The Samurai's Garden

“Stepping through the bamboo gate, I found myself in the garden. The sweet perfumes were immediately intoxicating. A silk tree, still heavy with summer blossoms, and two large black pine trees shaded the house. An oval-shaped pond, with hints of movement that flashed orange and silver beneath its surface, dominated one side of the garden. It was surrounded by pale green moss. A wooden bridge arched across its width, and lines of odd-shaped, waterworn stones created two paths, one leading through the secluded garden right up to the front door, while the other disappeared around the back of the house. White sand formed soft beds in the crevices.” 

This is Stephen’s first moment in the samurai’s garden, rich in image and metaphor. He will live and work there; paint there; begin to fall in love there; witness the relationships between Matsu, Sachi, and Kenzo there; and finally leave there having re-created it on canvas and gifted it to Matsu, its creator.

“With each stroke against the salty water, I felt a new surge of energy travel through my body. I swam back and forth, my arms thrusting forward with each stroke as I disrupted the calm of the sea with my furious motions. The coolness of the water felt good against my body. As I relaxed, a sense of freedom emerged which had been buried under my illness.”

Stephen swims frequently at the beach in Tarumi. This ritual heals both his body and his mind. He finds freedom in the water and emerges from his illness into his new life. It is on the beach that he first meets Keiko; often, it is there that he reflects on his experiences among the people living beyond the dunes.

“’Japan is like a young woman who thinks too much of herself. She’s bound to get herself into trouble.’” 

As Stephen and Matsu listen to the news on Matsu’s radio, Stephen asks Matsu his opinion on Japanese encroachment in China. Matsu’s response reveals Matsu’s humanity: He is an individual, not an imperialist.  

“For the first time in my life I saw what it meant to be a leper, a disgraced one. They seemed to watch me with just as much curiosity. I tried not to stare, but I couldn’t take my eyes off their wounds; the missing fingers and toes, the large, gaping holes in the sides of their faces, the mangled features that had once been noses and ears. It looked as if they were all wearing monstrous masks that I kept waiting for them to remove.” 

This is Stephen’s first visit to Yamaguchi. The idea of the “monstrous mask” is important; it will be echoed in Kenzo’s calling Sachi a “monster” when he finds her with Matsu in the garden. Stephen’s journey will teach him that everyone wears a mask and that beauty is what dwells beneath it. 

“While the left side of her face had been devastated, the unblemished right side was the single most beautiful face I’d ever seen.” 

Stephen is captivated by Sachi’s strange beauty on their first meeting, and throughout the novel. While at first he struggles to reconcile her loveliness and her scars, soon he sees them as one and the same. He learns that beauty and suffering are two sides of the same coin.

“After Matsu left, I began to paint. I didn’t want to lose the light which had already begun to change.” 

Stephen begins his painting of the garden, which will serve to encapsulate his time in Tarumi and will be his gift to the garden’s samurai, Matsu. “[T]he light which had already begun to change” is at once literal and psychological: Stephen’s perspective is being altered by the “light” of Tarumi.

“’Are there lots of young people around here now?’ I continued. ’Not many. A few families in town, ‘she answered. ’Most of the young men have joined the army, while the others move to the city as soon as they can.’” 

Stephen speaks with Keiko on the beach. He learns that Tarumi has been depleted of young men for the Japanese army. This fact will become problematic for Stephen and Keiko: her father does not approve of the young Chinese man in his village while his son is off at war against China.

“In place of the greens, browns, and flashes of color which punctuated Matsu’s garden, the spareness of Sachi’s garden stunned me. There were no trees, flowers, or water, only a landscape made of sand, stones, rocks, and some pale green moss which covered the shaded areas.” 

Stephen sees Sachi’s stone garden for the first time. Hers works in tandem with Matsu’s to provide meaning: there is beauty both in abundance and in simplicity. Her creation of it, with Matsu’s encouragement, has helped her to heal her life.

“’Does Kenzo know Sachi?’ I quickly asked. Matsu slowed down and turned to face me. ‘Tarumi is a small place. We all knew each other when we were young.’ ‘Then why doesn’t Kenzo go to visit her?’ ‘When we were young, Sachi cared a great deal for Kenzo, but the disease changed everything. After she left for Yamaguchi, she would no longer see him.’” 

Stephen has just met Kenzo at the teahouse. Here, he begins to understand the Matsu-Sachi-Kenzo triangle. The relationships have many layers, and Tsukiyama lifts them slowly, revealing the secret-keeping among the friends and the depth of their loyalty to one another.

“As my head cleared, I remembered the last thing I felt was the strong punch of the rushing water and then nothing; blackness. It was just a miracle that the house still stood, somehow having survived the crashing waves.” 

Stephen has just received his mother’s letter about his father’s infidelity. He is reeling, and the storm embodies his shock and sense of helplessness. But Stephen ultimately finds himself resilient – like the house and his new friends.

“Each day I work in the garden with Sachi, I feel stronger. The headaches lose their urgency once my hands dig deep into the cool, dark soil and I smell the damp dirt and pine. Even the cold wind of approaching winter makes me feel more alive.” 

Sachi has come down from Yamaguchi to help rebuild Matsu’s garden. As fall turns to winter, Stephen gains strength through working with his friends. This togetherness, this mutual service, becomes a major element in Stephen’s transformation.

“Sachi let out a small scream as her scarf dropped to the floor. For a split second, they all stood frozen; the white, puckered scars magnified in the bright light. Kenzo stepped back. ‘You really are a monster!’ he roared.” 

When Kenzo finds Sachi with Matsu in the garden, he feels betrayed. His rage punches through the present to the past. Not long after this fight, Kenzo hangs himself, a sad parallel with the suicide Sachi was unable to perform on herself long ago.

“’Would you like to help?’ she asked. ‘I don’t want to ruin the pattern,’ I answered, as I stepped back and shrugged my shoulders. Sachi raised her right hand up to cover her laugh. ‘How can you ruin stones, Stephen-san? You can only rearrange them, and who knows if it won’t be for the better.’”  

Stephen learns another existential lesson from Sachi and her garden. After the fight at the beach house, Sachi’s raking reveals duality: stones are both fluid and immutable, like human beings. And change is inevitable – one may as well embrace it.

“I was old enough to understand everything he said, but as his mouth softly formed the words, I knew the sense of integrity I had long admired in him had died, and that I was already grieving for its loss.”

Stephen’s father visits Tarumi and discusses his affair. Stephen loves his father no less than before; he simply understands now that he is only human, and fallible. This is part of Stephen’s progress toward manhood, grieving for innocence, and learning to parent himself.

“Above the counter, not more than three feet away from us, hung Kenzo’s limp body.” 

Kenzo has hung himself after learning of Sachi and Matsu’s ongoing relationship, unable to deal with his own resentment and shame. The theme of suicide – once part of the stories of the past – becomes horribly present.

“When her father turned back to me, it was with a look so full of hate I simply bowed my head and walked quickly away.” 

Keiko’s father encounters Stephen at Kenzo’s funeral and rejects him – the young Chinese man in a Japanese village in wartime – with utter contempt. Stephen, blossoming into himself, now knows what it is to be seen not as an individual but as a faceless enemy.

“By seventeen, I had shamed my family twice; first, when the disease chose me, and then when I was too weak to honor them with my death.” 

After the fire in Yamaguchi, Stephen spends time with Sachi, and  she tells him the heart of her story from decades ago: How she came to the leper village after failing to commit seppuku. More layers of her relationship with Matsu are revealed, and her journey from suffering to peace is gets clearer.

“’What are you doing?’ I asked. Matsu waited until the last turn of the wheel slowed, then came to a complete stop. He held up the knife so I could clearly see its ivory handle and honed blade. ‘It was my father’s fishing knife,’ he said.”

Matsu sharpens the very knife about which he’s just told Stephen: the fishing knife his sister Tomoko asked him to help her find to commit seppuku after she contracted leprosy. Matsu refused then, but she found it and carried out her wish. The past overlays the present.

“All over Japan they were celebrating the dead, even as more and more Chinese were being slaughtered. There would be no one left to celebrate them.” 

Stephen celebrates O-bon with Matsu and Fumiko. While he has come to love his life in Tarumi, he worries increasingly about the war. The ancestors of the past and the dead of the present converge in Stephen’s imagination.

“The madness of war destroyed much more than just the soldiers fighting in it. It picked apart everything in its way, so that no one escaped its clutches. Not even someone as decent and humane as Keiko would be left without scars.” 

Stephen has encountered Keiko on the beach. As much as they desire each other, she must reject him or risk shaming her family. The war has affected everyone, and Stephen’s “scars” will be like Sachi’s, finally – a record of his feelings for Keiko, beauty in suffering.

“I’d always felt uncomfortable being waited on, even by Ching, who has worked for my family ever since I can remember. But it was evident that after so many years Ching had a certain power over our family.” 

As Stephen witnesses Matsu and Sachi serving each other at dinner, he remembers Ching’s service to his family. He has come to understand that service is not always servitude – it can be a relationship of power, even one of great depth.

“Sometimes we love and hate without thought. We expect too much from one another, and often we are wrong.” 

Matsu talks with Stephen as they prune the black pine in the garden, using the flora as metaphor. He could be speaking of almost any character in the novel, or of the Chinese and Japanese. The flip side of his assertion, of course, is that  sometimes we are right, and we do great things for one another.

“You have been the musuko we lost so many years ago.” 

During a last visit with Stephen, Sachi reveals the final secret of her past with Matsu: they had a stillborn child. Stephen becomes that child to Sachi and Matsu. His connection with them is in some ways more familial than that with his biological family.