by Tan Twan Eng
I clambered up a rock face to get a better view. The prisoners were gathered outside the mine’s entrance, hemmed in by the guards. I tried to pick out Yun Hong from the crowd, but I was too high up. A man in a gray robe and an oddly shaped hat paced outside the mine, waving something in his hand that gave off smoke. Incense, I realized a second later.
From inside the mine a figure appeared, growing taller as he came up the sloping tunnel. He was dressed in white, and I knew it was Tominaga, even though I could not make him out clearly. He stopped in front of the prisoners and did something no one had ever done to them—to us—before: keeping his arms to his sides, he folded his body into a deep bow.
Straightening up again, he gave a signal to the guards. They began herding the prisoners into the jungle, away from the direction of our camp. Finally Tominaga was the only person left standing outside the mine. I had to move quickly, I had to get down to the mine and find out where the prisoners were being taken before I lost their trail. But something compelled me to see what Tominaga was up to.
He backed away from the entrance, moving until he was almost at the edge of the jungle. Then he stopped. On the wind came a series of faint detonations. And then, silence. Dust and smoke stormed out from the mine a moment later, but Tominaga continued to stand there, letting the cloud from deep below the earth engulf him completely. When the wind thinned the dust a moment later, he remained, stock still in the same position. Then he turned away from the mine and entered the jungle without a backward glance.
Then the hill above the mine sheared away, pulling everything down with it—trees, rocks, earth.
Rain was falling when I finally descended into the valley. I had no idea how much time had passed—perhaps two hours, perhaps four. I could not find the camp, then I realized that I was already inside it. The fence had been taken down. Every single one of the huts was gone, and the prisoners’ vegetable patch had been covered with earth. Even the rubble had been removed. There was no trace of the camp left.
I ran to the mine, recognizing it only from the fresh landslide burying its entrance, saplings and trees sticking out of the churned soil. I looked at the jungle around me, searching for the path the prisoners had taken.
Thunder rolled from somewhere over the mountains. It sounded again, the ground trembling lightly, and I knew it was not thunder. A third explosion came, echoing in the mountains. I tried to pinpoint where it came from. It was impossible. I caught sight of a well-trodden path leading into the jungle and ran toward it. The rain fell harder, blinding me and turning the trail into a river of mud. I did not know how long I kept going, but eventually I had to stop and take shelter beneath some low-hanging branches.
It was late morning when I opened my eyes again. The storm was over, but water still dripped from the branches and leaves. Shivering, I stood up and went to the edge of an escarpment. The thin morning mists were lifting off from the treetops. The jungle seemed to go on forever, and I knew I would only get lost if I went further into it. I made my way back to the mine. The rain had washed down more debris from the mountain during the night. My knees gave out and I collapsed to the ground. My weeping was the only sound in the silence.
Eventually I got up. It was time for me to leave. Turning to the jungle where the guards had taken the prisoners, I fixed the shapes and colors of the mountains and the limestone ridges into my memory, and I vowed to Yun Hong that I would come back for her, to free her spirit from where she had been immured.
I limped back to the camp and continued into the jungle, retracing the path I had used on the previous day, hoping I would be able to find my way out. Branches and thorns drew blood from my face and arms. All the time I had the feeling that I was being pursued by a wild animal. Perhaps a tiger was tracking me. Or maybe a demon of the jungle was stalking me, making me walk in confused circles. I was feverish. My bones ached. The moment came when I knew I could go on no further. In a hollow formed by the buttresses of a fig tree I lay down and shut my eyes. I sensed the creature that had been hunting me closing the gap between us. The undergrowth rustled, then shook harder. I opened my eyes. I heard the creature coming nearer, and then the ferns in front of me parted.
An aboriginal boy of fifteen or sixteen stood before me. He wore only a loincloth, and he had a blowpipe held near to his lips. Keeping his eyes on me all the while, he reached into a small bamboo tube hanging by his waist and took out a dart about four inches long. He inserted it into his blowpipe, tamping a small piece of cloth down into the mouthpiece. Then he brought the mouthpiece to his lips. At the back of my mind lay the knowledge that those darts were tipped with poison, but I was too exhausted to care anymore.
The boy aimed the blowpipe at me, puffed up his cheeks and blew the dart into my chest.
The shouts and laughter of children came from a distance, waking me. My vision was watery, but I could see that the wounds on my arms had been dressed; they smelled of an earthy concoction. I was lying under a coarse blanket in the corner of a long room. I heard voices; it sounded as though there were many other people around me. Underneath the floorboards, pigs grunted and chickens scratched in the dirt.
Despite my repeated questioning, the Orang Asli refused to tell me what tribe they were. Twenty to thirty families lived together in the longhouse, each with its own space, completely open. They let me stay with them for a week. Maybe it was longer; I do not remember much of that period. I drifted in and out of consciousness. During the brief moments when I was lucid, I wondered if they had drugged me. A constant flow of people came to squat and gawk at me, but they kept silent. The Malay I spoke was not much different from theirs, but I suspected they felt it was safer to pretend not to understand me. Only once did the headman speak to me, to tell me that the boy had not been trying to kill me with his dart, but only to make me unconscious so he could go for help.
When I recovered my strength, the headman got the same boy to lead me back into the jungle. He took me to Ipoh, the nearest town. I sensed that he had been instructed to take a long and confusing route, to prevent me from finding my way back to them again. They did not want me to return and bring trouble to their village, I supposed.
It took us four, five days to emerge from the jungle onto a tarred road. He pointed me in the direction and said, “Ipoh.” I asked for his name, but he only waved, turned around and slipped back into the jungle.
A lorry driver transporting a load of tapioca into town stopped and gave me a lift. He told me that Japan had surrendered twenty days before. The war was over.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The nuns in the temple were still chanting when I stopped speaking. “The war was over,” I said again. It should have made me feel better, allowing what I had kept bottled up inside me to bleed away, but it did not.
“Let me see your hand,” Aritomo said. “Take off your glove.”
He had seen it uncovered so many times already. I made no movement. He nodded to me, and I removed my left glove, exposing the two stumps. He took my hand, his fingers stroking the scars. “You are left-handed,” he said.
“Fumio was aware of that too. I had to learn to do some of the simplest things all over again.”
“The sketch of the kore-sansui garden you saw in Tominaga Noburu’s hut,” said Aritomo. “What did it look like?”
I thought for a moment. “Three stones in one corner, and two low, flat gray rocks diagonally opposite them, and behind them a miniature pine tree shaped like a dented temple bell.”
“The dry mountain-water garden at his grandfather’s summer home at Lake Biwa,” said Aritomo. “Three centuries old and famous all over Japan.” He paused. “Tominaga-san was a knowledgeable man where the Art of Setting Stones is concerned.”
“But he’s not as skilled as you.”
“He considered himself to be. Tominaga-san was a cousin of the empress,” he said, so softly that I thought he was talking to himself. “We have known each other since we were boys of five or six.”
“It wa
s him you quarreled with over the garden designs.” I should have realized it sooner. “Tominaga was the reason the emperor had to sack you.” When Aritomo did not reply, I said, “It was absurd to fight over a garden.”
“It was not merely about a garden. It was about what each one of us believed. He was always unyielding in his views, his principles. I once told him he would make a good soldier.”
“He couldn’t have been that rigid,” I said. “He disobeyed his orders. He helped me escape.”
“Now that was uncharacteristic of him. He was always our government’s strongest supporter, always loyal to the emperor, to our leaders.”
“He never said anything bad about you. In fact he often praised the gardens you had designed.”
Aritomo’s face seemed to age. “But what he did to the prisoners . . . what we did to all of you . . .” He became quiet, then said, “You have never told this to anyone?”
“I tried talking to my father about it, once. He didn’t want to hear about it. It was the same with my brother.”
“What about your friends?”
“I was severed from the world I had known. There was no shadow beneath my feet. I felt I was moving through a landscape that was familiar but, at the same time, unrecognizable to me,” I said. “Sometimes I’m so frightened . . . I’m frightened that this is how I will feel for the rest of my life.”
“You are still there, in the camp,” said Aritomo. “You have not made it out.”
“There is some part of me still trapped there, buried alive with Yun Hong and all the other prisoners,” I said, the words coming out slowly. “A part of me that I had to leave behind.” I stopped. Aritomo did not hurry me. “Perhaps, if I could go back to the camp and release that part of me, it might make me feel complete once more.”
“For all you know,” he said, staring into the distance, “the camp—and the mine—could be just over those mountains.”
“It wasn’t this high up. And it was humid there, and hot.” I breathed in deeply. “The air had none of this . . . this purity.”
“Did you try looking for your camp?”
“After I recovered, it was all I did. I wanted to find where they had killed Yun Hong. I wanted to free her—her and everyone who had died there. Give all of them a proper burial. But no one knew anything about that camp—not the Japanese, not any of the prisoners of war or soldiers I spoke to.” Scratching the stumps on my hand, I realized that I had not put on my gloves again. I was surprised that I was not embarrassed or awkward about it. “I visited a number of Orang Asli kampongs, and each time I would describe the village where I had been rescued, but no one knew anything about the aborigines who had saved me.”
“What do you think were inside those boxes hidden in the mine?”
“We thought it was weapons and ammunition,” I said. “But later, when we began to hear rumors that Japan was losing the war, I thought it was strange that they wouldn’t make use of the weapons.”
“A few months before our soldiers landed,” Aritomo said, “Tominaga came to see me.”
I sat forward and stared at him. “He came here? What did he want?”
“He presented the waterwheel to me, on behalf of the emperor.” Aritomo studied the creases on his palms. “If it can console you in some way, however small, I can assure you that Tominaga did not rape your sister. He preferred men. Always had. I think he went to see your sister because he thought you would not have left without her.”
“But I did leave without her. I abandoned her.”
“That was what she wanted you to do. You kept your promise to her.”
We sat there on the bench, listening to the voices of the aging nuns, left behind in this soon-to-be-forgotten temple. Perhaps they were summoning the clouds to come, to carry them away when the time came for them to leave this world.
For days after we returned from our hike to the Temple of Clouds, I felt restless, unable to concentrate on my work in Yugiri. By telling Aritomo about my sister’s experiences, I felt I had betrayed the promise I made to her, to keep her suffering a secret.
There was a heightened awareness in Aritomo; I saw it in the way he lifted his face slightly every morning when we began our kyudo practice, as though he was testing the air or listening for a noise in the trees. It began to rain more heavily and for longer periods every day, sometimes for hours, but Aritomo would push us harder in the garden whenever the rain let up, scolding us if we took too long to complete the tasks he gave us.
He asked us to pollard the pine trees at the perimeter of his garden. Being the lightest, I was strapped into a rope harness and then hoisted thirty feet above the ground. Pine needles scratched my cheeks and arms and I had difficulty catching Aritomo’s voice in the rising wind as he shouted his instructions to me. I had been up there for ten minutes when I saw him wave to the workers to lower me to the ground. Twisting in the harness to look behind me, I saw that the sky had turned black.
We ran back to his house, reaching it just in time. Standing side by side on the engawa, we watched the world dissolve into water. The mountains, the jungle, the garden, all disappeared into the rain.
An unnatural twilight shrouded the house. Lightning flickered through the rooms, illuminating the rice paper screens like spirits passing through worlds. He went into his study and switched on the desk lamp. It struck me that he had not bowed to the portrait of his emperor. In fact, the photograph, I saw, was no longer hanging on the wall.
“The monsoon has started,” he said. “There will not be much work for the next few months.”
“It won’t rain all the time,” I said lightly, hiding my concern that he was going to tell me that my apprenticeship with him had come to an end. I knew I was not yet ready to create my own garden.
“Listen to that.” Above our heads, the rain thrashed in the winds, savaging the roof tiles. The garden, the house, the space between the two of us, all became a song hidden in the static.
“You want me to leave Yugiri?” I said.
“No,” he said. “I want to create a tattoo for you.”
Had I heard him properly over the tumult of the rain? “A tattoo? Like the one you made for Magnus?”
“You do not understand.” He closed and opened his fingers a few times. “It will be a true horimono, covering the top half of your body.”
“You’re mad, Aritomo.” I stared at him. “Have you even thought what my life would be like, if anyone knew I had something like that on me?”
“If you cared about what other people thought, you would never have come to see me.”
“You said you had given up tattooing.”
“Lately it has been calling to me again.” He curled his fingers. Their joints seemed more swollen than I had realized. “The pain is getting worse. I want to make a horimono, Yun Ling. I never had the opportunity. Or found the right person.”
He went behind the empty bamboo birdcage and peered between its bars. I saw his face, divided into long, narrow strips. He set the cage spinning with a flick of his wrist. His face became distorted. “I have no interest in making a single, small tattoo. But a horimono . . .”
The spinning of the cage slowed down, but its bars continued to ripple their shadows across the walls. I had the sensation of being inside a magic lantern, watching the world reel around me on a rice paper screen.
“Obtaining a horimono is a great honor,” Aritomo said. “In Japan you would be asked for letters of introduction and you would be interviewed extensively by the horoshi before he decided if he wanted to work on you.”
There was a soft crack of bamboo as he stopped the spinning birdcage. The walls seemed to continue revolving for a few seconds longer. He stepped away from behind the cage.
“What sort of designs do you have in mind?”
“The horoshi and his client discuss the matter before a decision is made.”
“How do they decide?”
“Some horoshi keep drawings or photographs of the tattoos they have
already created.”
“Let me see them.”
“I never kept them—they were not something I wanted to have lying around. And, anyway, I have never made a horimono.” He thought for a second or two. Then he went to kneel before a chest of drawers in a corner of the study. He took out the box of woodblock prints he had shown me before and spread them out on his table.
“Most tattoo masters are expert woodblock artists—the skills are essentially the same,” he said. “Horoshi often create pieces inspired by Suikoden.”
“What are the procedures?”
He placed an ukiyo-e print on his desk. The process of tattooing would begin with suji, drawing the outline with a brush, he explained, his fingers moving around the print light as a dragonfly skimming over a pond. The outline would then be tattooed before the next stage, bokashi—filling in the drawings with colors.
“There are two ways to execute bokashi. More needles will be used where I want to put in darker colors. The ink is entered into your skin at a uniform level, the needles held like this.” His fingers tapered to a point, as though he was trying to cast a shadow of a bird’s head. He pecked my wrist in a vertical motion. “The effect of shading, like what you see here”—he indicated the camellia petals in the corner of the ukiyo-e—“is more difficult to create. The ink has to be inserted at different depths into your skin. I will require fewer needles, working them in at an oblique angle.”
His slow, matter-of-fact explanation lulled me. “The horimono will be contained within a frame,” he continued. “Or it can fade away into the surrounding skin, into akebono mikiri, a ‘daybreak’ design.”
“Daybreak,” I whispered. It called to mind a border with no visible boundary, a sky fenced in only by a barrier of light. “Any adverse side effects?”
