by Tan Twan Eng
The sky was bright when he finished. His clothes were wet and perspiration made his silver hair shine. He beckoned to me to approach.
“Hit me.”
I hesitated, looking at him uncertainly, wondering if I had heard correctly.
“Go on. Hit me,” he said again in a tone that gave me no choice but to obey.
I launched my fist into his face, using the punch that had stood me in good stead at school whenever I had been called a mongrel half-breed and which had provoked quite a few parental complaints.
I found myself lying on the dew-soaked grass a moment later, my breath knocked out of me. My back felt sore, even though the ground was soft. He pulled me to my feet, his hand firm and strong. There was a look of amusement on his face as he saw my anger. He held up a placatory hand and said, “Come. Let me show you how to do that.”
He asked me to hit him again—slowly. As my fist was about to connect with his face he deftly stepped aside and came closer to me. His arm rose up and met mine; with a spiraling motion he guided my hand away, gripped my throat from behind, spun my unbalanced body around and brought me to the ground. Then he let me do it to him, and after several attempts I managed to throw him off his feet. I was enthralled.
“What did you feel?” he asked.
“As though everything came together when I threw you,” I answered him as best I could. If I had wanted to sound pretentious I could have told him it felt as if the earth and I were spinning in harmony. But he seemed happy and satisfied with my reply.
He continued teaching me until it was almost noon. By then I was feeling quite hungry.
“Do you want to continue learning?” he asked.
I nodded. He told me to come again the following day. As we rowed back to the shore he said, “You must be made aware that the teacher, in accepting a pupil, takes on a heavy responsibility. The pupil, in return, must be prepared to commit himself fully. There can be no uncertainty, no second thoughts. Are you able to give me this?”
I stopped rowing as we approached the beach and considered his warning. The sun was hot, breaking onto the surface of the sea, casting shadows and bracelets of white light onto the seabed, making the tidal patterns of sand undulate like heat mirage. I felt that he was telling me more than what was being said, even though I could not catch a firm grasp of the complete picture. I was certain of one thing though. I wanted what he could offer me, and so I nodded.
I spent the rest of the day thinking about this strange person who had entered my life. The school term had finished for the summer holidays and I was liberated from the monotony of regurgitating Latin verbs and comprehending mathematical formulae. I was in an enviable position: money was hardly a problem as accounts of my purchases were settled monthly by the family firm. The house servants went about their duties and left me alone. We had arrived at an unspoken pact: no negative reports from any one of us to my father. It was an agreement that suited us all.
I would have to be discreet, however, if I wanted to be taught by Endo-san. Most of the servants were Chinese and my friendship with a Japanese could break our pact—the Chinese held no affection for their distant cousins across the seas. My being half Chinese made them assume I was sympathetic to the plight of their families left behind in China—even I knew, from their constant reports, of the atrocities being committed by the Japanese there—but they never knew that I felt no connection with China, or with England. I was a child born between two worlds, belonging to neither. From the very beginning I treated Endo-san not as a Japanese, not as a member of a hated race, but as a man, and that was why we forged an instant bond.
I began my lessons in aikijutsu the following morning, entering into a ritual of learning that would continue largely unbroken for nearly three years. I would row across to the island while it was still dark and traces of stars could still be seen hiding behind the veil of the sky. Inevitably Endo-san would already be waiting for me, impatient, his face stern.
We bowed to each other and stretched our limbs. He began with the easiest moves, teaching me to get out of the line of attack smoothly, with the minimum number of movements.
“In a fight, the fewer steps you take, the more effective you will be,” he said on my first lesson. He seldom spoke while he taught, his words as economical as the short, sharp movements he advocated.
He also taught me the finer elements of punching and kicking, the vital points to aim for. “To have a strong defense you must know the types of strikes and attacks which exist,” he said, as his hands came to my face, my chest, and my groin in a set of three fast, unseen punches. They stopped at my nose; I could see the lines on his knuckles and the faint strands of hair, and smell the light scent of his skin.
“Look down,” he said.
His foot had ended at my knee. If he had completed his kick he would have broken it. “Never look at your attacker’s fists. Look at his entire body. Then you will know what is coming.”
I was taught the fundamental movements during the first four weeks of my training with him. The daily classes would last for three hours. On Sundays Endo-san would demand two sessions from me, one in the morning and another in the evening. He taught me ukemi—to fall safely, roll on the ground, and emerge into a firm stance when thrown by him.
His throws were powerful, and initially I balked, fearing injury. I would stiffen my body whenever he attempted to project me into the air.
“You have to loosen up,” he said. “You will cause more harm to yourself if you resist the technique. Follow the flow of the energy, do not fight it.”
I found it difficult to believe him as his instructions seemed contradictory. He sensed my reluctance and agitation and attempted to reassure me by leading me to a monochrome photograph on the wall in his house. It showed a pair of hands being gripped at the wrists by another set of hands. The palms of the hands that were being held—the passive hands, I thought—were open, seeming to rest on the wrists of the dominant hands. At first I thought the impression created by the two pairs of hands was one of aggression, but to my surprise I found myself soothed by the scene as I studied it.
“I have always felt that this photograph has managed to distill the soul of aikijutsu,” Endo-san remarked. “There is a physical and spiritual connection with your partner. There is no resistance, but there is trust.”
He gripped my hands in the same manner and asked me to extend my arms and lay my palms on his wrists. I felt immediately what he was trying to impart to me. This connective touch, on one level, was the most basic of human interaction, but it seemed also to reach into a higher plane of union that leaped across the physical and I felt I had lost something invaluable when he released my hands.
“In a class, trust is paramount,” Endo-san said. “I trust you not to attack me in a manner we have not agreed upon, and you must trust me not to harm you when I neutralize your attack. Without trust we cannot move and nothing can be achieved.”
“But I feel I have to surrender completely when you perform a throwing technique on me.”
“Precisely. Complete surrender, but not total abandonment of awareness. You must always feel. Feel my technique, feel the direction of the force, how you move through the air and how you are going to meet the ground. Feel, open up, be aware of everything. If anything goes wrong, if my technique is faulty or if I fail you, then at the very least you are in a position to protect yourself and fall safely.”
He threw me a few more times and it began to seem easier. I was not so tense and the movements seemed to flow more naturally.
“In return for surrendering to the throw, you are given the gift of flight,” he said.
It was true. I quickly came to enjoy the exhilarating sensation of being launched into the air, to float unanchored for a few short seconds before curling my body into a sphere and coming to earth again. And I discovered that the harder I attacked him, the more strongly I directed my force against him, the further he could throw me, and so the longer I could remain in blissf
ul flight. I gave up my fear and at the end of each class requested that he throw me continuously until I was exhausted and could do no more.
There was a canvas bag filled with sand that I had to hit and kick, every day, hundreds of times. He demanded strength and speed, and I worked exhaustively to reach the standards he expected. He was strict and unyielding, but he was passionate about what he was teaching, as though he had once taught before and now missed it greatly. I thoroughly enjoyed the lessons. Our spirits would stretch out the way the light of the sun spreads through the sky. Our breaths came out, through our lungs, throats, soles, skin; we exhaled from our tingling fingertips. We breathed; we lived.
“This is where all power originates—the breath, kokyu.” He pointed to a spot below his navel. “The tanden is the center of your being, the center of the universe. At all times connect it to your opponent’s center with your breath and your energy, your ki.”
His eyes glittered, throbbed with a cosmic energy that seemed to reach into mine. They held me immobile, a hare caught by the stare of the tiger. His hands reached out and smacked my shoulder. “And never, ever look directly into an opponent’s eyes. Always remember this.”
It is amazing what one can achieve when one has an excellent teacher. Endo-sensei, that was how I called him during our lessons—teacher. I knew he was pleased with me when he realized I was not treating his classes lightly. He never told me, but I soon learned that he showed it in other ways.
One morning, as I was about to return home after a hard and painful lesson, he stopped me and said, “We have not finished.” He asked me to follow him into his house. Inside, we knelt on the floor before a low wooden table. He opened a box and removed a brush from inside. He spread out a sheet of rice paper and ground an ink-stick in a square stone mortar that had a slight dip in the center, until a small pool of ink covered the indentation. The grinding released a light trace of incense, unformed words escaping into the air. The ink thickened and, when he was satisfied as to its consistency, he stopped and placed the ink stick on a marble rest.
“The ink, the grinding stone, the writing brush and paper, these were described by the ancient Chinese as the Four Treasures of the Study,” he said. He looked closely at the blank sheet of rice paper, as if seeing words that had already been written upon it. He pulled back his sleeve and dipped the brush into the ink, shaped it to a point against the stone and wrote.
It was a series of slashes and curves, his hand pressing the brush into the paper where he required a thick stroke, and lifting it almost off the paper where he wished to leave a light trace. The tip of the brush never once lost a strand of contact with the surface of the paper until it reached the border of the sheet and then the brush was lifted away like a hunting tiger leaping off a rock.
“My name,” he said, handing me the brush. His fingers curved around mine as he showed me the way to hold it. “It is like holding a sword, not too tightly, but not too loosely either. By the manner in which a man holds his brush, you will be able to tell how he carries and uses his sword and, ultimately, how he lives his life.”
I copied the strokes on the rice paper. “There is an order as to which stroke is placed first, much like the patterns of the ken— the sword,” he said. “And, as in aikijutsu where you must never lose the connection with your attacker, so too you must never lose the connection between your brush, your paper, and the center of your being.”
I tried a few more times, the brush moving awkwardly, like a wounded bird crawling across a road. He sighed and I could see he was growing impatient.
“Do not write with your mind. Write with your soul. Don’t think; the movements must come free from the weight of your thoughts.” He folded my effort into a neat square and said, “That is enough. I shall get you your own writing set so you can practice on your own.”
He wanted me to learn to speak Japanese, and to read and write the three forms of Japanese writing: hiragana, katakana, kanji.
“Why must I learn the language?”
“Because I bothered to learn yours.” He looked at me. “And because it will save your life one day.”
It was hard work, yet I enjoyed it. Perhaps after years of tedium in a constrictive school I had at last been set free to truly learn.
I spent a lot of time on his island, even when he was at his office at the Japanese consulate. As deputy-consul of the northern region of Malaya, he looked into the affairs of the small Japanese community. As such he was quite free with his time, although on occasions there were receptions and dinners he had to attend. He had declined the accommodations provided by the consulate on their premises, preferring to stay on his own.
The Japanese were not very popular in Asia at that moment, due to their presence in China, I told him.
“Let us not talk of war and events far removed from us,” he said stiffly.
I was by now used to his manner of speaking, but I found his reply puzzling. He saw the injured expression on my face and softened his tone. “Your government has been pressuring us to cease our incursions into China, even though England and Japan are not at war, and the whole affair is none of the business of the English. I had to listen to the resident councillor berate me today. As though I had a say in the decisions made in Tokyo. This from a representative of a government that saw fit to turn a nation of healthy Chinese into opium addicts just so it could force the Chinese government to trade with it.”
I waved away his apology, for he was correct. The British merchants, backed by their government’s gunboats, had twice gone to war to introduce opium into China, shifting the balance of trade and the flow of foreign exchange in their favor. Why talk of events that did not concern us?
I looked at the wall of photographs in his home while he was cooking. He was an avid photographer. There were pictures of Japan, mostly of villages, mountains, and botanical gardens, but not a single one of his family. In fact almost none of the photographs were of people. There was a certain blandness about them, an emptiness which I disliked. They appeared to have been hurriedly taken, as if to serve only as a reminder, and not a memory. There was one taken of high, snow-covered mountains that caught my attention.
“Where’s that?” I asked him.
“That is the world’s highest mountain, in India.”
“And that?” I pointed to what appeared to be the only photograph that he had posed for, and even then he appeared tiny and almost indistinguishable beneath a massive sandstone statue of the Buddha carved into a hillside.
“Bamiyan, in Afghanistan. That is one of three statues of the Buddha. That one I am standing in front of is a hundred and seventy feet tall, carved in the third century. A group of Indian boys took the photograph for me.”
“You’ve traveled much,” I said. Photographs of dense forests and deserted beaches, as well as formidable mountains, were pinned to another wall. I recognized the tin mines of Ipoh and the rows of rubber trees that covered much of the west coast of Malaya. Hutton & Sons owned a large number of rubber plantations, and the photographs brought back to me the quiet of the mornings when the estate workers walked back and forth along the lines of rubber trees and made cuttings in the bark of the trees, coaxing trickles of milky sap to fill the cups hanging below the cut sections.
A painting in a little alcove caught my attention. It was a drawing, done in shades of black ink diluted in water, the brush strokes simple and almost casual. It showed a bald man with a heavy beard and an unbroken stroke of paint that implied his robes. His eyes were open wide and I thought they looked lidless. The rest of the painting was empty space. I walked nearer to study it, disturbed by the wide staring eyes and the black eyeballs.
Endo-san, seeing I was transfixed, explained. “That is my copy of a painting by Miyamoto Musashi. The man in the painting is Daruma, a Zen Buddhist monk. Do not touch it,” he said sharply, as I raised my fingers to stroke the eyes, as though I could close them for the monk and give him rest.
I knew what a Buddhist was, du
e to the influence of my mother’s sister: Aunt Yu Mei was a firm follower of the Buddha. But what was a Zen Buddhist, I asked Endo-san.
“A branch of Buddhism very much influenced by Daruma. It teaches its adherents to find Enlightenment by way of meditation and rigorous physical discipline. And before you ask what is Enlightenment, it is a moment of complete clarity, of pure bliss. At that instant everything will be revealed to you. Some take years to achieve this, some months, days perhaps, some never at all. In Japan we call such Enlightenment satori. The annals of Zen Buddhism have recorded it happening to young novices, untrained monks and temple sweepers, as well as to learned sages and temple patriarchs.” Now his eyes became fleetingly humorous. “It is indiscriminate. When it comes, it comes.”
“Are you Enlightened?”
He stopped what he was doing, gave a sad smile and said, “No, I am not. I have never been.”
“Why not?”
“That is a question I can never answer. I doubt if even my sensei can.”
“Will I become Enlightened?” I asked, although at this point I could only understand traces of his words. Still, the asking of the question made me sound serious and intelligent. It seemed to have been an expected query.
“I can only teach you the way, that is all. What you do with it and what it does to you, those are beyond my influence.”
Each lesson with him would be concluded by a half-hour session of meditation—zazen, sitting Zen. It was to free my mind, to achieve what he termed the “Void.” What exasperated him, though, was my inability to master this. It was hard to think of nothing and yet not think at all. Try as I might, I found it elusive. It frustrated me, as I wanted to show him that I could accomplish what appeared to me to be the easiest thing of all. Surely I had done enough of that in school to make me an expert?