staked their last coins without a grudge.

The bowls came round in turn. Fresh-ground powder, hot water poured over it, the foam whisked up with that bamboo broom, and so passed from one hand to the next. I was let into the company too, and laid down a coin.

I sipped the first bowl. Bitter. But a faint sweetness lingered at the back of the tongue. The second. This one had a sharpened bitterness that pricked the tongue. The third was good in the nose but thin in the aftertaste. The same green powder, the same hot water it should have been — how they could wear such different faces was more than I could fathom.

"Well, traveler? Have a go at telling it."

Every eye turned my way. After much wavering I named the first bowl, the one with the most sweetness left in it, as the true one. The old man opened the twist of paper to show me.

"Wrong. That's the cheap local stuff."

A roar of laughter went up, and my coin slid off easily to the knee of the man beside me. The one who had guessed right held forth, mighty pleased with himself: the astringency of Toganoo was nothing so slight as that, he said; it comes on slowly and lies heavy afterward. That difference in astringency I could not make out for the life of me — but the warmth of that ring of men, rejoicing and lamenting over who had guessed and who was guessed against, passing the bowls and slapping their knees and laughing together, that I understood well enough.

The second round began. This time four bowls went round. At each one the men closed their eyes, rolled the water over their tongues, and let out a low "hmm." Some even lifted the bowl to the tip of the nose, trying to sniff out the real one by scent alone. "The Toganoo has a different rising to its smell," said one, twitching his nose. I tried sniffing too, in mimicry, but to me it was all the same green, raw-smelling steam. In the end I pointed at random, and again missed clean. Laughter broke out beside me, and another of my coins went sliding off across the ring.

To the man who won came not only coins but the small things staked along with them. A single fan, a length of hemp toweling. Trifling things, every one — yet the triumphant face of the winner drawing them in might have been a man who had carved out a whole province.

A man deep in his losses added coins for one more round. The winner, in high spirits, treated everyone to another helping of the cheap tea. Steaming bowls went round and round, hand to hand. The old man before the cauldron kept his eye on the heat of the water and went on raising foam, one bowl after another. The later the night grew, the merrier the circle became.

"Drink tea," said the man beside me, "and strange to say your eyes stay wide the whole night through. Once you're caught up in the guessing like this, sleep just won't come. That's why a tea gathering always runs long."

Reasonable enough, I thought. Every one of them, kept from sleep by the bitter brew, laughed on tirelessly into the small hours over coins won and coins lost. The rice-planting in the village, the quarrel with the next village over, the matter of the year's tribute. Somewhere in the midst of the guessing, the business of the gathering, too, got itself quietly settled. Tea, it seemed, had some strange power in it — not merely to wake the eyes, but to bind people one to another around a circle for a whole night through.

Later I learned that in this village the folk gathered over tea several times a month like this. Each brought out his own local tea in turn, took his pleasure in the guessing, and in the course of it settled even the village's affairs. What had begun with the monks of the temple teaching them how to drink had, somewhere along the way, turned into a peasants' amusement, the old man before the cauldron said, laughing. The monks' medicine had come down like this to the ring of men on the earthen floor, and become the relish of a wager. A curious thing, I thought.

In the end I lost three times at the wager and guessed right just once. The coins I won back were slight, but I was warmed to the pit of my belly, and by the time I left the lodging I had forgotten the weight of the load on my shoulders.

◇ ◇ ◇

That guessing game was much in fashion for a while. The sport of telling the true from the false by tongue alone ran so far to the wagering of coin that in the end even the authorities came to frown on it and bid the people keep it within bounds.

But tea itself did not vanish. Far from it — once the fever of the wager had died down, another way of taking pleasure in it quietly put out its shoots.

Not the boisterous guessing of a crowd, but one or two together, bowl in hand, listening intently to the sound of the water coming to the boil. In what bowl to drink, how to pour the water, the whole heart put into that single serving — there would come, in time, those who preferred a quieter way of drinking like that. But that was still a long way off. Not one of the men in the circle that night yet knew any such calm and composed manner of drinking.

Even now, tea is everywhere about us. A trade like Mosuke's, selling steaming bowls at the roadside a coin a serving, became in time the teahouses standing eave to eave, and now the shop on the street corner, and tea packed into bottles lined up even inside the machines.

Every time I drink a mouthful of cold bottled tea, I find myself thinking of it. The shhh-shhh singing of the cauldron at that Ōmi lodging. That night I guessed wrong and they roared with laughter at me. How one bitter brew kept people from sleep and bound them around a circle the whole night through — that lively, steaming warmth.

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