Cutting Back

by Leslie Buck

  The men’s voices rose an octave. They’re interested too, it occurred to me. I felt terribly curious myself about the possibility of seeing these highly trained and beautiful women of Japan, but for a different reason than the men. I recited a silent prayer: Please surround me with more than just testosterone today.

  We arrived outside a front gate leading to the okiya, which was a large white modern building. We waited in the truck while Nakaji gained permission to enter. The property was enclosed by a naturally plastered wall, which from the inside had been lined with wide strips of tree bark. Towering maples grew over the wall, and a huge, dense forest hovered inside. Young women, practically girls, in bright kimonos fluttered past our truck, laughing softly and whispering to one another. The men watched their approach attentively through the rearview mirrors, trying to act as though they weren’t. I turned my head to follow their path, wanting to see every detail of their exquisitely designed kimonos. I did slink down a bit in my seat, hoping the women wouldn’t notice my masculine attire. I felt shy being so close to these soft-skinned women.

  When walking into cafés in Berkeley at the end of gardening days, seeing office girls in stylish skirts standing next to me, I feel awkward and invisible to men. I love working with the trees, the soil covering my skin, little spiders finding their way up my sleeves. But pruning requires sacrifice for a social young woman. On my days off, when I wear slim jeans tucked into black suede boots, I notice myself being noticed.

  A car pulled up very close to our work truck, and a tall woman got out, wearing a kimono with a formal, subdued print. She walked toward the front door with a certain power and elegance that drew everyone’s attention. How does she do that? I wondered, watching her stride, trying to deduce her method. Exiting the truck myself, I instinctually made sure my door did not touch hers, even in the slightest. Kei watched me. “Be careful, Leslie. That car belongs to the headmistress.”

  Stepping inside the garden wall, I was enveloped by a mass of scarlet foliage overhead and brilliant moss underfoot. The ground sloped downward from the outer garden wall toward the building, embracing its occupants. I observed multiple floors, each with a view out onto the upper portion of the forest through one huge window per apartment. Each room had its own living landscape painting through a window, a portrait of an ever-transforming geisha garden.

  This painting would alter over the course of a year, from a tender springtime portrait to a lush foliage-filled summer painting. As fall approached, new colors would appear, slowly at first, the artist painting them one by one, and then all at once, as though an invisible hand pricked the canvas with a pin, spilling blood across the canvas. In winter the tableau would become cool, with bare maple branches silhouetted against blue skies. Kei mentioned that maiko, apprentice geisha, entertained clients from their rooms, so the beauty and care of the garden held great significance for them. “They entertain from their rooms only during the day,” he clarified, sensing where my thoughts had strayed.

  He explained that the maiko learned traditional songs, dances, musical instruments, and dress. Maiko even studied the art of pleasant conversation, about current politics, for example—a lost art form in America’s Southern states, where my dad’s Republican and Democrat friends used to tease one another mercilessly, in friendship, every afternoon over lunch at their favorite diner, the Lunch Box.

  I watched Japanese films obsessively throughout college, including one about a modern geisha. I felt intrigued by filmmakers who saw their world through an aesthetic lens tinted with nature. One of these films, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, told the story of a cocktail lounge hostess in a small Japanese seaside town in the fifties. Similar to a geisha, this hostess entertained male customers at night for money, climbing stairs to an upper-story bar. The men accepted her as simply a conversational companion, even if they sometimes propositioned her. I identified with her as a sensible woman, determined to earn her own living, sometimes allowing herself to fall in love, at times with the wrong man. Occasionally, when I arrive home from work to my two-story home, exhausted and loaded down with workbags, I think of this woman as I climb the stairs to my front door. I asked Kei if he thought contemporary geisha were in any way intimate with their patrons. He responded firmly, “Leslie, Japanese men look to geisha as entertaining conversation companions, and that’s it.” Friends only, I repeated to myself to be sure I remembered his point.

  The early morning cold in the geisha garden dominated most of my ruminations. Despite the handmade cardboard insoles I’d cut for my thin-soled jikatabi, my chilled feet pinpricked with pain as I walked over the lumpy, icy moss during the first three hours of work. In the early hours of a Kyoto November garden, the ground released the cold it had gathered overnight, pushing frosty air into my soles. I pruned ferns from thick clumps down to three or five fronds per plant. Therefore, not only was I standing on a sheet of ice, I was hardly moving. I glanced over at the men. They didn’t wear sweaters yet, much less hats. I tried to push my discomfort as far inside as possible. I hoped my feet and hands might go numb rather than become painful. It’s just a feeling, I told myself, trying to accept my situation; you won’t die.

  Nakaji walked over to where I crouched, next to a fern that almost looked like the native California sword fern, and pointed to my well-worn leather gloves. He spoke disapprovingly. I understood his message. I’d heard it before. Bossman obsessed over clean gloves, donning brand-new white cotton ones every day. I had never thought twice about my gloves’ age or cleanliness. And daily glove donning was contrary to my environmentalist and frugal nature. One worker told me employees snagged Nakaji’s day-old gloves out of the trash can every night to use the next day. I felt tempted, but the trash can was claimed.

  My Uetoh coworkers showed up to work every morning in clean, pressed uniforms. These uniforms seemed to demand respect, in a way that made me think the torn jeans of the California garden outfit encouraged the reverse. Almost every person I met in Kyoto talked about the craftsmen in a deeply respectful way. I’d tell them I worked in the gardens, and they’d ooh and aah as though I were working on a doctorate. In California, if I mention my occupation, people often respond, “How relaxing to work outside!” as though I’ve figured out a clever way to hang out at the beach all day.

  On top of respect, Japanese society paid the most experienced gardeners and company owners well, and the Japanese government assured garden craftsmen a lifetime of free health care and affordable housing. And in return, the Japanese craftsmen, like doctors and geisha, trained in their craft for years, if not decades, before starting their own businesses. I sometimes wondered, though, what inspired my crew, many of whom were still very much in training and earning low pay. They worked so incredibly hard, every freezing winter day, six days a week, nine to ten hours a day. Why did they push themselves beyond what might be expected of a good worker?

  Nakaji had already hinted to me weeks ago about getting new gloves. I’d tried to compromise by simply washing my gloves each evening. Apparently they still looked too dirty. So I washed my gloves under the freezing outdoor faucet, right where the men could see me during first break, and wore them wet for the rest of the day, acting the martyr. When Nakaji saw me washing them, he pointed and loudly said to the men, “Bimbo!” They all laughed in unison while my complexion turned a color matching the fall leaves overhead.

  How could he know this obscure English word, I thought, furious, and announce it in a women’s garden? Traditionally, the geisha business consists exclusively of women: students, teachers, and even owners of the places where apprentice geisha live and work. I watched the proprietress of the okiya we worked at through a large window on the first floor. Over the course of several days, I saw this elderly lady sitting on a cushion in front of a low table piled with papers, working away for hours on end. And she could see us. After the B-word was spoken, I ran extra quickly, carrying several ladders at once as the men often did, mentally daring Nakaji to use that word again.r />
  When I got home that evening, I told my American landlord about Bossman’s sexist insult. He doubled over laughing. He explained that Nakaji had actually said binbo, which means poor person in Japanese slang. I laughed too, realizing I’d never survive if I actually understood what Nakaji said half the time. The next morning, I stopped off at a local 7-Eleven to buy a twelve-pack of gardener’s fuzzy white cotton gloves to last exactly twelve days.

  It took me a while to realize that Nakaji’s obsession over white gloves did not necessarily mean he was looking for people’s respect, even if he got it. He didn’t strike me as the type who waited for other people’s approval. White gloves pointed to one of the more difficult to understand ethics I discovered working alongside the craftsmen.

  The men ran between jobs and pruned furiously, almost competitively, as they searched for ways to do a little more than what was expected of them. Their pride did not necessarily come from high achievement, or from high pay, fancy titles, and retirements, although I’m sure they appreciated such things. I noticed that the Uetoh craftsmen’s main source of job satisfaction instead seemed to be effort and sacrifice.

  When I returned to California, a pruning colleague asked me, “What did you learn in Japan?” My impulse was to answer, “Life is hard.” Years later I reformulated that answer after I’d gained some perspective: “Gardening is very hard work, but at the end of the day, like raising a family, it is deeply satisfying.” The men taught me to put a little extra time into my work than what was expected, and to increase my speed over time. They taught me that if I do a little more than is asked of me every day, if I work with heart, I will feel a sense of pride before anyone tells me “you are so skilled.”

  Particularly because I am a woman working in a traditionally male field, I have to feel good about my work from the inside. It makes me sad to see other dedicated, brilliant American gardeners suffering from low self-esteem. By asking me to wear new white gloves every day, I think Nakaji was trying to teach me that if I act like a premier craftsperson, I might feel like one.

  By afternoon the glorious sun warmed up the geisha garden. Nakaji and the other workers enjoyed watching me try to feebly shake dead leaves out of the maples. I didn’t want to hurt the poor trees! I pulled the trunk back and forward carefully, causing a few leaves to tumble down. I shook the tree a little harder, and a bunch of leaves fell on my head. Not bad! I smiled at Bossman, congratulating myself. Wrong. Nakaji let out a distressed sigh. He motioned me aside. He grabbed ahold of the trunk and jerked it so hard I thought it would snap. Leaves fell as though a tornado had hit. Looking up afterward, I understood why he had used this violent method. Every single shriveled, brown leaf had fallen out of the tree, and all that remained was an exquisite, blood orange canopy silhouetted against the sky. This was the image that had inspired me for decades in Japanese garden photos. In reality, the leaves of maple trees go into fall color in spurts, leaving lots of brownish leaves mixed in with the colorful ones. Only with a gardener’s intervention was I able to view this stunning maple scene. The geisha at the okiya appreciated this scene so much that they hired us to do the same job two weeks later.

  High up in the maples, I had a chance to study branch patterns. “Coarse to fine,” I noted. Like all trees, the maples began with tiny roots under the earth, melding into a wide base, called the root crown, above the earth. This grows into a trunk, breaking off into thick branches, then smaller ones, then hundreds of tiny branchlets, the outer canopy of the tree. With this gradual upward structure, fine roots to coarse trunk to fine branches, the tree held quite stable, without rigidity.

  An excellent example of a tree’s combined strength and flexibility can be found at the Oklahoma City National Memorial, dedicated to those who died or survived the domestic terrorist bombing in 1995. A few years ago, my best friend from third grade, Karen, and I walked around the memorial reflecting on the uselessness of all that death. One of the women who died belonged to the hippie Catholic church I grew up in, a church that focused on social equality and justice. To kill someone trying to help poor people, who encouraged understanding between diverse human beings, seemed the ultimate stupidity.

  I felt a bit numb at the memorial, so I walked over to investigate a large tree on the site. The reverberations from the bomb blast caused the windows at my father’s law office, five blocks away, to shatter. An elm tree directly across from the blast became webbed with shards of glass all over its trunk and had all of its leaves shredded off. People said for months that the tree looked like it might die. But it still lives today because of its coarse-to-fine structure. People call it the Survivor Tree. Its huge root structure, with thousands of fine roots clinging to the soil, and its massive trunk held the tree firm, but the upper branches flexed so the tree didn’t snap. Sometimes I tell my clients who reluctantly neglect their gardens while they are busy with careers or family, “Don’t worry; plants are forgiving.”

  The geisha garden’s maple canopy also looked fine and clean. In pruning classes, I ask people to look at trees in the distance, at the fine canopies. Our subconscious knows that a tree’s outer perimeter is soft and even, even if our conscious mind would not be able to put this into words. This is why a poorly pruned tree, a “butchered tree,” with coarse stubs on the ends and long reactionary sprouts sticking out of its canopy, looks wrong even to a non-pruner. The craftsmen were quite careful to prune the maple branches properly, at intersections, so that no stub cuts could be seen.

  Wrestling another maple on foot, I climbed into the tree and shook every branch within reach. Then I used a hook on a long pole to shake even higher branches. We seemed to prune and shake every square inch of the forest. Then about thirty feet up one tree, I spotted a particularly messy-looking area that just wouldn’t shake clean. I climbed up to it feeling frustrated and stubborn; it was quite high. Peering over the mess, I discovered a small nest, skillfully woven out of moss and twigs. I marveled at how it had survived the garden craftsman storm. The tiny home looked so tender against the bright sky. I stared at it wistfully, wishing I could climb inside the soft bed and take a brief nap. My heart, beating erratically from all the shaking and climbing, slowed to gentle thumps. I sighed deeply, and went somewhere else where I could shake the tree again before Nakaji found me idle.

  We used noisy leaf blowers in the geisha garden, we raked around every trunk, we picked up fallen leaves by hand, and we swept crumbs off the rocks with our tebōki, hand brooms. I tried to enjoy the moment. After all, we were inside a private garden, in one of Kyoto’s oldest neighborhoods. But climbing forty-five feet into a spindly maple, I just didn’t feel like it. Instead I felt remorse because I’d accidentally raked up a fairly sizable chunk of the moss carpet off a rock. You’ll never learn, I reprimanded myself. I tried to transfer some new moss onto the spot, patting it into place like fixing a hole in a piecrust. But none stuck. So I left the hole bare and hoped no one would notice.

  Nakaji did his half-time yell to signal lunch. Rumble, rumble. The doors of a room on the ground floor slid open. For a moment, I thought I had fantasized that an elaborate picnic for a princess had appeared. I blinked. Sure enough, resting on the edge of the tatami sat black lacquered trays holding oranges, sweets, cakes, and a tea service. The geisha, experts in entertaining, hadn’t forgotten the dirt-smeared gardeners. As we enjoyed our meal, the rock with a mile-wide bald spot sat smack in the middle of our view, a few feet away. No one said a word. They knew it would be worse for me that way.

  Ring, ring! A young man rode into the garden on a bike. What’s that? I wondered. He opened a wooden box on the back of his bike and lifted out five steaming bowls of udon, covered tightly in plastic wrap. Scallions floated ever so delicately on top of the steaming broth, as though they had fallen from the maples. I felt a moment of peace, and I silently thanked the proprietress for allowing us to relax and enjoy the fall colors with a nourishing meal. Not only did she help train female geisha apprentices, but that day she helped a
female gardener apprentice. The men remained silent and contemplative as they ate. Their fierce work ethic, intertwined with their ability to appreciate refined beauty, was what allowed them to build premier naturalized gardens. I ran around and took photos, and in one adjusted a bucket of an old well to frame the shot. When I returned to the car, where the men had retreated to listen to talk radio, Nakaji said, “Don’t touch the well around the other side of the building. It is over a hundred years old.”

  On my way home, I instinctively headed for warmth in my local sentō. On any given evening, I’d find all sorts of neighborhood women there—from older wrinkled ladies to skinny girls to considerably plump middle-aged women. I’d even seen a little girl jump into the icy cold plunge and swim like a baby koi. I’d never had the opportunity to see so many types of female bodies on a weekly basis. One late night I saw a woman at the bathhouse about my age, naked, with bruises all over her body. Every woman was welcome at the bathhouse. We cleansed and warmed ourselves together.

  The evening after working in the geisha garden, I stood in a steaming tub up to my stomach and noticed a big red bump on my hand. Did I have a disease? I looked more closely this time. It finally occurred to me that I had a blister. I looked at it fondly. It had been such a long time since I’d gotten a blister, almost twenty years. I’d trained in ballet as a child and teenager, dancing four hours a day, five days a week. I loved my sweaty lessons. My teacher, Louise, was both a ballet teacher who could spin six turns on one toe and had a black belt in karate. She was tough. I had plenty of well-earned blisters back then. But not one blister since high school until now. I saw myself as a young girl running to class, so excited to work out. I eventually found myself too short in height and on talent to dance professionally. I’d also felt a desire to explore the world more than the demanding ballerina schedule would allow. Quitting ballet in college, I began searching for something I felt equally passionate about. I stared at the palm of my hand. It’s right here, Leslie, in the hand that holds your shears.