by Leslie Buck
The arborist sliced a sixty-foot tree down at its base so that it fell in an exact, predetermined spot. Toemon Sano drove the tractor up a steep winding slope and dragged the tree, attached to a chain, down the mountain. A hundred-foot crane then lifted it off the road to an open site. The husband cut branches off while we women separated the piles. The smallest kindling was thrown into a small fire. I couldn’t believe how strongly my older female companion worked, using her chain saw to deftly cut large branches into smaller ones for our piles. Smells of sap, fern, and ash mingled and penetrated our musty clothing. By late afternoon, we ended the job by huddling around the fire to drink tea, with embers and sparks swirling around us.
Back at the office, under fading light and dropping temperatures, I was introduced to Toshi, my boss for the remainder of my time at Uetoh. I didn’t know it yet, but my crew would be on the out-of-town work trip for much longer than I’d anticipated. Toshi was a tall, wiry man near forty or fifty who often seemed to be in a sour mood. He immediately began ordering me around. I realized we needed to take advantage of the few hours of light remaining. He told me to move dozens of fifty-pound bags of soil off trucks to another location. I could barely lift the bags by the end of that day, although other men working alongside me could manage two at once. We’d stack a number of bags on the truck, then drive them to other parts of the property and take them off. Sometimes Toshi would change his mind and tell us to put the bags back on the truck and move them to a third location. Why couldn’t he have strategized better from the start? What a waste of time, I’d think, with little patience at the end of the day.
He pointed for me to carry about fifteen bags, one at a time, by hand, down the road to a certain spot. I thought I had misheard him, given that the bags sat in the back of the truck and the spot was located sixty feet away. Why couldn’t we drive them to the spot rather than carry them? I hesitated, “Asoko?” (Over there?) I asked in what my grandmother would call uppity, sarcastic speech. Toshi went red in the face and stared me down hard. He grabbed two bags from my hands, walked them forcefully over to the spot, and threw them down to show clearly what he’d meant. Nakaji had never really been angry with me, so I felt a bit shaken. But I got the point. I picked up the bags—I couldn’t sling them over my shoulder—and half ran and half dragged them as nonchalantly as I could, cursing under my breath. The project seemed ridiculous and cruel. I felt frustrated and singled out. Then I felt frustrated with my reaction. After months of seeing every level of worker publicly reprimanded, I still reacted emotionally.
We continued our inefficient game of sack checkers for hours, until darkness and the temperature fell. My hands and feet began their crawl toward numbness and pain, which had never happened in the evening, only the morning. We worked for about half an hour more in the dark. My hair was plastered to my skull after hours of sweating. I limped a little on my way back to the icy cold concrete bus stop. “Christmas evening,” I muttered. The glorious first half of the day with loving nature made the last part of the day with the grumpy boss all the more difficult to take. I bought a can of warm green tea from a vending machine near the stop and held the can under my jacket to warm my belly.
I stopped off at a quiet bar on my way home where I usually ate dinner alone before the regular customers, the midnight crowd, took over. Just as well, given how dirty and disheveled I was each evening. I generally felt embarrassed to be seen in public in my work clothes. As he’d done every night for several months, without a word exchanged, the cook from his open kitchen prepared me a warm meal I’d randomly chosen. I couldn’t read the menu, so I’d just point. If the chef didn’t like what I had picked, he’d shake his head, making negative noises until I pointed out a dish he approved of. The chef gave me an unusually large serving that night after I said, “Merry Christmas!” In turn, I gave him a wrapped box filled with chocolates. I knew I’d soon be leaving Kyoto and had earlier planned to give a Christmas present to the man who cooked my dinner and did my dishes every night. He helped me make it through the evening that night as he had many others. He gave me just a bit of nurturing, a little rub under the scruffy puppy’s neck, and allowed my difficult and magical garden journey to happen.
My intention had always been to finish my apprenticeship to the end, but that night I wasn’t sure. Pulling the covers over my head for maximum warmth, I tried to reason out my emotions. Well, I thought, given that everyone works as a team, maybe Toshi was frustrated too. But my thoughts kept circling back to what I perceived as a particular meanness emanating from his actions. I thought and thought, until drifting off, I began to see embers, sandbags, and French custards circling a fir tree lit up with stars. Family and friends I loved sat around the tree, the light playing on their faces with dancing shadows. I watched them nearby from a dark corner. They kept calling to me, asking me to join them. But I shook my head. No. Not yet.
Black Coffee Warms the White Garden
I debated later that night whether it felt as cold inside my bedroom as out. I might as well slide my shuttered windows open, I reasoned, so I can see the sky while lying in bed. On nights when I couldn’t sleep, I’d look out at the stars. My worries lessened compared to the universe’s enormous and sparkling black-and-silver garden. So I scampered out of bed, slid the two wooden frames open, and ran back, the ancient floorboards singing their lullaby under my feet. After a few minutes of star wonder, my worries at last calmed. Then a cool breeze entered the room. So I got back up and closed the shutters with a click. The room grew slightly warmer, or did I only imagine it? Like much of my journey with the craftsmen, I wasn’t sure if what I experienced was fascinating or simply disagreeable.
The following morning, I tried to squeeze toothpaste onto my brush, but the tube wouldn’t budge; it had frozen solid overnight. Then I got milk out of the fridge for my breakfast muesli and noticed that it felt warmer inside the refrigerator than in my kitchen, a strange sensation. I packed backup clothing in my workbag: silk underclothes, fleece sweaters, plastic rain gear, and my warmest Machu Picchu wool hat. I even crammed ski pants into my bag, just in case. I loved the way my thin jikatabi shoes felt like wearing socks in the garden—in summer, that is. I had only a few weeks left with the traditional craftsmen at Uetoh, so buying new winter jikatabi boots was out of the question. I assumed I’d never wear my Creature from the Black Lagoon jikatabi back home in California. Years later, separated-toe shoes became all the rage.
At night I slept with covers so heavy, I imagined my fifteen-pound cat, Fat Boy, sleeping on top of me. He’d never want to work till he sweat, to run around for hours in gardens, although the idea of hiding behind a sweet-smelling camellia, ready to pounce on an unsuspecting mouse, might have piqued his interest. I briskly readied for work in my aesthetically pleasing, freezer-worthy wooden Kyoto home. Back home, perhaps at that very moment, my cat may have been sleeping warmly near my mom’s feet, on her queen-size bed in her well-insulated, conventional California stucco home.
Although daylight grows longer after December twenty-first, it felt as though it continued fading as New Year’s approached, only a little more than a week away. Still, the sun shone almost every afternoon, causing Camellia sasanqua to burst open, pink and rosy as my cheeks. I felt a little silly with my bulky workbag full of clothes sufficient for a trek to the North Pole, especially on warm, sunshiny days. On a sunny Tuesday morning, it looked as though the three of us would be crammed into the front seat of a truck, so I stuffed just a few items into my bag tightly, hoping the men wouldn’t notice, and left the remaining layers in my locker.
My regular crew was still out of town on their work trip. I sat in the front seat of the truck with a senior worker and my new boss next to me on a bench seat. Staring out the window, I fell slowly into hibernation mode. We drove through Kyoto, past city boundaries, and out into the countryside. I’d close my eyes, and then open them for seconds at a time, peeking groggily out the window. I saw farmhouses with long bamboo drying racks out front, h
ung with hundreds of long white slender daikon radishes, a farmer’s winter’s harvest. Fields, buildings, and trees passed, looking like low-resolution black-and-white prints covered in frost. On the distant mountainside dark green conifers and orange trees rippled across the hills, mingling with strips of bare earth stabbing upward from the fertile valley below. I could hardly budge my eyes open, but the beauty still touched me.
A chill penetrated my wool hat, so I doubled it near the bottom and fell into a soft slumber. The truck firmly braked, and I awoke to find we’d arrived in the large parking lot of a rectangular building, a nursing home, with institutional, symmetrically sheared plants. Really? I thought, laughing a bit. Yet another boring job my last week in the company, I said to myself. With my regular crew absent, we’d really hit the dregs. What did you expect, another imperial garden? The company has to work where it is needed, not where you want to work, my businesswoman side retorted.
With Masahiro gone, I tried to fulfill my role as number-one kōhai, the lowest-ranking worker in the company. I jumped on the truck to get ladders off before anyone else, hauled multiple loads of debris at once, and, at ten o’clock on the dot, ran to find the tea tray. The men ignored me, in speech and gaze, and I just had to guess what to do next. I brought a book with me about an American studying at a Japanese monastery as a short-term apprentice like me, but at a temple instead of a garden company. Training in a Japanese monastery looked surprisingly similar to doing an apprenticeship at Uetoh. The lead priest in the temple asked each monk, regardless of rank, to treat the American apprentice as an equal. Sometimes the American would be told to do advanced duties with senior monks and then to work on basic projects when working with novice monks. I had always been treated in this manner at Uetoh Zoen. But with Masahiro gone, the switch between duties grew, confusing me more than usual.
One minute I’d pull weeds, the next I’d style a pine. In retrospect, I realized the variety helped me see the breadth of company duties. But I’d grown weary during my last week. I’d become more like Fat Boy, dreaming simply of sleep. Yet the craftsmen had no intention of letting up.
I finally hit my frustration limit at the nursing home garden, which I’d dubbed “the icicle courtyard.” The air in this garden, where we stood still and pruned pines for hours, held such a cold humidity that my feet and hands throbbed with pain for three hours. It felt like someone was smashing them repeatedly. I almost began crying several times, with my boss working right next to me. But I willed myself to hold out until I could find a private place at first break. When I felt really bad, I’d visualize things that brought me comfort, like tea with milk and sugar, or babies with brown eyes and dark curly hair. At breaktime I went to the women’s restroom, where I let myself cry, risking puffy, bloodshot eyes. Before returning I rinsed my face with cold water to lessen the evidence.
I realized that the double socks I’d put inside my jikatabi were a mistake. The booties hugged so tightly that the wool socks couldn’t insulate—like a down sleeping bag pressed too flat. So I removed a pair, which helped, but the thickening clouds overhead did not. Sipping hot green tea, I tried reassuring myself. I thought back to how I’d confided in Kei the week before. “Do you feel the cold?” I asked. He responded, “My hands do not get cold, and typically I do not wear hats in the winter.” Of course I took the hat comment personally and could hardly swallow my tea, choking back tears while thinking of his words. Fine, my mind yelled at Kei, no one understands! Quickly, I resumed my visualizations: yellow flowers, funny friends, grilled cheese sandwiches on buttery Wonder Bread.
Pruning that day, I wore thin gloves instead of thick ones in order to do detailed work. But trembling fingers don’t function well either, so I brought out my thick ones again and decided to keep them on, no matter what, even if they got ruined from sap. Just before my cry break, I was taken off pine pruning and told to pull some weeds with thousands of barbed seeds on their tips. Not only did they drench my gloves with dewy frost, but they blanketed my cheap cotton gloves with hundreds of seeds, making my hands feel like human pincushions. I felt the new boss had gone overboard to make me miserable.
Accustomed as I was to Nakaji’s fairly predictable command style, my new boss’s behavior took me by surprise. While Nakaji worked long and hard and expected us to do the same, the new boss seemed to relish giving me the worst possible jobs. Our clients revered Nakaji, and I felt loyal to him. Nakaji never gave me a single compliment, but with each command, I’d feel as though he yelled on a bullhorn, “You can do it, Leslie, dammit, you will!” In comparison, I suspected the strange boss of giving me jobs that guaranteed failure.
And for most of the day, for the life of me, I couldn’t remember my new boss’s name from our brief introduction the day before. I feared it would be insulting to ask. I didn’t trust my new senpai enough to confide in him, so I spent the day contriving ways to address my boss without using his name. I worked anxiously, afraid he’d guess. I spent most of first break trying to pull seeds out of my gloves. They’d hooked deep into the knitted material. The appalling thought of spreading the seeds throughout the garden, and my religiously tidy nature, forced me to pick them off, one by one, wasting my precious time off. Seconds before we ended the first break, the boss handed me a new pair of clean gloves.
An hour before noon, snow began to fall in elegant, feathery clumps, turning the nursing home garden into a strikingly beautiful scene, worthy of a Japanese garden calendar. I felt grateful for the extra fleece sweater I’d kept by chance. My fingers began to ache again. I prayed for lunch, when we could jump into the truck and at least find some comfort in the moderate warmth of heat from three people in a small enclosed truck. One minute past noon, I stood next to the truck and waited patiently for the men to climb inside the truck first. After they’d settled, the boss opened the car door for me from inside, motioned with his hand to say something about it being too crowded, handed me my bag lunch, and closed the door on me with a resounding click. I sighed, standing there while snowflakes noiselessly encircled me.
A small sliver of a feeling that the new boss didn’t like me had found its way into my thoughts, like a forgotten splinter. Now I felt like someone had whacked me hard, pushing the splinter deep. Could the boss have figured out that I didn’t remember his name? I had been so careful. Was he an unhappy person? Was I threatening as a woman? Or was I treated like any other apprentice in Japan? I asked myself all these questions. I could never be sure of his intentions. Yet in the midst of these swirling thoughts came the understanding that the cold and sleepless nights were making me think in crazy ways.
He may have desired to toughen me up, just like any other Japanese craftsman, just as I’d wanted. But I could no longer think straight. I sat down on the parking lot curb, as close to the truck as I could manage, to try to protect myself against the wind. Fine, I thought spitefully, I can adapt to this situation, like all the other workers would. I ate my lunch with my back turned to the men, my silent protest.
Then a woman wearing a lovely tailored skirt came running out of the nursing home toward me, slightly shielding herself from the wind and snow. By that third month, I still could hardly understand any Japanese outside of obscure garden terms. But she communicated with hand gestures and miming, speaking to me in rapid Japanese, as my guardian angel at the bus stop had done many times before. She asked if I wanted to come inside and eat lunch. “Come inside and get warm,” she said. Not hard to understand that. I responded with a slight smile, “Iiee, iiee, arigatō gozaimashita” (No, no, thank you so much), while inside I told myself resolutely, None of the other apprentices would go inside to eat lunch, no way. She hesitated. She held her skirt down with her delicate bare hands, just inches from my face. “Arigatō gozaimashita,” I said again politely. Stubborn pride surpassed discomfort. The woman retreated inside. I hunkered down.
Then she came out again. As she got closer, I saw she was carrying something steaming, a hot cup of black liquid, coffee. She drew
closer and held out the coffee until I took it from her hands. Her motherly compassion reached out to me at the same time, across a veil of falling snow between us, a warm arrow seemed to fly right into my chilled heart. I grasped the warm cup and instinctively held it near my chest.
I tried to keep my emotions in check. I felt determined not to cry in front of the men, especially this boss. But her gesture conveyed such kindness. As soon as she turned her back on me, tears began to run down my cheeks. I couldn’t wipe them away. The men might be watching me from the side mirrors, I told myself despairingly. My back was still turned to them. If I don’t touch my face, they’ll never know. I tried to sip my coffee and pantomime normal activity as tears rolled down my cheeks, collected on my chin, free fell, and splashed into my cup. They melted into the hot liquid, like snowflakes.
My thoughts swirled. I wasn’t sure I could take the stress anymore. Even trees have limits. Teaching pruning classes, I remind students of a key difference between aesthetic pruning and most pruning taught in books: aesthetic pruners know when to stop. Books mention all sorts of reasons to style trees: to prune out crossing branches, to remove the dead or diseased, to cut branches going straight up or down, or to angle into the canopy rather than out. But rarely do the books explain when to stop pruning.
Before even beginning, an aesthetic pruner first considers how much of the tree to prune. An easy rule for a novice pruner is to remove no more than a third of a healthy plant. If the tree has numerous problems, a few can be addressed each year. Nudge the plant. If a plant looks old, weak, or just planted, then prune no more than a tenth. Never prune a diseased plant. I too needed some time to recuperate between thinning cuts. But Japanese craftsmen simply do not slow down.
As I sipped my cooling cup of coffee, with lovely, icy snow falling around me, the woman came out again to retrieve the cup. I looked at the ground so she couldn’t see my tears. But she kept saying something to me over and over. I finally looked up. I must have looked a sight. I watched her expression turn from polite friendliness to horror then to tenderness in the space of a second. She understood. She took the cup without a further word and quickly walked back inside, her heels clicking on the icy pavement. I struggled not to feel ashamed. Surely she must have understood my determination to act strong, like a dedicated craftsperson. But deep down, I felt exposed and overly sensitive. What I believed was our female pact, to suffer in silence, made me cry even more.