Cutting Back

by Leslie Buck

  I had to make a decision, and soon. I began peeling the grapes one by one, as if this was totally normal to me instead of something my sister and I did as kids for fun. Then I popped them in my mouth one at a time, chewed them, and swallowed the whole thing, without spitting any of the seeds out. I learned how to do this while living with a Dutch family one summer on a sailboat on the Côte d’Azur. You just separate the seeds from the fruit in your mouth with your tongue, swallow the seeds first, then enjoy the fruit on its own. Tasks are carried out so traditionally in our crew that the slightest diversion got instant attention. I figured there was no harm in encouraging the “there goes the American doing another weird thing” reaction. They did stare at me but said nothing. Either they refused to react, or they knew I was up to something. Of course while this cultural interaction took place, not a word was spoken.

  Usually at break time, the men conversed a bit. But that day, when the men had returned from Tokyo, the crew was quiet, even at break. Masahiro just sat staring ahead at nothing, and Toyoka slept with his colorful cloth headband over his eyes. Bossman took his shoes off before lying down and put them neatly by his side. Kei smoked his cigarettes despite my icy stares. I’d already delivered my California-style “stop smoking” speech the week before. Calmness had overtaken our group. Kei hadn’t addressed me the whole day except to talk about the pine, not even to say hello in the morning. I worried I’d said something to offend him, but tried to think positive thoughts about how great it was to learn through observation. But I still wondered about my new friend’s distance.

  I hoped that perhaps Toyoka’s presence had calmed our group. He not only pruned with grace, but he also related to others with a certain gentleness. Toyoka addressed me as “Leslie-san.” No one else addressed me this way, and I noticed the difference. Each time Toyoka said “Leslie-san,” I felt as though he offered me something important, something hard to place. He did this without ever speaking a sentence to me that I could understand. Toyoka did not speak English. He’d get my attention, mime his message, or speak in slow Japanese. His usage of one word, san, meant more to me than I could have predicted.

  Continuing to prune pines after lunch, I shook branches hard to make them rustle and opened and closed my shears midair, making lots of clacking noise, so Nakaji would think I was busy at work. I was actually looking away from my branches to observe the men’s pruning techniques. If I was failing so much, I needed more time to learn. I watched how Toyoka pulled his pine’s needles with precise, smooth, almost soundless motions. Kei worked quickly and skillfully, but with a bit more macho yanking. With my needle-pulling style, because I was trying to keep up with the men, I probably looked like a contestant in a hot dog–eating contest, trying to eat as many as she could in a short period of time, no matter what it took. So what if I left a few half-torn needles behind; I could clean them up later!

  I kept close track of the time that day. How much longer till lunch? Finally, my watch showed it was noon, the moment when everyone drops their shears and heads for the tea tray. I looked up to see Masahiro still pruning. How odd. Why doesn’t he stop? I whined inwardly. If one person didn’t quit, no one could. Now I’ll never get my snack. I sulked over my pine, which had prickled me so much that an itchy rash had developed along my wrists. Then I noticed the men beginning to gather around Masahiro. I dared ask Kei a question: “What’s going on?” Kei responded, “Masahiro has been allowed to prune his first tree.”

  We watched in silence. Masahiro’s hands shook as he tried pruning a few small branches in his insecure yet fiercely determined way. He’d had six months to observe the men’s pruning while he swept, raked, and poured tea. He made one cut after another without a single specific instruction on how to do it. One after another, the men walked up to him and gave suggestions. Nakaji, eight feet away, barked his critique without moving from his spot. Precious, rare suggestions were offered. I watched silently, chastising my rumbling stomach to quiet down. I realized that despite loud commands, occasional teasing, and predictable morning reprimands, the crew in fact deeply cared about their youngest apprentice. Would we respect doctors as much if they did not endure a difficult residency where they practiced their healing work with a stressful schedule, under the eye of demanding mentors? After a brief, humble lunch, we picked up our shears and recommenced work at a furious pace.

  Toward the end of the day, we did our normal fanatical cleanup routine. We raked the garden, swept the rocks, and blew leaves off the paths. Sure, the blower ruined the garden’s peaceful lull, but it moved those leaves quickly and satisfied the men’s need to operate a mechanized toy. We picked up every last pine needle by hand. On top of that, we cleaned up a gravel area around a sitting bench, per Nakaji’s request. All he had to do was point and grunt. I knew instantly that the area wasn’t up to his standards, that I would have to grab a bucket, move the rocks aside, square foot by square foot, dust the ground, and replace the rocks. For some reason I wasn’t allowed to push all the rocks in one huge pile, sweep the area, and then replace them. “No,” the grunt meant, “do it the traditional way!” As the last bit of the day’s light faded, Nakaji commanded me to find my camera and snap a close-up photo of our handiwork. The camera made a loud click as the men gathered behind me closely, helping me focus on my important task. They had spoken but a few words to me that day, yet their silent lessons follow me to this day.

  Working under the Tree of Thorns

  One Monday morning at a company pep talk, I stared at the elder patriarch of the company, Toemon Sano, while everyone else listened with their head bowed and feet separated in the at-ease position. Toemon looked to be somewhere in his eighties. Several years after I returned to California from Kyoto, I met a California landscaper who’d studied decades before with a younger Toemon, who was at the time an active leader of the company. The landscaper, a young man himself at the time, had asked Toemon why he’d taken the time to train an American. Toemon replied that, with each generation, fewer Japanese enter the physically challenging traditional craft of landscaping, and he hoped that foreigners who showed an interest might learn this art form to keep it alive. “Please share this knowledge with others,” Toemon had told the California landscaper, who related this to me during a phone conversation. A tingling sensation moved down my arms to my center, where resolve waited, patiently. I never spoke directly to Toemon, but his message reached me anyway.

  Later Kei told me that Toemon had said, “It is unusually warm for this time of year” and “Today would normally be the first day of frost.” Good news, I thought sarcastically, it’s not actually as cold as it feels! I worked that week in a fleece hat, long scarf, and double gloves. Bossman teased me about my hat. He wore a thin cotton shirt. Toemon also said it felt like earthquake weather. Great, more tremblors while standing on the ladder! Then a worker stepped forward to give a short speech thanking company employees for donating money, equivalent to about three hundred dollars, for his grandmother’s funeral.

  We worked one last day at the temple garden, which had grown cool and humid in the mornings. Moisture penetrated my cloth boots as I ran over the squishy moss carpet, making me feel particularly chilly. The senior crew members pruned trees while Masahiro and I hauled debris to a hidden area behind the garden. The company’s youngest apprentice stopped several times to instruct me on how to cut the debris into smaller pieces in order to keep the piles compact. His idea made sense, considering we only had so much space to pile the branches. But it modeled a common mistake of the inexperienced gardener. Rather than spending time tediously cutting already pruned branches, one can simply stomp hard on the pile and reduce its size in seconds. I tried to ignore Masahiro, as the men were pruning furiously and we had to move quickly to keep up. On the third lecture, I decided to obey him just to avoid another one. As I cut up branches into tiny pieces to please Masahiro, Nakaji walked by. He yelled at me, pointing to my pruning shears, and jumped on the pile of branches to show me how to reduce the pile
efficiently. Masahiro happened to be in another part of the garden during this demonstration.

  Eventually, Masahiro was asked to prune a tree and join the senior crew. This meant I had to clean up after everyone. The tree Masahiro climbed was huge, tangled, and more than twenty feet high, covered with fat glossy green leaves and fruit resembling lemons. I would later find out this was a yuzu tree, a richly scented, traditional, and coveted Japanese citrus. I felt jealous of Masahiro and ill spirited in general. I didn’t mind the advanced workers getting to prune, but Masahiro was less experienced than I was. He’d worked only six months as a gardener, and I had seven years behind me. He had pruned his first tree only the day before. Yes, I knew that, according to Japanese craftsman hierarchy, he had seniority because he’d arrived at the company six months before me. He was supposed to prune while I cleaned up. He could tell me what to do anytime, as could anyone else who’d entered the company before I had. Yet I couldn’t help but resist. It seemed stupid to do something wrong. It felt unfair that Masahiro should get to do more advanced work when I could do it better. I eventually tried to turn the situation around in my mind by transforming myself from debris girl to power girl. I carried big loads to show the men how much I could carry at once and walked as fast as I could. That way, I breathed hard and sweated a lot, but Masahiro didn’t have time to instruct.

  Words from my pruning friends back home occasionally worked their way into my thoughts. I imagined hearing my California mentor’s stern voice: “You’re lucky Masahiro didn’t start instructing you on day one!” Dennis warned me to expect to have several bosses who would contradict one another. He said that obeying multiple senior workers would allow me to learn a variety of methods and would teach me how to remain calm in the face of frustration—a handy practice for those who adhere to the American motto “The client is always right.” Later that day, Dennis’s voice came into my thoughts again. In his fatherly way, with a sigh, he said, “Just do your best, and then some.”

  I also heard Van’s voice. He had been a boyfriend of mine for far too brief a time. A forest ranger in Yosemite, Van shared my dream of apprenticing in Japan. He died two years before I came to Japan, when his car crashed into a tree. After years of sobriety, he had succumbed to a one-night drinking binge, and was gone. Since then I had been determined to go to Japan for the two of us. Van was always committed to doing a little more than his share of the work. At his memorial, a Buddhist nun who’d known him said, “Van would always go the extra mile in whatever he did.” I imagined us standing together, watching Masahiro up in the tall tree he was pruning.

  We’re here! I exclaimed to Van in my thoughts. Isn’t it amazing, even if Masahiro drives me crazy?

  Well, Van reasoned in his soft voice, Masahiro has been working pretty hard the past few days. Come on, let’s go haul some more branches.

  The last friend who joined my thoughts was Dick, a pruning buddy and landscaper. He spoke fluent Japanese and was called “Mr. Dick” in Japan. “I can’t bear to correct them!” he’d muse. Dick was twenty-five years older than I, but often seemed younger in spirit. He never complained and hardly ever got tired, making me feel like I whined a lot over nothing. Dick ran beside me today, even though my crew couldn’t see him. Hey, he said as I carried a huge tarp of debris on my back, humoring me in between breaths. At least we’re not up there, doing what he’s doing. We both looked up at Masahiro, who was busy pruning the tangled citrus tree.

  Masahiro’s persistence in correcting me was worrisome. I believed the men told Masahiro to give me corrections, right or wrong, because he was my senpai, senior worker, and I was his kōhai, junior worker. Learning how to mentor others is a key part of becoming a master Japanese craftsman. Masahiro surely would have bossed me around from my very first day if I had been Japanese. But perhaps my teenage boss just didn’t know what to do with a thirty-five-year-old American woman.

  In part, I worried that if I got put in Masahiro’s slot, Nakaji might start yelling at me every morning. I wasn’t sure if I could handle it. Indeed, as my time in the company increased, the boss did treat me more firmly.

  Kei told me that the company had hired its first female Japanese gardener a year before I arrived. He said the men had decided to treat her as a “regular apprentice” and that “she cried every day, for a year, until she quit and got married.” Is he warning me? My paranoia increased with my exhaustion. I felt I needed to hold my ground with Masahiro or I’d be the next one walking down the aisle—with a long garden tarp as my bridal veil.

  I tried to do what Masahiro said. After all, I was in Japan to learn new ways, not to teach others. I’d make exceptions only when Masahiro told me to do something absolutely ridiculous. I’d hesitate just a few seconds before doing the task. I’d tilt my head to signal I was thinking about his words. I’d procrastinate by looking in my dictionary. Or I’d pretend I didn’t hear him at first. I figured that obeying him eventually would be enough. I’d stomp on my pile of twigs, and then, after about six reminders, I’d prune it into a million pieces. At least while he got to prune the tree, I didn’t have to obey him.

  Two advanced workers took off that afternoon, so only Nakaji, Masahiro, and I were left. I realized I’d never get to do any pruning. I’d been running the debris hard for an hour, hoping for some extra time to do something more interesting. I felt defeated. Even hot coffee delivered by the monks, a real treat in green-tea country, did not lift my spirits.

  Late in the day, the sun tilted against the trees, pushing clumpy dark shadows over the temple garden. Masahiro worked up in the citrus tree, getting prune-by-yell commands from Nakaji. The boss’s voice boomed over the temple garden. Way up in the tree, Masahiro frantically tried to keep up with the torrent of directions from below, yelling, “Hai! Hai! Hai!” every few minutes. I sulked in the back of the garden, jumping hard on the pile of broken branches in frustration. Then, I heard nothing. The silence continued. I looked up. Erratic footsteps came my way. Masahiro appeared out of some shrubs and quickly walked past me with a distant, cold look on his face. His arms, exposed in short sleeves, were profusely bleeding, gashes all over them. His shirt was stained with red splotches. What I didn’t know yet about a yuzu tree was that its coarse branches are covered in large, sharp thorns. It dawned on me that while Masahiro had the seeming privilege of a pruning assignment, Nakaji had given him the worst job; thorns had stabbed him at every turn.

  I heard muffled noises coming from the bushes. I realized my young coworker had gone behind the debris pile to cry. I didn’t feel sorry for him, though. I admired him. My tedious complaints looked ridiculous in comparison to his determination. Nature does not always play the soft role that so many weekend gardeners rightfully and peacefully enjoy. For full-time gardeners, the midafternoon sun can be brutal when the branch you have to work on doesn’t happen to be in the shade, and plants carry thorns and sticky sap that attracts dirt and sometimes causes infection. So why was Masahiro determined to help make the thorny tree look more beautiful? Was his sacrifice because of a simple desire to acquire skill? Masahiro worked harder than what was necessary for him to learn. No matter how tired parents feel, they take time to read to their children at night, the adults often falling asleep first. I saw Masahiro working with heartfelt purposefulness that day, the sort of love and care that a young parent feels for his child.

  Red-faced Masahiro walked slowly past me again to return to his tree. His shoulders slumped a little, but he held his gaze purposefully forward. When I saw him coming, I rushed to climb atop the debris pile and cut the branches into small pieces like mad. How could I have thought of Masahiro as my competitor? We worked as a team, the two lowest workers. We sacrificed for each other, for the garden. After he’d climbed back up the yuzu tree, I ran over and made a show of hauling the largest and thorniest branches I could find.

  Slowly, the light faded to dusk. I ran debris loads while the men pruned in earnest. Warm, sticky sweat slowly trickled from my scalp down my face.
I didn’t stop to dry it off, or take time for sips of water, as I would have done in California. I needed to support my team. I jogged to and from the debris pile a bit more slowly than I had earlier in the day, but the bright citrus and busy craftsmen, my vibrant companions, kept me engaged. Nakaji’s and Masahiro’s voices echoed in the garden. My footsteps pounded down paths that had filled with dark shadows. The birds joined in with their dusk singsong, egging us on to walk the last mile.

  Owning my own business over the past few years, I realized, had allowed my ego to grow too big, too fast. I was the boss of a business that had built up fairly quickly, making me feel quite proud and independent at an early time in my career. I pruned only small trees and plants, and rarely had to weed or get my hands in the dirt. I offered design advice to help the garden develop gracefully, and seemed to have a knack for dealing with all kinds of clients. In general, I was paid well and my clients offered only praise. True, I strived to do the highest-quality work for every garden. But most of my clients couldn’t tell the difference between good and excellent work. My mentor warned his pruning students to remain humble. “In America you are some of the best pruners. In Japan you are beginners.” I had become like a plant that had been given too much fertilizer. When a plant is overfed, it indeed grows fast. It will burst out with fresh, green, vibrant foliage. But while a heavily fertilized plant will grow big, it tends not to flower.

  Shifting Perspectives in the Landscape

  Rain pounded the truck’s front window as we splashed through drenched concrete streets. I wore a raincoat, plastic jikatabi, and my anti-dribble terry cloth tennis cuffs. I’d sweat in my sealed plastic suit, but a fleece sweater under my coat would wick the sweat away from my skin. Over time, moisture would line the inside of my rain jacket, but my skin would stay fairly dry. Expensive polyurethane breathable rain gear lasted about ten minutes on a gardener’s rain day. I noticed that two of my senpai still wore their thin cloth jikatabi in the rain! “Why don’t they buy plastic rain boots?” I asked Kei. Knowingly, he responded, “To make excellent gardeners.”