Garden of Evening Mists

by Tan Twan Eng

  Whenever I left Yugiri to go into the village of Tanah Rata, I would be disoriented by how much time had passed. When I came to the Cameron Highlands, I had left the world behind, thinking it would only be for a short time, but one day it struck me that I had been apprenticed to Aritomo for over a year. I mentioned this to him.

  “It was Magnus who first told me the story of the Garden of Eden. I had great difficulty imagining it,” he remarked. “A garden where nothing dies or decays, where no one grows old, and the seasons never change. How miserable.”

  “What’s so miserable about that?”

  “Think of the seasons as pieces of the finest, most translucent silk of different colors. Individually, they are beautiful, but lay one on top of another, even if just along their edges, and something special is created. That narrow strip of time when the start of one season overlaps the end of another is like that.”

  He was silent for a few moments. Then he asked, “What happened to the Garden of Eden after the man and woman were forced to leave? Did everything fall to ruin? The Tree of Life, and the Tree of Knowledge? Or is it all still there, unchanged, waiting?”

  I tried to recall what the nuns at my school had taught me. “I don’t know. It’s just a story.”

  He looked at me. “When the First Man and First Woman were banished from their home, Time was also set loose upon the world.”

  Kannadasan and his men appeared at Yugiri one morning, and I knew that the monsoon was over. There was much damage to clear up: tree branches had been amputated by storms; leaves and debris had swept down from the mountains, clogging the stream and flooding its banks. I was happy to be able to channel my attention and energies into the garden again. Soon we were occupied with only the lesser tasks—cleaning up the paths, making slight adjustments to the alignments of rocks, trimming the branches, anything that Aritomo felt had been thrown out of harmony.

  In the evenings he would collect his walking stick from Ah Cheong, and we would walk in the foothills behind the garden. I enjoyed those moments, when he showed me things I would have missed seeing on my own. “Nature is the best teacher,” he said to me.

  Requests began to come from senior civil servants and high-ranking military officials, asking to be given a tour of Yugiri. To my surprise, Aritomo agreed to most of them, although he always asked me to lead these tours and show the visitors around. By now my knowledge of garden design was sufficient, but I knew I would require many more years of study with Aritomo.

  I was raking the lawn in front of his house one afternoon when I sensed him coming up to me. For a few minutes he observed me silently. I continued with my task; I was no longer nervous when he scrutinized my work.

  “How does Yugiri compare to your other gardens?” I asked.

  “They have probably been ruined by coarse, unskilled hands,” he said. “This one here”—he looked around us—“this is the only one that is still truly mine.”

  “You can design more gardens here in Malaya. Adapt the principles of the Art of Setting Stones to our climate,” I said. “We’ll work together, you and I. We can start by creating the garden I want for Yun Hong.”

  “I had a letter from Sekigawa today,” he said. “The bureau has sent him to see me.”

  I swept the leaves into a gunnysack and laid the rake on the ground. “What will you tell him?”

  He looked at me with the steadiness of the sun contemplating its own reflection in the sea. “I will tell him that my home is here, in these mountains.”

  For a long moment we merely gazed at each other. Then I held up the gunnysack to him. “The garden is now perfect.”

  Taking the sack from me, he reached inside it and pulled out a handful of brown, withered leaves. He stepped onto the lawn and scattered them, as though he was a gust of wind. When the last leaf had fallen from his hand, he returned the sack to me and stood back to look at what he had made.

  That night, when he tattooed me, his hands felt slower, heavier. Once or twice his fingers would rest on my back, like a dragonfly poised on a leaf. It was past midnight when he stopped and sat back on his heels. Outside, frogs belched in the grass. A moment later I felt him touching me lightly on my shoulder.

  “It is done,” he said.

  My eyes took a second or two to focus. I pushed myself off the tatami mat and got to my feet. I looked over my shoulder and examined my body in the mirror, searching for the last tattoo he had colored in: the rounded shape of Majuba House, an ark floating on the green swells of tea. The horimono faded away into the bare skin around my neck, my upper arms, the sides of my body and just above the swell of my buttocks.

  I turned my body until I could see my entire back in the mirror. I looked as though I was wearing an overly tight batik shirt. I moved one shoulder, causing the figures on it to elongate. All of a sudden I was frightened.

  “You have a new skin now.” He circled me, as he had once done almost a year before, when his fingers had examined my blank skin.

  “But it’s not complete—there’s still this bit here.” I touched a rectangle the size of two cigarette packs above my left hip. The emptiness looked unnatural, sickly.

  “A horoshi will always leave a section of the horimono empty, as a symbol that it is never finished, never perfect,” said Aritomo, wiping his hands on a towel.

  “Like the leaves you scattered on the lawn,” I said.

  Even though the garden in Yugiri was completed, there was always some maintenance work to be done. Aritomo delegated most of the chores to me, telling me what he wanted done by the gardeners, elaborating on the reasons for each instruction.

  Walking past the archery hall one evening after the workers had left, I saw him there, dressed in his kyudo clothes. Since I had known him he had never practiced archery this late in the day; there was also something strange in the way he stood that made me stop and watch. My puzzlement increased when I saw him pretend to nock an arrow in the bowstring. He drew the bowstring back, and then released it. There was no arrow, but still I thought I heard the faint sound of paper being ripped, as though something forceful had pierced the target.

  He remained unmoving, one arm still stretched out, holding the bow level with his eyes. Finally, he lowered it, bringing a note of completion to the entire movement. He continued to stare at the target, and then he nodded his head once in satisfaction.

  I walked along the edge of the gravel bed to stand below him. “Did you hit the bull’s-eye?” I asked.

  He looked back at the target. “Yes, I did.”

  “It couldn’t have been too difficult, since you didn’t use an arrow,” I said, masking my confusion in a gently mocking tone.

  “But you are wrong. It takes years of practice. When I first started, I always missed,” he said. “And there was an arrow.”

  “There was no arrow,” I replied, restraining myself from turning to look at the target to be certain.

  “There was.” He touched the side of his head. “In here.”

  He began to spend more of his time in the shajo, shooting invisible arrows. And every night he would ask me to let him look at the horimono. I lay on the sheets as he studied my skin, his fingers stroking the pictures he had painted on my back: the temple in the mountains, the cave of the swiftlets, the archer shooting down the sun. After a few minutes of this I would turn around and pull him toward me.

  It was late in the evening, and Aritomo and I were the only people left in the garden. A silence welled up from deep inside the earth. I remained completely still, hoping that this caul of tranquility would never be pulled away from the world. Then the clouds started moving again, and the mists sagged and squandered themselves over the foothills.

  I cleaned my tools and hung them up in the shed. I went past the shajo. It was empty. At the front door of the house I found Ah Cheong, the chengal walking stick in his hand. Kerneels sat on a step, licking his paw. Aritomo came out presently. He hesitated for a moment before taking the stick from the housekeeper.

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nbsp; We strolled to the edge of Usugumo Pond, the cat following us, his tail high in the air. Aritomo stopped and stared out over the water. In the shallows the gray heron stood on one leg, trapped by its reflection. Behind us I heard the faint clatter of gravel as Ah Cheong pushed his bicycle out of the garden, one of its wheels squeaking.

  The path Aritomo normally took to go up into the hills went past the western perimeter of the garden. At the access to the trail, concealed by the thick wall of ferns and long grass, Aritomo stopped. He bent down and rubbed Kerneels’s head. “I think,” he said when he stood up, “I would like to be on my own this evening.”

  He held out his walking stick to me. We looked at each other, and in the end I took it from him.

  “I’ll leave it in your study,” I said.

  He nodded and moved past me, touching me once, lightly, on my hand. I watched him climb up the slope, the air tinctured green by the light reflecting off the ferns. At the top of the rise he turned back to look at his garden. Perhaps he was smiling at me, but the spokes of sunlight behind him made it difficult for me to be certain. I lifted my hand to my chest. Was I waving to him? Or was I summoning him to come back?

  The best chance of finding Aritomo was within the first twenty-four hours of his disappearance, Sub-Inspector Lee advised me the next morning when I drove to the station in Tanah Rata. He questioned me about Aritomo’s state of mind and asked me what he was wearing. He requested a photograph of him, and it was only then that I realized I did not have one.

  The police used Yugiri as their base of operations. One wall of Aritomo’s study was pinned with maps provided by the army. Ah Cheong was kept occupied with preparing food for the men who tramped in and out of the house at all hours of the day.

  “I found this on his desk,” I said, handing a bottle to Lee. “His pills. For his blood pressure.”

  The large number of people who joined the search parties surprised me. I mentioned this to Lee, and he said, “They are people he saved from torture by the Kempeitai or from being taken to the Burma Railway.”

  Our hopes weakened when days passed without the search parties coming across any signs of Aritomo. “The rains haven’t helped—our dogs can’t pick up any trace of his scent,” Sub-Inspector Lee said, “and the Ibans have had no success tracking him.”

  The local newspapers ignored Aritomo’s disappearance at first; it was just another hiker who had got lost in the jungle, after all. But after a Japanese journalist writing about the communists in the mountains filed a report with his newspaper in Tokyo, the reporters began to flock to Tanah Rata. They made much of the fact that I was the last person to have seen Aritomo. My experience as a prisoner of the Japanese was brought up, as was my relationship with Aritomo. My father ordered me to leave Cameron Highlands immediately before I damaged our family name beyond repair, but I ignored him.

  A week after the search for Aritomo had begun, Sekigawa showed up. I was on the verandah, paging through my notebook, when Ah Cheong brought him to me. I recalled that we had met on the same spot over a year ago—just before Aritomo started my horimono.

  “You must let me know if there is any way I can help,” he said. “I will be at the Smokehouse Hotel for as long as is required.”

  “What was it you wished to see Aritomo about?”

  “It would be better for me to speak to him personally,” he replied. “I am sure he will be found soon.”

  “Of course he will.”

  Sekigawa’s gaze swept across the garden in front of the verandah, and then back into the interior of the house. “Did he leave a note, a letter? For me, or for anyone else?”

  “He didn’t know that he was going to get himself lost in the jungle, Mr. Sekigawa,” I said. “Anyway, as you have said, he’ll be found soon.”

  He did not stay long. I opened my notebook again after he left, turning to the page where I had placed the thin blue envelope. Kerneels came out and rubbed against me. I held up the envelope and looked at it, this letter written by a Japanese war criminal to his son. I set it down on the table, making a mental note to get Ah Cheong to post it the next morning.

  My tea had cooled. I threw it over the verandah and poured a fresh cup. Still sitting in the seiza position, I shifted my body and turned toward the garden and the trees, to the mountains and the clouds. I lifted the cup, dipped my head once and drank.

  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 tea leaves 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 onward, and it appeared 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 onward, 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 that 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: theaters 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 add. “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—”