"Six Records of Agarwood" Part Two · Volume Seven: The Incense Ash of Shosoin

The rain in Nara was finer than in the capital.

Wen Ye exited the Kintetsu station without an umbrella, hugged his backpack to his chest. Inside, a porcelain bottle was wrapped in three layers of bubble wrap, containing the mother agarwood powder of Ranjatai—the portion Liu Zhiqiang had separated on that rainy night, saying he wanted to "return it to the place where it was born."

On days when Shosoin was not open to the public, tourists outside the walls were sparse. As agreed, Wen Ye went around to the east office and gave his name. The clerk at the window checked the email twice, then pointed to the end of the corridor: "Researcher Yagyu is waiting for you."

Wen Ye was taken aback: "Surname Yagyu?"

"Yagyu Shizuka," the clerk said without looking up. "Shosoin Conservation and Repair Institute, fragrance division."

The corridor was long, the wooden floor polished to a warm sheen by footsteps. Halfway along, Wen Ye suddenly stopped—Yagyu. He recalled what Liu Zhiqiang had said in the rain: *Mr. Yagyu, your 'Great Harmony' is about gathering.* That man who had walked into the rain with a broken black umbrella had a sister, and she was right next door to Ranjatai.

The door was open. A woman sat behind a long table, white gloves, tweezers, an alcohol lamp. She looked up; her features were almost deliberately similar to Yagyu Seima's, except that her eyes lacked that obsession to gather the six incenses into one.

"Mr. Wen Ye." She stood and bowed slightly. "Before you give me the bottle, I want to ask—did Liu Zhiqiang ask you to bring a message?"

"No," Wen Ye placed the backpack on the table. "He only said the incense must be returned."

Yagyu Shizuka stared at him for three seconds, nodded, and then unwrapped the bubble wrap. The moment the porcelain bottle was revealed, her gloved fingertips paused for an instant on its surface, as if a doctor had touched an old scar.

"When my brother was little," she said as she opened the bottle, her tone as casual as talking about the weather, "he found an old ledger in our family storehouse. He said it was the Yagyu family's nine-hundred-year mission—to gather the scattered incenses back together, and on the day they were all gathered, there would be great harmony under heaven. My grandfather believed it, my father believed it, and he believed it most fiercely."

"You don't believe it."

"I believe my mentor's words." She took a tiny pinch of incense powder, placed it on a mica sheet, and held it near the alcohol lamp. "She said that what Shosoin has guarded for twelve hundred years is not incense, but **records**. Who gave it, in what year, and why. Incense deteriorates; records do not."

A wisp of blue smoke rose, extremely fine, straight upward. A coolness spread first, then honey, then a faint trace of floral scent. Wen Ye had been in the incense trade for years, but this was the first time on the island that he smelled a base identical to the mother incense.

"Same origin," Yagyu Shizuka extinguished the lamp. "Your 'Purple Ranjatai' in the capital and the 'Tang agarwood' recorded in this Shosoin ledger are two branches of the same tree."

She turned, took an old ledger with a blue cloth cover from a cabinet, opened a page, and pushed it toward Wen Ye. The paper was yellowed and brittle, but the ink was clear:

**"In the second year of Chunyou of the Southern Song, Liu Gang of the Quanzhou shipping office presented a piece of agarwood in a mica box. He said his family had guarded six incenses for generations and feared that in times of chaos their names would be lost, so they hid them in four directions and left this as a record."**

Wen Ye's fingers hovered above the paper, not daring to touch it.

"Liu Gang," he read aloud.

"Nine hundred years ago, someone from the Liu family came to Nara," Yagyu Shizuka said. "It's not that they never thought of gathering them. It was when they arrived here, saw this ledger, that they decided to continue scattering them."

She turned to the next page. That page had only one line of small characters, the ink darker than elsewhere, as if written with something else:

**"Gathered, they share one name; scattered, each has its fragrance. Do not seek the seventh sachet."**

"The seventh sachet?" Wen Ye looked up.

Yagyu Shizuka did not answer. From deep in a drawer she took out a flat box and opened it—inside lay a dark object pressed extremely flat, its grain fine and dense, its edges bearing a scorched curve, as if peeled from the bottom of some vessel.

"Incense-ash note," she said. "Taken from the bottom of the outer box of Ranjatai when it was repaired during the Meiji era. The older generation called it the 'seventh incense'—not an incense, but the evidence that the six incenses were once burned together."

Wen Ye's breathing slowed by half a beat. *Gathered, they share the same name.* Nine hundred years ago, that one furnace—was it burning incense, or burning out something else?

"My brother doesn't know about this." Yagyu Shizuka covered the incense-ash note again. "What he seeks is the method of gathering. What someone else seeks is the trace of having gathered once."

"Someone else?"

"Three months ago, the institute received an unsigned borrowing request, naming this very ledger." She closed the blue cloth slipcase, very gently. "The name of the requesting institution—you've seen it in the news. It's that foundation that wants to 'repurchase' Ranjatai's overseas holdings this time. They were refused. Then my brother went to China."

Outside the window, the rain was still that fine, falling on the white sand ground of Shosoin, soundless. Wen Ye suddenly recalled the last scene of that rainy night in the capital: Liu Zhijiang folding the courier slip and stuffing it into his pocket—the white Ranjatai going to Taipei.

He took out his phone. Two unread messages on the screen: one from Wang Guanshu sent this morning—"The purple Ranjatai is well, do not worry." The other was a delivery confirmation from the courier platform, at 3:17 a.m.:

**【Your package has been signed for】Recipient: Received on behalf. Signing address: Taipei · Dihua Street.**

Wen Ye stared at the two words "received on behalf," then slowly laid the phone face down on the desk.

"Researcher Yagyu," he said, "could my return flight be rebooked for later?"

Yagyu Shizuka looked at his face, fished an institute borrowing card from the pocket of her white coat, and pushed it over.

"Where the incense is, the person is," she said. "And so is the ledger. From today on, you borrow it."

*(Part Two · Volume Seven, end)*

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> **Next chapter preview · Volume Eight, "The Receiver on Dihua Street"**: The white Ranjatai was "received on behalf" in Taipei, signed for at 3:17 a.m. Wang Guanshu's purple Ranjatai warms itself at night without fire. Qu Huaisha reads the other half of the two characters "seventh" in the Chu slips. And Liu Zhijiang opens the last page of his father's blood ledger and finds, beneath the three characters "scattered clean," another layer of impression—a line of small characters scraped away.小字。

> **Author's note · What you'll understand from this piece**: Ranjatai (yellow ripe incense) is a genuine Shosoin holding, donated to Todai-ji by Empress Komyo in 756, the eighth year of Tenpyo-shoho. Tradition holds that the three characters of its name conceal the three characters "Todai-ji" (ran contains "to," sha contains "dai," tai contains "ji"), and historically Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, Oda Nobunaga, and others were granted cuttings. Shosoin records the provenance of every item in its "offering ledgers," unbroken for over twelve hundred years—this is the source of the line in the text, "what is guarded is not the incense, but the record." Agarwood authentication speaks of "provable common origin": incense material from the same mother tree has sesquiterpene and chromone characteristic-component profiles that can corroborate one another, an important basis in the science of authentication.依据。