The Indigo House

About this book

The indigo of the Tachibana house is not dye in a bottle. It is a fermentation, a living culture kept in sunken vats, fed on composted indigo leaves and wheat bran and lye and sake and warmth and attention, tended twice a day for as long as it lives, spoken to, read like weather, and capable, like any living thing, of sickening and dying if it is neglected. Aoi's grandmother Toki kept the vats of the house for sixty years and kept, beside them, the Indigo Diary, a daily record going back five generations of the vats' moods and feedings, with a thread of that day's dyed silk pasted beside each entry, so that the book is also a hundred and fifty years of blue, darkening and clearing down the pages like a slow tide.