The Garden of Evening Mists

by Tan Twan Eng

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Late in the afternoon I step into the study. All day long I have been thinking about this moment and I know I cannot put it off any longer. Frederik will soon be here. But still I hesitate. My eyes slide along the bookshelves, to the pewter tea caddy. I pick it up, exposing a circle darker than the rest of the shelf. I wipe the dust off the caddy and give it a gentle shake. Something rustles inside. The cap pulls apart from the neck with difficulty, surrendering with a soft, plump pop when I finally get it out. I peer inside and see some tealeaves lying on the bottom, just enough to fill a teaspoon or two. I bring the caddy to my nose. There is still the faintest smell, like wood fire doused by rain, more a memory of the scent than the scent itself.

  ‘Yun Ling?’ Frederik stands at the door. ‘There was no one to show me in.’

  I set down the caddy on the desk. ‘I told Ah Cheong to go home early. Come in.’

  Kneeling at the sandalwood chest in the corner of the room, I rummage around inside it until my knuckles knock against the object I am looking for. I carry it to the desk and, with a letter opener, lever the cover open. I remember how Aritomo had once done the same. I am an echo of a sound made a lifetime ago.

  ‘Put these on.’ I give Frederik a pair of white gloves, yellowed with age. They are too small for his stubby fingers, but he pulls them on anyway. I lift the copy of Suikoden out of the box and lay it on the table. ‘Tatsuji spoke about the book that changed the art of tattooing, remember?’

  ‘ The Legend of the Water Margin.’

  The novel, written in the fourteenth century, recounts the tale of Sung Chiang and his one hundred and seven followers who revolted against a corrupt Chinese government in the twelfth century, I tell Frederik. The story of a group of outlaws fighting against repression and tyranny resonated with the Japanese people living under the rule of the Tokugawa regime. Its popularity increased from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, appearing in countless editions.

  ‘The best known of all was illustrated by Hokusai.’ I hold up the book. ‘This one has Hokusai’s original prints.’

  ‘And you’ve left it here all this time? It must be worth a fortune.’

  Turning the pages slowly, he lingers over the prints, now and again returning to those that he has already seen. The lines Hokusai carved onto wood and then pressed onto the paper are as intricate as an old woman’s thumbprint.

  ‘It’s quite amazing, isn’t it? That a novel could lift tattoos from the common into the realm of art,’ Frederik says when he comes to the last page.

  ‘This book transformed tattooing. Before it appeared, standards were crude.’

  The irony was even more striking, I explain, when one considered the fact that the strongest stigma directed against tattooing came from the Chinese who, since the first century, had viewed it as a practice carried out only by barbaric tribes. The opinions of the Chinese spread to Japan from the fifth century onwards, when criminals were punished by being tattooed.

  Murderers and rapists, rebels and thieves, were all permanently inked with horizontal bars and small circles on their arms and faces. It was a form of punishment which made them easily identifiable and effectively cut them off from their families and mainstream society. Tattooing was also imposed on the ‘untouchables’ of Japanese society – tanners, carriers of night-soil and those who handled the bodies of the dead.

  To camouflage those marks, some of the more ingenious offenders had elaborate and detailed tattoos layered over their original markings. By the end of the seventeenth century tattooing had become a form of adornment for couples – whether it was a prostitute and her patron, or a monk and his catamite – to testify to their love for each other. These tattoos were composed, not of drawings, but of Chinese ideograms of a lover’s name or of vows to the Buddha. It was only a century later that pictorial tattoos became popular, although the practice of tattooing was suppressed, particularly during the Tokugawa regime when any expression of individuality was punished severely. Restrictions were placed on anything that it considered subversive: theatres and fireworks, books about the Floating World.

  ‘No experimenting on techniques in such a hostile society,’ Frederik remarks.

  ‘Tattooing was driven underground and gradually faded away, but a resurgence took place, attributed to the popularity of Suikoden. Clients started requesting tattoo masters to paint Hokusai’s drawings on their bodies.’

  Some tattoo artists came up with their own designs based on Hokusai’s work. Firemen were one of the first groups to have full-body tattoos, to show their affiliation to their guilds.

  Other guilds soon followed. Writers and artists had themselves tattooed. So did Kabuki actors and the yakuza. Even members of the aristocracy had tattoos. The Tokugawa government viewed these developments with horror and tattooing was outlawed again.

  ‘The prohibition against tattooing did not apply to Westerners,’ I continue. ‘George the Fifth was tattooed by a well-known Japanese master. A dragon on his forearm.’

  ‘King George with a Jap tattoo,’ Frederik shakes his head. ‘Magnus would have loved that.’

  ‘Magnus wasn’t the only person Aritomo tattooed,’ I say softly.

  ‘I’m sure he tattooed others before – ’

  I look into his eyes.

  ‘You?’ He gives me a sceptical smile.

  ‘I wanted Tatsuji to look at my tattoo. That’s why I invited him here.’

  ‘So it was never about those woodblock prints at all.’

  ‘It was.’ I close the book and place it back in its box. ‘But I have to arrange to have the tattoo preserved, before...’ I swallow once.

  ‘This whole business is repugnant. You’re not some kind of animal to be skinned after your death.’

  ‘A tattoo created by the Emperor’s gardener is a rare work of art. It should be preserved.’

  ‘But you hate the bloody Japs!’

  ‘That’s another matter entirely.’

  ‘Well... have it photographed if you want to preserve it.’

  ‘That would be like taking a photograph of a Rembrandt and then destroying the original,’ I say. ‘Tatsuji feels he’d be more comfortable if there was another person with us when I show it to him.’ I take in a deep breath. ‘I’d like you to be there.’

  He is silent. ‘How large is this... this tattoo?’

  ‘I want you to look at it,’ I say. Frederik has seen me naked decades ago and I now feel some trepidation at the prospect of showing him my ageing body.

  He is taken aback. ‘What, here? Now?’

  ‘When Tatsuji arrives.’ I look at my watch. ‘He should be here soon.’

  ‘I don’t want to see what he did to you,’ he says, taking a step back.

  ‘There is no one else I can ask, Frederik. No one.’

  * * *

  The room I gave Tatsuji to work in was the same one where Aritomo tattooed me, night after night. For a moment I imagine I can smell the faintest odour of ink and blood, sealed into the walls by the sandalwood incense he always burned when he was working on me.

  ‘Close the shutters.’ The words sound familiar, and I remember that I had once spoken them, in this room. Or were they just an echo, curving back from across the canyon of time?

  For a long moment Frederik looks at me, not moving. Then he goes to the windows and pulls in the shutters, latching them. Tatsuji switches on the desk lamp.

  Watching myself in the mirror I placed there this morning, I remove my cardigan and fold it neatly over the back of a chair. I struggle with the pearl buttons of my silk blouse and Frederik reaches over to assist me, but I shake my head. I remove my brassiere, bunch my blouse against my breasts and turn my back to the mirror, peering over my right shoulder.

  A glow emanates from my skin, seeming to push back the shadows and open out the space to beyond the walls. Even after all this time, looking at the tattoos gives me a twinge of uneasiness, an uneasiness mixed with pride. I am familiar with every line
and curve of his design, but I remember the times when something new would catch my eye, something Aritomo had woven artfully into the patterns.

  Frederik has a transfixed expression on his face, a mixture of excitement, awe, and yes, even a hint of the fear I felt a moment ago. ‘They’re... they look grotesque,’ he says in a hoarse voice. ‘Awful.’

  On my back stands a grey heron. A temple emerges from the clouds. Exquisite drawings of flowers and trees seen only in the forests of the equator climb up from my hip. Arcane, inexplicable symbols have been sewn in the tattoos, symbols I have never been able to decipher: triangles, circles, hexagons, their strokes primitive as the earliest Chinese writing burned into tortoise shells.

  Tatsuji stares at me, like a tree waiting for the wind to stir its leaves.

  ‘Do you want me to catch a chill, Tatsuji?’

  He gives a start and apologises. Swinging the lampshade towards me, he bends over my back, holding a magnifying glass close to my skin. The thought crosses my mind that the light passing through the glass will burn my back. I tell myself I am being idiotic and twist my neck to see what he is doing.

  His shadow drowns the patches of horimono, the tattoos emerging again when he moves, like coral reefs regaining their colours the moment the clouds peel away from the sun. The cold metal frame of his magnifying glass touches me and I flinch.

  ‘Sorry,’ he mumbles. ‘Lift your arms, please.’

  I obey, staring ahead. The motes of dust floating between the layers of light and shadows are like krill drifting in the sea, and I think of the whales I had seen when I was a girl, standing on the beach below Old Mr Ong’s durian plantation.

  ‘Remarkable,’ Tatsuji says, his voice breaking into my reverie. ‘The style is Japanese but the designs are not. The horimono could almost be considered a companion piece to his ukiyo-e.

  Did you choose the designs?’

  ‘We agreed to use Sakuteiki as the source. But in the end I left it all up to him.’

  ‘I recognise the house at Majuba,’ he says and Frederik murmurs in agreement. ‘But what is this tattoo, here?’ He touches an area on the hollow of my back. There is no need for me to twist around to see what it is.

  ‘The camp where I was imprisoned,’ I say.

  ‘And this?’ Tatsuji’s fingers move an inch to the left, to what I know is a square the size of a postage stamp, almost completely black. ‘What are these white lines?’

  ‘A meteor shower,’ I say, half to myself.

  His fingers press into a spot an inch from my hip. Tattooed there is an archer, shown moments after he has shot his arrow into the sun, set against a completely white square of sky.

  ‘The legend of Hou Yi,’ I say, glancing at Frederik. ‘It’s a Chinese myth.’

  ‘I know of it. In that story Hou Yi left one sun to shine,’ Tatsuji replies. ‘But here, it looks like the archer has shot down the last sun in the sky. And he’s dressed not in Chinese clothes, but Japanese. Look at the hakama.’

  ‘And the sun – it looks just like your flag, Tatsuji,’ Frederik says.

  Tatsuji’s fingers glide over my skin again, grazing a temple. The memory of that morning’s climb up the mountain with Aritomo returns to me. I am glad that the nun told me the temple is still standing, still wafting incense into the clouds.

  ‘He didn’t finish it,’ Frederik says. ‘There’s a blank rectangle.’

  ‘A horimono must have an empty area inside it,’ says Tatsuji. He puts down his magnifying glass. Frederik collects my garments from the chair and hands them to me. The two men move away to the far side of the room.

  In the mirror, I see the etchings of age on my face, lines that have never appeared on my back. Turning around, I look over my shoulder at the reflection of the tattoos. Dusk has soaked up the last light from the study, but the lines and colours on my skin continue to give off a glow.

  One of the figures in the horimono appears to move, but it is only a trick of the eye.

  * * *

  Tatsuji comes to speak to me in Yugiri the following afternoon. We sit on the engawa. He has brought the contract for the ukiyo-e with him. I glance through it: the terms are as we have agreed and I find nothing to which I can object. Nevertheless, I ask him to give me a day or two to study it.

  ‘I spent the morning in the garden,’ he says.

  ‘I saw you.’

  He unfolds a large piece of graph paper and lays it out on the table. The paper is covered in his neat handwriting and diagrams. ‘I made a sketch of Yugiri’s plan, with all its major points of interest – the house, the water wheel, the pond, the Taoist symbols cut into the grass, the Stone Atlas.’

  It is the first time I have ever seen Yugiri laid out like this, and I take my time studying it.

  ‘Aritomo-sensei liked to use the principles of Borrowed Scenery in his garden designs,’

  Tatsuji says. ‘Now, a person in his garden will always be looking outwards. I have been studying his ukiyo-e for so many days. It made me wonder what I would see, if I were to view his garden in the same way: to stand outside it and look in.’

  ‘And what did you see?’

  ‘I have marked out the stone lanterns, the statues, the collection of rocks and the various sites where Aritomo placed the most distinctive views,’ he says, his finger pointing to various points on the paper. ‘They are all situated on bends or turns in a path.’

  ‘He designed it that way, to make the garden feel larger than it actually is.’

  ‘I am aware of that. I have walked through the entire garden many times, but I had no clear idea of how those objects are actually positioned, in relation to each other. Until now.’

  Taking a fountain pen from his pocket, he circles the symbol of a lantern, then draws a line connecting it to the other objects, to the places where the garden’s views are situated, until he comes to the last item, a stone Buddha in a bed of ferns. A rectangle appears, fixed inside the boundaries of Yugiri.

  I sit there, looking at it.

  ‘If drawn to the scale matching your horimono, I suspect this – ’ Tatsuji indicates the shape he has created on the graph paper, ‘– would fit into the untattooed space on your back. The lines of your horimono would probably join up with the markers and the paths in Yugiri here, on this paper.’

  I put on my reading glasses and study the graph paper. Since Tatsuji first came to see me

  – almost two weeks ago, now – I have been thinking about everything he has told me. It has made me re-examine what I know of Aritomo, made me consider what he has said and done in an altered light. This is something I had not expected.

  * * *

  The following night I have dinner with Frederik and Emily at Majuba House. She is animated and alert, chatting with us in the sitting room after we have eaten. It is late when she asks me to help her to her bedroom. I look around the room, trying to remember it from the time when I had slept here. The walls are no longer white but a soft blue. A photograph of Magnus in a silver frame, decorated with the spotted feather of a guinea fowl, stands on the bedside table, a shrine among the supplicant bottles of medicine.

  Emily lets out a moan of pain as she lowers herself onto her bed. She closes her eyes for so long that I think she has drifted off to sleep. I am about slip out quietly when her eyes open again, brighter than they have been all evening. She sits up and points to a shelf without looking at it.

  ‘That box,’ she says. ‘Take it down.’

  ‘This one?’

  ‘Yes. Open it.’

  A rice paper lantern lies on a bed of tissue inside the box. The lantern is old, the woodblock print of ferns on its shade brittle when I give it to her. There is still a half-melted candle stub fixed inside it.

  ‘I thought Aritomo destroyed all of them,’ I say.

  ‘Oh, I kept this one. It was from one of my Chong Qiu parties, long before you met him,’ she says, gazing at the lantern. ‘Remember those lanterns he made for Magnus? What a sight that was, when we set them f
ree into the sky that night. The old people here still talk about it, you know.’ She empties out a sigh from deep within her. ‘My memory is like the moon tonight, full and bright, so bright you can see all its scars.’

  She turns the lantern slowly in her palm, then gives it back to me. I am about to replace it in its box, but she stops me. ‘No, no. It’s for you. I want you to have it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I say.

  Frederik glances at the lantern when I return to the living room. He gives me a whisky and says, ‘How’s Vimalya? Are you happy with her?’

  ‘She’s intelligent, and she listens to instructions. Yugiri is starting to fascinate her.’

  He sits down across from me. ‘Your tattoos – you’ve kept them hidden all these years?’

  ‘Apart from my doctors – and my neurosurgeons – I’ve never shown them to anyone else.’

  I recall the expression on my own doctor’s face the first time he saw the horimono, years ago. Over the decades I have suffered from a variety of illnesses, but they have all been minor and have never required surgery. Some days I wonder if the horimono does actually contain talismanic powers, as Aritomo claimed. If it does, I am no longer under its protection.

  ‘Your... your lovers?’ Frederik asks. ‘What did they say when they saw your tattoos?’

  ‘Aritomo was the last.’

  He hears what I have left unspoken. ‘Oh, Yun Ling,’ he says softly.

  I think of the years of solitude, the care I have had to take in my dressing so that no one could ever see what lay on my skin.

  ‘Aritomo gave them to me, and I never wanted anyone else to see them. And I was rising up the ranks of the judiciary – just a rumour of something like this would have ruined my career.’ I move away from him. ‘And to be honest, after Aritomo, I never met anyone who interested me.’

  ‘Are they the reason you don’t want to get treatment?’ Frederik says. ‘You have to. You must.’

  ‘Whatever procedures I have to undergo, whatever drugs I take, they won’t save me in the end,’ I reply. The prospect of being locked inside my own mind terrifies me. ‘I have to ensure that the horimono is preserved.’