by Tan Twan Eng
I put on a cardigan, wound a scarf around my neck and walked to Yugiri. Banks of clouds were trapped in the hollows between the ridges. At Usugumo Pond I stopped and lingered. The garden felt larger, now that the pond was filled, and I realized that this liquid mirror was another form of shakkei, borrowing from emptiness to create more emptiness. The stones and pebbles with which we had lined the pond were now submerged in water. It gave me a deep feeling of satisfaction to know that we had done everything properly, even if the results of our efforts were not visible. The drowned stones imparted a different character to the water, made it seem older, denser, its secrets hidden away.
In the shallows, the gray heron stood on one leg, grooming itself. It stopped and eyed me, then returned to contemplating itself in the water. For some reason it had remained here, always returning to the pond after it had been absent for a day or two.
The rusty screeching of crickets filled the air. On the opposite bank, movement in the tree ferns caught my attention. I tensed up, preparing to run if I had to. Aritomo slipped out from behind the ferns a second later. I sighed, relief loosening my limbs. Like the heron, Aritomo paused, staring at me from across the water. Then he walked toward me.
Twilight dampened the air with a watery haze, weighing down every leaf in the garden with the sadness of another day ended. Aritomo stopped beside me and leaned on his walking stick, gazing at the heron. For the first time since I knew him, it struck me that he was no longer young.
“A pond guarded over by waterfowl will bring peace to the house,” I murmured, recalling a line of advice from Sakuteiki.
Creases flared out from the corners of his smile. For a timeless moment I looked straight into his eyes, and he stared at me with the same concentration he had shown when he was studying the target, just before he released his arrow.
Above the highest mountains, the last of the day evaporated from the sky. “The Pavilion of Heaven . . . Yun Hong would have been delighted.”
“I am glad.”
The heron flapped its wings once, twice, beating the stiffness out of them, the sounds echoing away into the trees. Droplets of water fell from the bird’s legs as it flew off, blooming into overlapping bracelets on the pond’s surface.
Movement high above us, higher than the heron, caught our attention. We both raised our faces to the sky at the same time. Aritomo pointed with the handle of his walking stick, looking like a prophet in an ancient land. In the furthest reaches of the eastern sky, where it had already turned to night, streaks of light were fanning out. I did not know what they were at first, but when I realized what I was looking at, a sigh misted from between my lips.
It was a storm of meteors, arrows of light shot by archers from the far side of the universe, igniting and burning up as they pierced the atmospheric shield. Hundreds of them burned out halfway, flaring their brightest just before they died.
Standing there with our heads tilted back to the sky, our faces lit by ancient starlight and the dying fires of those fragments of a planet broken up long ago, I forgot where I was, what I had gone through, what I had lost.
“My grandfather taught me the names of the planets and stars,” Aritomo said. “We often sat in his garden at night, studying the scatterings of light in the sky through his telescope. He was very proud of it, that telescope of his.”
“Tell me their names,” I said. “Point them out to me.”
“The stars are different here.” His eyes swept across the sky again, and I wondered whether the loss I caught in his voice would accompany him for the rest of his life.
“In one of the gardens he made, my grandfather used only white stones. Completely white, almost luminous,” Aritomo said, still looking up into the sky. “He set them in patterns that mirrored the positions of the constellations he loved most: the Winnowing Basket; the Sculptor’s Tool; the Purple Forbidden Enclosure.” The names from his lips sounded like offerings to the dome above us. “He wanted the people visiting that garden to feel as though they were walking amongst the night sky.”
The torrent of falling stars dried up, but the sky continued to exhale a luminance, as though it had retained the light from the meteors. Perhaps the illumination was trapped not in the sky but in our eyes, in our memory.
“My amah used to warn me that they’re bad omens, these meteors,” I said. “Soh pa sing, she called them—broomstick stars, sweeping away all of one’s good luck. I’ve always disagreed with her—how can something so beautiful be unlucky?”
“They remind me of our kamikaze pilots,” Aritomo said. “My brother was one of them.”
A few seconds floated past before I spoke. “Did he survive the war?”
“He was among the first batch of pilots to volunteer.”
“What made him do that?”
“Family honor,” Aritomo replied. That justification, so often uttered by the Japanese prisoners I had met, had always repelled me. He continued. “It is not what you think. Our father passed away shortly before I left Japan. Shizuo blamed his death on the troubles I had caused our family.”
He scratched at the pebbles on the bank with the tip of his walking stick. “Before I met you, before you came here, I never knew anyone personally who had lost friends or family in the Occupation. Oh, I knew of those here who had been brutalized by my people—the men and women in the villages, the workers here, even Magnus and Emily. But I kept myself above all of that. I kept out everything that was unpleasant. I attended only to my garden.”
The first stars of the evening were just appearing, faint and timid, as though overwhelmed by the deluge of light a few minutes before. Staring into the void, I felt I could stand there until dawn came, turning with the earth, watching the stars stencil their cryptic patterns across the sky.
Aritomo reached out his hand and touched my cheek once, lightly. I caught his fingers, pulled him to me and kissed him. He broke away first. He stepped back and slipped past me, merging into the shadows spilling out from the trees. I turned to watch him as he headed back to his house. He slowed down, then stopped walking.
For a few moments I did nothing, keeping just as still. Then I went toward him, and together, in silence, we walked back to his house, our breaths nothing more than clouds burned away by the light of the stars.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Two hours after midnight, I stop writing. I do not want to face what I have remembered, among all those pages and pages of words. But they are there, crouching behind a stone in my mind, waiting to come out again. Putting down my pen on the desk and pushing back my chair, I slide open the door and walk along the darkened verandah to the front of the house.
The world is frosted in moonlight. A nightjar calls out, then stops. I wait for it to resume, but it disappoints me. Rubbing the circulation into my wrists, I remember how, after that evening with Aritomo by the pond, I would often look up if I happened to be outside at night. But I never saw anything like that again, that monsoon of falling stars teeming across the sky.
I had forgotten about Captain Hideyoshi Mamoru. The memory of my conversation with him had come back to me as I was writing. I wanted to stop, but instead allowed it to unfold from my pen. Thinking about my own words again, I am appalled. Had I been so unfeeling as to correct a man’s grammar a short while before he was to be hanged? Hung, hanged—what did it matter?
As a judge I have presided in civil and criminal cases. I have sentenced people to death for murder, drug trafficking and armed robbery. I have always taken pride in my detachment, my objectivity, but now I wonder if these are merely the attributes of a deadened heart.
Before going back inside, I look to the sky again. The stars are still, unmoving. Not a single marker has been dislodged from its position on the eternal map.
For the past few days, Professor Tatsuji has been spending more time in the garden. We have not spoken much since our conversation in the Pavilion of Heaven a week ago. I have given him permission to explore Yugiri, but he doesn’t seem to wander far fro
m the house. Some days I see him by the pavilion, just standing there, hands behind his back. I want him to examine the prints as quickly as he can, but for some reason, the sight of him gazing out to the water fills me with a reluctance to rush him. More than once I have caught him staring at the sky, as though searching for something behind the clouds.
I wonder if there is any truth in Tatsuji’s suspicion that Aritomo had been sent to Malaya by the emperor. The answer is elusive, like ink in water.
This morning, I intercept Ah Cheong when he comes out from the kitchen with a tray of tea and scones. “I’ll take it to him,” I say.
Tatsuji’s attention is fixed on the prints spread out on the desk when I enter his workroom. The bamboo blinds are rolled up, the sun on the cedarwood floor hot when I walk barefoot across it. His copy of Yeats’s poems lies on the desk. He continues to stare at a woodblock print, only glancing up when he becomes aware of me. In the second before he looks away, I see his eyes are filled with grief.
Hesitating for a moment, I set the tray down next to a print of a Malay fishing village. The village seems to be located somewhere on the east coast. I wonder what it is about the print that has so affected him.
He clears his throat a few times. “They are all untitled. I have arranged them in chronological sequence.” He turns the sheet over and points to a vertical line of Japanese script behind it. “This one is dated the fifth month of the twentieth year of the Showa jidai—the Era of Enlightened Peace.”
I knew that each era in the Japanese calendar corresponds to an emperor’s reign. “When did Hirohito become emperor?”
“Christmas Day, 1926. That would make it 1945 when Aritomo wrote this. May 1945.”
“Three months before Japan surrendered.” In my mind I picture Aritomo sitting here in Yugiri, making this print while I was still a prisoner: each of us unaware of the other; unaware that our paths would converge one day.
I reach over and hold up the print. On a beach, rows of cuttlefish are drying on wooden racks. Behind them, coconut trees bow to each other, their leaves so finely etched that I can almost hear them rustling in the salted wind. Aritomo has set the entire scene inside the outline of a large cuttlefish, covering the outer edges with overlapping prints of smaller cuttlefish in translucent dark blue ink, shadows on shadows.
“The ancient Chinese called the cuttlefish the Scribe of the Ocean God, because it carries ink in its body,” I murmur. “Something Aritomo once told me. Is the quality of the prints acceptable for your book?”
Tatsuji clears his throat again. “Most of them. Not as good as Kanaoka’s works, of course. But then, no one’s is, I suppose.” I look at him, and he explains, “Kanaoka lived in the seventh century. He is remembered for the realism of his work. A horse he painted on a wall in a palace was said to come alive at night and gallop in the grasslands outside, beneath the autumn moon.”
“Some of the pieces have been damaged by moisture,” I point out.
“Even if they are in tatters, I want people to see them. They will go into my book—with your permission, of course.” He studies the fishing village again and, in a softer voice, says, “This is the first time I have been back since the war.”
“Only the older people like me—like us—remember it now,” I say.
He lifts his gaze from the ukiyo-e and looks at me. “You are not well, are you?”
I am silent for a moment. “You told me you were a navy pilot.”
He nods.
“Where were you based? Butterworth? Singapore?” I wonder if he was part of the first wave of planes that bombed the streets of Singapore and Penang. Perhaps he was in the squadron that sank the Prince of Wales and the Repulse off the east coast.
Tatsuji squints through the windows, as though he has seen something on the horizon. “My base was outside a fishing village.”
“Where was it?” I reach behind me and pull up the other rosewood chair, sitting close to him.
For a long while he does not say anything. Finally he begins to speak in a slow, steady voice.
“It was raining on the morning I was scheduled to die. I had not slept. All night the rain had blown in from the South China Sea, the water lashing the thatched roofs of our billets. The monsoon should have already ended, yet the rains still came, day after day.
“Colonel Teruzen, my flight instructor, was already on the verandah, looking out to the beach. Lightning flashed between the low-lying clouds and the sea. ‘No flying today,’ he said when I went to join him. His relief was evident. He was forty years old that year, and I knew he would survive the war. And for that I was glad.
“The small airfield was outside Kampong Penyu, on the southeastern coast of Malaya. The runway was parallel to the beach. The billets were now empty of pilots except for Colonel Teruzen and me.
“‘No flying today,’ I repeated. I would live another day. A sense of relief made me light-headed and ashamed. But stirred into that were also the increasing frustrations and uncertainties of waiting.
“I’d been assigned my duty over two months before, together with the other pilots in my squadron. Six of us had flown from the naval air base in Kyushu all the way to Luzon. We spent a night at the Luzon air base, leaving early at dawn the next day to avoid being detected by the Americans. An hour after taking off from Luzon, my plane developed engine problems, shuddering as it struggled to carry the five-hundred-pound bomb attached beneath. These planes had not been constructed to carry such a load. They were shoddily built by that time. There was nothing I could do. Our airplanes were so basic at this stage of the war that we did not even have radio to communicate with one another. I could only watch my fellow pilots speed away, flying south, toward Malaya. And then they were gone.
“I examined my charts for the nearest landing strip, praying that the faltering engine would not stall. Forty minutes later I made a rough landing on the Bacolod air base. It was just a collection of wooden huts surrounded by low mountain ranges, their peaks clipped off by the storm clouds. The only sign of life was a windsock, fluttering madly as though a bird was trapped in it.
“The ground crew consisted of a middle-aged limping mechanic and his assistant. I described the fault in the engine to them. ‘How long will it take to fix it?’
“‘We’ll have to wait for the engine to cool, but from what you described . . .’ The mechanic sucked his teeth. He understood my desperation: I had to die together with my squadron comrades. We had gone through our aviation training and graduated together from the Imperial Naval Academy. I did not want to be left behind. ‘There’s an old Mitsubishi engine in our workshop,’ he said. ‘Maybe we can salvage some parts from it. We’ll be as quick as we can.’
“He stood to attention as I sensed someone coming up behind me. I turned around, and for the first time in a year I saw Colonel Teruzen again. He narrowed his eyes in slight amusement and I raised a belated salute.
“‘Lieutenant Yoshikawa,’ he said. ‘Kind of you to drop in for a visit.’
“‘Trouble with my airplane, sir,’ I replied, flustered by his unexpected appearance.
“He glanced at the aircraft behind me, his eyes clouding over. ‘You’ve been assigned to the tokko unit?’
“‘I—all of us in my class—volunteered,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here? I heard you were in Tokyo.’
“‘I am touring our air bases in the South China Sea,’ he said, ‘reporting to Admiral Onishi on the efficacy of sending all you young pilots to your deaths.’ The anger in his voice was clear—he had trained so many of us. ‘A million hearts beating as one,’ he said, quoting the suicide pilots’ slogan, by now repeated throughout all of Japan. ‘A waste. A terrible, terrible waste.’
“I was tired, and my uniform was already wet and sour from the humidity. ‘Where is everyone?’ I asked.
“‘The last pilots left yesterday. A convoy of American warships were spotted in the Sulu Sea,’ Colonel Teruzen said. ‘We are awaiting the next batch. Perhaps they will be
sending children soon. Come,’ he said. ‘We will get you some breakfast. You can report to the CO later. He is usually drunk by this time.’
“I followed him to a room in a low building two hundred yards from the hangar, bare except for a desk and a faded map of the Philippines pinned on a wall. I bowed to a photograph of the emperor. Colonel Teruzen leaned against the door frame and watched, his arms folded across his chest. ‘Where are you headed?’ he asked.
“‘The southeast coast of Malaya,’ I said.
“‘Kampong Penyu?’ He frowned. ‘I thought we had abandoned that base.’
“‘I do not know, Teruzen-san. I merely follow orders.’
“He came closer to me, and I remembered our last day together in Tokyo. I had made the decision to fulfill my duty, to put aside my own needs. I did not wish to be reminded of those days, gone the way of all tokko pilots now. “How is Noriko?”
“‘There was an air raid,’ he said, his face rigid. ‘She was in the house preparing our dinner. The whole neighborhood was destroyed. The fires burned for days.’
“For a long moment we stood apart, and then I stepped forward and embraced him.”
The mechanic took five days to repair my engine, and another three days to fine-tune it. I was torn between the need to rush him and the urge to prolong my stay. Teruzen took me hiking in the nearby hills. There was no need to talk much now—we understood each other’s shades of silences. A new intensity came into everything we did. And for the first time since we met, so many years ago, I was rid of all futile guilt. At night I would lie awake and feel his presence next to me. He slept fitfully. His hair had turned a light ash, and there were more lines around his eyes.
“We had met at my father’s house in Tokyo. Teruzen had been the naval adviser sent to oversee the manufacture of the airplanes being built by my father. Japan had just taken Singapore and the war across Asia was going extremely well. There was an immediate understanding between us that night when I looked into his eyes after I bowed to him. I lingered around as my father introduced him to the other industrialists.
