The Garden of Evening Mists. Tan Twan Eng

extended, keeping the centre of the bow where he gripped it level with his eyes. He looked at the target for a moment longer before lowering the bow. The arrow had struck well away from the centre.

      I took the three low steps up to the platform, the gleaming cypress floorboards creaking beneath my feet. ‘Mr Nakamura?’ I said. ‘Nakamura Aritomo? We were supposed to meet later today—’

      ‘Take off your shoes!’ he said. ‘You bring the problems of the world inside.’

      Glancing behind, I saw sand and shreds of grass smeared across the floorboards. I stepped down from the range. The man returned the bow to its stand, his white socks leaving no mark on the floor. I waited as he put on his sandals.

      ‘Go around to the front of the house,’ he said. ‘Ah Cheong will take you to the sitting room.’

      A Chinese manservant led me through the house, sliding open the doors that partitioned off each room and then closing them behind us. I had the impression of moving through a series of boxes, each one opening up to reveal another box, and then another. The servant left me in a sitting room. The doors were opened to the verandah where a low square table was positioned.

      On the lawn below the verandah, string tied to four bamboo splints marked out a rectangle; the top layer of grass had been peeled away, exposing the moist, dark soil beneath. Beyond the rectangle, the ground sloped gently away to the edge of a depression, wide and empty as a saltpan. Mounds of earth and gravel were piled up at its side.

      The drizzle had stopped, but water continued to drip from the eaves, drops of congealed light falling to earth. The servant came out with a tray bearing two small celadon cups, a teapot and a small teakettle, its spout steaming weakly. The archer joined me a few minutes later. He had changed into a pair of beige coloured trousers and a white shirt, matched with a grey linen jacket. He sat in the traditional manner on one of the mats, his legs folded, the weight of his body pressing down on his heels. He indicated that I should sit on the other side of the table. I looked at him for a second and then followed his example, putting the roll of documents next to my knee.

      ‘I am Nakamura Aritomo,’ he said, placing an envelope on the table. I recognised my handwriting on the front, addressed to him. I told him my name and he said, ‘Write it out in Chinese,’ his fingers scribbling over the table.

      ‘I went to a convent school, Mr Nakamura. I was taught Latin, but not Chinese. I only picked up a little of it after the war.’

      ‘What does Yun Ling mean?’

      ‘Cloud Forest.’

      He considered it for a moment. ‘A beautiful name. In Japanese you would be called—’

      ‘I know what I’d be called.’

      For a few seconds he stared at me. Then he emptied the teapot into a bowl and threw the still steaming tea over the verandah. I thought it odd, but said nothing. He re-filled the teapot with hot water from the kettle. ‘I thought we had agreed to meet at nine thirty?’

      ‘If it’s inconvenient for you now, I’ll come back later.’

      He shook his head. ‘How old are you? Thirty-three, thirty-four?’

      ‘I’m twenty-eight.’ I was aware that I had been aged beyond my years by the deprivations in the camp; I thought I had come to accept it but the sudden jab of shame surprised me. ‘You’re making a pond?’ I said, looking to the shallow pit at the bottom of the slope.

      ‘I am merely changing its shape, making it bigger.’ Lifting the teapot, he filled the cups with a translucent green liquid and slid one towards me as if it was a piece on a chessboard. ‘You were a Guest of the Emperor.’

      This time his arrow had found its mark. ‘I was a prisoner in a Japanese camp,’ I said, wondering how he had known.

      ‘When I was building this house, Magnus gave me a watercolour your sister had painted,’ Aritomo said. ‘He reminded me about it when he brought your letter.’

      ‘Yun Hong used to exhibit her paintings with some artists.’

      ‘That is not surprising. She has a lot of talent. Does she still paint?’

      ‘She was with me in the camp.’ I shifted my body, unknotting the pain in my ankles; it had been a long time since I had last sat like this. ‘She died there.’

      Aritomo caught my left hand as I was reaching for my cup. A guarded look sheathed his face the instant his fingers closed around my wrist. I tried to pull away, but he tightened his grip, his eyes compelling me not to struggle. Like an exhausted animal caught in a trap, my hand stopped moving, became inert. He turned it over and touched the stitches where the last two fingers of the glove had been cut off. I withdrew my hand and placed it beneath the edge of the table.

      ‘You want me to design a garden for you.’

      From the moment I had sent my letter off to the gardener, I had been going over what I would say when I met him. ‘Yun Hong . . . my sister . . . she heard about you eleven years ago,’ I said, searching for the right words. ‘You had just moved to Malaya. This was sometime in 1940.’

      ‘Eleven years.’ He turned to stare at the empty pond, his face barren. ‘Hard to believe that I have been living here for so long.’

      ‘Yun Hong was fascinated by Japanese gardens even before we heard about you. Before you came to Malaya,’ I said.

      ‘How did she know about our gardens?’ he said. ‘I doubt there were any in Penang in those days, or in the whole of Malaya. Even today, mine is the only one.’

      ‘My father took all of us to Japan for a month. In 1938. Your government wanted to buy rubber from him. He was busy with his meetings, but the officials’ wives showed us around the city. We visited a few of the temples and the gardens. We even took the train to Kyoto.’ The memory of that holiday – the only time I had been overseas till then – made me smile. ‘I’ll never forget how excited Yun Hong was. I was fifteen, and she was three years older than me. But on that holiday . . . on that holiday she was like a little girl, and I felt I was the elder sister.’

      ‘Ah . . . Kyoto. . .’ murmured Aritomo. ‘Which temples did you see?’

      ‘Joju-in, Tofuku-ji, and the Temple of the Golden Pavilion,’ I said. ‘When we returned home, Yun Hong read all the books she could find on Japanese gardens. She wanted to know – she was obsessed to know – how they were created.’

      ‘You cannot learn gardening from books.’

      ‘We soon found that out,’ I said. ‘She tried to make a rock garden behind our house. I helped her, but it was a failure. My mother was furious that we had ruined the lawn.’ I paused. ‘When Yun Hong heard about you living here, she wanted to see your garden.’

      ‘There would have been nothing to see. Yugiri was not completed at that point.’

      ‘Yun Hong’s love of gardens kept us alive when we were in the camp,’ I said.

      ‘How did it keep you alive?’

      ‘We escaped into make-believe worlds,’ I said. ‘Some imagined themselves building the house of their dreams, or constructing a yacht. The more details they could include, the better they were insulated from the horrors around them. One Eurasian woman – the wife of a Dutch engineer at Shell – this woman wanted to look at her stamp collection again. It gave her the will to go on living. Another man recited the titles of all of Shakespeare’s plays again and again, in the order they had been written, when he was being tortured.’ My throat dried up and I took a swallow of tea. ‘Yun Hong kept our spirits up by talking about the gardens we had visited in Kyoto, describing even the smallest details to me. “This is how we’ll survive,” she told me, “this is how we’ll walk out of this camp.” ’

      The sun was breaking free of the mountains. Over the distant treetops, a flock of birds unspooled into a black wavering thread, pulling across the sky.

      ‘One