by Tan Twan Eng
“They did this to me.” Slowly I raised my maimed hand, protected in its leather glove.
He pointed to his eye-patch. “You think this fell out by itself?”
Three weeks after that meeting with Magnus at the club, I was sacked. His idea of building a garden for Yun Hong had stayed with me; in fact it had grown more insistent. In the camp, she had often talked to me about the garden she would build once the war was over and our lives were returned to us again.
On my last day at work, I sat down to clear my desk. Packing away my personal things, I stopped when I saw the news article I had clipped from the Straits Times. The photograph accompanying the article showed a group of Japanese men in tailcoats standing behind their prime minister, Yoshida, as he signed the Japan Security Treaty with the Americans. Staring at the photograph, I thought about the camp. And I thought about Nakamura Aritomo, recalling the first time I had heard about him, all those years ago. I had never forgotten his name; it had followed me wherever I went. It was time I visited him. Creating a garden was something I had to do for Yun Hong, something I owed her.
Taking out a blank sheet of paper, I uncapped my fountain pen and wrote a letter to Magnus, asking him to arrange a meeting with the gardener for me. When I had finished, I sealed it in an envelope and asked the clerk to post it for me as I left my office for the last time.
The world was growing brighter, bleaching away the moon and stars. Halfway down to the bottom of the valley, I found the path separating one division of tea bushes from another. The track was tramped hard by generations of tea pickers. This shortcut would take me to Yugiri, Magnus had informed me at dinner the night before. “There’s no fence on this side,” he had said, “but you’ll know where Yugiri starts when you come to it.”
The fir trees in the distance rose higher as I came nearer to Yugiri. The path wound between the trees and continued into a thicket of bamboo, their poles knocking gently against each other, as if transmitting the news of my arrival through the garden, passing the message from tree to tree.
It began to drizzle. Wiping the blisters of rain from my face, I walked beneath the bamboo and emerged into another realm.
The silence here had a different quality; I felt I had been plumbed with weighted fishing line into a deeper, denser level of the ocean. I stood there, allowing the stillness to seep into me. In the leaves, an unseen bird whistled, deepening the emptiness of the air between each note. Water dripped off the leaves. Not far away, the edge of a red-tiled roof could be seen through the treetops. Setting off toward it, I soon came to a long rectangle of round, white pebbles. I crouched and picked one up. It was about the size of one of the leatherback turtles’ eggs my mother had sometimes bought at the Pulau Tikus market.
About fifty feet away to my left stood two round targets. Set on low stilts to my right was a simple wooden one-story structure with an attap roof. Putting down the stone, I went closer to it. The front of the structure was open, the bamboo chicks rolled up to the eaves. A man was standing at the edge of the platform, dressed in a white robe and a pair of gray pantaloons that just showed his white socks. He appeared to be in his early fifties, his hair just starting to turn gray. In his right hand he held a bow. He did not acknowledge my presence, but somehow I knew that he was aware of me.
I had not seen a Japanese nor spoken to one in nearly six years, but I would always be able to recognize them. It had been easy enough to write to Nakamura Aritomo, but I had been a fool to think I could just stroll in here and talk to him. I was not ready to do this; perhaps I never would be. The urge to turn around and leave the garden took hold of me. But when I looked at the roll of documents in my hand, I knew that I had to speak to the gardener, I had to tell him what I wanted from him. I would do it, and then I would leave. If he chose to accept my offer, we would communicate through the post. There would be no need for me to talk to him in person again.
Raising his bow, the man drew back the bowstring, his arms stretching in opposite directions until he reached a point where he seemed to be floating just above the floorboards. He stood there with his tautened bow, an expression of complete peace spreading across his face. Time had stopped: there was no beginning, there was no end.
He released the arrow. The bowstring sliced a sharp sound from the air. The man remained unmoving, one arm still extended, keeping the center of the bow where he gripped it level with his eyes. He looked at the target for a moment longer before lowering the bow. The arrow had struck well away from the center.
I took the three low steps up to the platform, the gleaming cypress floorboards creaking beneath my feet. “Mr. Nakamura?” I said. “Nakamura Aritomo? We were supposed to meet later today—”
“Take off your shoes!” he said. “You bring the problems of the world inside.”
Glancing behind, I saw sand and shreds of grass smeared across the floorboards. I stepped down from the range. The man returned the bow to its stand, his white socks leaving no mark on the floor. I waited as he put on his sandals.
“Go around to the front of the house,” he said. “Ah Cheong will take you to the sitting room.”
A Chinese manservant led me through the house, sliding open the doors that partitioned off each room and then closing them behind us. I had the impression of moving through a series of boxes, each one opening up to reveal another box, and then another. The servant left me in a sitting room. The doors were opened to the verandah, where a low square table was positioned.
On the lawn below the verandah, string tied to four bamboo splints marked out a rectangle; the top layer of grass had been peeled away, exposing the moist, dark soil beneath. Beyond the rectangle, the ground sloped gently away to the edge of a depression, wide and empty as a salt pan. Mounds of earth and gravel were piled up at its side.
The drizzle had stopped, but water continued to drip from the eaves, drops of congealed light falling to earth. The servant came out with a tray bearing two small celadon cups, a teapot and a small teakettle, its spout steaming weakly. The archer joined me a few minutes later. He had changed into a pair of beige-colored trousers and a white shirt, matched with a gray linen jacket. He sat in the traditional manner on one of the mats, his legs folded, the weight of his body pressing down on his heels. He indicated that I should sit on the other side of the table. I looked at him for a second and then followed his example, putting the roll of documents next to my knee.
“I am Nakamura Aritomo,” he said, placing an envelope on the table. I recognized my handwriting on the front, addressed to him. I told him my name and he said, “Write it out in Chinese,” his fingers scribbling over the table.
“I went to a convent school, Mr. Nakamura. I was taught Latin but not Chinese. I only picked up a little of it after the war.”
“What does ‘Yun Ling’ mean?”
“Cloud Forest.”
He considered it for a moment. “A beautiful name. In Japanese you would be called—”
“I know what I’d be called.”
For a few seconds he stared at me. Then he emptied the teapot into a bowl and threw the still-steaming tea over the verandah. I thought it odd but said nothing. He refilled the teapot with hot water from the kettle. “I thought we had agreed to meet at nine thirty.”
“If it’s inconvenient for you now, I’ll come back later.”
He shook his head. “How old are you? Thirty-three, thirty-four?”
“I’m twenty-eight.” I was aware that I had been aged beyond my years by the deprivations in the camp; I thought I had come to accept it but the sudden jab of shame surprised me. “You’re making a pond?” I said, looking to the shallow pit at the bottom of the slope.
“I am merely changing its shape, making it bigger.” Lifting the teapot, he filled the cups with a translucent green liquid and slid one toward me as if it was a piece on a chessboard. “You were a guest of the emperor.”
This time his arrow had found its mark. “I was a prisoner in a Japanese camp,” I said, wondering ho
w he had known.
“When I was building this house, Magnus gave me a watercolor your sister had painted,” Aritomo said. “He reminded me about it when he brought your letter.”
“Yun Hong used to exhibit her paintings with some artists.”
“That is not surprising. She has a lot of talent. Does she still paint?”
“She was with me in the camp.” I shifted my body, unknotting the pain in my ankles; it had been a long time since I had last sat like this. “She died there.”
Aritomo caught my left hand as I was reaching for my cup. A guarded look sheathed his face the instant his fingers closed around my wrist. I tried to pull away, but he tightened his grip, his eyes compelling me not to struggle. Like an exhausted animal caught in a trap, my hand stopped moving, became inert. He turned it over and touched the stitches where the last two fingers of the glove had been cut off. I withdrew my hand and placed it beneath the edge of the table.
“You want me to design a garden for you.”
From the moment I had sent my letter off to the gardener, I had been going over what I would say when I met him. “Yun Hong . . . my sister . . . she heard about you eleven years ago,” I said, searching for the right words. “You had just moved to Malaya. This was sometime in 1940.”
“Eleven years.” He turned to stare at the empty pond, his face barren. “Hard to believe that I have been living here for so long.”
“Yun Hong was fascinated by Japanese gardens even before we heard about you. Before you came to Malaya,” I said.
“How did she know about our gardens?” he said. “I doubt there were any in Penang in those days, or in the whole of Malaya. Even today, mine is the only one.”
“My father took all of us to Japan for a month. In 1938. Your government wanted to buy rubber from him. He was busy with his meetings, but the officials’ wives showed us around the city. We visited a few of the temples and the gardens. We even took the train to Kyoto.” The memory of that holiday—the only time I had been overseas till then—made me smile. “I’ll never forget how excited Yun Hong was. I was fifteen, and she was three years older than me. But on that holiday . . . on that holiday she was like a little girl, and I felt I was the elder sister.”
“Ah . . . Kyoto . . . ,” murmured Aritomo. “Which temples did you see?”
“Joju-in, Tofuku-ji, and the Temple of the Golden Pavilion,” I said. “When we returned home, Yun Hong read all the books she could find on Japanese gardens. She wanted to know—she was obsessed with knowing—how they were created.”
“You cannot learn gardening from books.”
“We soon found that out,” I said. “She tried to make a rock garden behind our house. I helped her, but it was a failure. My mother was furious that we had ruined the lawn.” I paused. “When Yun Hong heard about you living here, she wanted to see your garden.”
“There would have been nothing to see. Yugiri was not completed at that point.”
“Yun Hong’s love of gardens kept us alive when we were in the camp,” I said.
“How did it keep you alive?”
“We escaped into make-believe worlds,” I said. “Some imagined themselves building the house of their dreams or constructing a yacht. The more details they could include, the better they were insulated from the horrors around them. One Eurasian woman—the wife of a Dutch engineer at Shell—this woman wanted to look at her stamp collection again. It gave her the will to go on living. Another man recited the titles of all of Shakespeare’s plays again and again, in the order they had been written, when he was being tortured.” My throat dried up and I took a swallow of tea. “Yun Hong kept our spirits up by talking about the gardens we had visited in Kyoto, describing even the smallest details to me. ‘This is how we’ll survive,’ she told me, ‘this is how we’ll walk out of this camp.’”
The sun was breaking free of the mountains. Over the distant treetops, a flock of birds unspooled into a black wavering thread, pulling across the sky.
“One day, a guard beat me for not bowing properly. He wouldn’t stop, but just kept hitting me. I found myself in a garden. There were flowering trees everywhere, the smell of water . . .” I paused. “I realized that where I had been was a combination of all the gardens I had visited in Kyoto. I told Yun Hong about it. That was the moment we started to create our own garden, in here,” I said, tapping a finger on the side of my head. “Day by day we added details to it. The garden became our refuge. Inside our minds, we were free.”
He touched the envelope on the table. “You mentioned that you worked as a researcher for the War Crimes Tribunal.”
“I wanted to ensure that those who were responsible were punished. I wanted to see that justice was done.”
“You think I am a fool? It was not all about justice.”
“It was the only way that I would be allowed to examine the court documents and official records,” I said. “I was searching for information about my camp. I wanted to find where my sister was buried.”
His eyes narrowed. “You didn’t know where your camp was located?”
“We were blindfolded when the Japs—when the Japanese—transported us there. It was somewhere deep in the jungle. That was all we knew.”
“The other survivors from your camp, what happened to them?”
A butterfly trembled over the cannas by the verandah. It finally alighted on a leaf, its wings closing together in prayer. “There were no other survivors.”
“You were the only one?” He looked at me as though I was trying to deceive him.
I held his stare, not swerving away from it. “I was the only one.”
For a while we did not speak. Pushing the tray to one side, I untied the twine around the tube of papers I had brought with me and unrolled it on the table, weighing down the edges with our cups. “My grandmother left a piece of land in KL to Yun Hong and me. It’s about six acres.” I pointed to the first document, a map from the Land Office. “It’s a short walk up the hill from the Lake Gardens. The climate is too hot and humid for an authentic Japanese garden, I know,” I added quickly, “but perhaps we can use the local flora instead. Here, I’ve taken photographs of the place. You can have some idea of what the terrain looks like, what needs to be done.”
He gave only a cursory glance at the map and the photographs. “Your sister was the one who dreamed of creating gardens, not you.”
“Yun Hong lies in an unmarked grave, Mr. Nakamura. This is for her, a garden in her memory.” I foraged among my thoughts for the words to persuade him but found none. “This is the only thing I can do for her.”
“It makes me uncomfortable—the fact that you are asking me to do this because of what happened to your sister—and to you.”
“It shouldn’t, if you weren’t involved in the Occupation.” I spoke more sharply than I had intended.
The line of his jaw became accentuated. “If I had been, would I not have been hanged? Perhaps by you even?”
“Not every guilty Japanese was charged, much less punished.”
Some element in the air between us changed, as though a wind that had been blowing gently had been come to an abrupt stillness.
“British soldiers came here one day, not long after the surrender,” he said. “They dragged me out of my house and made me kneel on the ground, there. Just there.” He pointed to a patch of grass. “They clubbed me. When I fell over and tried to get up, they kicked me, again and again. Then they took me away.”
“Where to?”
“The prison in Ipoh. They locked me in a cell. They never charged me with anything.” He stroked his cheek with the back of his hand. “There were other prisoners there, Japanese officers, waiting for their sentences to be carried out. Some of them wept when they went to their execution. One by one they were taken away, until I was the only one left. And then, one evening, the guards came for me.” He stopped stroking his cheek. “They took me out of my cell. I thought I was going to be hanged. But they let me go. Magnus was waiting
for me at the prison gates. I had been inside for two months.”
The butterfly flew off, its wings flashing black and yellow semaphores. The gardener drummed the table with his fingers. Eventually he rose to his feet. “Come, I will show you part of the garden.”
“Our tea will get cold.” I had hoped to get a decision from him and he had not given me any indication of whether he would accept my offer.
“We are not likely to run out of tea in this part of the world,” he said, “are we?”
He collected an old solar topi from a hat stand by the front door and led me outside. We skirted the edge of the unfilled pond; I noticed that the bottom was already lined with hardened clay. Further into the garden, a Tamil coolie was stacking rocks coated in a batter of mud and broken-off roots into a wheelbarrow. “Selamat pagi, Tuan,” he greeted Aritomo. The gardener examined the man’s work and shook his head, his irritation obvious. The Tamil spoke barely any English and Aritomo was unable to tell him exactly what he wanted done. I stepped between them and translated his instructions into Malay. Aritomo gave me more detailed directions to convey to the man, interrogating him until he was satisfied that he was understood precisely.
“He will still make a mess of things,” Aritomo said as the Tamil pushed the wheelbarrow away.
“How many workers do you have here?”
“I used to have nine,” Aritomo replied. “When the war ended they went to Kuala Lumpur. Now I have only five of them working for me. They have no interest or ability in gardening. And as you have seen, they cannot understand my instructions.”
“You’ve been here eleven years,” I said, gazing around us. “I would have thought that the garden would’ve been completed by now.”
