by Tan Twan Eng
“Well . . . in the old days, when cadmium was used in red ink, clients would experience fevers and pain. Some people have complained that their tattooed skin stopped perspiring, that they felt cool even on the warmest days.”
“Like a reptile. How long would it take to complete the tattoos?”
“Most people can only endure an hour’s session a week.” He paused to do some mental calculations. “A horimono like what I have in mind will require about—oh, twenty to thirty weeks. Half a year. Perhaps less.”
“I’ll consider it,” I said, laying out my words carefully between us, “if the tattoos—the horimono,” I corrected myself, preferring the Japanese word as it did not have the same connotations, “if the horimono covers only my back.”
He deliberated for a few seconds. “Let me see your body.”
“Close the shutters.”
“Only a fool would be out in this storm.”
I continued to stare at him, and after a moment he obeyed me. Now and again the noise of the rain on the roof shifted as the wind changed, only to pick up a few seconds later, the erratic rhythm seeming to match my breathing.
Aritomo unbuttoned my blouse slowly and then turned me around, slipping it off my shoulders. I scrubbed some heat into my arms as he unclasped my brassiere. We had been naked in each other’s presence so often, but now I felt awkward as I stood there in his study. He draped my clothes over the back of a chair and switched on another lamp, angling its shade at me. I shielded my eyes, the heat feeling good on my bare skin.
He circled me and I turned with him, a satellite moon pulled around a planet’s orbit. “Keep still,” he said. “And stand up straight.”
I pulled back my shoulders, lifting my breasts and my chin. His touch was gentle at first, and then his thumbs began to press into my back. He stopped when I flinched, but I signaled to him to continue. His hands lingered over the scars from the beatings I had suffered in the camp. I felt the tips of his fingers stroking the marks.
“I will paint you from here”—he traced a curve along my shoulders and stopped at my back where it hollowed before rising into my buttocks—“to here. The horimono will not be visible under your clothes.”
“The pain, is it bearable?”
“You have endured much worse.”
I turned away from him and got dressed quickly. I adjusted the collar of my blouse and brushed my hair into place. “You’ve never done something like this on anyone else? Not even your wife?”
“You will be the only one, Yun Ling.”
The sheets of ukiyo-e crackled when I picked them up, as though the demons pressed into the paper were struggling to escape their infernal prison. I put them down again quickly. “I don’t want these on me.”
“They mean nothing to you,” he conceded.
“What do you suggest then?”
He was silent for a minute or two. “The horimono can be an extension of Sakuteiki. I will put in the ideas I have accumulated over the years, the things you should remember when designing a garden.”
The possibilities were taking shape in my mind, like an unkempt bush being clipped into recognizable topiary. “Things I will never discover in any book or from any other gardener.”
“Yes.”
“All right.” It seemed so easy, agreeing to let him tattoo me. I wondered which of my dresses I could never wear again.
“It is not uncommon for people to change their mind, to give up before the horimono has been completed,” Aritomo said. “I want to be certain that I will get to finish it.”
I went to the window and opened the shutters. Cold, moist air hit my face. The storm had weakened for the moment; the clouds over the mountains were swirls of silver and gray. I felt like a pearl diver on the ocean floor, looking at the soundless waves pounding the rocky shoreline far above me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
A line of cars were parked along the road outside the Smokehouse Hotel when Aritomo and I got there just after noon. The light on the terrace was painful after the dimness of the lobby. I shaded my eyes and looked around. Marquees had been set up in case it rained, but the skies were clear. Errol Monteiro’s four-piece Eurasian band from Penang was playing on a low platform decorated with white bunting. I recognized most of the guests. A few of them glanced at us and then looked away quickly. The whole of Cameron Highlands had probably heard I was living with Aritomo by now. Magnus broke away from a cluster of people and strode over to us.
“My old friend,” Aritomo said, smiling and giving him a bow.
“Ja, seventy-three years old today.” Magnus grimaced. “Can you believe I was not even sixty when I first met you?”
The two men looked at each other, perhaps thinking of that moment when they had become acquainted, in a garden somewhere in Kyoto. They were, I thought, the most unlikely people to have become friends, even if, as Emily had mentioned at the Mid-Autumn Festival, their relationship had been weakened by the war.
“Happy birthday, Magnus,” I said, giving him a box wrapped in brown paper and tied with a ribbon. “From both of us.”
“Ah, baie dankie.” He shook the box lightly. “In the early years of our marriage Emily always scolded me if I opened any gift before the guests had all gone home. Said it was the sort of bad manners only ang-mohs have.”
Behind him, I noticed a table piled with presents, all of them still wrapped in gift paper. “It’s a good Chinese custom,” I said. “Saves you from having to pretend you like the gift when you open it.”
“So what is it?” he asked, lifting the box to his ear and shaking it.
“We bought a donkey for you.” I laughed. “I’ll let you two talk.”
The band was playing a jaunty “Tuxedo Junction.” Making my way through the crowd, I lifted a flute of champagne from a passing waiter, greeting the people I knew. The noise and laughter rose above the music; the mood was carefree, optimistic. Templer’s measures seemed to be taking effect; the number of CT attacks had more or less halved. There were now more areas designated “White” than “Black” and the curfew had been lifted in most places.
“Did you hear?” Toombs stopped me, raising his voice above the music. “They killed another CT! Manap the Jap!”
“I’ve heard,” I said. The son of a Malay mother and a Japanese father, the commander of the Tenth Regiment had been shot dead by a Gurkha patrol a few days before. Manap’s head had carried a price of seventy-five thousand dollars.
By a flowering rambutan tree a short way off from the crowd I found a quiet, shady spot to enjoy my drink. Aritomo had been subdued on our drive here. It was more than a week since I agreed to let him tattoo me. He had not mentioned the horimono since and I did not raise the matter with him. Looking at the people on the other side of the lawn, laughing and chatting, I wondered how appalled they would be if they knew I would soon have a tattoo draped over my back. I tried to imagine what Yun Hong would have said, but I found I could not remember her face or even the sound of her voice. I thought back to the camp, to the last time I saw her, and slowly her face formed in my mind’s eye. I had gone to see her at the window, bringing her a whole ripe mango. I had not had the chance to visit her in more than three weeks and her pale face in the dusky shadows shocked me. She refused to tell me what was wrong, but I pressed her until finally she admitted that she had become pregnant. Dr. Kanazawa had aborted the fetus two days earlier. That was the last time I saw her or spoke to her. Shortly after that Tominaga had smuggled me out of the camp.
Wiping away my tears, I saw Frederik coming toward me. “There you are,” he called out.
“Magnus didn’t tell me you’d be here.” I forced a lightness into my voice.
“I just arrived a second ago.”
I had not seen him in almost a year. He looked darker, and the air of toughness in him was stronger than I remembered. I pointed to the cuts on his cheeks. “What happened?”
“I got caught in an ambush.”
My eyes examined him in a quic
k sweep. “No serious injuries, I hope?”
“A few scratches. Nothing as bad as yours.” His eyes studied my face, slid down the length of my body, paused at my thigh, then floated up to my face again. “I heard about the attack. I couldn’t get leave to see you. It’s been a mad time. Did you get my card?”
“Yes. And the lilies. They were beautiful.” I wanted to show my gratitude for his concern, and an idea came to me. “How long will you be staying?”
“I’m here for two days.”
“We’ve nearly finished the work in Yugiri. If you’re free early tomorrow, I’ll take you through the garden.”
“I’ve already seen it. That morning—when I went there to drive you back to Majuba. The first time we met.” He was clearly annoyed that I seemed to have forgotten.
“Oh yes. But the garden wasn’t ready then.”
“I don’t know how ready it was, but everything looked controlled, artificial.”
“Then you’ve failed to understand what the garden is about.”
“Gardens like his are designed to manipulate your emotions. I find that dishonest.”
“Is it?” I fired back. “The same can be said of any work of art, any piece of literature or music.” I had worked extremely hard in the garden, and to hear someone denigrating it angered me. “If you weren’t so stupid you’d see that your emotions are not being manipulated—they’re being awakened to something higher, something timeless. Every step you take inside Yugiri is meant to open your mind, to lead you to the heart of a contemplative state.”
“I heard you’re living with the Jap now.”
The reason for his prickly mood had become obvious. “I’m sleeping with him, if that’s what you’re trying to ask me.”
“It is.”
I moved a few steps away from him, turning toward the guests on the lawn. “I first heard his name when I was seventeen. Almost half a lifetime ago,” I said, my anger dissipating, replaced by a sadness for all that I had lost.
“It’s only a name,” he said.
“It was more than that.”
To cheers and applause Emily and Magnus strode onto the platform. The band broke off from the song they were in the middle of and began to play the opening strains of “Happy Birthday.” The cheering grew louder. Frederik looked at me, then walked off into the crowd.
Just above my head, a tattered, abandoned spiderweb hung from a twig. I thought of the story Aritomo had told me about the murderer climbing out of hell on the filament of web.
I reached up to brush the web from the twig, but stopped just before I touched it.
I was quiet during dinner, and Aritomo did not talk much. Most of the food remained untouched when we left the dining room.
Once alone in the bedroom, I took off my blouse and brassiere, then stepped out of my skirt. I put on a silk dressing gown and stepped, barefoot, out into the corridor.
The house was in darkness; the weak illumination from the room at the far end of the passageway pulled me toward it. In the spill of light outside the opened door, I stopped to look around. Water dripped from the eaves, the stones in the courtyard glowed faintly and I was reminded of the journey through the swiftlets’ cave. The end of the passageway I had just come from seemed far away. I tightened the sash around my robe, then stepped into the room.
Aritomo was sitting in the seiza position. A charcoal brazier radiated warmth across the room. Spread out on the tatami mats was a cotton sheet, smooth and white. In a brass censer a stick of sandalwood incense unraveled a line of smoke. I faced Aritomo and sat in the same manner, having becoming used to it by now, my ankles and shins no longer feeling as if they were being slowly pulled apart. We placed our hands on the mat, looked at each other, and then bowed.
He poured a cup of heated saké and offered it to me. I shook my head, but he insisted. “The American occupation of Japan ended two days ago.” He raised his cup to me and, reluctantly, I did the same, swallowing it in one gulp. The wine seared my throat and pressed tears from my eyes.
I stood up. I untied the robe slowly and let it fall. The chill touched my skin, but the saké was warming me. He watched me for a moment. Then he took a large white towel to wrap around my waist. Telling me to lie on my stomach on the sheet of cotton, he folded my clothes neatly and placed them on the mat. Then he came to kneel beside me, one hand balancing a wooden tray lined with his tools. His movements were purposeful and assured, the way he appeared when he was working in his garden. He dribbled some water from his fingers into a stone inkwell and ground an ink stick in it. Inhaling the sooty smell of the fresh, new ink, I could almost pretend to myself that I was in a scholar’s study, observing him as he practiced calligraphy.
He wiped my back with a hand towel, then dipped a writing brush into the inkwell and shaped it against the side, pressing out the excess ink. He drew on the skin around my left shoulder with light, quick strokes. When he was finished he asked me to sit up. He passed a large mirror over that area for me to see.
The black outlines of flowers filigreed my skin—camellias and lotuses and chrysanthemums. I took the mirror from him. As I examined my back, he lit a candle and set it down between us. Opening a small wooden box, he lifted away the upper tray to reveal a compartment beneath. A row of needles was arranged on it, glinting in the light. He selected four or five and, biting off a length of thread from a spool, tied them to a thin wooden stick. Gesturing to me to lie down on the sheet again, he passed the needles through the flame of the candle a few times. The shadows on the rice paper walls wavered and, for a moment, I felt I had been inserted into a wayang kulit, becoming a character in the shadow play the Malays performed with leather puppets by the light of a paraffin lamp.
He blackened the needles by rubbing them against the ink-soaked calligraphy brush gripped between the last two fingers of his left hand. Then he stretched the skin on my shoulder and pushed the needles into me.
He had warned me, but still I could not help myself. I cried out at the first of a million cuts, my fingers clawing the sheet beneath me.
“Keep still,” he said. I attempted to get up, but he pressed me down with his palm, repeating the incisions. I fought back the grunts of pain. I clamped my eyelids against the tears, but still they leaked through. My body flinched each time his needles bit into me; I felt my skin was being taken apart, line by line, stitch by stitch.
“Stop fidgeting.” He wiped my back again and I turned my body to look. The white towel was covered in moist, red blotches.
“There was a Japanese engineer in the camp—Morokuma. He collected tattoos.” My voice sounded hoarse, and I cleared my throat. “Prisoners who were tattooed would show them to him in exchange for cigarettes.” Aritomo pressed the needles into my skin again, and I forced back a cry. “He’d photograph them. Later, when he ran out of film, he’d draw them in a sketchbook. He once asked me to translate the words in a man’s tattoo. I made the mistake of doing it correctly.”
Aritomo’s hands ceased moving over my back. “What happened?”
“The man was a rubber planter. Tim Osborne. He had ‘God Save the King’ tattooed above a bayonet on his arm. Morokuma copied it into his book. Then he informed the camp commander. Tim was fifty-seven years old, but they gave him a beating anyway.” I paused for a moment. “They cut the tattooed portion of his skin from his arm and burned it in front of all of us. He died two days later.”
Outside, a passing breeze nudged the brass rods of the wind chime hanging under the eaves. The candle flame shivered, tilting the walls around us. For an instant I smelled burning skin again.
Aritomo worked for about an hour without speaking. The agony did not settle into a dull sensation, as I had hoped it would. Every subsequent prick of his needles hurt as much as the first. Finally he sat back on his heels and let out a long breath. He put his tools down on the tray and began to clean my back, dabbing the towel here and there. His touch was gentle, but the cloth was abrasive. “That is enough for tonight,” he sai
d.
Getting up unsteadily, I walked around the room, shaking out the stiffness in my arms and legs. Aritomo’s fingers, palms and wrists were smeared with black ink. His fingers were rigid, and I realized they were causing him pain.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“It will go away in a few minutes,” he said.
I picked up the mirror and angled it above my back, letting out a cry when I saw the reflection. “It looks awful,” I said. He had cleaned away the mess of smudged ink and bloodstains, but my skin was raw and bruised, already beginning to swell. A meshwork of lines overlaid my back, and even as I looked, a cluster of blood droplets beaded up from beneath my wounds, collecting on the skin before sliding down the curve of my back in a viscous crimson trail. It looked nothing like any tattoos I had seen, nor did it resemble anything from his woodblock prints, and I wondered if he had lied to me about his tattooing abilities.
“Until it is finished, this is how it will appear.” He pulled my hand away. “Stop scratching it. Let it heal.”
He helped me into a light cotton robe; the cloth stuck to my back, stinging me. “I thought there would be more blood,” I said.
“Only unskilled horoshi inflict excessive pain or draw an unnecessary amount of blood.” He looked at me for a moment, but I knew he was thinking of something else.
“What’s wrong?”
“I forgot how addictive it can be, not only for the person being tattooed, but also for the artist.”
“I wouldn’t describe it as addictive.”
“You will feel differently after a few more sessions.”
The corridor was in darkness when I stepped outside. I felt disoriented as I followed Aritomo to the bathroom at the back of the house. The water in the upright cedar soaking tub had been heated, filling the bathroom with steam and a clean fragrance. Aritomo tested the water and, taking my hand, helped me into the tub.
“Stay in there until the water cools,” he said. “Your skin will heal faster. Sit straight—do not lean back.”