by Leslie Buck
So I was quite surprised when Taylor called one night and said, “I found a ticket to Kyoto in a few weeks. Should I come for a visit?” “Of course!” I’d said instinctively. Kei and I drove toward the temple garden the day before Taylor’s visit, and I worried that I should have waited until after my apprenticeship ended to have my boyfriend come out. I’d been warned by my mentor that if I took vacation during my apprenticeship, it would set me apart from my Japanese coworkers. But that sounded to me like a male workaholic’s suspicions. I felt passionate about the gardens and passion for those I loved; the two held equal weight.
I called my new American friend Maya, who had lived in Kyoto many years, for advice. “Do you think it would be such a big deal if I took a week off for a visit with my boyfriend? I would have time to tour other gardens. Would the crew really care?” I asked. “Yes,” she replied bluntly. “Such a request would be unheard of for a Japanese worker,” she had to add. Damn. I’d never worked so hard and felt like such a quitter. Yet how could I say no to my boyfriend’s desire to see me halfway through my stay? I missed him. I tepidly asked the head of Uetoh for permission to take a seven-day holiday and forged ahead with my plans, hoping the men would understand. I wanted to see Taylor, and I also needed some time off to mentally prepare for the winter’s approaching chill.
The cold, which was increasing daily, had me freaked out. It was one thing to write to friends about pruning pines in a lightning storm, watching soap operas on the built-in Japanese sauna television screens, or sipping udon noodle soup covered in locally picked wild mountain vegetables. It was another to bother my friends about the cold numbing of my hands and feet every morning. My thoughts began to sound like a scratchy broken record: Why can’t Masahiro leave me alone? When is break? Why doesn’t my boyfriend call? I never once heard a complaint from the men. Even my banal curse words—Darn. Shoot! Fudge.—had to be held in check. Maya had explained to me that Kei got only twelve days of holiday a year. I heard he’d asked for a week off right after my holiday request and that the supervisors had said no. I once asked the men gamely, “What is your favorite holiday? New Year’s? Some other particular holiday?” They laughed but wouldn’t respond. Finally Kei translated for Nakaji, who said, “You silly girl. We don’t care about the holiday’s meaning. We love New Year’s because we get our longest vacation of the year, a full five days off!”
In California I worked in the gardens four days a week, did office work on Fridays, and always took a full weekend off. Plus, I allowed myself a four-day weekend once a month in addition to a month or so of vacation a year. I just need some time off, I reasoned with myself, feeling guilty about my Kyoto holiday. I couldn’t feel sure, but I sensed the men becoming more distant as my holiday approached. For weeks, Kei still remained fairly quiet around me. What did he and the other men think? I could not guess, nor did I feel comfortable asking. I anticipated Taylor’s visit like a child waiting for Christmas.
I continued to ponder Kei’s silence. I asked Maya if perhaps I’d offended him by asking too many questions. She reassured me. “Japanese men,” she explained, “become quiet as you get to know them.” Yet I suspected otherwise. “Any other reason you can think of?” I prodded her. “Leslie, silence is comfortable to Japanese men. Kei feels you are becoming a friend, so he is becoming more himself. He’d only talk to you a lot if he considered you just a polite acquaintance.” That made me feel better for about an hour. Then I’d slip back into paranoid thoughts: He’s definitely giving me the silent treatment. He’s mad. In my family, silence meant anger. Silence equaled the unspoken message, “You pushed me too far” or “I’m upset about something, and you have to figure it out.”
Over the past few weeks, I had noticed my thoughts straying more and more toward Kei. It seemed natural for us to get along. We both obsessed about nature and our gardens. We’d both attended college and studied horticulture. We knew by heart Helen Reddy songs—he to study English, me because I was a child of young hippie parents. Despite our academic backgrounds, both of us had chosen to do physical design work. We loved pruning, touching the plants directly. We both understood the monetary and physical sacrifice of working on behalf of nature.
I thought back to the day when Kei showed me his small patio filled with thirty or so delicate woodland plants, known as accent plants in bonsai. “I like pruning pines,” he’d explained to me, “but I most enjoy working with the plants that grow in the mountains.” That was the moment when I felt I’d found a special friend. I had never met a man, particularly someone so macho, who loved tender accent plants, often placed in bonsai shows next to specimen bonsai to help viewers imagine a certain time of year or a particular scene. Kei’s two-inch-tall fern in a misshapen tiny pot might have suggested a wild woodland scene; a cluster of fresh grass in a half-inch-high pot, a meadow. Tiny flowers suggested springtime. The pots of his plants were so small that Kei would have had to care for them carefully, watering them sometimes twice a day.
As the weeks passed, I realized I was thinking about Kei more than what was usual for a woman with a boyfriend she loved back home. I told myself at first that I was thinking about him only because I was lonely. Yet the more I tried to shove thoughts of Kei out of my mind, the more they found their way back. A forcefully pruned plant reacts with taller, stronger, more numerous sprouts. Only with skillfully selected, delicate cuts will a plant’s reactionary tendencies diminish over time.
Yet with my boyfriend’s imminent arrival, I had to face something I’d been trying not to think about. Just before I’d left Berkeley, Taylor asked if he thought we should leave open the possibility of dating other people while I lived in Japan. At the time, I’d fallen into tears and said—in an unhelpful, angry sort of way—absolutely not, that I loved him. He assured me that he loved me too, and that he’d asked only because he wondered if I needed some space. Then he’d gotten upset that I’d gotten angry, and I’d left the next day with both of us feeling out of sorts. It was not the farewell I’d pictured. I’d tried to eliminate that conversation from my mind over the past eight weeks in Japan. But just like with weeds, when we try to ignore them, hoping the more desirable plants will take over, they just get bigger and spread.
As I wondered about Kei, I occasionally felt justified in thinking, Fine, if my boyfriend wants to bring up dating other people, then I’ll consider it. I was afraid of being alone, and I felt so tired and confused. The day before Taylor arrived, I sat on the edge of a garden fence between two starkly different gardens, one I knew well and another hardly at all, not knowing how anyone felt about me. In my loneliness at the time, I could hardly admit this to myself.
I found it a little odd that Nakaji had sent Kei and me off to work alone together at the temple garden the day before my boyfriend’s visit. Why did he choose this day in particular? Had he also noticed that Kei had grown particularly distant with me ever since I’d mentioned my boyfriend was coming? He was older and wiser than either of us. I understood Nakaji’s commands without him speaking a single sentence in my language. I could almost guess his daily directions. Could he do the same with me?
Once we arrived at Sainenji, Kei, my boss for the morning, let me take a few minutes to look around. The property stretched wide. It grew lush with strolling gardens and private courtyards. It offered burial grounds and buildings for relatives to relax and meet. Kei told me later that visitors wandered about the gardens after funerals, and that the monks lived in some of the buildings, looking out at private courtyards from inner rooms. He instructed me on how to prune the dead tips off hundreds of slender reeds inside a small courtyard garden surrounded on three sides by four-foot-deep engawa decks.
One could open the sliding doors of particular rooms and look out over the engawa into the courtyards—much like sitting on a dock and looking out onto a lake. The monks and their guests could feel the presence of the garden this way while still being protected by a roof. I’d never had a chance to sleep in a room with engawa, where the
walls could be opened up completely onto the garden. If the monks slept this way, could they feel the early morning dew? Feel the drop in temperature just before an evening shower or see with perfect clarity shooting stars while snuggled under covers? I had no idea if anyone ever took advantage of the opportunity to open up the walls at night, but I liked the idea.
In the courtyard, we worked amid pines, camellias, azaleas, reeds, and ferns. It felt like a soft, wild forest, with sheared plants formalizing the scene. No one plant was allowed to grow too big and dominate the space or shade out smaller plants, nor were any plants pruned so tightly that the scene looked miniaturized. The courtyard felt like a lovely spot in nature, even though every section of it was maintained carefully, probably pruned and cleaned once or twice a year.
Japanese garden pruning is a unique combination of the pruner’s skill and the plant’s spirited growth. A proficient pruner not only learns pruning and horticulture but also studies how plants look in nature. The pruned garden plant should reflect the same species in its native habitat. It should not look like a made-up form or an animal. I love biking past a certain hedge in Berkeley that is regularly clipped to look like a squirrel. It always makes me laugh. This pruning technique is called topiary and has little to do with aesthetic pruning.
To encourage a natural look in the garden plant, the aesthetic pruner nudges the plant toward its natural form but doesn’t force this look in a harsh, manipulative way. I might want a tree branch to lean a certain way—for example, toward a front door to guide the garden visitor down the front path. But if the plant keeps growing away from the door because of sunlight in that location or an out-of-control irrigation system, I might change my mind and let it grow into a tall overhead tree. As a pruner, I am the silent assistant to the plants, not their demanding style-maker.
I once pruned a small pine at the Berkeley cooperative Cal Sailing Club. I spent four hours, along with two fellow volunteers from my pruning club, pruning and styling a five-foot tree that had previously been styled for years by an infamous Japanese windsurfer. The next week, I happened to be sitting on some steps right next to the pine when a longtime member of our club said, “You know, I’ve never noticed that pine before. But it just looks beautiful.” I remained silent. An aesthetically pruned tree will shine, but it will never appear just-pruned.
My morning task in the Kyoto temple felt rather mundane. I snipped off the browned tips of hundreds of reed plants to allow the viewer to focus on the green, the living. As my fist closed on the handle of the pruning shears to cut one reed, my eyes would already be searching for the next. This process helped me maintain maximum speed and focus. Then I’d find myself wondering about what Taylor and I could do next week, wishing Kei would work nearby so I wouldn’t feel so alone. The pruning helped me keep my mind on the garden, and each physical snip allowed for a certain emotional release.
Finally at lunch Kei and I sat together in the truck with a pile of individually wrapped monk snacks between us. We listened to the radio as we sampled our green tea and sweets. When we’d both consumed enough sugar, I pushed the pile of leftover snacks toward Kei so he’d take them home. Then he pushed them toward me. I felt guilty about my vacation tomorrow, so I pushed them back. Kei looked at me sternly and once again pushed them over to my side. He won. I didn’t want him mad at me. And Kei was the boss.
A radio DJ kept up a frantic monologue on the radio, pretending in a funny accent that he was a crazy Japanese housewife. We couldn’t stop laughing. I found myself thinking how much I’d miss Kei the following week. I felt I needed to say something to him, like, “You are an important part of my life now.” Nakaji had given us this precious opportunity, after all.
“I’ll miss working with the crew,” I said. It was all I could manage. It was my apology to him, just in case he was secretly upset about the visit. Silence ensued. The monks brought us bright green tea in handleless ceramic cups. I swirled the powdery green residue from the tea in my beige cup. It reminded me of our frequent tornados in Oklahoma. My father would watch the news on the television set upstairs, prepared to join the rest of the family if the weather map showed a dangerous funnel moving too close to our part of town. Scared, I asked my mom why Dad didn’t join us in the tiny cellar. She responded, “He’s protecting us.” I sipped my chaotically spinning tea. It warmed my spirit a little. I thought about how, despite Kei’s silence, he remained my closest friend in Kyoto.
After lunch, the rest of the crew joined us. I was determined to refocus on my work and away from my emotions. I spent the rest of the afternoon shearing hedges all around the property while the men worked with vigor. In general, I disliked shearing, a process of making hundreds of tiny blunt cuts that spur the plant into reacting with three hundred tiny shoots, creating a shrub. I preferred gentle pruning to reactionary work, even if purposeful. I mentally tried to deduce why tamamono, the rounded sheared shrubs common in Kyoto, existed in Japanese gardens at all. Aren’t the gardens meant to imitate nature, not Disneyland? I’d quip in my head. After having visited dozens of gardens in Kyoto, I’d observed that, contrary to popular American belief, most Japanese gardens were not sheared. Certainly, there existed some tamamono in almost all the gardens I visited, but always in moderation. The question remained: were sheared plants an inherent element in the Japanese garden palette?
And why did Americans think Japanese gardens were completely sheared, miniaturized landscapes? I believe this misunderstanding arose in part because sheared, miniaturized gardens do exist in Japan. When American tourists come to Japan, they look for and find what they expect: the most intensely sheared gardens of Kyoto. They take photos of these landscapes because Americans tend to be drawn to what is fascinating, not subtle. They’d pass by the subtler gardens, which look like common forest scenes. Then they bring home photos of sheared gardens, the branches held up by posts, stone lanterns, and metal statues of cranes—anything that looked interesting. The misconception that Japanese gardens are contrived, rather than some of the most natural-looking native landscapes in the world, continues. Photos of naturalized gardens often look boring. Everything is green.
On the positive side, tamamono bring elegance, formality, and a soothing quality to gardens. When viewed in person, they look more natural than in photos. I’ve wondered if they might be used to represent distant plants, as one might find in landscape paintings. Artists often blur the plants in the background of paintings to create an illusion of distance to the viewer. Sheared azaleas might mimic this effect, making a plant in a small garden appear distant.
Many consider the beauty of an azalea to lie in the flower. By shearing the azalea, the pruner is creating more reactionary sprouts, and therefore more flowers. One might theorize that the desire for a flower show is the purpose of shearing.
Almost without exception, my eighty or so California clients that I visit once a year or so feel more comfortable with loose, natural pruning than with formal shearing. They want their garden to look as though it comes straight from the forest—a relaxed, free California feeling. Yet most lack the powerful drama of the gardens I witnessed in Kyoto. I shear only one shrub in California. One of my clients, Maggie, whom I’ve known for more than nineteen years, serves me tea with cookies each time I visit her. She mesmerizes me with her stories of living in Japan during the World War II reconstruction period. She felt such admiration for the Japanese people she met there, who showed “graciousness and resilience in the face of hardship.” For her I pull out my stiff American pruning shears and neatly trim two of her English vase-shaped hedges as requested.
After pumping my arms on my millionth tamamono, I came upon a hedge that was horribly flat and square instead of rounded. I had already worked myself into a sour mood after so many hedges, and this square shrub grated on my nerves. It stood next to a gray utility shed way in the back of the garden and looked like a Tinkertoy. I pruned it nice and flat. Masahiro came over and corrected me. “No, no, Leslie, no.” Unlike Kei, who wa
s self-assured, Masahiro spurted his commands out, sounding frantic and desperate.
He spent nearly five minutes explaining that I had incorrectly pruned the square hedge. I needed to prune it into a “square shape,” going so far as to outline the shape of a square in the dirt with a stick. Thank you, Masahiro, for the visual prop! But I’d already pruned it square. I looked up the Japanese word for square, shikaku, in my dictionary, and repeated the word to him, emphasizing my understanding of his instruction, even though I’d already understood ten minutes earlier. But each time I began shearing it square again, he’d begin drawing square shapes on the ground anew. Finally, I could stand it no longer and went off in search of Kei. Maybe he’d understand.
I felt so annoyed at this point that when I found Kei, I did what I’d never allowed to happen. I let a bit of anger slip out. Not at him specifically, just toward Japanese craftsmen in general. I said, “If the Japanese really want to shear hedges so perfectly, why don’t they use electric hedge trimmers like American gardeners? They are faster and easier to handle.” I thought this was a doubly clever statement given that karikomi, the traditional handheld hedge shears, were not only slow but such a bitch to maneuver with their wobbly handles. Kei, understandably, appeared peeved by my interruption.
After talking to Masahiro for a while, he admitted that Masahiro had indeed gone too far in his need for the square shrub to look perfect. But because one shrub had been pruned so exactly, the rest of the hedges in the area had to be done the same way, by everyone in the crew. He told me this in a way that insinuated that all the extra work was my fault. Then, in his masterful fashion of appearing calm outside even when he was agitated, Kei pointed to an azalea shrub, told me I hadn’t pruned it well enough, and walked off. He completely ignored me the rest of the day and would hardly even look at me.