The garden belonged to an ancient family, Nakamura by name, whose inn had once served traveling lords in a post-station town along the Central Mountain Road. For the first decade after the Meiji Restoration, it remained much as it had been. In the gourd-shaped pond lay limpid water, and atop a miniature hill drooped the branches of pine trees. The two pavilions, the House of the Resting Crane and the Bower of the Purified Heart, had also endured. Into the pond, from a cliff at the far end of the garden, cascaded swirling white water. Among the golden kerias—their expanse growing year by year—stood a stone lantern to which Princess Kazu is said to have given a name on her journey through the region.
There was nonetheless the undeniable intimation of impending ruin. Particularly at the beginning of spring, when the upper branches of the trees within and beyond the garden suddenly sprouted new buds, one could sense all the more intensely that lurking behind this picturesque artifact was a menacing and savage power.
The retired head of the family was a gruff old man who spent untroubled days in the main house, which looked out on the garden. With his elderly wife, who suffered from an ulcerated scalp, he would sit at the heated table, playing go or flower cards. Sometimes, however, after losing to her five or six times in succession, he would fly into a rage.
To his eldest he had relinquished his rights as householder. This son was married to a cousin and lived with her in a cramped annex connected by an elevated corridor. He had taken the nom de plume of Bunshitsu and was of so petulant a disposition that even his own father, to say nothing of his frail wife and younger brothers, was eager to avoid his displeasure.
One visitor to the inn in those days was the mendicant poet Seigetsu, who in his wanderings would turn up from time to time. Strangely enough, he was the only guest welcomed by the elder son, who served him drink and encouraged him to compose. Among the linked verses they have left for posterity is:
Lingering in the mountains
The scent of flowers,
The nightingale’s1 song; (Seigetsu)
Here and there—here and there
A waterfall’s glimmerings (Bunshitsu)
Of the two younger brothers, the first had been adopted into the family of a relative, a grain merchant; the other worked for a large sake brewer in a village four or five leagues away. As though by tacit agreement, they rarely returned to their parental home. The youngest was inconvenienced by the distance but was also disinclined by long-standing ill feeling between himself and the current householder. The sibling between them was leading a dissolute life and was hardly seen even in the home of his adoptive parents.
Within two or three years, the garden had gone further to seed. Duckweed had begun to appear on the surface of the pond, and withered trees mingled with the shrubbery. During a terribly dry summer, the old man suddenly died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Four or five days before, he had been drinking shōchū when he saw on the other side of the pond the form of a court noble, dressed in white, going in and out of the bower. At least it should be said that he had seen such a phantom in the daylight.
At the end of the next spring, the second son absconded with money from his adoptive parents and ran off with a tavern maid. In the autumn, the wife of the eldest gave premature birth to a baby boy.
After the death of his father, this son had moved into the main house to live with his mother. The annex was rented to the local schoolmaster, who having embraced the utilitarianism of Fukuzawa Yukichi, succeeded over the course of time in persuading the owner to plant fruit trees in the garden. Now when the spring came, there were among the familiar pine and willow trees the richly colored blossoms of peach, apricot, and plum. As he strolled with the eldest son through the new orchard, he would remark: “One could host splendid blossom-viewing parties here, thereby killing two birds with one stone.” The artificial hill, the pond, and the pavilions merely looked the more forlorn, as though, so to speak, man had lent a hand to nature in the ruin of the garden.
Moreover, in the autumn, a fire, such as had not been seen in many a year, broke out on the hill in the back. Suddenly and completely, the waterfall was no more. Then, with the first snowfall, the householder fell ill. The diagnosis of the physician was consumption or, as it is called today, tuberculosis. Whether lying in bed or up and about, he was more irascible than ever. At New Year’s, when his second brother came to offer his best wishes, he concluded a heated argument with him by throwing a hand-warmer in his direction. The intended target took his leave and never saw the other again, not even on his deathbed over a year later. Lying under the mosquito net in the nocturnal care of his wife, the elder brother had said just before breathing his last: “The frogs are quacking. What’s become of Seigetsu?” But the poet had long ago ceased coming round to beg, perhaps having wearied of what there was to see.
The third son waited until the year of mourning was over and then married the grain merchant’s youngest daughter. Taking advantage of the schoolmaster’s transfer to another post, the new couple moved into the annex. Into their abode came black-lacquer wardrobes and red-and-white cotton decorations.
But now the widow of the first son fell ill, diagnosed with the same disease as that of her late husband. She had spat out blood, so that now their one and only child, Ren’ichi, having already been separated from his father, was taken away from her and made to sleep with his grandmother. Every night she wrapped a kerchief round her head, but the smell of her head sores nonetheless attracted the rats, and when on occasion she forgot the kerchief, she was bitten.
At the end of that year, the wife of the first son died as quietly as the dimming of an oil lamp. On the day after her funeral, the House of the Resting Crane, below the artificial hill, collapsed under the weight of snow from a heavy storm.
When spring returned, the garden seemed to all appearances, except for the thatched roof of the bower near the turbid pond, little more than a budding thicket.
One snow-cloud-covered evening, ten years after his elopement, the second son returned to his father’s house, or rather to what was now in reality the house of his younger brother. The prodigal was received with neither open displeasure nor particular joy; it was as though nothing at all had occurred.
He spent the days thereafter in the main house, stretched out in the room with the Buddhist altar. There, suffering from a foul disease, he huddled at the warmed table. In the altar stood the mortuary tablets of his father and elder brother. But he had closed the cabinet doors to avoid the sight of them and, for that matter, rarely glimpsed his mother, younger brother, and sister-in-law except at mealtimes. The only occasional visitor to his room was his orphaned nephew. For him he would draw pictures of mountains and ships on the boy’s paper slate. There too the lyrics of an old song would sometimes turn up in a faltering hand:
“Mukōjima is now in bloom.
Come out, come out, O teahouse maid.”
Again it was spring. Amidst the overgrown grass and shrubbery of the garden, meager peach and apricot blossoms bloomed. The Bower of the Purified Heart was still reflected in the dull water of the pond, but the second son remained as ever, shut up alone in the altar room, for the most part dreaming the day away.
One day he heard the faint sound of a shamisen and simultaneously fragments of a song:
“Of Matsumoto, Lord Yoshie
With cannon armed,
Went out to battle at Suwa . . .”
He raised his head from where he lay and listened. It was without doubt from his mother in the sitting room that the music was coming. “In dazzling attire, the valiant warrior, set proudly forth that day . . .” She was singing, it seemed, to her grandson; the ballad was of a style popular two or three decades before, one that her high-spirited husband might well have learned from a courtesan.
“At Toyohashi, his fate was sealed,
By hostile cannonball cut down;
As dew on the grass,
His precious life vanished,
His name passed on from age to age . . .”
His face covered by an unkempt beard, the second son listened, a strange light appearing in his eyes.
Several days later, the youngest son discovered his elder brother digging at the foot of the hill, now overgrown with butterbur. He was panting for breath, wielding his hoe uncertainly. It was a somewhat comical sight, though there was also an earnest intensity in his efforts.
“What are you doing, elder brother?” asked the third son, a cigarette in his mouth, as he came up behind him.
“Me?” he replied, looking up as though dazzled by the light. “I thought I’d make a small crick here.”
“A crick? Whatever for?”
“I’d like to make the garden what it once was.”
The youngest of the brothers smiled and asked nothing further.
Every day, hoe in hand, the second son labored zealously on his creek. Illness had so weakened him that he had no easy time of it. Vulnerable to fatigue, he was also unaccustomed to such work and thus prone to the disabilities that come with blistered hands and broken fingernails. Sometimes he would throw down the hoe and lie down as though dead, the flowers and leaves all about him obscured in the summer haze that filled the garden. After a few minutes of rest, he would nonetheless struggle up to his feet and doggedly resume his hoeing.
But even with the passing days, there was little noticeable change. Weeds still filled the pond, and in the shrubbery the brushwood was putting out branches. Particularly when the fruit trees had shed their blossoms, the garden looked more desolate than ever. Moreover, no one among the other members of the family, young or old, had any sympathetic interest in the second son’s endeavors. The third son had caught speculation fever, his head filled with the fluctuating prices of rice and silk stocks. His wife felt a womanly revulsion toward her brother-in-law’s illness, while the mother worried that all his puttering about would only cause him to overexert himself. Turning his back on both nature and human society, he stubbornly carried on, incrementally reforming the garden.
One morning he went out after the rain had lifted and found Ren’ichi arranging stones at the edge of the stream, overgrown with the drooping butterbur. “Ojisan!” he happily exclaimed, looking up at his uncle. “Starting today, I’ll give you a hand!”
For the first time there was a bright smile on the man’s face. “And so you shall,” he said.
Thereafter, Ren’ichi no longer went out to play; instead he became a steadfast assistant to his uncle. Resting in the shade of a tree, the second son would entertain his nephew with tales of the world beyond his ken: of the sea, of Tōkyō, of the railway. As he munched on green plums, Ren’ichi would listen intently, as though mesmerized.
There was no rainy season that year. Despite the fierce sunlight and the suffocating vapors of the overheated plants, the aging invalid and the boy persevered, digging out and clearing the pond, cutting down the scrub, and gradually moving on to other tasks. Yet though they might manage to overcome the external obstacles, those within remained immovable. The second son had before his eyes the phantom of the garden as it once had been, but in regard to the details, the arrangement of the trees or the course of the paths, his memory quite failed him. Sometimes in the midst of his work, he would suddenly stop, lost in thought, leaning for support on his hoe and gazing about.
“What is it?” Ren’ichi would invariably ask, giving him a look of concern.
Drifting about, drenched in sweat, the other could only mumble in confusion to himself: “Now what was it like before? This maple couldn’t’ve been here . . .” There was nothing Ren’ichi could do but crush ants with his muddied hands.
There was more to the interior obstacles than this. At the height of the summer, the second son, perhaps a victim of his own unceasing labor, began to grow ever more befuddled. He repeatedly undid his own work, filling in the pond he had once dredged, replanting pine trees he had just uprooted. It particularly angered Ren’ichi to see him make stakes for the pond by cutting down the willows along the embankment.
“But we just planted those trees!” he protested, glaring at his uncle.
“Yes, I suppose you’re right,” came the reply. “I don’t understand anything at all anymore.” He stared sadly at the pond, blazing in the noonday sun.
With the coming of autumn, however, the garden could again be distinguished, if only dimly, amidst the mass of weeds and scrub. Of course, anyone who had known it as it once had been, would have seen that the House of the Resting Crane was no more and that the waterfall had ceased to flow. Moreover, that was the least of it: the elegant beauty that the renowned designer of the garden had bestowed upon it had all but utterly vanished.
And yet it was still what one would call a garden. The water of the pond was again clear, reflecting the round miniature hill, and in front of the Bower of the Purified Heart the pine trees once more spread forth their branches in languid majesty.
At the very moment of the restoration, however, the second son was forced to take to bed, burning with fever day after day, his body wracked with pain. “It’s all because you’ve gone beyond your strength!” lamented his mother repeatedly, sitting at his bedside.
Her son was nonetheless content. There remained, of course, many places in the garden to which he might have liked to attend, but now there was naught to be done about it. It had in any case been all worth the effort, and for that he was at peace. A decade of suffering had taught him resignation, and such had become his salvation.
It was unbeknownst to all that he slipped away, just as the season was drawing to an end. Ren’ichi ran shrieking over the elevated corridor into the annex when he found him. Their faces filled with dismay, the members of the family immediately gathered around the deceased. The youngest son turned to his mother and said: “Look. He seems to be smiling.” With her eyes fixed on the large Buddhist altar and away from the body of her brother-in-law, his wife exclaimed: “Oh, the panel doors are open today!”
After his uncle’s funeral, Ren’ichi often sat alone in the Bower of the Purified Heart, invariably gazing forlornly at the water and the trees of the deepening autumn . . .
It had been the garden of a venerable clan, the Nakamuras’ inn having served the great feudal lords. Within ten years it had all gone to ruin. The house was torn down, and on the site a railway station was built, with a small restaurant in front.
Of the Nakamura family, no one remained. The mother had, of course, long since made her place among the dead. Having failed in business, the third son had reportedly gone off to Ōsaka.
Trains daily pulled into the station and departed. The young stationmaster sat at a large desk. Pausing in his already leisurely routine, he would look out at the blue mountains or chat with his subordinates from the region. Yet in all their talk was never a mention of the Nakamuras. Indeed, it never occurred to anyone that here, in the very place where they now found themselves, had once stood a miniature hill and pavilions.
In the meantime, Ren’ichi had made his way to Akasaka in Tōkyō and was studying in an institute for European art. As he stood in front of his easel, there was nothing in the atelier—neither the light that came in through the roof window, nor the smell of the paint, nor the model, her hair in a split-peach bun—that might have reminded him of home. And yet as he moved his brush over the canvas, he sometimes saw in his inner mind the sad face of an old man, who, smiling again, was surely speaking to him now that he too was weary from uninterrupted work: “When you were still a child, you helped me, so let me help you now.”
Ren’ichi lives in poverty, toiling every day on his oil paintings. Of his uncle, the youngest son, there is nary a word.