The Garden of Evening Mists (31 page)

I wonder if there is any truth in Tatsuji’s suspicion that Aritomo had been sent to Malaya by the Emperor. The answer is elusive, like ink in water.

This morning, I intercept Ah Cheong when he comes out from the kitchen with a tray of tea and scones. ‘I’ll take it to him,’ I say.

Tatsuji’s attention is fixed on the prints spread out on the desk when I enter his workroom. The bamboo blinds are rolled up, the sun on the cedar-wood floor hot when I walk barefoot across it. His copy of Yeats’s poems lies on the desk. He continues to stare at a woodblock print, only glancing up when he becomes aware of me. In the second before he looks away, I see his eyes are filled with grief.

Hesitating for a moment, I set the tray down next to a print of a Malay fishing village.

The village seems to be located somewhere on the east coast. I wonder what it is about the print that has so affected him.

He clears his throat a few times. ‘They are all untitled. I have arranged them in chronological sequence.’ He turns the sheet over and points to a vertical line of Japanese script behind it. ‘This one is dated the fifth month of the twentieth year of the Showa
jidai
– the Era of Enlightened Peace.’

I knew that each era in the Japanese calendar corresponds to an emperor’s reign. ‘When did Hirohito become emperor?’

‘Christmas Day, 1926. That would make it 1945 when Aritomo wrote this. May, 1945.’

‘Three months before Japan surrendered.’ In my mind I picture Aritomo sitting here in Yugiri, making this print while I was still a prisoner: each of us unaware of the other; unaware that our paths would converge one day.

I reach over and hold up the print. On a beach, rows of cuttlefish are drying on wooden racks. Behind them, coconut trees bow to each other, their leaves so finely-etched that I can almost hear them rustling in the salted wind. Aritomo has set the entire scene inside the outline of a large cuttlefish, covering the outer edges with overlapping prints of smaller cuttlefish in translucent dark blue ink, shadows on shadows.

‘The ancient Chinese called the cuttlefish the Scribe of the Ocean God, because it carries ink in its body,’ I murmur. ‘Something Aritomo once told me. Is the quality of the prints acceptable for your book?’

Tatsuji clears his throat again. ‘Most of them. Not as good as Kanaoka’s works, of course. But then, no one’s is, I suppose.’ I look at him, and he explains, ‘Kanaoka lived in the seventh century. He is remembered for the realism of his work. A horse he painted on a wall in a palace was said to come alive at night and gallop in the grasslands outside, beneath the autumn moon.’

‘Some of the pieces have been damaged by moisture,’ I point out.

‘Even if they are in tatters, I want people to see them. They will go into my book – with your permission, of course.’ He studies the fishing village again and, in a softer voice, says,

‘This is the first time I have been back since the war.’

‘Only the older people like me – like us – remember it now,’ I say.

He lifts his gaze from the
ukiyo-e
and looks at me. ‘You are not well are you?’

I am silent for a moment. ‘You told me you were a Navy pilot.’

He nods.

‘Where were you based? Butterworth? Singapore?’ I wonder if he had been part of the first wave of planes that had bombed the streets of Singapore and Penang. Perhaps he had been in the squadron that had sunk the
Prince of Wales
and the
Repulse
off the east coast.

Tatsuji squints through the windows, as though he has seen something on the horizon.

‘My base was outside a fishing village.’

‘Where was it?’ I reach behind me and pull up the other rosewood chair, sitting close to him.

For a long while he does not say anything. Finally he begins to speak in a slow, steady voice.

* * *

‘It was raining on the morning I was scheduled to die. I had not slept. All night the rain had blown in from the South China Sea, the water lashing the thatched roofs of our billets. The monsoon should have already ended, yet the rains still came, day after day.

‘Colonel Teruzen, my flight instructor, was already on the verandah, looking out to the beach. Lightning flashed between the low-lying clouds and the sea. ‘No flying today,’ he said when I went to join him. His relief was evident. He was forty years old that year, and I knew he would survive the war. And for that I was glad.

‘The small airfield was outside Kampong Penyu, on the south-eastern coast of Malaya.

The runway was parallel to the beach. The billets were now empty of pilots except for Colonel Teruzen and me.

‘“No flying today,” I repeated. I would live another day. A sense of relief made me lightheaded and ashamed. But stirred into that were also the increasing frustrations and uncertainties of waiting.

‘I’d been assigned my duty over two months before, together with the other pilots in my squadron. Six of us had flown from the naval airbase in Kyushu all the way to Luzon. We spent a night at the Luzon air-base, leaving early at dawn the next day to avoid being detected by the Americans. An hour after taking off from Luzon, my plane developed engine problems, shuddering as it struggled to carry the five hundred-pound bomb attached beneath. These planes had not been constructed to carry such a load. They were shoddily built by that time. There was nothing I could do. Our airplanes were so basic at this stage of the war that we did not even have radio to communicate with one another. I could only watch my fellow pilots speed away, flying south, towards Malaya. And then they were gone.

‘I examined my charts for the nearest landing strip, praying that the faltering engine would not stall. Forty minutes later I made a rough landing on the Bacolod air-base. It was just a collection of wooden huts surrounded by low mountain ranges, their peaks clipped off by the storm clouds. The only sign of life was a windsock, fluttering madly as though a bird was trapped in it.

‘The ground crew consisted of a middle-aged limping mechanic and his assistant. I described the fault in the engine to them. “How long will it take to fix it?”

‘“We’ll have to wait for the engine to cool, but from what you described…” the mechanic sucked his teeth. He understood my desperation: I had to die together with my squadron comrades. We had gone through our aviation training and graduated together from the Imperial Naval Academy. I did not want to be left behind. “There’s an old Mitsubishi engine in our workshop,” he said. “Maybe we can salvage some parts from it. We’ll be as quick as we can.”

‘He stood to attention as I sensed someone coming up behind me. I turned around, and for the first time in a year I saw Colonel Teruzen again. He narrowed his eyes in slight amusement and I raised a belated salute.

‘“Lieutenant Yoshikawa,” he said. “Kind of you to drop in for a visit.”

‘“Trouble with my airplane, sir,” I replied, flustered by his unexpected appearance.

‘He glanced at the aircraft behind me, his eyes clouding over. “You’ve been assigned to the
tokko
unit?”

‘“I – all of us in my class – volunteered,” I said. “What are you doing here? I heard you were in Tokyo.”

‘“I am touring our air-bases in the South China Sea,” he said, “reporting to Admiral Onishi on the efficacy of sending all you young pilots to your deaths.” The anger in his voice was clear – he had trained so many of us. “
A million hearts beating as one
,” he quoted the suicide pilots’ slogan, by now repeated throughout all of Japan. “A waste. A terrible, terrible waste.”

‘I was tired, and my uniform was already wet and sour from the humidity. “Where is everyone?” I asked.

‘“The last pilots left yesterday. A convoy of American warships were spotted in the Sulu Sea,” Colonel Teruzen said. “We are awaiting the next batch. Perhaps they will be sending children soon. Come,” he said. “We will get you some breakfast. You can report to the CO later.

He is usually drunk by this time.”

‘I followed him to a room in a low building two hundred yards from the hangar, bare except for a desk and a faded map of the Philippines pinned on a wall. I bowed to a photograph of the Emperor. Colonel Teruzen leaned against the doorframe and watched, his arms folded across his chest. “Where are you headed?” he asked.

‘“The south-east coast of Malaya,” I said.

‘“Kampong Penyu?” He frowned. “I thought we had abandoned that base.”

‘“I do not know, Teruzen-san. I merely follow orders.”

‘He came closer to me, and I remembered our last day together in Tokyo. I had made the decision to fulfil my duty, to put aside my own needs. I did not wish to be reminded of those days, gone the way of all
tokko
pilots now. “How is Noriko?”

‘“There was an air raid,” he said, his face rigid. “She was in the house preparing our dinner. The whole neighbourhood was destroyed. The fires burned for days.”

‘For a long moment we stood apart, and then I stepped forward and embraced him.

‘The mechanic took five days to repair my engine, and another three days to fine-tune it. I was torn between the need to rush him and the urge to prolong my stay. Teruzen took me hiking in the nearby hills. There was no need to talk much now – we understood each other’s shades of silences. A new intensity came into everything we did. And for the first time since we met, so many years ago, I was rid of all futile guilt. At night I would lie awake and feel his presence next to me. He slept fitfully. His hair had turned a light ash, and there were more lines around his eyes.

‘We had met at my father’s house in Tokyo. Teruzen had been the Naval Advisor sent to oversee the manufacture of the airplanes being built by my father. Japan had just taken Singapore and the war across Asia was going extremely well. There was an immediate understanding between us that night when I looked into his eyes after I bowed to him. I lingered around as my father introduced him to the other industrialists.

‘He came regularly to discuss the production and engineering details of the airplanes with my father, often staying the night. I was eighteen years old. All around me were exhortations to join the forces to protect our homeland. It was easy to get caught up in the hysteria, to be willingly seduced by the newspapers’ stories of the heroic fighter pilots. Every high school student in Japan wanted to be a Navy pilot.

‘I completed my preparatory aviation training and applied to the Imperial Naval Academy where he taught. Sometimes he would invite a few of us from class back to his home.

It was there that he first showed me some of Aritomo’s
ukiyo-e
. He had a large collection of them. “They were made by the Emperor’s
niwashi
,” he told me once when I was visiting him by myself.

‘“The same man who gave you the tattoo?” I said. I had already seen the pair of herons chasing each other in a circle on the upper left corner of his back. Repelled by it at first, I changed my mind the more often I saw it. It had struck me as odd that a man of Teruzen’s class would have himself tattooed. I took the opportunity to ask him about it now, and Teruzen replied, “We were close friends.”

‘Something in his voice made me ask, “What happened?”

‘“The Emperor sacked him. Aritomo left the country a few years ago. No one knows where he went.”

‘On a few occasions, Teruzen took me to the gardens Aritomo had designed and he told me stories about the gardener. Now when I look back on them, those were the happiest days of my life. But that was also the period when I met his wife Noriko. She was then in her thirties, her soft beauty in stark contrast to her robust-looking husband. I knew that I would have to end our relationship.

‘Japan was losing the war by then. We began to hear of Vice-Admiral Onishi’s plans to defend our country. Pilots were being asked to launch suicide attacks on American warships.

These pilots were called “Cherry Blossoms”, blooming for just a brief moment of time before they fell.

‘I received my assignment after my graduation. I did not tell Teruzen when he brought me to Yasukuni to worship the spirits of our fallen warriors. There, in the holy silence of the shrine’s courtyard, I told him that I would not see him again.

‘Even now I can still see it so clearly in my mind – the sorrow in his face. He closed his eyes, as though saying a prayer to the dead all around us. When he opened his eyes again, he said, “Promise me we will meet again here after the war.” I agreed, but I knew it would not happen. The war had brought us together but, once it ended, everything would change again. He would have Noriko to return to. I bowed to him and walked out of the shrine.

‘Ten days after I made the emergency landing on Bacolod, my plane was once again ready for me to fly onwards to Malaya. When I thanked the mechanic, he looked at me, and then at Teruzen walking towards us from the other side of the runway. “If I had had the courage, I would have damaged the engine beyond repair,” he said. “There have been too many wasteful deaths.”

‘“If I had had the courage, Naga-san,” I said, “I would have asked you to do it.” We bowed to each other. Then, as he was leaving, he stopped and turned back to me. “I’ll say a prayer for you at Yasukuni Shrine when this war is over.”

‘Teruzen came up to me and knocked on the plane’s fuselage. The metal sounded thin and hollow. “Your father consulted me on their construction,” he said. “But these are not what we wanted to build. They dishonour your family’s name. They shame our nation.”

‘“My father built some of the best airplanes before the war,” I said. “But we ran out of materials. We ran out of spirit.”

‘Teruzen gripped my shoulders. “We never ran out of spirit.”

‘I pulled out a sheet of paper from my battered flying suit and said, “You gave this to me, not long after we met.”

‘He glanced at it and pushed my hand away. ‘I don’t need it. I know it by heart.’

‘“I would like to hear it in your voice again,” I said. “Please... ”

‘“
I know that I shall meet my fate, somewhere among the clouds above…
” he began, speaking in English. It was the first line from Yeats’s poem,
An Irish Airman Foresees His
Death.
I closed my eyes and listened to him, hearing the resigned anger in his voice as he came to the last line. I knew then that, unlike our last parting, I would not try to forget him again. I opened my eyes slowly. “I was a fool, wasn’t I, that day at Yasukuni?” I said. “All this wasted time.”