by Tan Twan Eng
“Endo-san’s father disagreed with the military and made his opinions widely known. This was seen as acting against the emperor, a crime of treason. His father was sent to prison and the family was ostracized. Endo-san’s views reflected his father’s, although he was more subtle in expressing them. Still, there were attempts on Endo-san’s life, but he remained obdurate. This, I think, was due in part to his sensei.”
I nodded. Endo-san had studied under O’ Sensei Ueshiba, a well-known pacifist who was, paradoxically, one of the greatest Japanese martial artists of all time. I recalled the first time I met O’ Sensei. The man was then in his late sixties, suffering from illness, just a few months from death; yet he had thrown me around the training mats until I could not breathe, my head dizzy from the falls, my joints sore where he had locked me.
I told Michiko this and she laughed. “I too was thrown around like a rag doll by him.”
She stood up and walked out into the night, then turned back to me and said, “One day, a few months later and after Endo-san had been away for some weeks, I met him again. I was on my way home from the market, and he came up behind me and told me to meet him on the beach, where we had sat so often. I went home, pretended to my mother that I had left something at the market, and then ran all the way to the beach.
“I saw him first. He was facing the sea. The sun looked as if it had leaked its color into the sea, into his face and eyes. When I reached him, he told me he was leaving Japan for a few years.
“‘Where will you go?’ I asked him.”
“‘I do not know yet. I wish to see the world, and find my answers,’ he replied.”
“‘Answers to what?’ I asked.”
“He shook his head. Then he told me he had been having strange dreams, dreams of different lives, different countries. He refused to tell me more.
“I told him I would wait for him, but he said no, that I should live the life that had already been written for me. To attempt to do otherwise would be foolish. We were not meant to be together. My future was not with him.
“I was so angry with him, talking like that. I told him he was baka—an idiot. And you know, he only smiled and said that it was true.
“That was the last time I saw him. Later I heard that he had been sent by the government to some place in Asia, some country I had never even heard of—Malaya. It was very puzzling, I thought then, that a man so opposed to Japan’s aggressive military policies should have accepted service with the government.
“But as I have said, I never saw him again, even when he came back for a short visit. I could not, however much I longed to. My father had arranged a marriage for me, and I was being taught how to take care of my future husband and run his house. Ozawa, like Endo-san, was involved in his family’s company, which was then making electronic equipment for the war.”
She paused, and in her face made translucent by memory I saw the girl she had once been and I felt a faint sadness for Endo-san, for what he had thrown aside.
“I have never stopped thinking of him,” she said.
I pushed back my chair, feeling tired by the conversation, disturbed by the emotions her arrival had awoken within me.
“May I stay here for the night?” she asked.
I was disinclined to allow another person to unsettle the structure of my life, which had been laid out carefully over the years. I had always appreciated my own company and the few people who had tried to breach my barrier had always been hurt in the process. I looked out to the sea; there was no guidance from Endo-san but that had never stopped me from asking him. It was late and the taxi services in Penang were notoriously bad. Finally I nodded.
She was aware of my reluctance. “I apologize for causing you inconvenience,” she said.
I waved her apologies away and stood up, wincing at my stiff joints, hearing the expected pops and cracks in them—the symptoms of age and the lack of training. Old injuries sent their repetitive messages of wear and pain, urging me to surrender, which I always refused to do.
I started to clear away the remains of our meal, stacking the plates into little piles.
“You have no picture of him?” she asked as she helped me carry the plates to the kitchen.
I saw the faintest expression of hope in her eyes, like a weak flaring star, and I shook my head. “No. We never took any,” I replied, watching the flare sink into the ocean.
She nodded. “Neither did I. Our village did not have cameras at the time he left Japan. It is so ironic, really—my husband’s company now produces some of the most popular cameras in the world.”
I led her up the stairs to one of the more serviceable guestrooms. It had been Isabel’s room. After the war I had had the bedrooms redecorated, in an attempt to start anew, and sometimes I wondered if I should have bothered. I only see the rooms as they were, hear them as they used to sound, and smell them as if it were still fifty years ago. Someone once asked me if Istana was haunted and I had replied, why yes, of course, naturally so. It is no wonder that I seldom have visitors.
On the landing halfway up the stairs, she stopped, her eyes drawn to the wall where a hole had been gouged out.
“Isabel, my sister. She shot at someone here,” I explained. I had never had the scar in the wall covered up.
At the entrance to the room I gave a bow to Michiko and she returned a deeper one. I left her and walked slowly through the house, locking the doors, closing the windows, putting out the lights one by one. Then I made my way to the balcony outside my room. It was the same room I had always had from the moment I was born. I felt a sense of time stretching back, curving beyond sight like the shoreline of an immense bay. How many people in this world can say they have had the same room from birth and, in my case, probably until death?
The high winds had swept the clouds from the sky. It was turning into a crisp, clean night, and the layers and layers of stars above me added an immeasurable depth to the darkness. I thought about the letter Michiko had received from Endo-san. Fifty years! It would have been written four years after the Japanese invaded Malaya, toward the end of the war. The chaotic conditions of countries at war, the paranoia, the seas constantly patrolled by battleships and aircraft, all could have accounted for the letter getting lost. Fifty unimaginable years stretched out like a vast piece of fraying, sun-bleached cloth fluttering in the wind. Had it been that long?
Sometimes it had seemed longer.
Under the ancient light of a thousand stars I made out Endo-san’s island, sleeping in the swaying embrace of the waves. I have resisted all offers to buy that fragment of land and have kept it clean and as it was, with his little wooden house beneath the trees, the clearing where we used to practice, the beach where my boat would always touch land.
Memories—they are all the aged have. The young have hopes and dreams, while the old hold the remains of them in their hands and wonder what has happened to their lives. I looked back hard on my life that night, from the moments of my reckless youth, through the painful and tragic years of the war, to the solitary decades after. Yes, I could say that I had lived my life, if not to the full then at least almost to the brim. What more could one ask? Rare is the person whose life overflows. I have lived, I have traveled the world, and now, like a worn-out clock, my life is winding down, the hands slowing, stepping out of the flow of time. If one steps out of time what does one have? Why, the past of course, gradually being worn away by the years as a pebble halted on a riverbed is eroded by the passage of water.
A beam from the lighthouse farther up Moonlight Bay lit up the night. Here it came again, and again, and again. When I was a boy, my father, in the rare moments when he had not been too busy with work, told Isabel and me its history. I could even remember the name of the man who guarded the lighthouse then—Mr. Deepak, whose wife jumped off the lighthouse and hit the rocks below when she found out he had been unfaithful to her. Mr. Deepak was long dead now, yet the lighthouse lived on, a lonely sentinel of the sea still carrying out its
archaic duty even in this modern age.
I left the balcony and went into my room and tried to get some sleep. That night, as always, I asked to dream of Endo-san.
The following morning, unlike all the mornings of the past five years, I decided to train again. I found my gi, neatly pressed by Maria, in a cupboard. It was my favorite piece, and a slight trace of perspiration, which could never be completely washed away, teased my nose as I unfolded it.
I had converted two rooms on the ground floor of Istana into a dojo, a Place of the Way, when I started teaching. The floor was paneled with Japanese pine, polished to a perfect gloss then covered with thick training mats. Fresh lilies were placed daily in a small vase in the tokonama, the shrine in a little alcove that also held a portrait of O’ Sensei Ueshiba. A wall of mirrors faced a row of high glass doors that opened out to the lawns and beyond them to the sea.
I had limited my class to ten students and had seen them obtain their higher grades, then open their own schools. We had often traveled to seminars and conventions around the world, giving exhibitions and classes, and learning from other masters. My former students used to call me occasionally, trying to tempt me back to that world. But I refused, and told them I had removed myself from the River and the Lake, adopting the Cantonese phrase “toi chut kong woo,” used to describe warriors who had voluntarily left their violent world to seek peace.
Sitting in the seiza position, buttocks resting on my heels, I began to meditate. It came back to me slowly as I sat there feeling the morning sun warm my face. After twenty minutes I picked up my bokken, raised it horizontally in both hands, and bowed to O’ Sensei. Then I bowed to the wooden sword and practiced my cuts.
The bokken is used in training, when a real katana sword is impractical and dangerous. That does not mean it is not an effective weapon. Some swordsmen I have met actually prefer it to the metal blade, and Miyamoto Musashi, the Sword Saint of Japan, was well known for going to duels armed only with two wooden swords against a live katana.
My bokken was about three and a half feet long, made by a craftsman in Shikoku famous for his skills with cedar. I used to practice five thousand cuts daily, through the top and sides of the opponent’s head, cutting through his upper body, splitting him in half, from left shoulder to right hip, the arms moving without thought, cutting so precisely that there was not even a whisper as the wood sliced through the air. This particular morning I lost count when I reached two thousand, but my body knew, and I gave myself to it, seeing nothing, but aware of everything. Light filled my vision; lightness filled my being, embodying the principle that had been absorbed into me:
Stillness in Movement,
Movement in Stillness.
When I had finished I found Michiko facing me in her training uniform. I brought my sword out before me and bowed to it before placing it back on its wooden stand. Wordlessly we practiced with each other, using just our bare hands. Due to my seniority in rank I insisted on being the nage, the person defending and throwing. As the attacking uke, she had to trust me not to injure her or use excessive force. Endo-san used to tell me that trust between a pair of training partners was the foundation of aikido training, for without it the uke would be fearful of creating the attack necessary for perfecting the techniques.
She was extremely proficient, her ukemi falls soft and graceful, her hands never seeming to hit the mats in absorbing the force of my throws, but to stroke them gently, like a leaf settling down to the ground before being lifted lightly again by the merest flick of a breeze. She was nowhere near my level, but then very few people are. I was taught by a master and have had the experience of actually using my skills. In turn I became a Shihan, a teacher of teachers. Is that not the way of the world?
She expected me to switch roles and allow her to be the nage, as was the custom, but I shook my head and she did not protest. By the time we finished we were both soaked in perspiration, our breathing rapid, hearts hammering wildly as we sought to exert control over them.
“You are as good as people have said,” she remarked, wiping her face with a towel.
I shook my head. “I used to be better.” Long inactivity had eroded my sharpness. But what did I need those skills for now? At seventy-two, who was going to fight me?
She read my thoughts. “Your mind is still very strong,” she said. “That is what training is for.”
I noticed in the morning light how thin she was but refrained from asking about her health. Aikido trains a person to look and sense beyond the surface and, through the physical contact of training with her, I had felt that she was not well.
We had a light breakfast of porridge and dumplings on the terrace, beneath a bower of bean-vines. Maria came out with a tray of Boh tea. “Maria, this is Madam Michiko. She’ll be staying with us for a while.”
Michiko raised an eyebrow at me.
“Surely you don’t need to stay in a hotel?” I asked, as Maria began complaining about the mess in the kitchen and I waved her away. “Stay here. Go to your hotel and pick up the rest of your things,” I went on, enjoying the look of surprise on her face, knowing I had unbalanced her by anticipating her intentions.
I wanted to find out more about her childhood, about the life she had led with Endo-san. She was also good company. It had been a while since I had talked so candidly with another person. “You’re most welcome to stay for a few days,” I said. “I must ask you this, however: what is it you really want from me?”
“Will you take me to his home? To the little island he wrote about?” she asked.
It was a request I had expected and feared. I leaned back in my rattan chair. It was getting quite warm. Unlike the day before, there was not even a wisp of cloud above us.
“No,” I said, finally. “I can’t do that.” I was not willing to allow anyone else into that part of my life I had shared with Endo-san.
“Then I would like to know what happened to Endo-san,” she said, absorbing my refusal with a greater grace than I had delivered it, echoing the quality of her ukemi.
“He is dead. Why do you wish to bring it up? What’s the point?”
“He is not dead, here,” she tapped her temple softly. She remained silent, and then she continued, “Something else came with the letter he sent.”
She went inside the house and returned with a narrow box. Its presence had disturbed me from the moment I first saw it the evening before. I should have recognized the shape and length of it immediately but the wrapping had deceived me. Now I knew instantly what it held and I struggled to keep my composure.
She tore away the cardboard covering, and placed the box on the table. “You may open it.”
“I know what it is,” I said, my eyes hardening. But I reached out and opened the box and lifted Endo-san’s Nagamitsu sword from the bed of cloth on which it had been resting. I had seen him using it so often, but it was the first time in my life that I had ever touched it. It was a simple yet elegant weapon, and the black lacquered scabbard protecting it, so cool and smooth in my hand, was plain, without any form of decoration. It was almost identical to mine, one of a pair forged by the famed swordsmith Nagamitsu in the late sixteenth century.
“It was terribly neglected and rusted when I finally received it. I had a retired swordsmith restore it.” She shook her head. “Not many people know how to do it now. It is such a rare work, perhaps Nagamitsu’s greatest creation. The swordsmith was quite honored to work on it. He spent seven months polishing, oiling, cleaning. He refused to accept any payment at the end.”
She took it from my hands. “Can you recall the last time you saw Endo-san using it?” she asked.
I looked away. “Too well,” I whispered, trying to block the sudden rush of memories, as though the sword itself had cut a gash in the dike I had built. “Only too well.”
She looked up at me and a hand covered her mouth. “I did not mean to cause you pain. I am truly sorry.”
“I’m late for a meeting,” I said, getting up from the
table. I was stunned to realize that, despite my years of training, I was disoriented. Her visit, our conversation, the appearance of Endo-san’s sword—I felt their combined assault upon me. What made it more difficult was that these were not tangible opponents I could throw off. I stood still for a moment, trying to find my balance again.
She faced me. “I am not here to cause you harm. I truly wish to know.”
“I’ll take you to your hotel,” I said, and walked into the house, leaving her holding the sword.
Chapter Two
I drove the black Daimler into Georgetown and dropped her at the Eastern & Oriental Hotel on Northam Road. Traffic was already heavy on the roads and along the streets office workers hurried to work from the food stalls, carrying their breakfasts, packets of nasi lemak—coconut rice and sweet curried anchovy paste—wrapped in banana leaves and newspaper. Motorcyclists, the bane of Penang traffic, sped by recklessly as I turned into Beach Street. I let the Sikh doorman park my car and walked up to my office.
Hutton & Sons had occupied the same building for over a century. The company was founded by my great-grandfather, Graham Hutton, still a legend in the East. It was a shadow of its former glory, but still remained a respectable and profitable concern. During the war, a corner of the gray stone building had been torn away by a bomb and the shade of the restored stone could not be matched to the original. It still appeared like a patch of new skin over a wound. As I sat down at my desk, I was aware once again that this company was as much Endo-san’s as it was my family’s. Had it not been for his influence the business would have been swallowed up by the Japanese. How many times did he shield it from them? He never told me.
I read the various reports, facsimiles and e-mails that had come in during the weekend. The company still traded in the goods it had been founded upon—rubber, tin, agricultural goods grown in Malaysia. We owned a few reputable hotels, prime real estate, and three shopping malls in Kuala Lumpur as well. We operated mines in Australia and South Africa and held extensive interests in shipyards in Japan. Due to my knowledge of the Japanese language and my acceptance of its culture, I was one of the rare few that had foreseen and taken advantage of the spectacular rise of the post-war Japanese economy. Hutton & Sons was still a privately owned company, a fact that I was proud of. There was no one to tell me what to do and no one to answer to.
