Below the Castle, the Teahouse Suzumeiro

📖 Synopsis

You are the young master of Suzumeiro, a teahouse by the moat in the castle town of the Tokura domain, sixty thousand koku. Its specialty is Suzume no Ko, little dumplings wrapped around sweet bean paste, and the shop is busiest in the sparrow-colored hour, which is to say at dusk. You once trained at the confectioner Shirotaeya, purveyor to the castle. Two years since you took over your parents' teahouse, Onao, your senior from Shirotaeya, still drops by on one pretext or another, and gossip from the castle lands on the benches nearly every night. Gathering scraps of rumor between serving the twilight customers is your daily routine.

Now that same Onao has come bursting in, white as a sheet. A confection identical to Mine no Shiro, the reserved sweet that only the lord may serve his guests, is being sold in a shop in Edo. The recipe is passed from one generation of Shirotaeya to the next, to a single heir, and its ingredient, cold-bleached kudzu, is forbidden from leaving the domain. As it happens, the master of Shirotaeya has taken to his sickbed, and the head clerk is stirring up a fight over the succession. Suspicious eyes turned toward the senior apprentice who, woman though she is, had built up her skill. Meanwhile, a teahouse regular, the young samurai Hayase Tamon of the finance office, has spent three years chasing two packhorse-loads in the kudzu storehouse ledgers that went nowhere anyone can name. Confection and ledger, two threads, come together at a teahouse in the twilight.

👥 Characters

Onao is the de facto head artisan of Shirotaeya. Fast-talking and stubborn, her catchphrase is "Eat first." She is your senior from your apprentice days, and she tells everyone that she is the one who made the bean paste for Suzume no Ko. Hayase Tamon is an earnest young samurai of the finance office. Every visit, calling it part of his investigation, he orders exactly two plates of dumplings. His creed: a ledger is no lesser weapon than a samurai's sword.

🎭 How to Play This Story

The teahouse is the ears of the castle town. Gather the customers' rumors, clear your senior of suspicion, and lend your wits to the young samurai's ledger investigation. The weight of kudzu, the whiteness of a confection, the boats to Edo. The clues arrive from across the teacup. The white of Shirotaeya that your trained tongue remembers may become a weapon of your own. On the day of the snow-viewing tea gathering, everything will be settled by the white confection placed before the lord.