The Garden of Evening Mists

by Tan Twan Eng

  We were quiet for a minute or two. Then he picked up the pewter tea caddy and spooned some more leaves into the pot. ‘That’s beautiful’ I said, pointing to the caddy. It was the size of a mug, with a long elegant neck. Bamboo leaves were engraved all along its sides.

  ‘A gift from Magnus.’ He replaced the cap and it slid back into place without a sound, pressing out all the air inside the caddy. ‘What do you think of the tea?’

  ‘It’s bitter,’ I replied. ‘But I like the way it clenches my tongue.’

  ‘The Fragrance of the Lonely Tree. Grown in a small plantation outside Tokyo, high in the mountains. Cameron Highlands reminds me of it.’ His eyes gazed inwards. ‘When I was young we would go there in the summer, when it got too hot and humid for my mother. My father was friends with the owner.’

  I cut a slice from Emily’s moon cake and gave it to him. ‘That night at Majuba, just as we were going home,’ I said, ‘you mentioned something about borrowing the moonlight...’

  He looked blank for a second. ‘Ah! Hai, it was something a poet wrote before he passed away. His death poem.’

  It began to rain. Ah Cheong appeared and set two bowls of bird’s nest soup on the table.

  Aritomo had a fondness for swiftlet’s nests, eating them once a week. They were either cooked in a broth or, more to my tastes, served chilled in bowls of rock-sugar syrup and herbs. He believed, like many Chinese, that the nests were good for his health, cooling his internal body temperature and alleviating his arthritis. Formed from strands of the swiftlets’ saliva that had hardened in the air, these nests were found only in the high reaches of limestone caves. They were a delicacy few people could afford to consume frequently.

  He shook out a pill from a bottle and swallowed it with a spoonful of soup.

  ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘Blood pressure. The bird’s nest is supposed to help too.’

  I did not think there would be much to stress him, living here, but I said nothing and finished the soup. ‘How long does it take to become a skilled garden designer in Japan?’

  ‘Fifteen years. At least.’ He smiled. ‘You look shocked. That was in the old days.

  Apprenticeship is usually only four to five years these days.’ He shook his head. ‘Standards have dropped, like for everything else.’

  ‘Still... it’s a long time, five years.’

  A memory wisped across his face, like rain drifting over a mountain. ‘My father began teaching me when I was five,’ he said. ‘On my eighteenth birthday he gave me a satchel filled with sketchbooks and just enough money to walk for six months across Honshu. “The best way to learn is to look at nature. Draw what you see, what moves you. Return only when the winter snows begin to fall,” he told me.’

  ‘That was harsh of him.’

  ‘Oh, I thought so too, at first,’ Aritomo said. ‘But those six months became the happiest time of my life. I had no duties to anyone, no obligations. I was free.’

  He stayed with rice farmers and woodcutters at night. He took shelter in grass huts when it rained, and begged at temples for a bed to sleep in, for a bowl of rice, a cup of tea. Day by day he saw the countryside with changing eyes. ‘The smallest things made me stop to look, to draw, to feel: the light coming through the furry flowers of wild grass in a meadow; a cricket springing off a stone; the heart-shaped flower of a banana tree nestling among the leaves,’ he said. ‘Even the silence of the road would halt me. But how does one capture stillness on paper?’

  On some parts of his journey he was on the same path the poet, Bashō, had taken two hundred years before, when he had walked alone on his narrow road to the interior. ‘I felt I was seeing the same views he had recorded in his journals. There were days when I would not meet another person on the road. I took long, arduous detours just to see a famous valley, or to visit a monastery on a mountain peak. I lived in the seasons and, like the grass and the trees, I changed with them – summer to autumn. When the year came to its end, I made my way home, following the clouds that were carrying the first of the winter snows. Matsu, our gatekeeper did not recognise me at first. I had run out of money weeks earlier. I looked like a beggar, but I went immediately to my father’s study. I took out my sketchbooks from my travel-worn satchel and placed them on his desk. He glanced at the first few pages, closed the sketchbook and looked at me for a long moment. I felt I had disappointed him. “I do not need to see the rest,” he said, looking straight into my eyes. “When spring comes, you will start as a junior gardener in the palace gardens.”’

  Aritomo gazed at me for a while. ‘It was the longest winter I had ever endured. I could not wait for it to end. I was nineteen when I became one of the Emperor’s gardeners,’ he said. ‘I used to see his son, Crown Prince Hirohito, in the palace gardens. I was just a year older than him.’

  ‘Did you ever talk to him?’

  ‘He was very keen on marine biology. He asked me once if I knew anything about it. I told him I was just a gardener.’

  I looked at my hands, and I thought of how Aritomo had spoken to the man who had caused me so much pain, who had brought me so much loss.

  ‘Hirohito was twenty five when he became Emperor,’ Aritomo continued. ‘By then my views on gardening had become fixed. I knew what I wanted, what was right for a garden. Some of the older gardeners did not like me, but they could not do anything to me. I was very talented.

  I am not boasting – I was talented. And the Emperor liked me, liked my designs. I rose through the ranks of the palace gardeners quickly. I married Asuka.’ He pointed to my cup. ‘That tea comes from her father’s plantation.’

  ‘You’ve told me that she died. Was it from an illness?’

  ‘In the Year of the Tiger, in 1938 when I myself was thirty eight, my life changed. Asuka became pregnant.’ He stopped, his eyes blurred by memory. ‘It would have been our first child.’

  Our faces, I saw, were glazed into the surface of the table. ‘What happened?’

  ‘She was too frail. She died in childbirth; she and the baby. My son.’ He rubbed at an old water stain on the table with his thumb. I knew I ought to tell him how sorry I was to hear about that, but I had never liked people using that word with me.

  ‘Why did you come to Malaya?’ I asked. ‘Why did you choose this place?’

  Kerneels climbed on Aritomo’s knee and settled down on his lap. ‘We could accept commissions from clients outside the palace, subject to the approval of the Imperial Bureau of Gardens. Our clients were from the aristocracy. Empress Nagako had a cousin who wanted me to design a garden for him. So, not long after Asuka died, I returned to work – it was the only way I could go on,’ Aritomo said. ‘What a disaster! From the very first day he and I fought over my designs. He thought he was an expert gardener. He imposed his own ideas. A month into the project, he demanded I make changes to my designs. Extensive changes.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘The Emperor spoke to me. He asked me to apologise and make the changes. I refused.

  No one was going to change my designs just so they could put in a tennis court.’ Aritomo winced. ‘A tennis court! So I resigned. For a year I did not know what to do. I did not accept any more commissions. I visited the Floating World, drank too much and made a fool of myself with the women there. One day I remembered the tea planter from Malaya I had met a few years before. I had never taken up his offer to visit. Yes, I said to myself. I will write to him. I will go to Malaya. Do some travelling.’

  ‘Have you ever gone home since then?’

  ‘It is not my home anymore. My parents are dead. What I know, what I remember, all the friends I once had, all have been swept away in the storm.’ He gaze lowered to his palms lying on the table. ‘All I hold now are memories.’

  I looked at him, this man who had made his home in these highlands, who watched over his garden as one vague season replaced another, as years passed and he grew older.

  ‘A garden borrows from the earth, the sky, and everyt
hing around it, but you borrow from time,’ I said slowly. ‘Your memories are a form of shakkei too. You bring them in to make your life here feel less empty. Like the mountains and the clouds over your garden, you can see them, but they will always be out of reach.’

  His eyes turned bleak. I had overstepped the bounds between us. ‘It is the same with you,’ he said, a moment later. ‘Your old life, too, is gone. You are here, borrowing from your sister’s dreams, searching for what you have lost.’

  We sat there on the verandah, each of us adrift in our own memories, our tea slowly relinquishing its heat into the mountain air.

  * * *

  The rain stopped, and I got up to leave. In the main corridor leading to his front door, I paused to look at a horizontal scroll about two feet long. Painted in black ink and water on a plain white background, the scroll showed a frail old man leading a craggy-backed water buffalo by a rope tied to a ring in the beast’s nostrils. The man was about to pass through a moon-shaped gateway set into a high wall but was halted by a guard’s raised hand. Beyond the entrance lay a grey-wash, sinking into the grainy emptiness of the rice-paper.

  ‘ The Passage to the West,’ Aritomo said. ‘My father painted it. He gave it to me before he died.’

  ‘Who’s the man with the buffalo?’

  ‘Lao Tzu. He was a philosopher in the Chinese court, two and a half thousand years ago.

  Disillusioned by its excesses, he wanted to have nothing more to do with that life. You see him at the Hanku Pass, about to leave the borders of the kingdom, to ride out into the unknown lands in the west.’

  My hand hovered over the two figures. ‘He’s being stopped by the guard.’

  ‘The gatekeeper of the pass. He recognises the sage, and he begs him to stop for the night, to reconsider.’ Aritomo’s face was in shadow and I saw only the glint of an eye, the plane of a cheek, a line curved around one end of his lips. ‘Lao-Tzu agrees. That night he sets down on paper the principles and beliefs that had guided him all his life, the Tao Te Ching.’ Aritomo paused for a second. ‘Heaven’s way is like the pulling of a bow, bringing down the high and raising up the low. It takes from what is excessive, and gives to what is lacking. The way of Man is the opposite.’

  ‘After he had finished writing it,’ I said, ‘did he turn around and head back home?’

  ‘At daybreak, the old sage gave everything he had written to the young man. Pulling his buffalo by its rope, he went through the gate and out into the wilderness. No one ever saw him again.’ He stopped. ‘Some people think he never existed, that he was just a myth.’

  ‘But here he is, fixed in water and paper for eternity.’

  ‘ The palest ink will endure beyond the memories of men, my father once said to me.’

  Studying the drawing again, it seemed to me that the gatekeeper no longer appeared to be stopping the old man from going through the gate, but was, instead, bidding him a sad farewell.

  Chapter Twelve

  The murder of the High Commissioner continued to weigh on our thoughts as the year came to its end. Morale among the planters and miners across the country had plummeted further, and an increasing number of European families were packing up and leaving Malaya for good.

  Christmas at Majuba was a subdued affair. I turned down most of the invitations to the parties I was invited to. People continued to drop in at Majuba House for Magnus’s weekend braais. The visitors were varied: retired barristers from KL who tried to talk law with me, engineers from the Public Works Department, doctors, Indian Anglican priests, senior police officers, Malay civil servants. In my first few weeks at Majuba I had felt obligated to show up at these events, but I soon stopped going. Ever since I had come out from the camp, I could not tolerate being in crowds for long.

  Magnus had allowed the security forces to bivouac on his property. Sometimes I’d walk past a meadow and see tents being put up by men from the 1st Gordon Highlanders or the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, who patrolled the jungle and the hills. Most were around my age; many of them younger.

  Five months after Gurney’s death, General Gerald Templer flew into Kuala Lumpur to take up the post of High Commissioner. Magnus kept me informed whenever I dined at Majuba House, but the bits of news were like a caravanserai on a desert horizon, spirits in the mirage, irrelevant to me. All my energies were directed towards my lessons in Yugiri.

  I enjoyed my archery practice with Aritomo. There was more to the Way of the Bow than hitting the target. The central purpose of kyudo was to train the mind, Aritomo said, to strengthen our focus through every ritualised movement we made in the shajo. ‘From the moment you walk to the shooting line, your breathing must be regular,’ he said. ‘Your breaths must match every move you make, until the arrow has left not just your hands, but also your mind.’

  Each session began with us sitting quietly for a few minutes, purging our thoughts of all distractions. I discovered how much clutter bounced around in my head. It was difficult for me to sit there and not think of anything at all. Even with my eyes closed, I was conscious of everything around me: the rustle of the wind, a bird picking its way across the roof tiles, the itching on my leg.

  ‘Your mind is just like a strip of flypaper hanging from the ceiling,’ Aritomo complained.

  ‘Every thought, however fleeting and inconsequential, sticks to it.’

  Every detail of the eight formal steps in the process of shooting was prescribed, even down to the sequence of breathing, and I felt a satisfaction in conforming to the precise and ritualised movements. I practised the pattern of regulated breathing on my own, and I felt my mind and body slide gradually closer into harmony. In time I came to understand that, in decreeing the way I had to breathe, kyudo was showing me how to live. In the space between releasing the bowstring and the arrow hitting the target, I discovered a quiet place I could escape into, a slit in time in which I could hide.

  The two of us would stand at the shooting line, I imagined us looking like the pair of bronze archers on his desk. I enjoyed seeing the arrows fly from my bow. It had been difficult at first, when they too often veered to the sides or fell short of the matto.

  ‘You let go of your connection with the arrow too early,’ Aritomo said. ‘Hold it with your mind, tell it where you want it to go, and guide it all the way to the matto. And when it strikes, hold on to it for a moment longer.’

  ‘It’s not alive,’ I said. ‘It obeys no one.’

  Motioning me to step aside, he raised his kyu and nocked an arrow into the bowstring. He drew the bow to its limit, the stiff bindings releasing little clouds of fine dust into the air as the bow flexed. He aimed the arrow at the matto and closed his eyes. I heard his breaths come out in longer, quieter segments, softer and softer until it seemed as though he had stopped breathing altogether.

  Let it go, in my mind I urged him. Let it go.

  A smile hovered around his lips. Not yet.

  I was certain that I had not seen his lips move, and yet the voice in my head was unmistakeable.

  Keeping his eyes shut, Aritomo released the bowstring. Almost immediately I heard the arrow hit the matto. Aritomo opened his eyes and we both turned to look at the target sixty feet away. The fletched end of the arrow stuck out of it , drawing a line of shadow across its surface and transforming it into a sundial. Even from where I was standing, I could see that he had sent the arrow right into the dead centre of the target.

  * * *

  On the days when it rained too heavily for work in the garden, Aritomo would conduct the lessons in his study. He would bow to the Emperor’s portrait as he entered the room, ignoring me as I looked away in my resentment. He described in detail the history of gardening, matching his lessons to what we had been working on before the weather drove us inside. He taught me the finer points, explaining the concepts and techniques passed on to him by his father. He would pin a large sheet of paper on a corkboard, crowding it with pencil sketches to illustrate his teaching. He never allowed me to k
eep those drawings, tearing them up when he had finished.

  Coming to the end of one of these lessons, I noticed a sheet of paper trapped beneath a stone on his desk. I pulled it out and held it up to the light. It was a print of irises, the paper flecked with mould, like the rusty spores on a fern. ‘Yours?’ I asked, remembering the lanterns we had burnt on the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival a few months ago.

  ‘Something I made a while back. A collector in Tokyo wants to buy it.’

  ‘Do you have any other pieces? I’d like to look at them.’

  He took out a few prints from a box. These were not of flowers, as I had expected, but demons, warriors and enraged gods brandishing swords and halberds over their heads. I returned them after a cursory look, not concealing my distaste.

  ‘Characters from our myths and folktales,’ he said. ‘The warriors and thieves are from Suikoden – the Japanese translation of the Chinese novel, Sui Hu Chuan.’

  The name was an arrow fired from my youth. ‘ The Legend of the Water Margin,’ I said.

  The book, a classic of Chinese literature, was known to most Chinese, even those who, like me, were mute in our own language. ‘I read it when I was fifteen. Waley’s translation. I didn’t finish it, but I don’t think it had drawings like these.’

  ‘Older ukiyo-e prints often depicted characters from the novel,’ Aritomo said. He thought for a moment, then took out a small sandalwood box from a cupboard and placed it on his desk. I was wearing my leather gloves, which I did when was not working in the garden.

  Now I watched him pulling a pair of cotton gloves over his hands; I searched his expression for any hint of mockery, but there was none.

  He unlocked the box and carefully lifted out a book. ‘This is a copy of Suikoden. It is two centuries old,’ he said. ‘The illustrations were hand-printed by Hokusai himself.’ Seeing that I had no idea who he was talking about, he sighed. ‘You must have seen the picture of a big wave, frozen into stillness as it is about to crash back into the sea,’ he said. ‘There is a small boat caught in the hollow of the wave, and in the distance, Mount Fuji.’