The Garden of Evening Mists

by Tan Twan Eng

  ‘The Emperor thought the young clerk’s idea was good. “Send messengers to bring this Hou Yi to see me,” he commanded. “Quickly!” When the archer arrived, the Emperor told him what he had to do. Hou Yi listened and then asked to be taken to the highest tower in the palace.

  The Emperor, carried on a sedan chair by his slaves, followed Hou Yi all the way up to the top of the tower. Higher and higher they climbed, until they arrived at the very top. This was an open space where the Emperor performed ceremonies to greet the sun on the first day of every New Year.

  ‘The ten suns were so bright and hot that when Hou Yi looked down at the scorched land, he noticed that there were no shadows anywhere. It was so bright that even the blue sky had become completely white.’ Emily looked at the children. ‘Hou Yi took up his bow. Now, this Hou Yi was a very big man.’

  ‘How big?’ A skinny boy broke in.

  ‘How big, Muthu? Oh, bigger than Mr Magnus, but without his huge stomach of course.

  Big like that tree there, but a bit shorter.’ Emily’s eyes brushed over the other children. ‘Ah, but if Hou Yi was big, then his bow was even bigger, twice his size.’ She wet her lips before continuing. ‘Hou Yi took out his first arrow. It was long and thick, like a spear. He pulled his bowstring.’ Hands pushing on her knees, Emily rose to her feet stiffly and took up a shooting stance, stretching her arms wide. The younger children laughed. I glanced at Aritomo; he was leaning back in his chair, his arms crossed over his chest, his face in the shadows.

  ‘Hou Yi pulled the bowstring. He pulled and pulled and pulled until the Emperor feared the string would snap. He closed one eye and aimed his arrow at the closest, fiercest, sun.’ Emily paused, her arms still in the pose of the archer about to release his arrow. She let the silence stretch out. ‘He shot the arrow.’ Emily made a sharp whistling sound with her lips. ‘It flew up into the sky, towards the sun. It hit the sun right in the centre. The sun burned brighter for a second, then a minute, then another minute. Moans and groans filled the air. Hou Yi had failed.

  But then the sun weakened, the flames died, and it disappeared from the sky. People cheered and shouted and clapped, even the Emperor. Hou Yi wiped his sweating brow and shot his arrows, again and again. He never missed. The Emperor and his courtiers and his slaves – everyone in the world – could feel the terrible heat disappearing, as one by one the suns died.

  ‘Finally there was just one sun left in that empty sky. As Hou Yi was about to shoot down the last sun, the Emperor leaped up from his chair and shouted, “Stop! You must leave it to shine, or the world will be covered in darkness.”’

  ‘But the moon leh? What about the moon?’ a girl in pigtails asked.

  ‘ Aiyah, Parames, wait- lah, I’m not finished yet.’ Emily stopped for a second and made a show of gathering her disrupted thoughts. The children groaned loudly. ‘Where was I hah? Oh, yes. So the last sun was saved. Years later, when the Emperor was dying, he made Hou Yi the new ruler of China,’ she continued. ‘Hou Yi loved being an emperor so much that he asked the gods to make him immortal.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Parames asked.

  ‘It means forever and ever he cannot die,’ Emily replied. ‘The gods decided to give him a magic pill to eat, so that he would live forever.

  ‘Now, Hou Yi had a beautiful wife, Chang Er. He loved her so much he wanted to give half the pill to her, so he kept the pill in a box to surprise her. Chang Er saw he was hiding something and became curious. One day, when her husband was out hunting, she opened the box. She saw the pill and picked it up. And then...’ Emily pinched the invisible tablet between her forefinger and thumb, looked around furtively, and then popped it into her mouth, forcing it down her gullet. The children shrieked.

  ‘Immediately she felt her body become lighter and lighter,’ Emily said. ‘Her feet lifted off the floor, higher and higher. She floated out of the window, into the sky. She went up and up and up. But she did not want to leave Hou Yi, and so, as she flew past the moon, she decided to stay there. It was the closest she could be to her husband. When Hou Yi came home and realised what she had done, he was heartbroken. But he realised that, on one single night every year, when the moon was at its largest, he could see his wife Chang Er, still living there on the moon.’

  She stopped and pointed to the full moon rising over us. ‘There she is, dressed in her robes, with long flowing sleeves, waiting for Hou Yi to join her.’

  Like the children, the grown-ups tilted their faces to the moon. For a while there was only silence in the garden. I looked as well, and it seemed to me that the shadows on the surface of the moon did appear like a woman in a robe.

  Emily clapped her hands. ‘Time to light your lanterns, children.’

  The guests cheered Emily, raising their drinks to her. Laughing and shouting, the children ran off, their lanterns bobbing like fireflies in the dark. Emily opened the box Aritomo had given her. Lying inside were three rice-paper lanterns, each one about a foot and a half high, their cylindrical frames constructed from thin bamboo sticks. Emily lit them and placed them on the buffet table, between the dishes of food. The lanterns spilled out shards of colour onto the white tablecloth.

  ‘They’re all Aritomo’s prints,’ I said, recognising the style from the illustrations in the copy of Sakuteiki he had given me. He had transformed his woodblock prints into lantern shades.

  ‘He used to give me these lanterns for Chong Qiu, before the war,’ she said. ‘They’re pieces that aren’t good enough, he told me, pieces he would have thrown out anyway.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with this one.’ I took the lantern and spun it slowly on my left palm.

  Melting wax from the candle holder spilled onto my glove. The mountain scenery on the print flickered. ‘Good enough or not, they must be worth something.’ An idea occurred to me. ‘Have you kept all of them? I’d like to see them.’

  ‘Cannot,’ Emily said. ‘Don’t look so offended- lah. Wait until everyone goes home later, then you’ll see why.’

  I set down the lantern on the table and closed my hand into a fist, cracking the skin of wax that had hardened on my palm.

  * * *

  Tea and moon-cakes were served after dinner. The cakes came in square, octagonal and round shapes, each one about two inches thick and covered in a soft, brown skin. Emily cut them into quarter slices and handed them around. Those who had come with children left shortly after; the other guests did not remain for much longer. Magnus had used his influence to obtain an exemption from curfew for his guests, arranging for them to be escorted home in groups by members of the Auxiliary Police. The servants were cleaning up when Emily caught my eye and nodded towards Aritomo. I watched him moving over to the buffet table. He carried two of his lanterns to the oil drum in which Magnus had cooked the boerewors and lamb chops. In the dark, with the pair of glowing lanterns in his hands, he looked like a monk leading a religious procession.

  ‘Bring me the other one,’ he called out over his shoulder to me.

  I did as he asked. The guttering candles in the lanterns made them look as though they were shivering. He dropped the first one onto the embers in the oil drum. It caught fire instantly, the flames tearing through the print, consuming the shade in seconds.

  I touched his elbow. ‘Give them to me.’

  He looked at me, then dropped the other lanterns into the drum. The glow from the flames rippled across his face. We watched the lanterns burn to the end. The ashes flaked away into the night, edged in glowing red, soundless as moths.

  He brushed his hands over the embers. ‘Let me walk you home.’

  ‘I’ll get a flashlight from Magnus.’

  He shook his head and pointed to the cloudless sky. ‘I borrow moonlight for this journey of a million miles,’ he said.

  Chapter Eleven

  One morning, I stood outside the archery hall and waited until Aritomo finished his practice.

  When he returned his bow to its stand, I said, ‘I’d like to try.’

/>   Perhaps I caught just the flicker of incredulity in his eyes; with Aritomo it was often difficult to gauge his reaction. ‘You cannot do it without the proper clothes,’ he managed to say at last.

  ‘ Proper clothes? Well, don’t you have a spare set lying around? Emily will know someone who can alter it for me.’

  ‘Why would you want to learn kyudo?’

  ‘Doesn’t it say in Sakuteiki that to become a skilled gardener you ought to take up one of the other arts too?’

  He reflected on my reply for a moment or two. ‘Perhaps I have an old set of clothes somewhere.’

  I returned to the archery range a few days later, carrying the kyudo kit in a bag. Before entering the practice hall, I removed my shoes and placed them on the lowest step. In a space sectioned off by a curtain at the back of the hall I changed into a thin white cotton robe and black hakama – loose pleated pantaloons. Emily had done the alterations for me herself, and the kit fitted me well.

  Coming out from the cubicle, I held up the long, tangled straps of the hakama and gave Aritomo a perplexed look. He showed me how to tie them around my waist with a series of loops and knots. Then he gave me an odd-looking leather glove, similar to the one he wore during his practice. ‘The yugake has to be worn on the drawing hand.’ I struggled with its separate components – the three leather pieces, the various straps and padding – and in the end I had to let him put it on for me.

  We knelt on the tatami mats and bowed to each other. I repeated his every movement. I resented these rituals. They were tainted with the memories of the acts of obeisance I once had to perform for my captors.

  Aritomo selected a bow from the stand, offering it to me on his open palms. The bow, made from compressed bamboo and cypress wood, came up past my head when I rested one end on the floor. Pulling the bowstring all the way into the shooting position, I fought the bow’s unwillingness to bend to my will.

  ‘There is no need to use brute strength. The power comes not from your arms, but from the earth, rising through your legs, up along your hips, and into your chest, into your heart,’

  Aritomo said. ‘Breathe properly. Use your hara, your abdomen. Pull every breath deep down into you. Feel your body expanding as you breathe: that is where we live, in the moments between each inhalation and exhalation.’

  I did as I was told, choking a few times before I could achieve some semblance of what he wanted from me. I felt I was drowning in air.

  He nocked an arrow to the string of his own bow – there were two arrows to every round and the second was held between the fingers of the drawing hand as he pulled the bow. He drew the string with an ease I envied, now that I knew how hard it was to do it. The fletched end of the arrow was brought low to his ear, as though he was listening to the vibrations of the feathers.

  The world around us collected into an expectant stillness, a drop of dew poised on the tip of a leaf. He released the arrow and it struck the centre of the target. He maintained his position for a second or two longer before lowering his arms, the bow coming down with the weightlessness of a crescent moon sinking into the mountains. Repeating the entire process, he shot the second arrow dead centre again. I plucked at the string of my bow, but failed to replicate the sound I had heard.

  ‘ Tsurune,’ he said, glancing at my hands. ‘The song of the bowstring.’

  ‘There’s even a name for that?’

  ‘Anything beautiful should be given a name, do you not agree?’ he replied. ‘It is said that one can gauge the ability of a kyudo-ka just from hearing the quality of the sound of his bowstring when he shoots. The purer the tsurune, the greater the archer’s skills.’

  By the end of the hour’s practice my arms, shoulders and stomach muscles were trembling and sore, but I also noticed Aritomo squeeze his fingers and then grunt in pain.

  ‘Arthritis?’ I said. I had seen the slight swelling in the joints of his fingers.

  ‘My acupuncturist blames it on the damp air.’

  ‘Then you shouldn’t be living here.’

  ‘That is what my acupuncturist says too.’

  I followed him back to the house to change into my work clothes. We went all the way to the western side of the garden, where the ground began to swell into the foothills. Just before coming to the perimeter wall, Aritomo turned off the path and continued uphill. A short distance further, the track ended at an exposed rock face, about ten feet high and just as wide, ferns curling from its base.

  ‘I found this when I was clearing the land,’ he said.

  I wondered if we had stumbled upon a sacred stone left behind by a tribe of rainforest aborigines, a tribe that, centuries before, had trekked into extinction. The iron buried in the stone had bled up to the rock face. In the morning light, shorelines of rust overlapped and glowed. I stretched out my hand and traced the unknown continents and nameless islands the lichen had mapped on the pitted surface.

  ‘The Stone Atlas,’ murmured Aritomo.

  I glanced at him, this collector of ancient maps.

  * * *

  Just after midday I stopped working to return to my bungalow. I went past the empty pond.

  Aritomo was checking its clay-bed.

  ‘It should be hard enough for us to fill it soon,’ he said, looking up at me. I continued on my way, but he called out to me. ‘You waste time going back for lunch. Eat here with me.’

  Noticing my hesitation, he added, ‘Ah Cheong is a good cook, I assure you.’

  ‘All right.’

  The pavilion’s roof was taking shape. Mahmood, the carpenter and his son Rizal were unrolling their rugs on the grass next to a stack of planks. Side by side, father and son knelt to perform their prayers, prostrating themselves towards the west.

  ‘Sometimes I wonder if they will fly away on their magic carpets when the pavilion is completed,’ Aritomo said. He glanced at me. ‘Think of a name for it – the pavilion.’

  Taken by surprise, nothing came to me. I stared at the half-finished structure, thinking furiously. ‘The Pavilion of Heaven,’ I said finally.

  Aritomo grimaced, as if I had waved a putrefying object beneath his nose. ‘That is the sort of phrase ignorant Europeans come up with when they think of… the East.’

  ‘Actually, it’s from one of Shelley’s poems. The Cloud.’

  ‘Really? I have not heard of it.’

  ‘It was one of Yun Hong’s favourite poems.’ I closed my eyes and opened them again a moment later.

  ‘I am the daughter of Earth and Water,

  And the nursling of the Sky;

  I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;

  I change, but I cannot die.’

  Remembering how Yun Hong had so often spoken these lines, I stopped; I felt I was stealing something from her, something which she had treasured.

  ‘I have heard nothing about a pavilion,’ Aritomo said.

  ‘For after the rain, when with never a stain

  The pavilion of Heaven is bare,

  And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams Build up the blue dome of air,

  I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,

  And out of the caverns of rain,

  Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise, and unbuild it again.’

  My voice wandered off into the trees. By the half-finished pavilion the carpenter and his son touched their heads to the ground one last time and then began rolling up their rugs.

  ‘The Pavilion of Heaven…’ Aritomo looked even more doubtful about my choice of name than before. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Lunch should be ready.’

  * * *

  He gave me a full tour of his house before we ate. It was constructed in the style of a traditional Japanese dwelling, with a broad verandah – which he called engawa – running around the front and sides. The room where he received his guests was located in the front of the house. The bedrooms were in the eastern wing, while his study lay in the western wing. In the centre of the house was a courtyard wit
h a rock garden. Walkways, covered but open at the sides, connected these different sections. The twists and turns made the house feel larger than it actually was. It was the same technique he had used when he designed his garden. All the rooms opened onto a verandah, and the only concessions he had made to the mountain climate were the glass sliding doors he had put in; one could sit warmly inside the house and view the garden on even the coldest of days. The stark decoration heightened the gleaming emptiness of its cedar-wood flooring. In the sitting room stood a folding screen decorated with a field of tulips, the flowers covered in gold leaf gleaming in the shadows. A seventh-century pale limestone torso of the Buddha, its arms and head broken off, glowed in one corner.

  We finished our meal with a pot of green tea on the verandah. It was the end of the week and I could tell that he was feeling lazy, in no hurry to get back to the garden. Thunder rumbled from far off. Kerneels came and rubbed against Aritomo. Stroking him, he started telling me about the temple gardens his ancestors had worked on and how, by helping to maintain them, he had upheld the traditions his family had begun.

  ‘You must go and see them,’ he said.

  ‘The temple gardens? I’d like to.’

  His gaze became distant, and for a moment I almost thought he was losing his sight.

  ‘Todaiji. Tofukuji. And the pond garden at Joju-inji,’ he said. ‘And of course Tenryuji, Temple of the Sky Dragon, the first garden to ever use the techniques of shakkei.’

  ‘ Shakkei?’

  ‘Borrowed Scenery.’

  ‘Borrowed? I don’t understand.’

  There were four ways of doing it, he explained: Enshaku – distant borrowing – took in the mountains and the hills; Rinshaku used the features from a neighbour’s property; Fushaku took from the terrain; and Gyoshaku brought in the clouds, the wind and the rain.

  I turned his words over in my head. ‘It’s nothing more than a form of deception.’

  ‘Every aspect of gardening is a form of deception,’ he replied, the hollowness in his voice echoed in his eyes.