Cutting Back

by Leslie Buck

  I felt horrible. I hated the anal square shrub. I felt angry at Masahiro, but mostly I blamed myself. I knew I’d gone too far with my friend Kei. No one ever expressed anger to anyone above them in the hierarchy. And I’d done it on the day before I was about to get seven days off in a row, more than he’d ever had in his whole time with Uetoh. And the day before I was to meet up with my California love.

  Soon the whole crew joined us, and indeed the whole area apparently needed redoing. The afternoon of the last day before vacation, the angry god of “thou shalt take no extra days off as a Japanese gardener” had arrived. No one said a negative word or teased me about my impending vacation, which made me more suspicious. They just sheared furiously until afternoon break as though we were competing against some invisible team on the “Iron Garden” show.

  Toward the end of the day, Nakaji told me firmly to shear a huge, round azalea tamamono near the front entrance to the hospital. “Prune just a little,” he said simply in Japanese. I took this to mean, “Don’t take too long on this one.” I worked quickly and debated internally whether I’d done a good enough job. But I reminded myself, “Do as you’re told,” and whipped through the area. Bossman returned to inspect. He looked intently for a few seconds, and then went into a crazy reprimand, yelling loudly, gesticulating dramatically, grabbing my Japanese hedge trimmers and pruning the azalea much more neatly than I’d done in my haste. He hesitated only to glare at me silently and wait for me to respond.

  I stared back, dumbstruck. I’d never been yelled at that forcefully and loudly. I felt less than emotionally prepared that day. And I’d tried so hard to do the right thing and yet apparently had done it wrong. I tried to look respectful, as Masahiro did when he got reprimanded. Yet I couldn’t understand how I could have so misunderstood him. Worst of all, I began sensing in the back of my mind that maybe the worst scenario had arrived. I felt my temples tighten and restrict. I felt on the verge of crying.

  Jennifer, one of the young American women I’d met at Kei’s party, had been through a much lengthier Japanese apprenticeship than mine, studying fine art restoration for years. She said she had decided that, no matter how hard things got, she would not cry in front of her boss. When Jennifer told me this story, I had decided that, as another woman, I needed to model her inner strength. I tried to focus on how being yelled at was considered a compliment because it meant I was being treated like everyone else. Still, while I began pruning the shrub over again, very carefully this time, I had to focus very intently on the smooth slicing noises of the karikomi blades in order to keep my emotions in check. This is a compliment, Leslie, slice, a compliment, slice.

  Then the men showed up to help me finish the azalea. They acted as though they just wanted to help so we could leave on time, the sun sitting near the horizon. Yet squeezing back tears, I suspected they felt sorry for me. How dare you help me! I thought. Just because I’m a woman, and an American, you think I can’t handle Nakaji yelling at me. Even though this was true. I wanted to keep up with the men, but they appeared determined to show I never could. I wanted to tell them to go away, but I knew that humiliating tears would spill out if I spoke one word. So I kept silent while they clipped furiously beside me. As the last tiny lump on the smooth azalea was snipped, I made one more effort to keep my moist eyes from spilling over by promising myself that I could go to the bathroom and cry as much as I wanted right before we left. “Just hold on,” I told myself.

  As soon as everyone began loading the trucks, I casually walked—like it was no big deal—to the one place no crazy Japanese male gardener could find me: the women’s bathroom. Earlier I had found this particularly fabulous female-only bathroom with a heated toilet seat. Warmth, comfort, solitude. While I occupied my comforting seat, it occurred to me that if I did cry, I’d have red, puffy eyes when I returned to the group. So I altered my strategy. Just wait till you get home tonight to cry. I couldn’t sit there too long, or it would be obvious I was upset, so I reluctantly jogged back to the men.

  With the truck finally loaded, the sun setting behind a sleek, sheared background shrub, Nakaji decided to hose down a path leading to the front door of the temple entrance. I wondered if I’d ever get home that night. We stood watching for quite a while. Five minutes passed, then eight, then ten. I silently willed him, Please finish so I can take my vacation, please. He watered one square-foot concrete spot for literally five minutes. I looked at Kei, who stood next to me, still as a mannequin. I turned my head toward him slightly and gave him my best big-eyes, “I can’t believe he’s so slow” expression. He whispered, “This is Nakaji’s me-di-ta-tion,” placing slow emphasis on the syllables, speaking ever so close to my ear. We smiled at each other. After about fifteen minutes of brutal, enforced patience, Nakaji gave Masahiro a terse hand signal while still keeping his eyes on the end of the hose. The youngest apprentice, who had his eyes fixed on Nakaji, his hand hovering over the water spigot, flipped the knob to the off position in a split second. We sped home.

  By the time we returned to the office, I had only three minutes to catch the bus, five blocks away. So I bolted without saying good-bye to everyone. With the bus stop in sight, I slowed down to ease my labored breath and heard something behind me, sounding like, “Essie, Essian, Leslie-san, Leslie-san!” I turned and saw Masahiro far away, running toward me, trying to catch up with me. It turned out that one of the seniors had instructed him to chase me down and tell me I had been offered a ride home.

  He had run full speed for four blocks to carry out his assignment. Masahiro insisted, between gulps of breath, with hand signals, that I should walk back slowly, while he’d run back to inform the driver he’d found me. I obeyed willingly for once, defeated and exhausted from my own sprint. I walked back to the office calmly. My week off from the determined craftsmen had finally begun.

  Songs from the Emerald Opera

  Ka-klunk, ka-klunk went my shoes down the gray stone steps as I sprinted with anticipation toward the city bus, carrying me back to Uetoh Zoen. My Kyoto holiday had passed by as quickly as it took to get to the bottom of the stairs. For an ever-so-brief week, I got to wake up to the glowing sun on my indigo futon cover instead of darkness. I could feel the warmth of Taylor’s cheek pressed against my shoulder as he slept, and witness brilliant, scarlet cherry leaves outside my window. One morning I saw a delicate bird staring at me from a silky smooth cherry branch; we looked at each other, both allowing ourselves a moment to relax. I savored Taylor’s sandy smell, his curly hair, even his coarse day-old stubble, all so different from the clean-shaven craftsmen.

  Taylor had already returned to Berkeley, and I knew we’d probably hardly communicate again until I returned home in two months. Working at craftsman speed sapped all my energy. Taylor made me laugh so hard for a week with all his American antics, overslouching in his chair and pretending he would step on the tatami with his dirty boots. Yet I sensed, and wondered if I imagined, a distance between us. I felt tired a lot rather than excited to run around with him all over Kyoto, and Taylor seemed to walk slower than normal too. He seemed fine to anyone who didn’t know him well, but I noticed he rarely had any interest in deciding where to go or what to do together. By chance, I managed to secure a ticket so we could visit the very garden I worked in my first week back with the Uetoh craftsmen, one of the most spectacular estate gardens in Kyoto, Shugakuin Rikyu Imperial Villa. I’d felt so excited to take Taylor there to show him the beautiful estate. But he was so caught up in taking photos that he stepped off a path and destroyed some lovely moss on a rock, and then smashed the lower limb of an innocent azalea. I cringed, hoping our tour guide hadn’t seen, and then cringed for cringing. Taylor didn’t know how long it took for a garden to grow.

  I hoped for a moment to have a quiet talk during our Kyoto visit week. I took him to my local homemade tofu stand where the lady smiled particularly sweetly at me. We visited a real pub from Ireland: Irish craftsmen-carpenters had been hired to transport the building, piece
by piece, to Kyoto. We ate at a traditional Japanese restaurant where a female chef prepared homemade stock next to our table with leftover fish and vegetables on our plates. We snacked on feather-light pastries from the French bakeries; Japanese took their training in France seriously. Every few days we’d step into a steaming bathhouse, even though we had to separate here, to retreat into the male and female tub areas. Of course I had to give Taylor strict instructions on how to clean himself properly, three times, before entering any tub or sauna. I simply could not find the right time to talk about any of my concerns. I’d wanted to keep things light for his trip to Kyoto. When we said good-bye, he told me, “I love you.” I couldn’t really hear him because he spoke to me from behind a closed taxi window. We hardly communicated again while I was in Kyoto. I held on to that image the rest of my stay, repeating it in my mind, as though the tree I stood in felt unsteady and I needed something extra to hang onto.

  Within five minutes of arriving back at the office, the crew shot off toward Shugakuin, the emperor’s garden. Packed into the work truck like a row of logs, the men and I rode to my most anticipated project yet. The men sat stiffly, with excellent posture, caught in their own reveries, never glancing at me. I felt loneliness creeping up, a heaviness in my spirit. We approached the sublime villa of Emperor Go-Mizunoo, a broad estate positioned at the base of a pine-covered mountainside, the garden my father never stopped dreaming about. Three hundred and forty years ago, the emperor, savvy not only in politics but also in calligraphy and art, oversaw the design and construction of his garden. He built it as a refuge for retirement, combining rice fields, lakes, mountains, buildings, bridges, roads, trails, and plants.

  I shivered on first sight of the tall mountainside surrounding Shugakuin. Temperatures had dropped that week, and I’d come down with a cough. Yet nothing would keep me from working in one of my favorite Kyoto gardens. Shugakuin both intimidated me with its exclusiveness and enveloped me in its romantic, poetic tones.

  I’d visited Shugakuin years earlier with Marcello, the young gardener I’d met at a garden conference. The two of us had approached Shugakuin, as did all visitors, by walking up a dirt road running between sunny rice fields with farmers working on either side. The harvest added to the drama of Shugakuin, allowing the visitor an imaginative, historic setting as they approached from the rural countryside rather than from a concrete parking lot. While Marcello and I strolled toward the central lake, insects sang, imperial koi splashed in the lake, and birds flapped their wings over a maze of paths.

  I wore a breezy skirt and carried an open umbrella to ward off the sun on that hot and humid day. Women farm workers along the path called out to us. I looked at Marcello questioningly by tilting my head. I’d learned to tone down my speech and emotions with my Japanese friend. He understood, and said with a grin, “They ask if we are married.” I felt self-conscious but certainly not offended. Marcello was a handsome young man of Japanese ancestry, raised in Brazil. The joyful women, like all the elements of Shugakuin, assisted in creating a magical atmosphere of wild beauty and fanciful imagination.

  Although Marcello and I remained shy friends, I believe neither of us could escape the romantic entanglement Shugakuin placed on its visitors, past or present. The emperor and his friends would have walked on the same garden paths at night to watch the moon’s reflection on the lake. They would have strolled along the same curve of the water’s edge and perhaps floated on the lake in sturdy wooden boats. A boathouse still stood, rotting, its roof covered with moss.

  When I first heard that our pruning crew would work at Shugakuin, I thought I’d misheard. After all, Shugakuin was one of Kyoto’s more prestigious gardens. Visitors have to ask permission a year in advance from the Imperial Household Agency if they want to walk through the gardens, although foreign tourists can attain entry in less time. I’d asked Kei about Shugakuin, and he confirmed that we’d work there, although he warned of the dangerous nature of the work, which I didn’t understand at first. He’d said that Shugakuin had initially barred me from working there, hinting at security concerns. But Uetoh had persisted, and I’d finally been allowed to join the men on their imperial excursion.

  Through vibrating truck windows, I spied Shugakuin from the worker’s entrance road rather than from the tourist path. I felt thrilled. I noted that pines on the mountains surrounding Shugakuin were sixty feet high, and some maples in the central garden reached twenty to thirty, much taller than the trees we’d worked on at private homes. The height of the pines reflected an old Japanese forest in its mature grandeur. Yet every square inch of the property, from rice field to landscaped estate to mountainside, had been cared for, pruned, and maintained for hundreds of years by imperial gardeners.

  Ron Herman, an American landscape architect who trained at length in Japan, designed the largest traditional Japanese private estate garden in the United States, for a North American contemporary emperor: high-tech billionaire Larry Ellison. Mr. Herman had based a portion of Ellison’s traditional Japanese landscape design on Shugakuin. Both emperors’ estates represented nature, wealth, and power, in that order. Also, the construction of both properties allowed the training and employment of hundreds of woodworkers and garden craftsmen. The construction of Ellison’s estate created a subculture of high-end Bay Area artisans who specialize in Japanese design, construction, and furniture building—a subculture that persists today.

  Speaking loudly over the truck’s rumbling engine, Kei teased Masahiro about the dangerous work ahead. “Someone’s gonna get hurt,” he said in English, for my benefit. Young Masahiro tried not to look anxious. I asked with a stiff smile, “What?” refusing to let the men recognize my first-day-back-at-school anxiety. Encouraged, Kei described with a sly look how we’d be using razor-sharp traditional Japanese scythes called uchigama to prune in the garden that day, and how past gardeners had cut themselves while learning to handle them. Masahiro became even quieter. A small patch of sweat formed on his long cheekbones just beneath his glasses.

  Before entering the gardens, we had to check in with security, three guards in crisp uniforms in a plain stucco-walled room with a high ceiling. I leaned against a cool plastered wall, out of the way, while the men handled things. I wondered how many American women had been allowed to prune in Emperor Go-Mizunoo’s 340-year-old estate. I may have been the first. Panicking, I realized I had forgotten my passport. I’ve blown it, I thought, after all the trouble the company went to! How could they allow a foreigner into the garden without proper identification? My pulse beat quickly as I tried to adopt what I imagined was Kei’s most self-assured stance. Stare ahead, eyelids slightly droopy with boredom. I tried to remain still, especially my hands, which I kept clasped in front of me in an attempt to look humble. A guard sitting at a small wooden desk with an expressionless face looked over at me, nodding to motion me forward.

  He asked my name, as he had each worker. I glanced down at the huge ledger book in front of him, two feet wide, one foot tall. Dozens of names were written on each page in beautiful, stylish swirls of Japanese calligraphy, except one. Glaring at us in the lower section of the right-hand page was the name Leslie Buck in boring roman lettering. Instead of looking at the obvious, the guard put his finger on the top of the first page and traced the names down slowly with his finger. Everyone in the room stood so still, I could hear the faint brushing of his skin against the page as he moved his index finger down. He continued on to the next page until his strong brown finger stopped at my name. I resisted the urge to say, “There it is! Right there!” I’ll never forget my number: twenty-one, the year that one reaches maturity, becomes an adult in the United States. He grunted his approval. He never asked for identification.

  The security guard mumbled something to Nakaji, which I understood as, “Make sure she’s careful!” Bossman smiled encouragingly and laughed. I giggled softly with them, smiling sweetly, praying I wouldn’t accidentally behead anyone in my favorite Kyoto garden.

  We
finally drove toward the central part of the estate and went deep into a tall cryptomeria forest. Cool! We get to drive on the road of a real emperor, I couldn’t help but think. The air was chilly and moist, despite the warm sun just outside the tree canopy. I spotted a small wooden structure, dark under the thick ceiling of branches, a gardener’s shed. It had a little chimney with smoke coming out of it. Nice! I thought. We’ll get to meet some of the imperial gardeners! I’d only seen them from a distance on my previous tours. I felt so excited I could hardly contain myself. We didn’t come close to entering the building. Instead, the men set up camp on the wet, mossy, cold ground near the truck. My first day at Shugakuin with Uetoh, poignant and filled with poetic beauty, felt particularly chilly under the trees there, furthering my illness.

  Sliss, slash, sliss, slash. The men pressed and slid their shiny metal blades against porous flat stones. I tested my scythe blade. It was plenty sharp. But the men kept sharpening their blades, so I did too. I stroked the metal against the stone repeatedly, dipping the blade and stone periodically into a bucket of water to wash away built-up grit. I watched and copied the men who tested their blades by gently slicing them against their thumbnails, leaving fine crisscrosses on the nail. I’m not sure what the scratches revealed, except my overlapping levels of fear, but I figured if I did it enough times, I’d unravel the mysterious technique.

  Years later I learned the secret behind this sharpening method from a friend who sold scary-sharp kitchen knives made by small craftsman groups in Japan. I hesitated buying one of Sazuki’s knives. She showed me how to sharpen my pruning shears after tolerating my dull kitchen knives for years. She stroked one side of my blades ten or so times with a sharpening stone, maintaining a steady, level stroke. Then she turned the blade over to feel for a slightly raised bur with her thumbnail, just as the craftsmen had. She said, “The bur proves the blade’s sharpness. You must feel it along the full length of the blade, or continue sharpening.” Next she turned the blade over to the bur side and made a few passes with the stone to smooth it off. She cleaned grit off the stone under her kitchen sink faucet. Although she used several grades of stone, she said I could use a single diamond metal file instead when sharpening my garden tools for ease. My pruning shear blade glinted, just like my coworkers’ blades at Shugakuin.