by Tan Twan Eng
“They were all made before I knew him,” I say.
“Creating an ukiyo-e print is a time-consuming and difficult process,” Tatsuji says. “The artist has to draw an outline on a piece of paper before pasting it on a block of wood. An inverse copy of the drawing is then carved on it. A print like this, with such a variety of colors and depth of detail, would need seven, perhaps ten, different blocks.” Bewilderment tugs at his face. “I do not see any duplicates here. Why go to all the trouble and then make only one copy of each work? Are you sure there are no other pieces lying around the house?”
“These are the only ones he left behind. He sold his prints to buyers in Japan,” I say. “I’ve always suspected that was how he supported himself—he never took on any commissions to design gardens when he was living here.”
“I have tracked down all of the prints he sold. None of those I have seen is a copy of these.” Tatsuji’s voice has the faintest tremor in it, and I notice the shine in his eyes. His already high standing in the academic world will be elevated further once his book on Aritomo—with the inclusion of these prints—is published.
“There’s another print hanging in Majuba House,” I remember.
“I would like to see that too.”
“I doubt Frederik will object. I’ll ask him.”
Tatsuji puts down his magnifying glass. “The subject matters of the ukiyo-e are also unusual.”
“Unusual? In what way?”
He pulls a print from the pile, holding it up in his hands like a piece of fabric offered by a merchant. “You have never noticed it?”
“They’re scenes of mountains and nature. Common subjects for ukiyo-e, I would have thought.”
“All of them are views of Malaya,” he says, “every single one of them. There is nothing here that is related to his own homeland, none of the usual motifs beloved of our ukiyo-e artists: no winter landscapes, no scenes of Fujiyama or the Floating World.”
I page through the sheets again. Each piece contains recognizable elements of Malaya: lush tropical jungles; lines of rubber trees in estates; coconut trees bowing toward the sea; flowers and birds and animals that are found only in the equatorial rain forests—a rafflesia, a pitcher plant, a mouse deer, a tapir.
“It has never occurred to me before,” I say.
“I suppose it is not something you think about when you see it all around you.” He strokes the ukiyo-e. “I would like to examine these in detail before I decide which ones I want to be included in my book.”
“They are not to be photographed or taken out of Yugiri without my permission,” I warn him.
“That goes without saying.”
Keeping my voice light, I say, “I’ve heard that you collect human skin, that you buy and sell tattoos.”
He shapes the knot of his tie with his thumb and forefinger. “I keep that aspect of my work circumspect.”
“So you should.”
“Horimono has never been accepted by the Japanese public, but there are wealthy collectors keen to own pieces of tattoos created by famous horimono masters,” Tatsuji says. “Sometimes, a man might wish to sell his skin; on a few occasions I have acted as a broker for such transactions.”
“So how much does a man’s skin fetch?”
“The price varies,” Tatsuji says. “It would depend on the identity of the artist, the scarcity of his works, the quality and size of the piece in question.”
The memory of a museum in Tokyo I visited ten years ago comes back to me. The museum was famous for its collection of tattoos. They were of various sizes and age, sealed and preserved inside glass frames. I had walked among the hangings on the walls, looking at the faded ink on human skin, repelled and, at the same time, fascinated.
“What made you become interested in tattoos?”
“The worlds of ukiyo-e and horimono overlap,” Tatsuji replies. “Quite a number of horoshi created woodblock prints too.”
“Yes, yes, you’ve told me that already. ‘They fill their buckets from the same well.’ Now tell me the real reason.”
He breathes in deeply and then exhales. “The first time I saw the horimono Aritomo-sensei put on my friend’s back . . . at that time I knew nothing about tattoos, but even then I realized that it was magnificent, a work of art. I thought it was wonderful that an ukiyo-e artist could also create similar drawings on the human body. Seeing that horimono started me on a lifelong obsession with them.”
“Your friend’s tattoo wasn’t preserved . . . after his death?”
Tatsuji shakes his head. “For years I have been searching for other horimono created by Aritomo-sensei, but I have never found any.” He is silent for a moment. “Tattoos created by horoshi—by masters—are very much sought after,” he continues, “but as an outsider it was difficult for me to enter their world.” His gaze drops to the ukiyo-e on the table. “To earn their respect, their trust, I had myself tattooed.”
It is an extraordinarily intimate revelation for him to make, having only met me twice. I sit down on the edge of the table and cross one leg over the other. They still look good, my legs, firm and unblemished by any liver spots, with no cobwebs of varicose veins anywhere. “You had a tattoo put on your whole body?”
“A horimono? Oh no. No, I asked for a tattoo to be put here.” He runs his right hand over his left arm, from the shoulder to about two inches above the elbow. I stare at it but see nothing underneath his sleeve. “It was difficult to get a horoshi to work on me,” he says. “I had to provide letters of recommendation and references. Even then they turned me down. But in the end one of them agreed to work on me. Word spread once I had the tattoo, and the other horoshi started recommending their clients to me, clients who wanted to sell their horimono.”
“I’d like to see it,” I say, aware that I am being ill-mannered.
Tatsuji’s thumb probes the dimple in the knot of his tie. He comes to a decision and removes the silver cuff link on his left wrist. He proceeds to roll up his sleeve, his movements so precise that each fold seems to have the same width—about an inch and a half. Reaching his elbow, he pushes the rolled-up sleeve to his shoulder, exposing the tattoo wrapped around his upper arm. I get off the table and lean in to take a closer look. Inside a field of gray clouds, two white cranes pursue each other in a loop, almost catching one another.
“The artist captured the birds well,” I say.
“It is not as good as the tattoo Aritomo-sensei put on my friend.”
“Your wife was fine with it, when you came home with this?” I ask.
“I have never married.” He strokes one of the cranes. “Like you.”
I ignore the last bit and instead study the colors on his arm. “What you told me about Aritomo . . . that he was a tattoo artist,” I say. “If it was disclosed to the world, it would ruin his reputation.”
“His name would become immortal.”
“The gardens he created have already made him immortal,” I correct him.
Tatsuji rolls down his sleeve with the same careful movements he showed earlier. “Gardens change over time, Judge Teoh. Their original designs are lost, erased by wind and rain. The gardens Aritomo-sensei made no longer exist in their original forms,” he adds, buttoning his cuff. “But a tattoo? A tattoo can last forever.”
“The palest ink will outlast the memory of men.” From out of nowhere the old Chinese proverb comes to me, and I wonder where I have heard it before.
“Only if it has been preserved properly.”
“Years ago I went looking for the gardens Aritomo had designed. It was the one and only visit I ever made to Japan.”
“Did you find them?” The look on his face tells me he already knows the answer.
“It was difficult locating them,” I admit. “The old families whose gardens he had made had died since the war; the descendants had dispersed, their ancestral homes sold or subdivided. An apartment block or a road had been built over where his gardens had once been. I found only one of his gardens th
at still existed. It had been turned into a neighborhood park.”
“Ah, that was in Kyoto, in the old Chushojima suburb. I have been there.”
“As I walked in it, I could tell that it was not the original design he had created. It lacked his spirit.”
“Yugiri is the only garden that still bears his imprint,” Tatsuji says.
I pull out the last sheet of woodblock print from the pile. It is a triptych, three vertical rhomboid frames almost coming together, pyramids with their tops cut off. The objects inside the frames are misshapen. Feeling queasy all of a sudden, I press my palm on the table for support, terrified that my illness has taken another turn, removing my ability to recognize shapes and forms. The doctors have said nothing about this. I blink my eyes a few times, but the objects remain warped.
Tatsuji takes the ukiyo-e from me and holds it up high, tilting his head back to study it. The light through the rice paper molds his face with colors, transforming him into a performer in a Beijing opera I once attended. I want to ask him if the print looks normal to him, but I am afraid of what he will tell me.
An idea pushes its way out from my confusion. “Give it to me,” I tell Tatsuji.
He looks puzzled at the urgency in my voice. I take the print from him, nearly snatching it, and spread it on the table, smoothing it out with my palm. I take a step back, and then another. He glides backward to stand next to me. Both of us look at the ukiyo-e.
The distortions in the print are gone. We are standing at the edge of three parallel lotus ponds narrowing into the distance. The trees, the sky and the clouds all have been brought into the water, into the drawing. Relief charges into me. My laughter sounds loud in the study, unnatural, but I don’t care. I laugh again. Tatsuji looks at me, amused but not sure why.
“Cunning,” he says, “the way he has done it, playing with perspective. I should have seen it immediately.”
“Shakkei,” I say.
“He taught you that?”
“It was in everything he taught me.”
“The old palace gardeners I spoke to all mentioned Aritomo-sensei’s talent for Borrowed Scenery. It was his strongest skill, but it was never given the recognition it deserved.”
“Perhaps it’s because he did it so well that people weren’t aware of it,” I reply. “How often does one notice the clouds above us, the mountains over the fence?”
Tatsuji considers my words for a moment. He tidies the desk and packs his gloves and magnifying glass into his satchel.
“I’ll have a room prepared for you to work in, probably in a day or two,” I say. “You’re not pressed for time?”
“Well . . . I would like to finish the book as quickly as possible.” He buckles his satchel and looks up at me. “This will be the last book I will ever write. I am retiring after this.”
“I can’t see you spending your days on a golf course.”
“I have a promise to keep, a promise I made many years ago.”
Struck by the sorrow in his voice, I am about to ask him more about it, but he takes his satchel, bows to me, and leaves the room. At the door he turns to me and bows again.
Leaning on the windowsill, I stare at the mountains. Shakkei. Aritomo never could resist employing the principles of Borrowed Scenery in everything he did, and the thought comes to me that perhaps he may have even brought it into his life. And if he did so, had there come a time when he could no longer distinguish what was real and what were only reflections in his life? And will this also happen to me in the end?
Before strolling to Majuba that evening, I decide to sweep the fallen leaves from the kore-sansui garden below the front verandah. The five stones I helped set into the earth have been worn smoother now, and the lines on the bed of gravel have been rubbed away. I stand there at the edge, trying to remember the last time I saw it, the pattern Aritomo had raked into them. He had his favorites: the contour lines of a map, the memory rings of a tree, the ripples on a lake. After a moment or two I comb out a series of lines, the gravel crackling softly beneath my rake. By the time I have finished shadows are flooding the furrows between the lines, like water from a rising tide.
Branches and wild grass have narrowed the trail I so often used when I was apprenticed to Aritomo, obstructing the way in a few places. I spend some time clearing them, perspiring and growing ever more annoyed. The earliest stars are just appearing when I cross over into the tea estate. I had forgotten that night comes quickly to the mountains.
In the last year I have heard the odd story or two about Frederik from people who spent their holidays in Cameron Highlands. Frederik had made Majuba Tea Estate his home even before Magnus’s death, and except for occasional visits to England and South Africa, he has lived in Cameron Highlands since he came here in the fifties. He occupied one of the bungalows in Majuba when he took over the running of the estate. On her seventieth birthday Emily persuaded him to move into Majuba House. Over the years, I heard about various women with whom he was involved, but he never married. Given his mania for indigenous gardening, I wonder if his quest to restore everything to what he considers to be endemic to the highlands has extended to the Cape Dutch house his uncle had built and of which he had been so proud. I hope not.
The aged eucalyptuses lining the driveway have not been taken out, and their bark peelings cover the ground. I bend to pick one up—it feels like old vellum, cracked and dried up. Coming to the end of the driveway, I stop to look at Majuba House. The lights from inside spray a golden nimbus around it, reflecting in the pond. I am glad to see Frederik has kept it the way it was when Magnus was still alive, even if the Transvaal flag is no longer flying. A green pennant with the Majuba Tea Estate logo, an outline of a Cape Dutch house, flaps gently from the flagpole.
The strelitzias along the walls have been replaced with red hibiscus. So common, I think as I walk up to the front door. A maid takes me along the corridors to the living room. The house has been kept the way it was, and I wonder if it is out of respect for Emily. The bronze sculpture of the leopard remains on the sideboard: the predator forever chasing its prey.
The furniture in the living room is the same yellow wood pieces Magnus brought over from the Cape, although the upholstery has been redone in blue and white stripes. The Bechstein piano stands in one corner. The Thomas Baines paintings and the Pierneef lithographs have not been replaced; I almost expect the roots of the fever trees to have cracked the frames and dug themselves into the walls. I remember reading in a magazine somewhere that the works of these two artists are now worth a fortune.
Moving past Magnus’s Boer War medal, I stop before Aritomo’s woodblock print of Majuba House, the same one that Frederik wanted my permission to use. I think of the other prints Tatsuji and I examined earlier today, and I think of his tattoo.
There are more books now than before, the additional shelves taking up an entire side of the room. I tilt my head and study some of the titles: Adrift on the Open Veldt; The Voortrekkers; On Commando ; De La Rey: The Lion of the Transvaal. There are books on the Great Trek and the Boer War, and novels and poetry collections in Afrikaans by writers I know nothing about: C. Louis Leipoldt, C. J. Langenhoven, Eugene Marais, N. P. van Wyk Louw.
“Magnus never talked much about the Boer War, or his life in South Africa,” Frederik says. I did not hear him enter. He is dressed in a gray blazer, a white shirt and a light blue Jim Thompson silk tie; it always pleases me to see someone who has made the effort to be properly dressed. “Those books helped me understand the world he had left behind,” he adds.
“It was your world too.”
“But it’s no longer there. It’s gone.” For a moment he looks lost. “You once said something about old countries dying—to be replaced by new ones. Do you remember that?” His hand makes an awkward flutter in the air, as if he suddenly realizes that he has asked me to do something I might no longer be able to.
“It was the day we met for the first time,” I say, relieved that I can recall it instantly.
“At the braai–” I nudge my chin at the windows looking out onto the garden behind the house. The warm glow of shared memories; of the few people left, Frederik is the only one with whom I can truly feel this. “And I was right, wasn’t I? Malaya became Malaysia. Singapore broke away from us. And there’s Indonesia, India, Burma . . .” Moving further down the shelves, I pull out The Red Jungle and show it to him. “I still have the copy you signed for me.”
“It continues to sell rather well, that and my book on the origins of tea. Unlike my novels—those are out of print now.”
“Are you working on anything at the moment?” For a second I am tempted to tell him about what I have been writing.
“Can’t run a tea estate and still have enough time to write. Perhaps when I retire, I’ll start writing seriously again. Update The Red Jungle.” He hands a tumbler of whisky and soda to me. “I hear that Chin Peng wants to come home. Is that true?”
The rumors about the secretary general of the Malayan Communist Party have been floating around in the last few months, but I have not given much thought to them. “He can try all he wants, but the government will never let him come back.”
“Why not? He’s an old man now. He’s been in exile for almost forty years. I think all he wants is to go back to the village where he was born.”
“Once you step out of your world, it doesn’t wait for you. The world he used to know is gone forever.” I lower myself into an armchair, the chill of its leather seeping through my slacks. “You look vexed. And I doubt it’s caused by the plight of poor old Chin Peng.”
“Just some problems with the workers.”
“Ah, yes. The television sets.”
“The servants have been gossiping to Ah Cheong again, I see.”
“What do you expect your workers to do after a day’s work, if you refuse to let them have TVs in their homes?”
“Electronic transmission signals have an adverse effect on insect life in gardens. Research done by universities has proven this,” he says. “I can show it to you.”