The Bonsai Tree

by Meira Chand

  She understood much better now the social inflexibilities behind his explanation. She took another sip of wine as Paula spoke again.

  ‘It’s considered very modern now for young people to be in love, but people still rarely marry out of class. Everything depends on place.’

  Kate nodded dully. All the Baileys said enlightened but did not encourage her. Instead of opening doors, more appeared, until they surrounded her like a maze. She felt suddenly without defence against a whole land and culture. Japanese women had behind them the narrowness of centuries and the wiles of survival. She saw it in Fumi’s pathetic, tender fussing about Jun, the pandering to his every whim, untying his shoelaces, massaging his shoulders. She saw it in Itsuko’s crafty control of life, nothing overtly stated, yet every aim fulfilled. She had seen it in Yoko’s slim eyes, filled with sensuality and calculation, in the strength to survive by every feminine means. In the end this history of cruel dismissal produced a formidable force of women. At this moment it seemed that Japanese men, pampered and spoilt at home, indulged and milked by pleasure outside, were now the victims of a national conspiracy of women, so that she was not so sure this country, termed the most patriarchal, was not more truly matriarchal in many ways. Perhaps this explained why Japan appeared so misogynist. Whatever the positions and the strengths, it was all part of a sexist game she knew she would never fully grasp or understand. Kate decided she would only survive by being true to her own identity. She looked at her watch, it was past eleven, Jun had not come.

  9

  Tamura hit his wife across the face, blood welled up where his signet ring caught her on the cheekbone. She made no noise, as usual; just shrank back against the wall, neither standing nor squatting. Only her money had persuaded him to marry her. She was too ugly to draw any suitors, a bag of bones and sinew, thick lips always parted over prominent teeth. The marriage had brought him all he desired; and he hit her again for that.

  She shielded her face with an arm and over her elbow her eyes stared at him, small and dark as a vindictive bird. Not unlike that damned Nagai woman, he thought, as she had righted his plate of salmon at her party the day before. He recollected his feelings, his shame and confusion and the congratulations that seemed glued to the roof of his mouth. She had no reason but spite to invite him. And what, he wondered, had possessed him to go? He hit his wife even harder, then wiped his palms on the cotton vest stretched across his belly. His fingers were short and thick as cigar stubs.

  ‘Get out of my sight.’ He yelled, and she stumbled forward, nursing her cheek.

  ‘Tell them you fell again,’ he hissed. Whether the servants believed this or not was immaterial, the excuse was all that mattered. It was understood that the green and yellow blotches covering his wife were the results of a strange disease that caused her to fall about like a ninepin, though at no time had this been witnessed. She took it all silently; she knew her duty, she knew her place. And what wife did not expect a beating? It kept the balance of roles, he thought.

  Matsue shut the door behind her and he sat back on the bed to pull on Tamura’s socks. It was already eight in the morning. The beating had exhilarated him, like a good game of golf, or a night with a new woman. He flexed his muscles then observed the clothes she had laid out for him. He did not like the match and yelled again for her. The door opened at once, she could only have been outside, still snivelling he saw, by the dampness about her eyes.

  ‘What’s this, eh ? When have I ever worn this tie with this shirt, this shirt with this suit?’ he barked, standing in his underclothes and socks, his belly hanging low before him. Still nursing her cheek, she hurried to the cupboard and lifted out a fresh set of clothes. He observed her as she knelt, the kimono tight about her skinny buttocks, and the gap of brown skin between its hem and top of her white tabi sock.

  Her family had once maintained with considerable status the wealthiest brothel in Osaka. Her father, a graduate of Tokyo University, had inherited the business from his father along with ample, social pretensions. Open house had often been held, when pillars of the local community were entertained to formal tea ceremony by some of the best tea masters. But American influence ended legal prostitution in 1957 and the underworld took over.

  Matsue’s father had married his youngest daughter to Sakamoto Yujiro, the son of the boss of a powerful gang. Matsue, the eldest daughter, long ago shelved for spinsterhood, had been married at last through Sakamoto’s connections, to Tamura, who had overlooked her age and plainness for the money that came with her. And by marriage he was the brother-in-law of one of Osaka’s most powerful men, for Sakamoto soon succeeded his father to headship of the gang. When at last he set up on his own textile mill with the help of Sakamoto, Tamura began to compete with the haughty Nagais. What could not be achieved by legal means was achieved by fear and extortion. The business soon grew to a large concern, satisfying Tamura and Sakamoto.

  Tamura strode from the room and through the house. Three servants waited for him at the bottom of the stairs, and bowed as he rounded the curve in the wrought iron bannisters, and kept it up, huddled together, bobbing like roped geese. In the porch he changed from slippers into shoes and stood for Matsue to tie his laces. She followed him out to the waiting chauffeured car and bowed as he drove away. From huge kennels each side of the gate two Akita dogs pulled on their chains and barked, biting savagely at the air.

  Tamura left the concrete edifice of his home and drove to the even larger proportions of Sakamoto’s mansion. There, after a closed circuit television certified identity, the massive copper doors rolled back upon a spacious garden. Sakamoto’s henchmen littered the place like a variety of crew-cut garden gnomes, standing about in twos and threes waiting for the day.

  Sakamoto sat on the floor in a silk dressing gown, gnawing a chicken leg. As Tamura bowed, and uttered greetings, and thanks for support and patronage, a door opened at the far end of the room, and two of Sakamoto’s henchmen appeared, supporting between them a further man, who appeared the to have taken a beating, his lip was split and bleeding.

  Sakamoto continued to pull at the chicken and spoke through its meaty shreds. ‘Men used to offer a finger to atone for offense, but I find it an outmoded custom, we must move with the times. Money is a better means of apology.’

  ‘What did he do?’ Tamura asked.

  ‘Women,’ said Sakamoto mysteriously, his cheeks greasy with chicken fat.

  He put down the bone and a subordinate immediately appeared with a steaming towel. As Sakamoto wiped his fingers, cleaning precisely round each nail, his sleeves fell back upon his short tattooed arms. The whole of his back, buttocks and thighs were covered with a female demon, tattooed in inky blues and reds and a dangerous yellow dye. Sakamoto’s skin was like a diaphanous cloth that patterned his naked body. Only once, when they had bathed together at a hot spring resort, where they had gone with a party of women, had Tamura seen this great work of art. Sakamoto was said to have sold his skin to a tattoo museum, Tamura remembered now.

  ‘Well,’ said Sakamoto, sitting back upon his cushion. ‘Did you bring it all?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Tamura opening his briefcase and placing the wads of notes on the table. ‘It’s all there.’

  ‘Good.’ Sakamoto summoned a henchman to take away the money.

  Tamura had trouble at his factory with an agitating union. Sakamoto, for a price, had sent a group of men to ‘deal’ with the main offenders. Tamura had also sought assistance in keeping the mouths of stockholders shut about troubles he had no wish to explain. Sakamoto’s men easily intimidated into respectful silence any shareholders with questions. He snapped the briefcase shut in relief at the final payment of these debts, and accepted a cigar from Sakamoto.

  ‘Whiskey?’

  Tamura nodded and took a good gulp as soon as the glass was placed before him. Sakamoto turned his attention to a piece of sirloin steak that had been placed before him. Even at eight-thirty in the morning the room was dark with panelling an
d velvets. A plaster cast of Venus de Milo stood beneath a huge round lamp of faceted glass, reflective and revolving.

  The house was full of henchmen with the traditional crew-cuts of gangsterland or the tight curled perms that were popular now as a mark of modern times. It was all changing, Tamura noted to himself. He wouldn’t trust one of these sadistic louts out of sight of Sakamoto.

  With an effort Tamura kept his attention on Sakamoto who still concentrated on his steak.

  ‘I’ve had to close down our project.’ Tamura cleared his throat nervously.

  ‘What project?’ Sakamoto asked absently, chewing with an open mouth, his lips wet with meaty juice. There were always so many projects.

  ‘The air spinning project.’

  ‘You can’t let those Nagais get away with it?’ Sakamoto reached for a toothpick and poked about inside his mouth.

  ‘We don’t have the right work team, we don’t have the right brains,’ Tamura admitted despondently.

  ‘What progress are the others making?’ Sakamoto asked.

  ‘Almost finished, just upping speeds,’ Tamura replied.

  ‘Have they applied yet for a patent?’

  ‘Don’t think so,’ Tamura shook his head.

  ‘I told you to take some short cuts. You could have stolen the blueprints, you could have been first, but now well ... it’s very late.’ He withdrew the toothpick from his mouth.

  ‘But there must be something, there must be some way ... I can’t think of that woman getting away with it. There’ll be no way to contain her arrogance. I can see her face, I can hear her voice.’ Tamura broke off, with an effort he lowered his voice.

  ‘I thought maybe you might ...’

  Sakamoto’s bodyguard entered the room, a huge man with a glass eye and a broken nose. He handed a note to Sakamoto who at once stood up in agitation and began to undo his dressing gown, as if he would finish dressing in the middle of the lounge.

  ‘I must go, some urgent business has come up, said Sakamoto as Tamura looked at him from his cushion on the floor.

  ‘I thought maybe it was not too late, that there might yet be some way, some means ...’

  ‘There are always ways, there are always means. Tell me the way and I’ll apply the means.’ Sakamoto nodded and left the room.

  Tamura cursed softly, drank down the remains of the whiskey and soon went out to his waiting car, his expression dark with thought.

  10

  Already it was August. It had been more than eight months since she arrived in Japan. Behind her the days stretched away; she seemed to have found a way to live. She was no longer depressed nor even unhappy. She remembered the hard, frozen ground of January and it was another world. Now the summer seemed an eternity, the heat went on and on, the days blazing, the nights mysterious, the moon dilated. It was too hot to do anything, too hot even to lie by the pool with Paula at the club. They closeted themselves in air-conditioned rooms and played tennis in the evenings. The lessons with which Kate now filled her day, flower arrangement, ink painting and tea ceremony, became an effort, and she cancelled them for the month. They would go to the sea, they would go to the mountains Jun said, but could not fulfil his promise for all manner of business reasons.

  It seemed the summer was possessed by a race of singing creatures. By the river the frogs chanted and croaked, an elusive bass orchestra filling each night. In trees and grasses crickets and the hysterical cicada worked away in frenzy. She awoke and slept to a noise like interference on a radio, whirring through the heat. The fir trees in the garden were hot and noisy factories of insects, disgorging an endless racket. The bell insect, small and black as watermelon seed, the kantan with its metallic twang, the king of the dead, and the demon-korogi, the dark insect choir played on.

  She learned from Jun that these sounds should not be cursed and thrust away but loved and cultivated, for they were summer’s poetry. He told her of the trade and culture and literature of these short-lived singers that went back centuries. He told her of his childhood and how every Japanese youngster deftly hunts his own small choir. He brought a green gauzed insect box and led her to the garden. There they laughed like children and crept about amongst the shrubs in a thickening summer dusk, catching insects in a net until the evening sky was the deep blue of butterflies’ wings and their limbs covered with itching bites. The green gauze box was full of scaly, moving bodies, jumping midgets, muscled thighs and a waving artillery of antennas. She held it dubiously as it vibrated in her hands. In the dark garden Jun stood with his head on one side and told her to listen to the songs.

  ‘There,’ he said, ‘that’s the weaver, ju-i-i-i chon-chon, like the sound of a shuttle. Tsuzure-sase, sase, that’s the kirigirisu. And the loud one, that’s the korogi.’ His face was serious as a child’s.

  She began to laugh and could not stop, placed the box upon a rock and put her arms about him. She could not say she had regrets. It seemed love stretched out beyond the flat serenity of the evening, heavy and warm with an inner perfection that overcame all. She was happy. It was enough.

  But sometimes, in the hot, still silence of noon when she tried to sleep, she thought again of the child. Its small, dead face came back to her, a weight at the base of her brain in those midday siestas. This summer sleep was no dreamless nap, she slept as if stupefied by a pressure of light and heat. At noon the world lay naked to the sun, stripped of every shadow. A stillness filled the garden beneath the insects’ drone. Within it each sound seemed to magnify, the crack of a twig or the papery rustle of bamboo. On the bed she tossed and turned in some twilight region between sleep and consciousness, and the noises broke in her as ugly visions and sudden leaps of heart. Then the child’s face floated up within her, its eyes closed, its face stiff and expressionless. She awoke filled with the sickening knock of her pulse, her body covered with sweat. The dream returned each day.

  Outside the enormous heat and light pressed on, the garden was drunk with sun. Nothing in it moved. She understood how for some black races noon was the hour of ghosts. It was her hour. At night there was always Jun, and the solid repository of him to deliver her into the present. But even at night, sleep was not entirely bland. In the darkness something seemed to wait for her. She could not explain the nuances of this fear, as she held Jun close, her hands caressing his smooth, neat body. He was the reason for her fears as for her happiness. He was the anchor holding her in this world of exotics and banalities, its sensibilities and barbarities, and its slow consumption of herself. She had begun both to love and to hate the place.

  On one August evening they sat eating watermelon upon the raised veranda of their home, with glass and paper doors drawn back. The house though small had a delicate garden of stones and moss and old gnarled firs, costly as antiques. The scents of plants and cooling earth, rose with the dusk.

  ‘Soon,’ he said, ‘Obon will be over.’

  He explained again how the dead were never far away and once a year returned to earth for several weeks for reunion with the living. Kate remembered the night some days before when she had gone with the family to the cemetery to light the spirits towards home. In the dark graveyard the white globes of the lanterns on graves and the smoke and smell of incense were an eerie sight. But she had clung to the thought that the child was with her in some unseen way, and had known through the month it had been the reason for her restless dreams.

  ‘Soon, the spirits will go back,’ he said. ‘We light their journey once again with lantern boats launched on rivers and lakes. We will go to Kyoto and launch our own, and see too the great bonfire of daimonji.’

  On the last day of Obon they arrived before dark in the Kyoto suburb of Arashiyama. The town curled in a valley along the Katsura river; already there were crowds. The evening was oppressive and insects were busy in the trees along the river banks; clouds of gnats swarming beneath the branches. The river was spanned by a heavy wooden bridge raised up in ungainly elegance upon a regiment of stilts. People jostled for pla
ces on the bridge, leaning over the sides to stare down into the water where a great landing stage had been erected. Crammed upon it was a mass of delicate lanterns, each carrying the name of a departed soul, waiting to be launched.

  They went first to the marquees especially erected along the river bank, where for a small sum a priest wrote the name of the deceased on a thin, wooden tablet and placed it in a lantern boat. They requested a lantern for Jun’s father and grandparents, and another for the child. But Kate could not let the child’s lantern set sail on its lonely journey, jostled anonymously in a ghostly armada. She insisted they take the lantern with them, and launch it on the river themselves.

  They crossed the bridge and saw on the upper reach of river small, green-roofed boats punted about. Japanese-style inns lined the banks, each craning its roof behind the other for a partial water view. Their windows, bare and open, were like layers of multiple eyes, each reflecting a different scene. A family ate dinner, a couple dressed in yukata, a woman nursed a baby, all oblivious of privacy, all linked within each window by the identical yukata provided by the inn. Souvenir shops and small restaurants lined the road. The grey-tiled roofs of the town backed steeply up into the hills behind a temple and pagoda. Everywhere, growing crowds of people, waited for darkness to descend. In the thick, dusty pines the insects resounded fortissimo, the cicadas rattling their last brassy volley of the day.

  Boatmen were busy preparing a flotilla of the green-roofed punts for an evening upon the water. Cold dinners of buckwheat noodles were laid on long tables the length of the boats. Beside them stood a row of plaited bamboo cages, each housing a large, black, slim-necked bird. Kate knelt to look. The birds smelled of fish and shifted about uncomfortably in their cramped baskets.