Garden of Evening Mists

  “For what purpose?” I sit down in one of the rosewood chairs.

  “Have you ever heard of Golden Lily?”

  The brooch glints on the creases of my gloved palm. “No.”

  “It is the title of one of our emperor’s poems,” he says. “Kin No Yuri. A beautiful name, is it not, for one of my country’s worst crimes of the Pacific War? It was 1937—after we attacked Nanjing. Officials in the palace became concerned that the army was siphoning off the spoils of war. To ensure that the Imperial General Headquarters received its share of the plunder, a plan was conceived. It was named Golden Lily.”

  The operation was not under the control of the army, Tatsuji explains, but was headed by Prince Chichibu Yasuhito, the emperor’s brother. Chichibu was assisted by some of the other princes. “They had accountants, financial advisers, experts in art and antiques working under the direction of these princes. Many of these experts were connected to the throne by blood or marriage,” Tatsuji says. “Golden Lily sent its spies out to Asia, to gather information about the treasures that could be stolen. Anything that was worth taking was noted, the information scrupulously recorded.”

  “As though they were compiling a catalog for an auction house,” I say.

  “Hai. A very exclusive auction house.” He shifts on his feet. “When the Imperial Army swept through China . . . Malaya and Singapore . . . Korea, the Philippines, Burma . . . Java and Sumatra, members of Golden Lily followed closely behind. They knew where to look, and they stole everything they could lay their hands on: jade and gold Buddha statues from ancient temples; cultural artifacts and antiques from museums; jewelry and gold hoarded by wealthy Chinese with their distrust of banks. Golden Lily emptied royal collections and national treasuries. It removed bullion and priceless artworks, carvings, pottery and paper currencies.”

  “They took all that back to Japan?”

  Tatsuji’s eyes fix onto a point far away in time. “Golden Lily knew that it would be dangerous to transport these items back to Japan once the war had begun. There was also the fear that in the event we were occupied by foreign powers, Golden Lily would have no access to these treasures. It was safer not to move the loot back to Japan, but to hide it in the Philippines. Spies were dispatched to scout for suitable hiding places in Mindanao and Luzon. Once the army took control of these islands, Golden Lily moved in.”

  “Was Golden Lily operating here, in Malaya?”

  “There were factories in Penang and Ipoh that melted down gold and silver stolen from families and banks,” Tatsuji says. “They could have been run by Golden Lily.”

  “Those treasures looted in Malaya were then shipped out to the Philippines?”

  “Yes.”

  “That was a huge risk, transporting the loot across the seas.”

  “Golden Lily vessels were made to pass as registered hospital ships,” Tatsuji says. “Allied airplanes and warships coming across these ships noted the flags, cross-checked the registration numbers and left them alone.”

  I am rigid with anger. “Thousands of civilians were evacuated from Singapore in a convoy of ships flying the Red Cross flag. Your planes sank all of them. The survivors floating in the sea were strafed or left to drown. The women were picked up, raped and then thrown back into the sea.”

  Tatsuji looks away from me. “The plan was,” he says, “that once things had settled down, once we had won the war, the hiding places in the Philippines would be opened and the treasures shipped back to Tokyo.”

  “But you lost the war.”

  “Hai. The unthinkable happened. And so everything stolen by Golden Lily could still be out there.”

  I return the brooch to Tatsuji. “Where did you get this?”

  “When we were on Kampong Penyu, Teruzen told me that part of his duties was to fly members of the imperial family to wherever they wanted to go, and to organize air cover for their vessels. He refused to say anything further when I pressed him.” He stares at the chrysanthemum brooch. “That last morning, after he had flown off, I returned to our hut. I found the brooch among my things.” He falls silent. “I have been doing research on Kin No Yuri over the years, just to understand what Teruzen had been doing.”

  “Was he a part of this . . . Golden Lily?” I feign unfamiliarity with the term.

  “A year ago I tracked down an engineer who had worked for Golden Lily,” Tatsuji says. “He was in his nineties, and he wanted to tell his story before he died. He had been sent to Luzon, to supervise gangs of POWs toiling in underground vaults built into the mountains. Hundreds of slave workers had worked day and night to excavate the tunnels and chambers. Once the chambers were packed full with the treasures, a Shinto priest was brought in to conduct a blessing ceremony for the site. Ceramics experts from Japan sealed the entrances to the chambers with a mixture of porcelain clay and local rocks, dyed to blend in with the local geology. Fast-growing trees and shrubs—papayas and guava trees worked best, the engineer said—were planted over the entire area to blend it into the surrounding countryside.”

  “What happened . . . what happened to the prisoners?”

  “They were taken to another place a short distance away—a cave or an abandoned mine prepared months in advance. Those who resisted were shot. Once they were all inside, explosives were set off to seal the entrance.”

  “Burying them alive,” I whisper.

  “Treasure hunters have tried to locate these sites in the Philippines over the years. Perhaps some of them have been emptied and the loot shipped back to Japan.”

  “Treasure hunters?”

  My skepticism seems to amuse him. “They told journalists that they were searching for the gold bullion hidden by General Yamashita when he evacuated from Luzon. Or they informed the Filipino authorities that they were collecting the bones of fallen soldiers to be properly buried in Japan,” he says. “And even if someone did find one of these hiding places, the vaults were armed with thousand-pound bombs and glass vials of cyanide buried in sand. Anyone who tried to open them up, anyone who did not have the proper maps . . .”

  I pull myself from the quicksand of memories. “If what you’ve said really happened, someone would have spoken about it by now,” I say. “Maybe one of the Japanese who had worked in one of these underground vaults—like your engineer, or one of the guards.”

  “The Japanese personnel were buried alive too, along with the prisoners,” Tatsuji says. “The man I spoke to was one of the luckier ones—he had been blindfolded when he was brought to the camp. But all his life he was terrified, wondering if someone had made a mistake in letting him go.”

  “What has all this got to do with Aritomo?”

  “I was only interested in his ukiyo-e, but the more I found out about him, the more I think he played a role in Golden Lily. I have no evidence of this,” he adds hurriedly, “just my own suspicions.”

  “He was a gardener, Tatsuji.” I keep my voice firm so he will not realize how much his words have shaken me.

  “He might have come here to survey the topography. He had the necessary knowledge of landscaping and horticulture—remember, the locations had to be camouflaged or concealed. And who better than a master of shakkei to do it?”

  “But to be party to a thing like this . . .” My voice, even my strength, dwindles away.

  “We were heading into war, Judge Teoh. All of us had to play our part, to serve the emperor.”

  “Even his friend Tominaga Noburu?”

  “He was in charge of Golden Lily in Southeast Asia. Eyewitnesses I interviewed—old soldiers and military administrators—placed him in Malaya and Singapore in the years between 1938 and 1945.”

  “But Aritomo remained here—long after the war ended. He never went home.”

  “Have you forgotten what the situation in Malaya was like at that time?” Tatsuji says. “According to what I have read in The Red Jungle, there was much lawlessness and unrest immediately after the surrender—communist guerrillas taking revenge on collaborators; C
hinese and Malays killing each other. And British soldiers were coming back. Maybe Golden Lily thought it was not the right time to move the treasures, but someone had to be here to make sure they were not disturbed.”

  “So he stayed here, in his garden, waiting for things to settle down.” I lay out the pieces in my head to see if I can discover a coherent pattern in the mosaic. “But then the communists started their war.”

  “If he was a part of Golden Lily, he would have known where the loot was hidden, at least in Malaya.”

  The thought of the hordes of people that will inevitably come asking to speak to me again should it become known that Aritomo had been involved in something like this frightens me. “If he knew,” I say firmly, “then he took that knowledge with him.”

  “It is not the sort of information he would have left lying around,” concedes Tatsuji.

  “He didn’t tell me anything.”

  Tatsuji laughs at me, rather unkindly. “A man of his upbringing, and with his background?” he says. “He would have been obligated to carry out his duty properly. All the way to the end.”

  The new teahouse at Majuba is at the summit of a steep hill and I am breathing hard when I arrive there after a long walk. It is a few minutes before lunchtime, but all the tables have already been taken by elderly tourists in water-repellent jackets and bulky hiking boots. Looking around the restaurant, I spot Frederik waving to me from the terrace outside.

  “You managed to get us the best table in the house,” I remark, as he pulls a chair out for me.

  “It helps if you own the place,” he replies. “I converted it from a bungalow a year ago. It used to be Geoff Harper’s. Remember him?”

  Our table is at the end of a long, narrow terrace that extends over the valley like a pier, fenced in by chest-high plate glass that provides a vertiginous vista of the mountains and the tea-covered slopes. Wisteria froths down from the trellis overhead, sweetening the air. I close my eyes for a brief moment, going over again what Tatsuji told me about Golden Lily this morning. On the face of it, it is a preposterous story—except that I know differently.

  Frederik fills my cup with tea and slides it to me. “Something from our newest range. We’re still testing it.”

  Bringing the cup to my nose, I inhale the steam rising from it. I take a sip and hold the liquid in my mouth, allowing its flavor to bloom on my tongue. “I haven’t tasted any of Majuba’s teas in years.”

  He looks insulted. “You don’t like them?”

  “It’s not that.” I wonder how to explain it to him. “The tea grown here . . . it has its own distinct flavor . . . it brings back too many memories.”

  “Whenever I have to travel,” Frederik says, “I always bring a box of my own tea with me.”

  “Magnus once told me about a temple in China he had visited—”

  “In Mount Li Wu,” Frederik says, a smile sprawling across his face. “I went there a few years ago. It’s all there, everything he ever told you—the monks picking the leaves at dawn, the special flavor of the tea. It’s still the most expensive tea in the world.”

  Down in the valley, the brightly colored headscarves of the tea pickers are like petals scattered over a lawn.

  He indicates the people around us. “Quite a number of them are here for the anniversary of Aritomo’s death.”

  “I know. They’ve been pestering me. Some journalist wanted to film me for a documentary she’s doing on Aritomo. Another one tried to pin me down for an interview for a news channel.”

  “You should talk to them, tell them about Aritomo. You of all people knew him best.”

  “Did I?”

  The food arrives and we eat it in silence. “Tatsuji’s finished working on the woodblock prints,” I say when our plates have been removed. Slowly, working out the sequence of events even as I speak, I tell Frederik about Golden Lily. There is a long silence when I finish talking.

  “You think Aritomo was involved?” he asks finally.

  “I don’t know. But after what Tatsuji told me, I’m sure that I was sent to one of Golden Lily’s slave camps. A lot of things he said fit in with what I saw there.”

  “Did Aritomo know about the things the Japs did to you?”

  “I told him.”

  “But you never said anything to me.” Inside his voice is an old hurt, still sharp after all these years. “I could never really understand why you left Yugiri.”

  “I couldn’t live here, Frederik. I couldn’t even bring myself to build the garden I wanted for my sister—everything about it would have reminded me of Aritomo. Law was the only thing I knew I was good at.”

  “You haven’t done too badly.”

  “Strange isn’t it? I never considered entering the judiciary when I returned to practice. But I had the sort of credentials a newly independent nation was looking for—I’m not European and I had been so critical of our colonial masters, how they had sold us down the river.”

  “You’ve never recovered from being a prisoner.”

  “Do you know of anyone who has?”

  “I’m sorry. That was a stupid thing to say.”

  Behind Frederik, a hot-air balloon drifts into my sight, bright red and shaped like an inverted teardrop. Frederik follows my gaze, twisting around to look over his shoulder. “Some chap from KL brought it up here a week ago,” he said. “He gives rides to tourists. I was told a popular route is the area around Yugiri.”

  The balloon rotates slowly toward us. Wrapped around its side are the words MAJUBA TEA ESTATE and the estate’s logo, an outline of a Cape Dutch house. I groan with mock disgust when I see it.

  “Oh come on, it’s good advertising!” Frederik says.

  “I’ll shoot it down if they dare fly over Yugiri.”

  He laughs, causing several people around to look at us. “Remember that story about the Mid-Autumn Festival Emily used to tell every year?” he says, wiping the tears from his eyes. “Hou Yi who shot down the suns with his bow and arrows? And his wife who swallowed the magic pill and became immortal?”

  “Poor, poor Hou Yi, yearning for the wife he had lost to the moon,” I say. “He should have made himself forget her.”

  “Perhaps he couldn’t,” replies Frederik. “Perhaps he didn’t want to.”

  At five o’clock that evening I change into my walking clothes: a long-sleeved shirt, loose cotton slacks and hiking boots. Ah Cheong is already waiting at the front door. The housekeeper, having realized early on that I have taken up Aritomo’s habit of going for evening walks on the trails, never fails to appear with the walking stick for me whenever he hears me getting ready. I have never accepted the walking stick, but it has not deterred him from offering it to me every time.

  There are thirteen official walking trails spreading out from the three villages in Cameron Highlands, varying in length and difficulty. There are also many more paths that do not appear on maps, known only to forest rangers and those who have spent their lives in the highlands. One of them winds past the edge of the property. It will take me less than an hour to complete the walk, and at this time of the year, I will be unlikely to come across anyone else.

  The heaviness inside me lifts as I walk. Above my head, the overlapping leaves print their shadows on other leaves. The smell of mulch is softened by the fragrance of wild orchids. Aerial roots sprout from the branches of banyan trees; some of the older roots have hardened into stalactites over the years to prop up the sagging branches. Except for the track beneath my feet, there are no other signs that anyone else has been here before me, and within minutes I feel myself being absorbed into the damp, decaying heart of the rain forest.

  The path is steep and demanding. At a ridge looking down into the valleys, I stop to recover my breath. The old sense of injustice stings me again: I would have been a more robust woman if my health had not been damaged in the camp. When my neurosurgeon first informed me of the diagnosis, I asked him if it was caused by the deprivations I had suffered, a seed that had been sown
forty years ago, slowly burrowing its poisoned roots deeper and deeper into my body. “We don’t know for sure,” he said, “but it’s doubtful.”

  A part of me cannot help but continue to wonder about it. Aphasia . Such a beautiful name, I think as I sit on the stump of a mahogany tree. It reminds me of a species of flower—camellia perhaps. No, more like rafflesia, attracting hordes of flies with the smell of rotting meat when it blooms.

  My thoughts return to Tatsuji’s theories about Golden Lily. If he is correct and Tominaga Noburu was the head of Golden Lily in Southeast Asia, then I have no doubts that the camp I was sent to was part of it all. But where would that place Aritomo in the entire scheme of things? Is Tatsuji right in thinking that Aritomo was sent here to lay the groundwork for Golden Lily’s plans?

  A sudden fury against Aritomo grips me. My fingers claw into the sides of the mahogany trunk. The rage subsides after a moment.

  I stand up and brush the dirt from the seat of my slacks. It is getting dark. In the low mists over the hills, an orange glow broods, as if the trees are on fire. Bats are flooding out from the hundreds of caves that perforate these mountainsides. I watch them plunge into the mists without any hesitation, trusting in the echoes and silences in which they fly.

  Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analyzing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  A garden is composed of a variety of clocks, Aritomo had once told me. Some of them run faster than the others, and some of them move slower than we can ever perceive. I only understood this fully long after I had been his apprentice. Every single plant and tree at Yugiri grew, flowered and died at its own rate. Yet there was also a feeling of timelessness wrapped around it. The trees from a colder world—the oaks, the maples and the cedars—had adjusted to the constant rains and mists, to the seasonless passing of time in the mountains. The turning of their colors was muted. Only the maple growing by the house remembered the changing seasons in the expanding circles of its memory: its leaves turned completely red, flaking away from the branches to drift across the garden; I would often find the leaves plastered to the wet rocks on the banks of Usugumo Pond, like starfish stranded by the tide.