by Tan Twan Eng
“Picture your breath as a long slender string,” he said. “Now draw it in when you breathe, draw it deep. Beyond your lungs, right into the spot just below your navel, your tanden. Pause, let it swirl around and then imagine it being pulled out again as you exhale. That is all you think about in zazen—later, as you progress, you will not even think about that at all. You will not even notice your breath. Later on.”
It drove me mad, just sitting there in the Japanese way, my legs tucked under my buttocks. Inevitably my attention would drift away, a deluge of thoughts and images would crash into my mind and I would lose the thread.
But those were magical days, just before the threads that bound the world became unraveled. Europe was going to war, and Japan was setting up its puppet regime in Manchuria as a launching pad into a defenseless China. Dark days were coming. But for the moment the sun still shone on Malaya, on the endless rows of rubber trees, and on the tin mines with their melancholic lunar landscape, where the coarse and tough immigrant Hakka coolies crouched in muddy pools and sieved through tons of earth and water to find some tiny granules of tin ore. There were still parties to attend, weekend trips to Penang Hill, picnics by the beach . . .
Endo-san hit my back with his palm and I hurriedly tried to retrieve my own tangled thread.
I sat facing the sea, the waves rolling to the shore like the ticking of a natural clock. “Look out there,” he said, pointing to the horizon. “Do you see the spot where the ocean meets the sky? Sitting here, you think that spot is fixed. Yet as soon as you move, even an inch, that spot moves. That is where you must put your mind, that place where air and water meet.”
And then I understood what he wanted and, for the first time, I managed to achieve a state of total awareness, even if for just a few seconds. For that short period of time I was there at the spot, yet I was everywhere too. Spirit expanded, mind unfurling open, heart in flight.
Chapter Four
Captain Francis Light obtained the island of Penang from the Sultan of Kedah, with dreams of turning it into a vital British port. He named it Georgetown, after the King of England. By the time I was born the original settlement had grown into a warren of streets stretching from the Quayside into the fringes of the thick, undisturbed jungle.
Georgetown was divided into sections according to race. The British took the best part, naturally. Hence the waterfront was dominated by Fort Cornwallis and the armed forces’ camps. The offices of the East India Company, Hutton & Sons, Empire Trading, the Chartered Bank, and the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank were all located within the vicinity of Beach Street.
Further in, the town was divided into Chinese, Indian, and Malay quarters. Each had its own characteristics, its own temples, clan associations, guilds, and mosques. The streets, all with English names but for a handful of exceptions, were narrow and hemmed in by shophouses on both sides. The shops at street level sold goods from China, India, England, and the various islands of the Malay Archipelago. Traders and their families lived their entire lives here; it was common for three generations to reside in the same building, and as Endo-san and I walked along Campbell Road we could hear the cries of children, grandparents shouting at their servants, and even the sound of an erhu player coaxing mournful wails from his stringed instrument.
And there were the smells, always the smells that remain unchanged even to this day—the scents of spices drying in the sun, sweetmeats roasting on charcoal grills, curries bubbling on fiery stoves, dried salted fish swaying on strings, nutmeg, pickled shrimps—all these swirled and mixed with the scent of the sea, fusing into a pungent concoction that entered us and lodged itself in the memory of our hearts.
I pointed out Armenian Street to him, where immigrants from Armenia had lived and carried on their trades. “That’s what I was named after. My middle name, Arminius, although I never use it. My mother chose it. Some people have roads named after them; I have it the other way round,” I said, and he laughed.
People stared as we walked through the town. Even in his Western clothes Endo-san looked out of place, his features too refined, too aristocratic for a Chinese. He walked slowly, his back straight, his eyes taking in the surrounding stalls and hawkers.
He surprised me when he took me into a small Japanese community just at the edge of the Chinese quarter, on Jipun-kay, Japan Street. It was a busy area and there were camera shops, restaurants, bars, and shops supplying food and provisions. To me there was hardly any difference between Jipun-kay and the Chinese quarter: even the signboards looked the same, although I was hardly an expert since I could not read Chinese. However the streets here were very clean. People bowed to Endo-san as they passed.
“There it is,” Endo-san said, pointing. “Madam Suzuki’s restaurant. “
Entering the shop, I found it furnished pleasingly: low wooden tables, shoji screens and framed paintings of scenes of nature. Madam Suzuki, a slim woman with small eyes and lacquered hair, greeted us at the entrance. Endo-san nodded to a few patrons as we made our way to our table.
“I never realized there were so many Japanese in Penang,” I said as a young Japanese woman laid our table. I stared at her, watched her quick certain movements. She was much shorter than me, her face painted white, her lips a controlled explosion of red.
“They’ve been here for years. All attracted to the wealth in this region.” He ordered for me, the waitress’s voice like the sound of wind chimes as she repeated the orders after him. The food came quickly. Most of the dishes were cold and uncooked, which I found disconcerting. It was also quite bland. I was used to the spicy food of Penang, food that squeezed perspiration out of me like a sodden sponge. I told him this and he smiled.
“I have not grown used to your curries and spices here,” he said. “Do you like the tea?”
I took a swallow. It tasted bitter and melancholic, which puzzled me, for how could a beverage capture the essence of emotion?
“I have no explanation for it either,” he said, when I asked him. “The Fragrance of the Lonely Tree. It is grown on the hills not far from my home.”
“What are you doing in this part of the world?” I was curious. He had never told me much about himself. I had looked up the atlas in the library and thought the islands that collectively formed the nation of Japan made it look like a tilted seahorse swimming against the currents of the ocean.
Endo-san’s eyes took on a faraway look and he clasped his hands together on the table. “I grew up near the sea in a beautiful place within sight of Miyajima Island. Do you see that painting of the large structure rising out from the sea?” He pointed to a wall behind me.
I turned to look and nodded.
“That is called a torii—a gate to a Shinto temple. It is a famous shrine in Japan. Our village has one that is very similar to that, although I admit it is not as impressive. Each morning the sun comes to rest on it and it burns red and gold, as though the gods had just forged it in their furnace and placed it in the sea to cool.”
The unadorned lines and subtle curves of the massive gate looked to me like a Japanese ideogram, as though a word of piety had been transformed into a physical structure, an expression of prayer made real.
He came from a samurai family, he told me, part of an aristocratic dynasty that was dwindling in power. Traders were weakening the power and influence once held by the aristocratic and military classes, and often these families borrowed heavily from these businessmen when the rice crops in their fiefdoms failed. Endo-san’s father had displeased the emperor and had moved away from Tokyo to venture into commerce, selling rice and lacquer to the Americans and the Chinese.
“Your father worked for the emperor of Japan?” I asked, impressed.
“Many of the aristocracy do. It is not as important as you think. My father was one of the officials in charge of court protocol,” Endo-san said. “He advised Western diplomats on how to address the emperor, the proper clothing to wear, the appropriate gifts to present.”
“How did he
anger the emperor?”
“The emperor was surrounded by a clique of high-ranking military advisors who wished to expand our territories by taking China. My father thought that would be a grave mistake. Unfortunately he did not keep his views to himself.”
His father had ensured that his children would never forget their past and Endo-san had spent his childhood learning the skills of the samurai: hand-to-hand combat, archery, horse riding, swordsmanship, flower arranging, and calligraphy. His father also taught him the skills of trade, marrying the principles of warfare to those of buying and selling. “‘Business is war,’ my father used to tell us,” Endo-san said as he sipped his tea.
He was born in 1890, into one of the most turbulent periods in Japanese history. Japan was then emerging from sakoku, a self-imposed national seclusion under the Tokugawa Shogunate that had lasted for two hundred years.
“Sakoku—’chain the land’—meant that Japan had closed her doors to foreigners. People could not travel out of Japan. Some did; those who were caught were sentenced to death. Those who traveled out could never return. The laws made by Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu were enforced strictly.”
He told me that the shogun was the supreme military commander, having more power than the emperor, who was merely a figurehead.
“Due to the shogun’s strict laws, this period of seclusion became a golden age for the arts: haiku poetry, kabuki, and Noh plays. But by the nineteenth century Japan was crippled by famine and poverty. We were weak, left behind as the world outside advanced. When the Americans sailed to our shores we had to succumb to their demands to open up the country.”
I nodded in agreement. It was the same all over Asia. I myself was the result of such a tale.
“The closed-door policy weakened my country. While the nations of the West conquered and colonized, Japan sat to one side, wishing to participate in world events but hamstrung by its historical seclusion and lack of experience and technical knowledge. We sent our brightest minds to Europe to learn, and the success of the Western nations inspired our own military ambitions. “He shook his head slowly.
“And it was the coming of the gai-jin—the “outside people”—that made trade so lucrative. By the time of my childhood we were besotted with the West. I was taught to play the works of the great European composers, I studied European and American history and I was given lessons in reading and writing and speaking English. That is why I can talk to you today, in a Japanese shop, in Malaya, thousands of miles from our respective homelands. Strange, is it not?”
“My home is here, never England. England, to me is as strange as—well, as Japan,” I said.
Silence fell between us, a comfortable silence, while we considered each other’s words. Was it only two months ago that a man came to borrow a boat from me? Today I was having lunch with him, hearing his life story. I felt as though in a dream, a surreal and languid pool in which I floated.
We finished our meal of raw fish and rice wrapped in dried seaweed. It was late when his chauffeur returned us to Istana. As he walked down the steps to the beach he said, “I would like to know more of Penang. Will you show me around?”
“Yes,” I said, pleased that he had asked me.
That was how I became his guide, taking him around the island. He wanted to look at temples first, and I knew immediately which one to show him.
Endo-san was fascinated by the Temple of Azure Cloud, where hundreds of pit vipers took up residence, coiled around incense holders and the eaves and crossbeams of the roof, inhaling the smoke of incense lit by worshippers.
He bought a packet of joss sticks from a monk and placed them in the large bronze urn after whispering a prayer. Plates of eggs had been left on the tables as offerings for the snakes. I stood around, uncertain. Religion had never played a large part in my life. My mother had been a lapsed Buddhist, but I attended the weekly service at St. George’s Church with my family. This temple, with its intricate writings and large wooden plaques— their lacquer chipped and faded—felt strange to me. The various gods and goddesses housed in different altars stared at me from beneath half-closed eyes as I walked past.
A bell tolled, and through the smoke I heard the chanting of monks. A cobra uncurled itself from a pillar and slithered across the uneven tiles, swaying to the drone. Its tongue stabbed out to taste the air, its scales shining like a thousand trapped souls. A passing monk picked it up and slung it over the back of a chair. He asked me to touch it. I stroked its dry, cool skin. Like the snakes, I felt myself being slowly drugged by the smoke and the chanting, which vibrated through my body to be absorbed by my blood and bones.
“A fortune-teller,” Endo-san said, pointing to a massive old woman cooling herself with a rattan fan. “Let us see what she can tell us.”
I sat before her as she examined my hand. Her skin had the same texture as the cobra’s. She studied my face and looked as though she were trying very hard to recall where she had seen me. “You have been here before?” she asked.
I shook my head.
She stroked the writings on my palm and asked for my date and precise time of birth. She spoke in Hokkien: “You were born with the gift of rain. Your life will be abundant with wealth and success. But life will test you greatly. Remember—the rain also brings the flood.”
Her vague pronouncements made me pull my hands away from her, but she was not offended. She looked at Endo-san and her eyes became dreamy, as though trying to remember a person she had once known. She returned her gaze to me, her eyes coming back into sharp focus, and said, “You and your friend have a past together, in a different time. And you have a greater journey to make. After this life.”
Puzzled, I translated her words for Endo-san, who could only speak a few phrases of the local dialect. He looked momentarily sad, and said softly, “So the words never change, wherever I go.”
I waited for him to tell me what he meant, but he remained silent and thoughtful.
“What does my friend’s palm show?” I asked the fortune-teller. She crossed her arms over her chest and refused to touch Endo-san. “He’s a Jipunakui—a Japanese ghost. I do not read their futures. Beware of him.”
I was embarrassed at the way she had dismissed Endo-san and wanted to soften her harsh words before I conveyed them to him. “She isn’t feeling well, she says can’t do any more readings today,”
I said. But he saw the struggle in my expression and shook his head, touching me on the arm to let me know nothing had escaped him.
I paid her and we walked out of the dim, timeless space of the temple into the sun, leaving the reverberations of the place behind, our bodies slowly tightening, coming to stillness again. Everything seemed to move faster outside, even the shadows cast by the sun.
“What did you mean, when you said the words never change?” I asked, as he bought me a glass of cold coconut juice from a roadside hawker.
“I have seen many fortune-tellers, of all sorts. Some have read my face, some my palms. Others went into a trance and asked the spirits for guidance. And always they came back with similar words. That old one back there did not even have to touch me to do the same,” he said, starting to walk back to where his chauffeur was waiting for us.
“What did they tell you?” I asked, catching up with him.
He stopped, and turned to face me. I felt compelled to look at him directly. “They told me that we had known each other a long, long time ago. That we will know each other in the times to come.”
I found what he was saying, coupled with the fortune-teller’s strange pronouncements, quite incomprehensible, and told him so.
“You are a follower of Christ,” he said. “You would not be aware of the Wheel of Becoming in which the Buddhists believe.”
I shook my head. Seeing my ignorance, he went on, “What happens after you die?”
I answered that easily. “You go to heaven—if you’re good.”
“But what happened before you lived? Where were you then?”
Tha
t simple question caused me to stop walking and think. It could not have been heaven. Otherwise, what was the point of leaving it and going back there again? Finally, I said, “I don’t know.”
“You had another life. After the end of that life you were reborn to this life. And so it will go on and on until you have redressed all your weaknesses, all your mistakes.”
“And what will happen then?”
“Perhaps after a thousand lifetimes, you will reach Nirvana.”
“Where is that?”
“Not where, but what. It is a state of enlightenment. Free from pain and suffering and desires, free from time.” “Like heaven,” I said.
He turned to look at me and twitched his eyebrows. “Perhaps.” “So the Christian way is shorter. You only have to die once.” He laughed. “Oh, definitely.”
I thought no more of the fortune-teller’s words. Endo-san’s explanations made no sense to me and so I did not dwell on them. My training intensified. Apart from the hand-to-hand combat, he now made me practice with a wooden staff. The weapon came up to my shoulders when it was planted on the ground and he wielded it with great dexterity. In his hands the stiffness of the wood seemed to transform into fluid flexibility.
“Once you have mastered the rudimentary movements of the staff, you will learn how to use a sword. In some instances the staff will be more deadly than the sword,” he said. “A sword has only one cutting edge but a staff—jo—has two ends to strike. And the entire jo is a cutting edge.”
He swung the staff, his hands moving up and down the shaft smoothly. “As with all the principles of aikijutsu, you do not meet the force of the strike head-on. You parry, you step to the side to avoid the blow, you redirect the force and unbalance your opponent. It is the same with the ken, the sword.”
I heard the seriousness in his voice as he continued, “These principles apply to your daily life as well. Never meet a person’s anger directly. Deflect, distract him, even agree with him. Unbalance his mind, and you can lead him anywhere you want.”