by Tan Twan Eng
“It’s a bit too late for me.”
She looks into my eyes. “You’re sick, aren’t you?”
I put down my knife on the plate, silently cursing Frederik’s loose lips.
“I’m not blind-lah,” Emily goes on. “Coming back here so suddenly, and after all these years, when you’ve never visited us.” She leans forward, her neck stretching out. “So, what is it? Cancer? Don’t look so angry-lah—old people are allowed to be tactless. Otherwise where’s the fun in growing old?”
I point to my head with a finger. I am in no mood to give her the details of my condition; it seems easier to let her think what she wants.
She touches my wrist lightly. “We might be suffering from different illnesses, but it means the same thing in the end, doesn’t it? Our memories are dying.” We do not speak for a few moments. Then she says, “At my age, you know what I wish for? That I should die while I can still remember who I am, who I used to be.”
“Most people would just ask for a peaceful, painless death. Preferably going to sleep and never waking up again.”
“We’re not most people,” she retorts. “At least I hope I’m not.” She takes a small bite of her scone. “Does Frederik know?”
“I’ve told him.” I make a mental apology to Frederik for questioning his discretion earlier.
“If there’s anything we can do, you must let us know.” She waits for me to agree, and then says, “Did you ever find out where your sister was buried?”
“I put up a soul tablet for her in the Kuan Yin temple in Penang.”
“That’s good enough.”
“The tablet is nothing more than a piece of wood.”
“You never made that garden for her?”
“I tried. But I was never happy with the results. I wasn’t good enough to do it on my own.”
Emily takes another scone from the dish. “You could have hired somebody from Japan.”
“Building a garden for Yun Hong was not going to ease my pain, nor would anything that I did. I realized that.”
“Remember when you came to stay with us, all those years ago?” She smiles. “There was so much anger in you. Of course you had good reasons. But I still see it in you, that anger. Oh, you’ve hidden it well. And maybe it’s not the same as it used to be. Not as strong. But it’s there.”
Later, as we are leaving the Smokehouse, she stops me. “Aiyah, I almost forgot—one of my friends is the head nun in a temple. She wants to see you.”
“See me, or see the garden?” I say.
“She wants to talk to you about Aritomo.”
“In relation to?”
“How should I know? Ask her yourself-lah.”
I consider it for a moment. “Fine. Tell her to come.”
Returning to Yugiri an hour later, I find Tatsuji at the katsunigi-ishi, the stone where guests are required to remove their shoes before entering the house. He is tying his shoelaces, and he looks up when he senses my presence. “I was just going back to my hotel. I need to talk to you about the ukiyo-e.”
“What is that book you’re always reading?”
Straightening up, he hesitates, then removes the book from the pocket of his linen jacket and gives it to me. I look at an anthology of Yeats’s poems, surprised.
“You were expecting something else?” he asks.
I shrug and return the book to him.
“A friend read me one of Yeats’s poems when I was a young man,” he says. The sense of loss in his voice is old, as though it has been a part of him for most of his life, and for some reason I am struck by its similarity to my own.
“Come with me,” I say.
His face brightens when he realizes I am taking him into the garden. The leaves on the maple by the house are rusting, the branches pushing out from behind the thinning foliage. I lead him deeper into the trees, following the path to the waterwheel. Red bromeliads straining to bloom spike the slope. Since coming back to Yugiri I have not gone to look at the waterwheel. I am relieved to see it is still there. But it no longer turns, no longer grinds the water with the patience of a monk. Lichen daubs the sides of the wheel and two of its paddles are missing. The waterfall is now a trickle, and the pool is choked with algae and drowned leaves and broken-off branches.
If Tatsuji is appalled by the state of neglect, he does not show it. “The emperor’s gift,” he announces. From the rigid way he holds himself I suspect he would have bowed to it if I were not present. “How many turns has this wheel made since it was built, I wonder?”
“As many as the earth has made around the sun,” I say, humoring him.
“Emperors and gardeners.” Tatsuji shakes his head. “Do you know what happened to the Chinese emperor after the communists took over? They rehabilitated him. He ended his days as a gardener.”
The inscriptions beneath the remaining paddles are grouted with moss; the writing is fragmented, the prayers garbled and weakened, and I realize that a day will come when they will be silenced completely.
“Shobu,” Tatsuji says, pointing to the plants along the banks. He breaks off a leaf and holds it up. “They are a symbol of courage for us because they are shaped like swords.” He crushes it and the burst of scent flings me back to the first time Aritomo brought me here. I take the broken leaf from Tatsuji and inhale deeply. I can see it all so clearly in my mind, that morning. I must remember to add it to what I have written down.
“I was chatting to some hikers in the hotel lobby this morning,” Tatsuji says. “They were waiting for their guide to show them the trail Aritomo had taken on that last day.”
“You’ll see a lot more of them in the coming days,” I say. “In a month’s time it’ll be thirty-four years to the day Aritomo got lost in the jungle. And there’ll be tourists hoping to see the garden.”
The search for Aritomo was only reported as a minor item in the newspapers, but it soon generated sufficient interest for journalists from Singapore, Australia and Japan to flock to the highlands. The reporters were followed closely by Buddhist and Taoist monks, Chinese and Indian mediums and travelers of the spirit world, all of them trying to convince me they knew where Aritomo had gone, into which ravine he had fallen, or who had abducted him. They had come from all over: Ipoh, Penang, Singapore—even from Bangkok and Sumatra—and all claimed to have knowledge of where Aritomo was or of what happened to him. Some were well-meaning but most were charlatans, hoping to collect the reward of ten thousand Straits dollars I had posted. The police followed up on the more plausible leads, but with no success.
For years after his death, I continued to receive interview requests for me to talk about Aritomo. Then came the inquiries asking for permission to visit Yugiri. I turned away every one of them. Interest in Aritomo did not die off completely, but I was relieved when it waned over time. The periodic flashes of curiosity over the decades usually occurred during the reissues of his translation of Sakuteiki, or when one of his early ukiyo-e prints went on sale in an auction in Tokyo. Over the decades the story of his disappearance had obscured him, like mists blurring the outlines of a mountain range, transforming it into whatever shapes people wanted to see.
“Since coming here I’ve discovered an entire cottage industry centered just on Aritomo-sensei,” Tatsuji says, shaking his head, half in admiration, half in disbelief. “Walking tours and talks, beer mugs and books and postcards and maps.”
“I wouldn’t waste any money on those books if I were you. They’re rubbish, every one of them. Written by people who never knew him.”
“Some of the theories are quite credible,” Tatsuji says.
“Which?” I throw a few of them at him: “The one that says he was kidnapped by the communists? Or that a tiger mauled and ate him? Some even think that he was a spy and had been recalled home to Japan.”
“If he did return to Japan, no one ever saw him.”
“You know which theory is my favorite?” I ask. “The story a bomoh—that’s a Malay witch doctor—told me: that an
aboriginal sorceress had fallen in love with Aritomo and had bewitched him to live with her in the jungle.”
“I remember the morning when I read about Aritomo-sensei’s disappearance in the news,” Tatsuji says. “That was the moment he became a real person to me, and not just a name. Strange, is it not, that a man should become real only when he vanishes?”
Elephant-ear ferns between the rocks flap gently, and I fancy for a moment that they are straining to eavesdrop on our conversation.
“What do you think really happened to him?” Tatsuji asks.
“Look around you.” My hand draws a circle in the air, throwing a lasso over the mountains. “Do you know how easy it is to lose your way in the jungle? Just one wrong turn and suddenly you wouldn’t know where you were.” I point to a ridge behind us, a crack running up its side. “See that viewing tower jutting out there, among the trees? His favorite walk goes past that. You think you would be able to find your way out from the jungle if you went off the path there?”
“Probably not.”
“People get lost in the jungles up here. It happens quite often, although the papers don’t report it. And forty years ago the highlands weren’t as developed as they are today. This place was wilder then.”
Tatsuji’s eyes take in the hills in a long, slow sweep. Going to the edge of the slope, I tell him about the Taoist symbols Aritomo had etched with light and shadows on the lawn below. He shades his eyes with his hand and peers down. “I do not see them.”
“Too much cloud-shadow,” I reply.
But when we walk past the area later I realize it is not the clouds that have rubbed away the symbols but the grass growing wild. The boundary between positive and negative, male and female, darkness and light, has been lost. Like so many other features in Yugiri, the positive and negative elements created by Aritomo are based on illusion, visible only when the right conditions are present.
“Why did you come here to see him?” Tatsuji asks.
“I asked him to design a garden for my sister,” I reply, “but he turned down my commission.”
“Yet he accepted you as his apprentice.”
“He said he would teach me to make the garden myself. He needed an extra pair of hands to work the garden, and to interpret his instructions to his workers. That’s what he told me.”
“You do not sound convinced.”
“I’ve always had the feeling that . . .” I hesitate, afraid of sounding foolish. “I’ve always felt he had other reasons for wanting to teach me. But he never told me,” I add. “And I never asked him.” I stopped wondering about it years ago, but since coming back to Yugiri the question has been floating just beneath the surface of my mind, its shape refracted by the water of time.
“You met him in the first week of October of 1951,” Tatsuji says.
Again, the depth of his knowledge both impresses and disturbs me. “It was the day after the communists killed the high commissioner.”
“I am reading Mr. Pretorius’s book about the Emergency: The Red Jungle. Fascinating—I never knew that there were Japanese soldiers fighting with the communists.”
We resume our walk. Tatsuji stops at every view, examining every stone lantern and statue, and it is nearly an hour later when our walk brings us back to the pavilion. Vimalya’s workers have swept the leaves and cleaned the area around it. The lotus pads they hauled out from the pond are piled to one side. A shoal of carp swims out to us, a tattered orange and white banner pulling through the murky water. In my head I hear the echo of my voice from a long time ago, reciting the lines from a poem. I am the daughter of Earth and Water . . .
Tatsuji is looking at me, and I realize I was mumbling to myself. “How is the work on the ukiyo-e coming along?” I ask.
“I’ve almost finished examining them and writing up my notes,” Tatsuji says. “Do you speak or read Japanese?”
“Nihon-go? I used to. I learned it when I was in the camp.” The memory comes to me of an abandoned squatter village a few miles outside Kuala Lumpur I once visited to take photographs for a war crimes hearing. The villagers had been taken away by the Japanese to a nearby field and made to dig their own graves before they were shot. Through the broken doors and windows of the houses I glimpsed tables and chairs, a rocking horse lying on its side, a doll on the floor. Pasted on a wall in front of a ransacked provision shop was a poster in English, exhorting the villagers to use the Japanese language. Someone had crossed out the word “Nihon-go” in red and scrawled “British Come!” beneath it.
Tatsuji is speaking, and I bring my mind back to the present. “The first piece of the ukiyo-e was made in early 1940, according to Aritomo’s notes on the back,” he says.
“That was the year he came to Malaya.”
“To put his disgrace behind him, perhaps?”
“Disgrace?” I look at him sharply.
“There are not many people still alive who would have known about it,” Tatsuji says. “Aritomo-sensei had been commissioned to build a garden for a member of the imperial family—”
“But he resigned. He told me so. He wasn’t willing to sacrifice his vision to accommodate the client’s needs.”
“Is that what he told you?”
“What happened exactly, Tatsuji?”
“There were arguments. They turned vicious. He lost the commission before the work was even a third of the way completed. To make things worse, the emperor sacked him. Everyone heard about it. It was a tremendous loss of face for him. From that moment on, he could no longer call himself the emperor’s gardener.”
“He never told me that,” I say quietly.
“In the last few years I have spoken to the few people still living who knew him . . .” He looks out over the water, to the lotus flowers nodding in the breeze.
“What is it that you’re trying to say?” He reminds me of some of the lawyers who cannot get straight to the point.
“I think,” he says, scratching at the peeling wood of the railing, “Aritomo-sensei played a small but important role in the war.”
A breeze disturbs the wind chime hanging beneath the eaves. It sounds brittle and out of tune. The rods, I notice, are cancerous with rust.
“He protected a lot of people from the Kempeitai,” I say. “He kept a lot of men and boys from being taken to the Burma Railway.”
“I believe he was working for the emperor when the imperial army attacked Malaya.”
“You’ve just told me that the emperor had sacked him.” I realize that I must sound like I’m back in the courtroom, picking up on some inconsistency in a witness statement.
“I have often wondered if this was his chance to redeem himself, to repair the damage to his reputation. It certainly gave him a strong reason to leave Japan.”
“To do what? You think he was a spy?” I give the historian a skeptical look. “I’ll admit that the possibility had occurred to me shortly after Aritomo went missing, but I dismissed it.”
“People think he went missing only once in his life, but I disagree,” Tatsuji says. “He did it twice. The first time was when he left Japan before the Pacific War started. No one knew where he went or what he did from that moment onward, until he showed up in these mountains.”
“Look, everyone knows now that there were Japanese spies everywhere in Malaya years before the war, working as tailors and photographers and running little businesses. But they were living in towns, Tatsuji,” I say, “in places that had some strategic importance to your army. Aritomo was here. Here.” I rap my knuckles on the wooden railing. “He had hidden himself away in his garden. And, anyway,” I add, “if he was still working for your country, why did he remain in Malaya, long after the war ended? Why did he never return home?”
Tatsuji is silent, the intent look in his eyes telling me he is studying my words from various angles.
“What did you do in the war, Tatsuji?”
There is a moment’s hesitation. “I was in Southeast Asia.”
“Where in S
outheast Asia?”
He turns his gaze to the heron picking its way between the lotus pads. “Malaya.”
“In the army?” My voice hardens. “Or the Kempeitai?”
“I was in the imperial navy’s air wing. I was a pilot.” He leans slightly away from me, and I notice how rigidly he contains himself. “When the air raids over Tokyo began, my father moved to his villa in the countryside,” he says. “I was still in the pilots’ training academy. I was an only child. My mother had died when I was a boy. I visited my father whenever I could get a few days’ leave.”
He closes his eyes and opens them again a moment later. “There was a labor camp a few miles away from our villa. Prisoners of war had been shipped from Southeast Asia to work in the coal mines outside the town. Every time some of them escaped, the men in the village would form search parties. One weekend when I was visiting my father, I saw them with their hunting dogs and their sticks and farming tools. They made wagers as to who would be the first to find the escaped prisoners. ‘Rabbit hunting,’ they called it. When they were recaptured, the prisoners were taken to the square outside the village hall and beaten.” He stops, then says, “Once I saw a group of boys club a prisoner to death.”
For a long time neither of us speaks. He turns to me and gives me a bow so deep I think he is going to topple over. Straightening up again, he says, “I am sorry, for what we did to you. I am deeply sorry.”
“Your apology is meaningless,” I say, taking a step back from him. “It’s worth nothing to me.”
His shoulders stiffen. I expect him to walk away from the pavilion. But he stands there, not moving.
“We had no idea what my country did,” he says. “We did not know about the massacres or the death camps, the medical experiments carried out on living prisoners, the women forced to serve in army brothels. When I returned home after the war, I found out everything I could about what we had done. That’s when I became interested in our crimes. I wanted to fill in the silence that was stifling every family of my generation.”
The chill in my bones leaches into my bloodstream; I restrain myself from rubbing my arms. Something he mentioned earlier is troubling me. “Those boys in the village,” I say, plumbing the depths of his eyes, “you were with them when they punished the prisoners, weren’t you? You took part in the beatings.”