The Garden of Evening Mists (40 page)

‘It was not merely about a garden. It was about what each one of us believed. He was always unyielding in his views, his principles. I once told him he would make a good soldier.’

‘He couldn’t have been that rigid,’ I said. ‘He disobeyed his orders. He helped me escape.’

‘Now that
was
uncharacteristic of him. He was always our government’s strongest supporter, always loyal to the Emperor, to our leaders.’

‘He never said anything bad about you. In fact he often praised the gardens you had designed.’

Aritomo’s face seemed to age. ‘But what he did to the prisoners... what
we
did to all of you... ’ He became quiet, then said, ‘You have never told this to anyone?’

‘I tried talking to my father about it, once. He didn’t want to hear about it. It was the same with my brother.’

‘What about your friends?’

‘I was severed from the world I had known. There was no shadow beneath my feet. I felt I was moving through a landscape that was familiar but, at the same time, unrecognisable to me,’ I said. ‘Sometimes I’m so frightened... I’m frightened that this is how I will feel for the rest of my life.’

‘You are still there, in the camp,’ said Aritomo. ‘You have not made it out.’

‘There
is
some part of me still trapped there, buried alive with Yun Hong and all the other prisoners.’ I said, the words coming out slowly. ‘A part of me which I had to leave behind.’ I stopped. Aritomo did not hurry me. ‘Perhaps, if I could go back to the camp and release that part of me, it might make me feel complete once more.’

‘For all you know,’ he said, staring into the distance, ‘the camp – and the mine – could be just over those mountains.’

‘It wasn’t this high up. And it was humid there, and hot.’ I breathed in deeply. ‘The air had none of this... this purity.’

‘Did you try looking for your camp?’

‘After I recovered, it was all I did. I wanted to find where they had killed Yun Hong. I wanted to free her – her and everyone who had died there. Give all of them a proper burial. But no one knew anything about that camp – not the Japanese, not any of the prisoners of war or soldiers I spoke to.’ Scratching the stumps on my hand, I realised that I had not put on my gloves again. I was surprised that I was not embarrassed or awkward about it. ‘I visited a number of Orang Asli kampongs, and each time I would describe the village where I had been rescued, but no one knew anything about the aborigines who had saved me.’

‘What do you think were inside those boxes hidden in the mine?’

‘We thought it was weapons and ammunition,’ I said. ‘But later, when we began to hear rumours that Japan was losing the war, I thought it was strange that they wouldn’t make use of the weapons.’

‘A few months before our soldiers landed,’ Aritomo said, ‘Tominaga came to see me.’

I sat forward and stared at him. ‘He came here? What did he want?’

‘He presented the water wheel to me, on behalf of the Emperor.’ Aritomo studied the creases on his palms. ‘If it can console you in some way, however small, I can assure you that Tominaga did not rape your sister. He preferred men. Always had. I think he went to see your sister because he thought you would not have left without her.’

‘But I did leave without her. I abandoned her.’

‘That was what she wanted you to do. You kept your promise to her.’

We sat there on the bench, listening to the voices of the ageing nuns, left behind in this soon-to-be-forgotten temple. Perhaps they were summoning the clouds to come, to carry them away when the time came for them to leave this world.

* * *

For days after we returned from our hike to the Temple of Clouds, I felt restless, unable to concentrate on my work in Yugiri. By telling Aritomo about my sister’s experiences, I felt I had betrayed the promise I made to her, to keep her suffering a secret.

There was a heightened awareness in Aritomo; I saw it in the way he lifted his face slightly every morning when we began our
kyudo
practice, as though he was testing the air or listening for a noise in the trees. It began to rain more heavily and for longer periods every day, sometimes for hours, but Aritomo would push us harder in the garden whenever the rain let up, scolding us if we took too long to complete the tasks he gave us.

He asked us to pollard the pine trees at the perimeter of his garden. Being the lightest, I was strapped into a rope harness and then hoisted thirty feet above the ground. Pine needles scratched my cheeks and arms and I had difficulty catching Aritomo’s voice in the rising wind as he shouted his instructions to me. I had been up there for ten minutes when I saw him wave to the workers to lower me to the ground. Twisting in the harness to look behind me, I saw that the sky had turned black.

We ran back to his house, reaching it just in time. Standing side by side on the
engawa
, we watched the world dissolve into water. The mountains, the jungle, the garden, all disappeared into the rain.

An unnatural twilight shrouded the house. Lightning flickered through the rooms, illuminating the rice paper screens like spirits passing through worlds. He went into his study and switched on the desk lamp. It struck me that he had not bowed to the portrait of his emperor. In fact, the photograph, I saw, was no longer hanging on the wall.

‘The monsoon has started,’ he said. ‘There will not be much work for the next few months.’

‘It won’t rain all the time,’ I said lightly, hiding my concern that he was going to tell me that my apprenticeship with him had come to an end. I knew I was not yet ready to create my own garden.

‘Listen to that.’ Above our heads, the rain thrashed in the winds, savaging the roof tiles.

The garden, the house, the space between the two of us, all became a song hidden in the static.

‘You want me to leave Yugiri?’ I said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I want to create a tattoo for you.’

Had I heard him properly over the tumult of the rain? ‘A tattoo? Like the one you made for Magnus?’

‘You do not understand.’ He closed and opened his fingers a few times. ‘It will be a true
horimono
, covering the top half of your body.’

‘You’re mad, Aritomo.’ I stared at him. ‘Have you even thought what my life would be like, if anyone knew I had something like that on me?’

‘If you cared about what other people thought, you would never have come to see me.’

‘You said you had given up tattooing.’

‘Lately it has been calling to me again.’ He curled his fingers. Their joints seemed more swollen than I had realised. ‘The pain is getting worse. I want to make a
horimono
, Yun Ling. I never had the opportunity. Or found the right person.’

He went behind the empty bamboo birdcage and peered between its bars. I saw his face, divided into long, narrow strips. He set the cage spinning with a flick of his wrist. His face became distorted. ‘I have no interest in making a single, small tattoo. But a
horimono
…’

The spinning of the cage slowed down, but its bars continued to ripple their shadows across the walls. I had the sensation of being inside a magic lantern, watching the world reel around me on a rice paper screen.

‘Obtaining a
horimono
is a great honour,’ Aritomo continued. ‘In Japan you would be asked for letters of introduction and you would be interviewed extensively by the
horoshi
before he decided if he wanted to work on you.’

There was a soft crack of bamboo as he stopped the spinning birdcage. The walls seemed to continue revolving for a few seconds longer. He stepped away from behind the cage.

‘What sort of designs do you have in mind?’

‘The
horoshi
and his client discuss the matter before a decision is made.’

‘How do they decide?’

‘Some
horoshi
keep drawings or photographs of the tattoos they have already created.’

‘Let me see them.’

‘I never kept them – they were not something I wanted to have lying around. And, anyway, I have never made a
horimono
.’ He thought for a second or two. Then he went to kneel before a chest of drawers in a corner of the study. He took out the box of woodblock prints he had shown me before and spread them out on his table.

‘Most tattoo masters are expert woodblock artists – the skills are essentially the same,’ he said. ‘
Horoshi
often create pieces inspired by
Suikoden.
’

‘What are the procedures?’

He placed an
ukiyo-e
print on his desk. The process of tattooing would begin with
suji
, drawing the outline with a brush, he explained, his fingers moving around the print light as a dragonfly skimming over a pond. The outline would then be tattooed before the next stage,
bokashi
– filling in the drawings with colours.

‘There are two ways to execute
bokashi.
More needles will be used where I want to put in darker colours. The ink is entered into your skin at a uniform level, the needles held like this.’

His fingers tapered to a point, as though he was trying to cast a shadow of a bird’s head. He pecked my wrist in a vertical motion. ‘The effect of shading, like what you see here,’ he indicated the camellia petals in the corner of the
ukiyo-e
, ‘is more difficult to create. The ink has to be inserted at different depths into your skin. I will require fewer needles, working them in at an oblique angle.’

His slow, matter-of-fact explanation lulled me. ‘The
horimono
will be contained within a frame,’ he continued. ‘Or it can fade away into the surrounding skin, into
akebono mikiri
, a “daybreak” design.’

‘Daybreak,’ I whispered. It called to mind a border with no visible boundary, a sky fenced in only by a barrier of light. ‘Any adverse side-effects?’

‘Well... in the old days, when cadmium was used in red ink, clients would experience fevers and pain. Some people have complained that their tattooed skin stopped perspiring, that they felt cool even on the warmest days.’

‘Like a reptile. How long would it take to complete the tattoos?’

‘Most people can only endure an hour’s session a week.’ He paused to do some mental 267

calculations. ‘A
horimono
like what I have in mind will require about – oh, twenty to thirty weeks. Half a year. Perhaps less.’

‘I’ll consider it,’ I said, laying out my words carefully between us, ‘if the tattoos – the
horimono
,’ I corrected myself, preferring the Japanese word as it did not have the same connotations, ‘if the
horimono
covers only my back.’

He deliberated for a few seconds. ‘Let me see your body.’

‘Close the shutters.’

‘Only a fool would be out in this storm.’

I continued to stare at him, and after a moment he obeyed me. Now and again the noise of the rain on the roof shifted as the wind changed, only to pick up a few seconds later, the erratic rhythm seeming to match my breathing.

Aritomo unbuttoned my blouse slowly and then turned me around, slipping it off my shoulders. I scrubbed some heat into my arms as he unclasped my brassiere. We had been naked in each other’s presence so often, but now I felt awkward as I stood there in his study. He draped my clothes over the back of a chair and switched on another lamp, angling its shade at me. I shielded my eyes, the heat feeling good on my bare skin.

He circled me and I turned with him, a satellite moon pulled around a planet’s orbit.

‘Keep still,’ he said. ‘And stand up straight.’

I pulled back my shoulders, lifting my breasts and my chin. His touch was gentle at first, and then his thumbs began to press into my back. He stopped when I flinched, but I signalled to him to continue. His hands lingered over the scars from the beatings I had suffered in the camp. I felt the tips of his fingers stroking the marks.

‘I will paint you from here,’ he traced a curve along my shoulders and stopped at my back where it hollowed before rising into my buttocks, ‘to here. The
horimono
will not be visible under your clothes.’

‘The pain, is it bearable?’

‘You have endured much worse.’

I turned away from him and got dressed quickly. I adjusted the collar of my blouse and brushed my hair into place. ‘You’ve never done something like this on anyone else? Not even your wife?’

‘You will be the only one, Yun Ling.’

The sheets of
ukiyo-e
crackled when I picked them up, as though the demons pressed into the paper were struggling to escape their infernal prison. I put them down again quickly. ‘I don’t want these on me.’

‘They mean nothing to you,’ he conceded.

‘What do you suggest then?’

He was silent for a minute or two. ‘The
horimono
can be an extension of
Sakuteiki
. I will put in the ideas I have accumulated over the years, the things you should remember when designing a garden.’

The possibilities were taking shape in my mind, like an unkempt bush being clipped into recognisable topiary. ‘Things I will never discover in any book or from any other gardener.’

‘Yes.’

‘All right.’ It seemed so easy, agreeing to let him tattoo me. I wondered which of my dresses I could never wear again.

‘It is not uncommon for people to change their mind, to give up before the
horimono
has been completed,’ Aritomo said. ‘I want to be certain that I
will
get to finish it.’

I went to the window and opened the shutters. Cold, moist air hit my face. The storm had weakened for the moment; the clouds over the mountains were swirls of silver and grey. I felt like a pearl diver on the ocean floor, looking at the soundless waves pounding the rocky shoreline far above me.

A line of cars were parked along the road outside the Smokehouse Hotel when Aritomo and I got there just after noon. The light on the terrace was painful after the dimness of the lobby. I shaded my eyes and looked around. Marquees had been set up in case it rained, but the skies were clear.

Errol Monteiro’s four-piece Eurasian band from Penang was playing on a low platform decorated with white bunting. I recognised most of the guests. A few of them glanced at us and then looked away quickly. The whole of Cameron Highlands had probably heard I was living with Aritomo by now. Magnus broke away from a cluster of people and strode over to us.