My host nodded. “It is a little older,” he answered.
“But you said that your father named the garden,” I objected “I thought that he made it.”
The folding screens opened quietly and Kumamoto’s aged servant came in with tea. She knelt down and bowed in the oldfashioned way, touching the floor with her forhead. We sat down on cushions on the floor and accepted cups of tea from her.
“Yes, my father was the maker of the garden, but this tokoniwa and tree were in the possession of our family already before”, explained Kumamoto, in the sweat of his brow collecting his English for this conversation on an unexpected subject. “My great-grandfather was a famous cultivator of dwarfed trees; even poems were written in his honour, and on one of Hokusai’s wood-cuts you can see my great-grandfather with a great number of his dwarfed creations. This pine was his favorite piece of work. However, my grandfather neglected the family tokoniva, and it perished; only the tree survived. And because my father suffered the same fate of being overlooked in the family, he took a deep liking to this tree and befriended it. My honourable father, I must explain, was extremely ugly. It is painful to me to speak of this matter. It seems cruel that some one should suffer on account of his looks, but it happens often enough, I think. At any rate it happened to my father. He looked like one of the successful artificially dwarfed creations of his grandfather, my renowned great-grandfather. Between him and the old tree there arose a sort of brotherhood of feeling. When my father grew up and it was brought home to him that he would have to go through life without a companion, because he was so unsightly, he made this garden, which you see here in my room, of the sunbaked, formless earth of the tokoniwa. And he dedicated it to the gods with the humble entreaty that they take pity on his miserable loneliness . . . You see there in the corner Thousand-handed Kwannon, the Goddess of Mercy, and near the lake Benten, the Goddess of Luck, and other deities. Why, however, my father put only the metal mirror into the shrine, I do not know. He probably had his reasons.”
Having filled our cups for the second time, the aged servant hobbled out backwards, bowed profoundly between the sliding doors, muttering apologies, and disappeared. We were alone.
“Superstitious reasons”, added Kumamoto and laughed with a buzzing sound.” You understand that of course I look at it all from a different point of view!”
I could not help getting angry and interrupted him rather unceremoniously:
