After they'd simmered to medium rare, heading for well done, they climbed out, toweled each other off, slipped back into their yukatas once again, and glided back to the room. She noticed that an interior screen had been pushed aside, opening onto another tatami room where a thin futon mattress had already been unrolled and prepared with white sheets and a thick brocade coverlet. Hot tea waited on their little lacquer table, but their bags had disappeared. She checked behind a pair of sliding doors and saw that all her things had been neatly shelved by some invisible caretaker. Even the clothes she'd been wearing were already hung in the closet.
"Now for my surprise." He was slipping on a black silk kimono. "They have a special little garden here that only a few people know about. I've arranged everything."
"Shouldn't I change too for whatever it is we're doing?"
"Theoretically, yes. But formality doesn't suit you." He cinched his obi. "Come on. You can be formally informal."
He led the way to the end of the veranda where they each put on the wooden clogs that were waiting. Then they passed through a bamboo gate into yet another landscape, this one lit by candles set in stone lanterns. At the back stood a small one-room structure of thatch, reed, and unfinished wood. A teahouse.
"Tam, can you sit here for a second, in the waiting shelter?" He indicated a bench just inside the gate under a thatch overhang. "I'll only need a few minutes to prepare."
Off he went, clogs clicking along a string of stones nestled in among the mossy floor of the garden. He was following the roji, the "dewy path" that led to the teahouse half hidden among the trees at the back.
Unlike the ryokan’ s larger garden, this one had no water; it was meant to recall a mountain walk. The space was small, with natural trees, offering no illusion of being more than it was. But it was a classic setting for tea, a kind of deliberate "poverty." While she watched the flickering stone lanterns and listened to the night crickets, the cacophony of Kyoto could have been eons away.
Finally Ken appeared beside the doorway of the teahouse and signaled her forward. As she moved along the stepping stones, she noticed that the pathway had been swept clean of
falling leaves, after which the gardener had strewn a few back to give it wabi, an unaffected natural look. The art of artlessness, she thought, as she paused at a stone water basin to rinse her mouth from its bamboo dipper, part of the preparatory ritual.