The Garden of Evening Mists

by Tan Twan Eng

  * * *

  Tidying the study after I have walked the nun and her companion out of the garden, I think of what she told me. There are still so many things I did not know about Aritomo, so many things that I never will.

  Pulling out some books from a shelf, I discover a box behind them. Opening it, I find a pair of swiftlets’ nests, aged to a treacly yellow. They are the nests Aritomo gave me. I hold one up; it feels brittle when I press it. I do not remember keeping them in this box when we returned from the cave; I never made them into a soup as Aritomo suggested.

  ‘Judge Teoh?’ Tatsuji appears at the door. I close the box and replace it on the shelf, then beckon him in. ‘I have finished my examination of the ukiyo-e,’ he says.

  ‘Use all of them,’ I tell him. ‘You have my permission.’

  It is more than he has expected. He bows to me. ‘My lawyer will send you the contract.’

  ‘There is one more piece of Aritomo’s work I want you to evaluate, Tatsuji.’ I wonder if I should proceed with it; it is not too late to change my mind, but this was the reason I had wanted to see him, the reason I had called him to Yugiri. ‘Aritomo was a tattooist.’

  ‘So I was right all along. He was a horoshi.’ The smile on his face broadens. ‘Do you have any photographs of the tattoos he created?’

  ‘He never took any photographs.’

  ‘Sketches?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Did he leave you pieces of his tattoos?’

  ‘Only one.’

  Realisation filters the murk of excitement from his face. ‘He tattooed you?’

  I nod, and Tatsuji’s eyes close briefly. Is he giving thanks to the God of Tattoos? It would not surprise me if such a deity exists.

  ‘Where is it? On your arm? Shoulder?’

  ‘On my back.’

  ‘Where exactly?’ he asks, growing impatient. I continue to look at him, and a sudden understanding floods into his face. ‘ So, so, so. Not just a tattoo, but a horimono.’ For a while he does not speak. ‘It would be one of the most important discoveries in the Japanese art world,’ he says finally. ‘Imagine: Emperor Hirohito’s gardener; the creator of taboo artwork. On the skin of a Chinese woman, no less.’

  ‘There will be no mention of this, if you want to use Aritomo’s ukiyo-e.’

  ‘So why did you tell me about it?’

  ‘I want the horimono preserved after my death. I want you to handle this.’

  ‘That is easily done.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘A contract will be drawn up for you to bequeath your skin to me on your death, upon immediate payment now, if you wish,’ Tatsuji says. His hand draws an elegant circle in the air.

  ‘We can discuss the details later. But first,’ his hands come together in a silent clap, ‘ first I have to ascertain the quality and the texture of the work on your skin. We will do it with a female assistant present, of course. We can arrange to meet in Tokyo.’

  ‘No. We do it here. Right here. In this room. I’ll only show it to you, no one else,’ I say.

  ‘There’s no need to look so embarrassed, Tatsuji. We’re both adults. We’ve seen our share of naked bodies.’

  ‘I would prefer to have another person present, so there can be no questions of... ahh... ’

  His fingers rub his tie.

  ‘At our age? Surely not. Or should I be flattered that you think there’s even a possibility that I might... change your preferences?’ I give a luxuriant, voluptuous sigh, enjoying his discomfort. ‘All right, Tatsuji. I’ll find someone. A chaperone.’ I laugh; it feels good. ‘Such an old-fashioned word, chaperone, don’t you think?’

  ‘There were things which puzzled me when I was doing my research on Aritomo-sensei,’ he says.

  ‘What sort of things?’ My humorous mood flees, to be replaced by a sense of wariness.

  ‘Inconsistencies?’

  ‘No. Quite the opposite, in fact. Everything I discovered about his life felt natural yet...manufactured. It was like... well, it was like walking in a garden designed by a master niwashi.

  Take the feud between Tominaga Noburu and him, for instance,’ he adds. ‘They had been good friends since they were boys.’

  ‘It’s quite common for childhood friends to quarrel when they grow up.’

  Tatsuji thinks for a moment. Telling me to wait, he leaves the study and returns a few minutes later with his satchel. He opens it and takes out a small black pouch. He loosens its drawstring and picks out a shiny, metallic object. For a second I imagined him removing a hook snagged in a fish’s mouth. He drops the object onto my palm. It is a silver brooch the size of a ten-cent coin, the quality of its craftsmanship understated and exquisite.

  ‘A flower?’ I say, turning it over.

  ‘A chrysanthemum. These brooches were given out by the Emperor to a select group of people during the Pacific War.’

  ‘For what purpose?’ I sit down in one of the rosewood chairs.

  ‘Have you ever heard of Golden Lily?’

  The brooch glints on the creases of my gloved palm. ‘No.’

  ‘It is the title of one of our Emperor’s poems,’ he says. ‘ Kin No Yuri. A beautiful name, is it not, for one of my country’s worst crimes of the Pacific War? It was 1937 – after we attacked Nanjing. Officials in the palace became concerned that the army was siphoning off the spoils of war. To ensure that the Imperial General Headquarters received its share of the plunder, a plan was conceived. It was named Golden Lily.’

  The operation was not under the control of the army, Tatsuji explains, but was headed by Prince Chichibu Yasuhito, the Emperor’s brother. Chichibu was assisted by some of the other princes. ‘They had accountants, financial advisers, experts in art and antiques working under the direction of these princes. Many of these experts were connected to the throne by blood or marriage,’ Tatsuji says. ‘Golden Lily sent its spies out to Asia, to gather information about the treasures that could be stolen. Anything that was worth taking was noted, the information scrupulously recorded.’

  ‘As though they were compiling a catalogue for an auction house,’ I say.

  ‘ Hai. A very exclusive auction house.’ He shifts on his feet. ‘When the Imperial Army swept through China... Malaya and Singapore... Korea, the Philippines, Burma... Java and Sumatra, members of Golden Lily followed closely behind. They knew where to look, and they stole everything they could lay their hands on: jade and gold Buddha statues from ancient temples; cultural artefacts and antiques from museums; jewellery and gold hoarded by wealthy Chinese with their distrust of banks. Golden Lily emptied royal collections and national treasuries. It removed bullion and priceless artworks, carvings, pottery and paper currencies.’

  ‘They took all that back to Japan?’

  Tatsuji’s eyes fix onto a point far away in time. ‘Golden Lily knew that it would be dangerous to transport these items back to Japan once the war had begun. There was also the fear that in the event we were occupied by foreign powers, Golden Lily would have no access to these treasures. It was safer not to move the loot back to Japan, but to hide it in the Philippines.

  Spies were dispatched to scout for suitable hiding places in Mindanao and Luzon. Once the army took control of these islands, Golden Lily moved in.’

  ‘Was Golden Lily operating here, in Malaya?’

  ‘There were factories in Penang and Ipoh that melted down gold and silver stolen from families and banks,’ Tatsuji says. ‘They could have been run by Golden Lily.’

  ‘Those treasures looted in Malaya were then shipped out to the Philippines?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That was a huge risk, transporting the loot across the seas.’

  ‘Golden Lily vessels were made to pass off as registered hospital ships,’ Tatsuji says.

  ‘Allied airplanes and warships coming across these ships noted the flags, cross-checked the registration numbers and left them alone.’

  I am rigid with anger. ‘Thousands of civilians were evacuated
from Singapore in a convoy of ships flying the Red Cross flag. Your planes sank all of them. The survivors floating in the sea were strafed or left to drown. The women were picked up, raped and then thrown back into the sea.’

  Tatsuji looks away from me. ‘The plan was,’ he says, ‘that once things had settled down, once we had won the war, the hiding places in the Philippines would be opened and the treasures shipped back to Tokyo.’

  ‘But you lost the war.’

  ‘ Hai. The unthinkable happened. And so everything stolen by Golden Lily could still be out there.’

  I return the brooch to Tatsuji. ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘When we were on Kampong Penyu, Teruzen told me that part of his duties was to fly members of the Imperial family to wherever they wanted to go, and to organise air-cover for their vessels. He refused to say anything further when I pressed him.’ He stares at the chrysanthemum brooch. ‘That last morning, after he had flown off, I returned to our hut. I found the brooch among my things.’ He falls silent. ‘I have been doing research on Kin no yuri over the years, just to understand what Teruzen had been doing.’

  ‘Was he a part of this… Golden Lily?’ I feign unfamiliarity with the term.

  ‘A year ago I tracked down an engineer who had worked for Golden Lily,’ Tatsuji says.

  ‘He was in his nineties, and he wanted to tell his story before he died. He had been sent to Luzon, to supervise gangs of POWs toiling in underground vaults built into the mountains.

  Hundreds of slave-workers had worked day and night to excavate the tunnels and chambers.

  Once the chambers were packed full with the treasures, a Shinto priest was brought in to conduct a blessing ceremony for the site. Ceramics experts brought in from Japan sealed the entrances to the chambers with a mixture of porcelain clay and local rocks, dyed to blend in with the local geology. Fast-growing trees and shrubs – papayas and guava trees worked best, the engineer said – were planted over the entire area to blend it into the surrounding countryside.’

  ‘What happened… what happened to the prisoners?’

  ‘They were taken to another place a short distance away – a cave or an abandoned mine prepared months in advance. Those who resisted were shot. Once they were all inside, explosives were set off to seal the entrance.’

  ‘Burying them alive,’ I whisper.

  ‘Treasure hunters have tried to locate these sites in the Philippines over the years.

  Perhaps some of them have been emptied and the loot shipped back to Japan.’

  ‘Treasure hunters?’

  My scepticism seems to amuse him. ‘They told journalists that they were searching for the gold bullion hidden by General Yamashita when he evacuated from Luzon. Or they informed the Filipino authorities that they were collecting the bones of fallen soldiers to be properly buried in Japan,’ he says. ‘And even if someone did find one of these hiding places, the vaults were armed with thousand-pound bombs and glass vials of cyanide buried in sand. Anyone who tried to open them up, anyone who did not have the proper maps...’

  I pull myself from the quicksand of memories. ‘If what you’ve said really happened, someone would have spoken about it by now,’ I say. ‘Maybe one of the Japanese who had worked in one of these underground vaults – like your engineer, or one of the guards.’

  ‘The Japanese personnel were buried alive too, along with the prisoners,’ Tatsuji says.

  ‘The man I spoke to was one of the luckier ones – he had been blindfolded when he was brought to the camp. But all his life he was terrified, wondering if someone had made a mistake in letting him go.’

  ‘What has all this got to do with Aritomo?’

  ‘I was only interested in his ukiyo-e, but the more I found out about him, the more I think he played a role in Golden Lily. I have no evidence of this,’ he adds hurriedly, ‘just my own suspicions.’

  ‘He was a gardener, Tatsuji.’ I keep my voice firm so he will not realise how much his words have shaken me.

  ‘He might have come here to survey the topography. He had the necessary knowledge of landscaping and horticulture – remember, the locations had to be camouflaged or concealed. And who better than a master of shakkei to do it?’

  ‘But to be party to a thing like this... ’ My voice, even my strength, dwindles away.

  ‘We were heading into war, Judge Teoh. All of us had to play our part, to serve the Emperor.’

  ‘Even his friend, Tominaga Noburu?’

  ‘He was in charge of Golden Lily in South East Asia. Eyewitnesses I interviewed – old soldiers and military administrators – placed him in Malaya and Singapore in the years between 1938 and 1945.’

  ‘But Aritomo remained here – long after the war ended. He never went home.’

  ‘Have you forgotten what the situation in Malaya was like at that time?’ Tatsuji says.

  ‘According to what I have read in The Red Jungle, there was much lawlessness and unrest immediately after the surrender – communist guerrillas taking revenge on collaborators; Chinese and Malays killing each other. And British soldiers were coming back. Maybe Golden Lily thought it was not the right time to move the treasures, but someone had to be here to make sure they were not disturbed.’

  ‘So he stayed here, in his garden, waiting for things to settle down.’ I lay out the pieces in my head to see if I can discover a coherent pattern in the mosaic. ‘But then the communists started their war.’

  ‘If he was a part of Golden Lily, he would have known where the loot was hidden, at least in Malaya.’

  The thought of the hordes of people that will inevitably come asking to speak to me again should it become known that Aritomo had been involved in something like this frightens me. ‘If he knew,’ I say firmly, ‘then he took that knowledge with him.’

  ‘It is not the sort of information he would have left lying around,’ concedes Tatsuji.

  ‘He didn’t tell me anything.’

  Tatsuji laughs at me, rather unkindly. ‘A man of his upbringing, and with his background?’ he says. ‘He would have been obligated to carry out his duty properly. All the way to the end.’

  * * *

  The new teahouse at Majuba is at the summit of a steep hill and I am breathing hard when I arrive there after a long walk. It is a few minutes before lunchtime, but all the tables have already been taken by elderly tourists in water-repellent jackets and bulky hiking boots. Looking around the restaurant, I spot Frederik waving to me from the terrace outside.

  ‘You managed to get us the best table in the house,’ I remark, as he pulls a chair out for me.

  ‘It helps if you own the place,’ he replies. ‘I converted it from a bungalow a year ago. It used to be Geoff Harper’s. Remember him?’

  Our table is at the end of a long, narrow terrace that extends over the valley like a pier, fenced in by chest-high plate glass that provides a vertiginous vista of the mountains and the tea-covered slopes. Wisteria froths down from the trellis overhead, sweetening the air. I close my eyes for a brief moment, going over again what Tatsuji told me about Golden Lily this morning.

  On the face of it, it is a preposterous story – except that I know differently.

  Frederik fills my cup with tea and slides it to me. ‘Something from our newest range.

  We’re still testing it.’

  Bringing the cup to my nose, I inhale the steam rising from it. I take a sip and hold the liquid in my mouth, allowing its flavour to bloom on my tongue. ‘I haven’t tasted any of Majuba’s teas in years.’

  He looks insulted. ‘You don’t like them?’

  ‘It’s not that.’ I wonder how to explain it to him. ‘The tea grown here... it has its own distinct flavour... it brings back too many memories.’

  ‘Whenever I have to travel,’ Frederik says, ‘I always bring a box of my own tea with me.’

  ‘Magnus once told me about a temple in China he had visited –’

  ‘In Mount Li Wu,’ Frederik cuts in, a smile sprawling
across his face. ‘I went there a few years ago. It’s all there, everything he ever told you – the monks picking the leaves at dawn, the special flavour of the tea. It’s still the most expensive tea in the world.’

  Down in the valley, the brightly coloured headscarves of the tea-pickers are like the petals scattered over a lawn.

  He indicates the people around us. ‘Quite a number of them are here for the anniversary of Aritomo’s death.’

  ‘I know. They’ve been pestering me. Some journalist wanted to film me for a documentary she’s doing on Aritomo. Another one tried to pin me down for an interview for a news channel.’

  ‘You should talk to them, tell them about Aritomo. You of all people knew him best.’

  ‘Did I?’

  The food arrives and we eat it in silence. ‘Tatsuji’s finished working on the woodblock prints,’ I say when our plates have been removed. Slowly, working out the sequence of events even as I speak, I tell Frederik about Golden Lily. There is a long silence when I finish talking.

  ‘You think Aritomo was involved?’ he asks finally.

  ‘I don’t know. But after what Tatsuji told me, I’m sure that I was sent to one of Golden Lily’s slave-camps. A lot of things he said fit in with what I saw there.’

  ‘Did Aritomo know about the things the Japs did to you?’

  ‘I told him.’

  ‘But you never said anything to me.’ Inside his voice is an old hurt, still sharp after all these years. ‘I could never really understand why you left Yugiri.’

  ‘I couldn’t live here, Frederik. I couldn’t even bring myself to build the garden I wanted for my sister – everything about it would have reminded me of Aritomo. Law was the only thing I knew I was good at.’

  ‘You haven’t done too badly.’

  ‘Strange isn’t it? I never considered entering the judiciary when I returned to practice.

  But I had the sort of credentials a newly independent nation was looking for – I’m not European and I had been so critical of our colonial masters, how they had sold us down the river.’

  ‘You’ve never recovered from being a prisoner.’