The Bonsai Tree

by Meira Chand

  ‘We were worried,’ he added. She nodded silently, and did not ask how he knew she was here in Kamagasaki.

  He was out of place in the room, the cut and colour of his raincoat carrying with it a world from which she was now far removed. It seemed a long while since she had seen him; she had entered another dimension. She tried to think of Kobe, of Itsuko and Jun, of Paula. Her thoughts moved over these things like thin clouds blown by the wind. She gripped the metal frame of the chair beneath her, and looked up at Pete in confusion. He sat down beside her and took her hand as if she was a child.

  ‘I want you to come back with me. I’m not here for myself, Jun has sent me, he knew you were here. That missionary says you want to stay a bit longer, and I can understand your confusion, but I think you should return.’

  ‘Then why didn’t Jun come himself?’ She looked up sharply, something breaking in her.

  ‘It’s difficult to explain. A lot has happened. The reasons he has not come are not what you think.’

  He told her then of the complications Tamura had evolved for Jun. Pressing her gently for details of all that had happened since they last met, relieved to hear things were not as Tamura had indicated in his letter to Jun; the man had no hold upon them.

  ‘The past can be the past if you want,’ he said. ‘It is no more than memory, and what is memory but a thought. The future can be different. I think Jun only sought to protect you from things he himself did not know how to cope with.’

  ‘Then he must tell me so himself,’ she said, hardening her voice to cover her emotions.

  She could not so easily appear to forgive everything that had passed. There was that child and there was Itsuko, her face encrusted with a smile of malice that nothing would dissolve. Yet, even as these thoughts came to her, she saw again in her mind the small, blue tray she had stood before earlier in the day. Nothing could explain the feelings that it left within her. The bare tray, the careful pebbles and clear water, the daisy on the rock; a hope so pure and strong that it lived forever, separate from the broken life that made it. She drew a breath and looked at Pete. Compared to that broken life, there was so much she saw now in her own to salvage.

  Even as she spoke she was filled with fatigue. Itsuko appeared like an old ivory queen on a chessboard, calling checkmate to the world. With an effort she put the thought aside.

  ‘If he wishes to prove our life together still holds some meaning, he must come and tell me. I know this is an ugly place, but I can see some true perspectives from here. They’re always in need of volunteers, they won’t mind if I stay.’

  He saw she shivered with emotion, her hands clenched tightly before her.

  ‘Wait,’ she whispered and left the room in search of paper and a pen.

  Climbing the ladder stairs, she sat upon the bed, and began a letter to Jun, placing words on the paper, without emotion. Each word as it formed beneath her hand seemed to anchor events about her again, like scenery on a stage set for an act that was yet to be played, while she waited in the wings. She wished Pete had never found her. It was enough to support her own emotions, without those of other people. She folded the letter, placed it in an envelope and wrote Jun’s name upon it.

  23

  Itsuko turned a rice paper page of the hand-bound book upon her lap. The language of Noh was medieval, and she had brought with her to the theatre her own modern translation of the play. Upon the stage three musicians on folding stools waited for the audience to settle. There was silence and then a strange, inarticulate, deep-throated cry from the man with a long drum held to his shoulder. The sharp crack and the hollow thud of the drums wound in between an eerie flute. Itsuko closed her eyes and let the sounds lead her to their timeless world.

  She never missed the first Noh performance of the season, and today she could relax a little for she was sure the stress of the last few days would soon be behind her. At the insistence of the detectives she had written to Tamura, asking for more time to deliver the blueprints. Kate was not yet found in that disreputable area, although discreet inquiries had been made at innumerable dubious houses there. But the detectives had confirmed that Kate had escaped, and it appeared Tamura’s threats were mostly bluff. She would see Tamura finished for this; she would see to it that he got jail instead of her blueprints.

  The chanting of the chorus brought her back to the performance.

  Before her, the apron stage was devoid of scenery but two large wooden columns indicating the entrance to a shrine. Three small living pine trees stood along the entry ramp, representing heaven, earth and man. The immaculate polished stage was austere, but brilliant with light.

  Jun moved impatiently in his seat beside his mother. He found Noh difficult at the best of times, and even more so today. He had not told his mother that Kate had been found and was safe. According to Pete, Tamura had nothing but groundless threats of spite. Relief made Jun light-headed. Soon he would go to bring Kate back, but until that moment he wished to hold the knowledge secret within him, like her letter in his pocket. She would come back, he knew it now. And he would prove to her that he was not as she thought. They would have a different life now; it was not too late. He had already made that clear to Chieko.

  On this day each year he always accompanied his mother to the Noh, as his father had done before him. It was one of her few real pleasures. They always came in the morning. The performance was long, eight hours or more, divided into five or six plays. His mother did not like to miss Okina, that old and ritual play with which the performance always began. It was a play without a plot, it was the dedication of the mask to the mystery of divinity. The theatre of Noh was not a mirror of life, but an image in the mirror to which life approximates. Like a form of meditation, the effort through Noh was to transcend time.

  It annoyed Itsuko to enter the theatre halfway through the day, into the middle of performances, but with the detectives and the worry of Tamura, this had been unavoidable. Jun was relieved to have only to endure two hours of Noh for he would also leave early. Pete was to meet him here at the theatre; his office was nearby in Osaka. They were going together to Kamagasaki. It would be a shock to Itsuko, but that was as Jun planned. It was better that way, she would have no time to think or forestall him. He had considered going without informing her but that would bring its problems. Knowing already where Kate was, it had been difficult to listen to the useless suggestions of the detectives earlier through the morning.

  On the stage the chorus sat with their fans on the floor before them. An actor advanced with measured, sliding steps to the centre of the stage. He was masked and rotundly wrapped in many layers of heavy brocade kimono. The chorus informed them that this was the beautiful daughter of Kino Aritsune. Beneath the ethereal mask, protruded the jowls of an elderly man. For long periods he stood totally still or circled the stage in a protracted way, while the chorus chanted hypnotically. Jun could not seem to break through the static actions and find the experience beyond. He could not concentrate for long enough to pass through the eye of the needle and into the impenetrable Noh, but slid from its surface like rain from a leaf. Today he impatiently watched a somnambulist’s world, of remote mannered postures and sequences. He looked at his watch and tried again to narrow his thoughts to the play, all that filled his mind was Kate, and his own nervous anticipation. Beside him his mother appeared to have crossed the moat of white pebbles, separating everyday life from the distant world of the stage.

  A strange peace always took hold of Itsuko when she came to the Noh, a feeling she rarely recaptured elsewhere. For a fleeting moment she had no wish to seem in life quite the predator she appeared. But that was her role and responsibility, a destiny that was impossible to reject. The cast of fate was always hard, as was apparent on the stage before her. Each play was the exploration of a state of emotion through the personification of a departed soul. Now, on the stage, was the outline of a well, just an open wooden framework and a spray of pampas grass. This was the play, Izutsu, the sto
ry of the nobleman poet Narihira and Kino Aritsune’s daughter. Itsuko’s eyes followed the thickly garbed actor, prayer beads in one hand, a bunch of green leaves in the other. The mask was secured by purple ribbons at the back of a straight, black wig. He reached the middle of the stage and the voice when it came from behind the mask was a muffled and fossilised thing, a sound thrown up from a distant place.

  Every dawn in the offering water

  The moon too, sinks in reflection,

  Her soul calm and clear ...

  The flat words grew facets and depths and touched her. Then the strange esoteric ballet with its barest economy of movement and sound, became a distillation of all human emotion, and tears filled her eyes. For this was yugen, the essence of Noh.

  With her husband, this love of Noh was the only thing they had seemed to share. They had always come together, this first day of the season. Itsuko remembered still the beauty of the words with which he had explained to her the depth and meaning of yugen.

  It is a place, he had told her, of eternal truth. Everything fades, life, beauty and happiness. The soul passes on alone and desolate. Yugen is universal loneliness. Yugen is the soul of Noh.

  She remembered the way he had looked at her then, with tenderness she could never again recall. She was sure that it was on that night Jun had been conceived. She swallowed hard to force back the tears that filled her eyes again. She felt old and very tired.

  The world of silence had caught Jun now, and drew him briefly in. The ghost of Kino Aritsune’s daughter changed into the robes of her dead lover and danced, half-man, half-woman, an ancient court hat on her head, in a kimono of gold and purple. It was a dance almost without movement, a solemn circling of the stage, frozen but flowing, effortless but erect, an unearthly, beautiful thing.

  The voice of the pines murmurs in the wind,

  Its course elusive, ever shifting,

  Such in life is the dreambound soul,

  At what sound will it awaken?

  The words deposited him in a strange, bare land. It no longer mattered that beneath the mask was an aging man, or that his hands were wide and gnarled. They faded until only his soul remained, expressing its torment and bittersweet longing. He communicated an eternity it was thought no young woman could portray. And the mask in its stillness evoked more than the most expressive face, changing gently as the shadows moved, from poignancy into grief.

  At last the actor came to the well, and knelt in the final moments of the play, gazing down at the reflection on the water of the moon and Narihira’s ghostly image. The words and gestures fell in and out of time.

  Nothing happens, but memory

  Long clings in this earthly life.

  The plantain leaves rustle,

  Broken easily as dreams.

  The dream is broken, and it is day.

  The play reached its consummation in the strange residue of silence that filled the audience and the stage as the last words faded away. No one moved for several moments. The words came to Jun like an eerie portent of everything that had been, and everything that might yet come. He swallowed at a sudden fear that gripped him from within. Then the audience stirred, pushing away the bare realm that had held them all captive. He sighed in relief and looked at his watch, it was the intermission, and time for him to leave Itsuko and go to Kate. Pete would be at the entrance soon.

  Jun steered his mother out of the auditorium and towards the refreshment kiosks. He found Itsuko a place on a bench and brought her green tea, a sugared bean cake and three tangerines in a small net bag. He knew he must find the words to tell her now. Already Pete was visible at the door, his head above the crowd, Jun caught his eye and nodded to him to wait.

  Itsuko bit fastidiously into the bean cake, chewing slowly to decide its worth. She noticed the expression on Jun’s face and looked up at him in question. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

  ‘I have found Kate. Pete went for me to Kamagasaki, she is safe at a Christian mission. Tamura has nothing on us, I’m sorry, I should have told you this morning. I’m going to bring Kate back. Pete is already at the theatre, ready to go with me. I must do what I feel is right for myself, and for Kate. I don’t want to disturb this afternoon for you. I’ll just leave quietly now.’

  Itsuko lowered the bean cake, and swallowed abruptly. ‘This is not the right way. It is good she is safe, certainly. I am glad for us all. But you must not go. We are not yet sure we are clear of Tamura. Let Bailey-san go, as before. Let him keep her, as before, in his home, until we can decide what to do with her, what is best.’ Itsuko raised the bean cake again to her lips, and took a determined bite.

  His heart beat fast. He should have gone without telling her. She had not even thought of Kate returning to her role as his wife. He saw now how she would use Kate’s desertion to force his marriage to an end. She did not care about his feelings, much less about Kate’s. She had not thought once that things could mend.

  Outside the auditorium, people talked and ate. An old couple beside Itsuko crunched loudly on rice crackers and slurped green tea. Itsuko waited silently, taking a tangerine from the bag, ignoring the possibility that anything more need be asked or answered. She began to peel the fruit and refused to look at Jun. The sharp smell of the tangerine rose up to him as she broke into the flesh.

  Through the open doors of the auditorium the stage rose bare and blond above the moat of dim seats. He saw now that his life lay forked before him with a choice he had wished not to see. He thought back to that time in London, when he had lived with Kate above Holland Park, and it seemed from here like a past incarnation, already many lives removed. He remembered that party at the Baileys, where he had first met Kate. He remembered how, after a visit to Romeo and Juliet, he had explained the popularity in Japanese literature of the theme of double suicide.

  He looked down upon Itsuko’s sculptured head bowed above the tangerine, and knew at last the choice he must make to free himself to his own life. The virtues he had inherited at birth and that made him Japanese would always return him firmly to duty, and his place in an inflexible order of things. He saw then all he must relinquish if he was to gain. Without a word he turned away from Itsuko, and walked to where Pete waited.

  There was a pip in her mouth that lay on her tongue behind her front teeth. As she stared at Jun’s departing back, the two remaining tangerines rolled unheeded from her lap. The sweet juice filled her mouth like acid, she could not swallow, could not breathe. Jun had taken leave of his senses; she would never forgive him now. With an effort Itsuko swallowed the mouthful of juice and inadvertently also the pip. Turning her head, blinking back tears of frustration, Itsuko stared through the open door of the auditorium to the empty, solitary world of the stage. She sat, unmoving, her face convulsed and old, clutching the concave shell of peel that was all that remained of her tangerine.

  Someone nudged her shoulder gently. A woman returned with a smile the string bag with two tangerines that had rolled from her lap. Itsuko stood up, she moved slowly back towards the auditorium and the enigmatic stage. Sitting down again in her seat, she, found the page in her book for the next play.

  24

  The sick of Kamagasaki were a nuisance and a liability, and alcoholic besides. Father Ota told Kate as he hurried along after they left the medical centre, ‘If we visit them in the hospital and the staff see we have an interest in them, sometimes they will keep them in for a little while longer. However, most men who are really ill just resign themselves to death. Some, like our runaway friend, Tomoko’s father, discharge themselves, much to the hospital’s relief, but if they do that more than once, they’re blacklisted and cannot be admitted again.’

  The sick man in the flophouse who they had visited the day before, and whose child they had taken to the children’s centre, had discharged himself from hospital just before their arrival. They walked in the afternoon sun and Kate breathed deeply, thankful to be out of the place with its smells of distress and antiseptic.<
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  ‘We must find him, he’s ill,’ Father Ota continued. ‘The first place he’ll go after discharging himself from hospital, is to pick up his child, and then there’s no knowing where he’ll disappear to. Even when they know we’re from the church, it’s sometimes still difficult for these men to trust us. They always think we’re going to tell the police and have them put away.’ Father Ota walked purposefully along.

  After Pete had left the day before, Kate had told Father Ota everything. He had listened quietly, nodding his head sympathetically.

  ‘I can understand your difficulties. Our society is not an easy one. Like you, the church too has a hard time here in Japan. If it is any comfort to you, in a way our problems are somewhat like yours. Sometimes its seems difficult to be both a good Christian and a good Japanese. Godliness here is a love of finitude, a training in efficiency and self-reliance whose rewards are here and now.

  ‘And how have you settled your dilemma?’ she had asked him in amusement.

  He smiled and shook his head, unwilling to reply. ‘It’s a constant battle, never quite decided, I suppose. I try my best to be first a good Christian, which means I am often not a very good Japanese. No, in fact, many people think I’m a very odd man indeed.’ He laughed, and it did not seem to worry him.

  ‘You must go back, you must try again, there will be a way.’ In the dying light of the silent room he had leaned forward towards her earnestly, a good and honest man, his vision clear and simple as the realities he saw.

  ‘The only condition in life that we can depend upon is change. Change is growth, and you cannot hold back from all that must mature you.’ He advised.

  ‘And what have you decided?’ he asked as they walked along.

  ‘I shall take your advice. I’ll go back. Jun will come, I know. And the fact that I know that, means we already have a new beginning. That already we have found a way.’