The Bonsai Tree

by Meira Chand

  ‘We cannot know what light is if we have never known darkness. But, as in a day, neither light nor darkness lasts forever, but give way to each other repeatedly. Everything has its purpose.’ Father Ota nodded.

  They turned into a main road that bounded one side of Kamagasaki. Here Father Ota stopped at the door of the medical centre in the hope that the runaway man might be there. Through a window Kate glimpse a few dejected-looking old men.

  ‘I’ll wait out here,’ she told Father Ota, not wanting to enter yet another place for the sick or rejected.

  She felt warm within her jacket, walking along a little further, to be rid of the window of old men. Already in the morning she had come along this stretch of road with Father Ota on his errands. She had not noticed the entrance to the shrine then. It was partly hidden by a short, spreading tree. A small courtyard lay beyond the arch of torii, guarded by stone lions, hemmed in by buildings. There was a bell rope and an offertory box before the open doors. She found some yen and tossed them in, shook the rope to ring the bell and clapped her hands to summon the gods to her mortal presence. Although only a few steps removed from the road, the shrine was quiet and peaceful. The air was edged with the scents of old stone and wood. Up the steps the interior was dim and empty, a small, bare room of polished boards, silent and austere as the residue of hope and sorrow that rested there. Offerings of rice and fruit and the evergreen sakaki, were laid upon the altar. A few pinewood steps ascended to the small latticed door of the innermost chamber of the shrine. Within it the gods rested, invisible to the world. Within that sacred chamber lay only emptiness, and silence.

  Kate stood before the shrine and it drew her to into its stillness. She looked up then and saw. On the cross beam above the altar was the symbol of all Shinto shrines, a polished silver mirror resting on a carved wooden cloud. She stared up at it, and it showed her nothing but the reflection of her own face. And that too dissolved and reformed as the flowing colours of the road moved across its surface. And she saw then that, as in the mirror, all thoughts and impressions formed only to dissolve, of no more substance than a dream. The only thing that remained unchanging was the mirror itself on its ethereal cloud. Everything else only came and went in some fleeting dance of time. She turned away then and could not explain the strange peace that seemed to fill her.

  ‘There you are! I was looking for you, Someone just told me our hospital runaway has been found. He’s been told to report to me at the mission, and Tomoko will be brought there too,’ Father Ota explained in relief as he hurried up to her.

  They made their way towards the nearby mission, and passed the labourers’ depot again. A heap of broken glass in a gutter reflected in the sun, a shabby window glinted silver. As Kate turned to speak to Father Ota, a child in a pink dress rushed by them.

  ‘It’s Tomoko,’ Kate exclaimed, trying to catch hold of the child.

  At the children’s centre, the child had been bathed and dressed in fresh clothes. Her grubby face was now white as magnolia flesh, the hair that was yesterday stiff with dirt fell softly about her small face.

  ‘It’s Tomoko,’ Kate exclaimed again.

  ‘And there is her father on his way to the mission,’ Father Ota said, hailing the man in relief.

  The other side of the road Tomoko’s father shuffled towards the child, waving to her, his face lighting up at the sight of her. The child gave a shout and turned into the road to run to him. As she reached the middle of the road, a truck turned the corner with a loud swerve of brakes, making for the labourers depot. It was an open-backed truck filled with returning men, all noisy with release from work and an early swig of liquor. The truck careened towards them, and seemed not to see the child crossing, nor hear her father’s cry of warning.

  It came on towards them all. Kate leapt forwards towards the child. For an instant, the truck towered above her, filling the sky, the reddened faces of the men stared down at her as if from a great height. She reached the child and snatched her up, gripping her hard, and for a moment their bodies clung together, the child’s heart moving against her own in astonishment more than fear. Then, flinging the child from her, Kate jumped clear herself of the advancing truck and stood again safely at the side of the road. The vehicle braked with an angry screeching of tyres, and began skidding towards where Kate stood, unprotected. It picked her up and tossed her like a frail reed against a nearby wall. She fell to the road with a soft thud, and lay unmoving there.

  It had happened in seconds before he could even cry out a warning. Father Ota stared down at Kate’s limp body. They covered her with a blanket brought from the medical centre around the corner, but the doctor knelt and shook his head. The men from the truck stood about in a circle, dazed and subdued. The child and the old man crouched together beside Father Ota who stood silently as the doctor stood up and shook his head once again.

  There was a stir then at the back of the crowd. He looked round to see the tall American, who had come to the mission the day before, elbow his way to the front. Beside him was a young Japanese, immaculately dressed in a navy blue suit and an expression of disbelief. It must be the husband, thought Father Ota, and turned resignedly to take his brief part in an act destiny had assigned to him.

  25

  In the house now silence lay about them. They immersed themselves in activities and little was said.

  Itsuko knelt on the veranda, a cushion beneath her knees. The doors of the room were pulled back to the garden, the evenings were cooling and drawing in. Although the sky was still bright the moon was already present and full, white as a mirror above the earth. Itsuko felt considerably exposed. Today was a day in one thousand years when to the West in the predawn sky, eight planets would align. Everywhere people awaited this cosmic climax in dread. Catastrophes were forecast, but nothing had occurred. In the garden, behind the blaze of a maple, Jun lethargically assembled a telescope. Itsuko watched him, her brow knotted as she fanned away a dark, persistent fly. Beside her on the floor the front page of the newspaper showed a photograph of the gathering planets, their names labelled in white upon a black sky. She looked up and thought of them settled there, ageless, timeless and imponderable, glaring down upon her. She felt a touch of terror. Beside the photograph was the article about Kate. Itsuko kept returning to it, unable any longer to remain superior to events. She had never wished for this death. Never. Of that she was innocent, even if for the rest everything was as she had planned. Jun was hers and free again, he would recover from his grief. The newspapers had seen fit to endow Kate’s death with missionary zeal, reporting it as a heroic sacrifice to save a child and an example to them all, as she had worked for those less fortunate than herself with Father Ota. The publicity had centred a more positive interest upon Kamagasaki. The Nagai name had emerged fortified, rather than diminished. No more had been heard of Tamura, there was nothing he could do. Why then did Itsuko find herself trembling, that darkness filled her?

  Before her, a five-needled bonsai pine waited to begin its training. Itsuko took up her scissors, drew it towards her and began to thin and trim. She had never thought of a death. Never. She repeated it firmly to herself, but her hands shook slightly as she massaged the branches of the pine to age its infantile bark. Alive, Kate could be relegated to irritating unimportance. But death transformed her to a threat that bled Itsuko of sleep. She began to snip at the small tree, but her hand trembled again and soon she put down the scissors and picked up a roll of wire. Gently, she pulled errant branches to their destined places, binding them carefully with the wire, so that they would not spring again into the free and uncouth jumble nature had intended. She had never known such fear, and dared not voice it, even to Fumi. Here they lived closely with the spirits and in that form now, Kate had the power to hold Itsuko to ransom. She remembered the ghost stories told to her in childhood, and her mother’s fear of bad spirits. If she did not live in these modern times she too, thought Itsuko, might be persuaded to believe in uri, those vengeful creature
s who died violent and untimely deaths that made it difficult to turn their backs upon the living.

  They floated around at night without feet, full of bitterness and malice. There was no end to the terror they wrought. Itsuko swallowed hard. She must not let these infantile fears destroy her. Everyone knew that uri were no more than the tales of old women. But her hand still trembled inexplicably when she thought of her vulnerability before such inhuman forces. There was no way she could protect herself.

  And they also had to live with disharmony now. There was little worse in a well-balanced life than the horror of disharmony. That break, in order and pattern, that Kate’s life and death had imposed upon them would sit like a stain on their family history, impossible to obliterate in the minds of those who knew the truth. Such discords went against the functioning of every ethic Itsuko knew. She shuddered and with an effort brought her attention back to the plant before her.

  Carefully, she made the last amendments to the tiny, stunted tree. With extra-fine wire she bound smaller stubborn twigs and straightened shoots so that all the pine needles would face upwards. Then she sat back to judge the effects of imprisonment upon the tree. The wire would be left in place until it bit into the branches. Then for a time the tree was released, only to be bound again as it sought to lose its intended shape. Three wirings were needed before the dwarfed tree made no more effort at deviation. Itsuko brushed loose soil from her hands and pushed the tree away. She breathed deeply to calm herself, and tried not to think of the assembling planets or the invisible Kate, more alive now in death than ever in life.

  Fumi drew out a stream of blond thread from a faded cotton bag. Its wooden handles knocked sometimes beneath the crochet hook, moving deftly in her hand. The light was fading in her corner of the veranda. She switched on a lamp and closed the panel of mosquito netting between the open doors. Immediately, a moth appeared to flutter round the light. The dry, ancient smells of the garden stirred her sadly to admit that many memories did not survive beyond a deep feeling in her bones. Life moved on like the thread in her little hook drawn from an infinite bag.

  She sighed and looked at Jun behind the maple, setting up the telescope with careless apathy. Nothing in his life she felt, justified the hard and bitter facts. None of it was what he intended; he was not callous, he was not cruel. And Kate. She thought of the unfinished baby clothes she had so recently folded away in the iron-bound chests, and remembered the day she had shown Kate the contents of those chests. She thought of all Kate had undoubtedly suffered and her swift and violent death, and wondered if the rites she had requested the priest to perform in the house and at the local shrine would ever really placate a tormented soul. She would pray, and welcome Kate’s spirit back at the next Obon with greetings and obeisance. Until then, and especially for the first forty-nine days, until the links of the dead were truly severed with this world and they might go forward freely in their new dimension, Fumi would make offerings each day in the little black lacquer house shrine in her room, of rice and fruit and sake wine, to absolve the penitence the living must always feel towards the dead. Only after the rites of the seventh week might Kate, wherever she was, feel a peace Fumi knew she deserved. This was the very least, and sadly now, thought Fumi, the most she could ever do to help.

  She looked at Itsuko, determinedly moulding a little tree to a shape she thought she desired, and sighed again pulling more thread from her cotton bag. The patternings that enmeshed them in life were so strange.

  She wiped the tears from her eyes for she knew Jun would need her now again.

  It had been his father’s telescope, a professional, complex one. He had not looked at it for years. He polished the lens and examined it for scratches. The sky was fading and he wondered if the pale star he saw now might be Arcturus or Mars. Fumi and his mother had suggested he resurrect the telescope, as they might offer comfort to a child. It was amazing they could really think he was back here as before. The moon was full and bright, he could not think, he could not feel. How could they be sure he would ever be as he was before because a conflict was removed. He was bound to Kate, as much in death as he had been in life, to the choice he had made when he married her. His mother might pull and bind that little tree, securing it to its determined shape, but he had escaped and could never in spirit be made to fit again. For better or for worse. He was like the bonsai that planted once in open ground could never be repotted. He was free inwardly now to spread like the roots of those released trees, refusing forever the fetters that once bound them. Their shapes became unattractive and their balance often lopsided, but they grew as they wished, without restriction or plan, in a way the Universe, not man, had intended.

  Kate. He silently whispered her name. The moon above was white and bright as a mirror. He knew then suddenly that for them all, true guilt would now begin.

  ALSO BY MEIRA CHAND

  THE GOSSAMER FLY

  ISBN: 978-981-4828-21-5

  Confronted by an arrogant and manipulative new maid after her mother is sent back to England following a breakdown, Natsuko, a young girl of English-Japanese parentage, is thrust into a dark and sinister adult world, causing her to retreat into mounting isolation, confusion, fear and anger, leading to a dramatic conclusion in this emotionally charged story.

  LAST QUADRANT

  ISBN: 978-981-4828-22-2

  In the havoc of a great typhoon, Akiko finds herself stranded with Eva, her adoptive mother, Kyo, the natural mother she has never known and Daniel, a troubled young man who has fallen in love with her. In the brief calm of the typhoon’s eye, the group arrives at the comparative safety of their wealthy English neighbour’s concrete house. There they must wait out the violence of the last quadrant – the wildest part of the storm. As the refugees draw together in a fight for survival and are forced to reckon with their deepest selves, the terrible night becomes a turning point for each of them.

  SACRED WATERS

  ISBN: 978-981-4779-50-0

  Orphaned as a child and widowed at thirteen, Sita has always known the shame of being born female in Indian society. Her life constrained and shaped by the men around her, she could not be more different from her daughter, Amita, a headstrong university professor determined to live life on her own terms. Richly layered and beautifully evocative, the novel is a compelling exploration of two women’s struggle to assert themselves in male-dominated societies of both the past and the present.

  A CHOICE OF EVILS

  ISBN: 978-981-4828-24-6

  Set against the backdrop of the Sino-Japanese war of the 1930s, the story of those tumultuous years is told through the lives of a disparate group of fictional characters: a young Russian woman émigré caught between her complex love affair with a British journalist and a Japanese diplomat, an Indian nationalist working for Japanese intelligence, a Chinese professor with communist sympathies, an American missionary doctor and a Japanese soldier, all brought together by the monstrous dislocation of war, enmeshed in a savage world beyond their control.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Meira Chand is of Indian-Swiss parentage and was born and educated in London. She has lived for many years in Japan, and also in India. In 1997 she moved to Singapore, and is now a citizen of the country. Her multi-cultural heritage is reflected in her novels.

  Also by Meira Chand:

  A Different Sky

  A Far Horizon

  House of the Sun

  The Painted Cage