The Samurai’s Garden by Gail Tsukiyama is a quietly compelling novel. It tells of the passage of a boy out of childhood: the year is 1937 and Stephen is a Chinese boy sent to recuperate in his family’s Japanese beach house following a withering bout of tuberculosis. Separated from his friends at university, from his sister and mother whom he loves, and from the hustle and bustle of his hometown of Hong Kong, Stephen finds the quiet town of Tarumi silent and lonely. But he pursues a friendship with the house caretaker, Matsu, and begins to find pleasure and strength in his daily swims in the ocean, time spent in Matsu’s beautiful Japanese garden, and in his painting. As Matsu and Stephen grow closer through the season of fall and winter, Stephen learns about the leprosy that visited the little town years earlier and the resulting deaths, suicides, and the establishment of a leper colony up in the mountains.
The leper colony is both a place of protection and a place of escape; for Stephen the village of Tarumi is both protection and escape. But the outside world bears down: the Japanese are taking over China in a brutal and savage war, Stephen’s parents’ marriage is threatened by the woman his father maintains in Japan, and concepts of honor threaten relationships of friends and lovers.
The gardens in the novel are also places of protection and escape, whether it is the living garden Matsu created at the beach house with flowers and trees, bushes and moss, or the one he made of stone in the leper colony, where placed rocks and raked pebbles create illusions of rivers, mountains, and plains. In both cases, the gardens are protected by walls but those walls can be breached by events out of human control. In the novel we see people also can create walls around themselves, through mantles of beauty or prejudice or ignorance, but that these walls too can be breached by events out of their control.
We all of us walk around in protective walls of identity (wife, husband, child, sister, brother, artist, banker, athlete, funny girl or dependable friend) and what we do and how we react when our protection — our identity — breaks down, is a test of our mettle and our endurance. In The Samurai’s Garden, the concepts of honor and courage are defined by how the characters respond to breaches brought about by storm, fire, devastating illness, quarantine, and the actions of others (parents, soldiers, friends). How they endure are the lessons that propel Stephen into adulthood. He learns that there are all kinds of being alone, different types of honor and courage, and that the strongest bonds between humans come from acceptance and forgiveness.
The novel is written as Stephen’s journal entries. The sentences and words are simple but there are beautiful descriptions of landscapes and seasonal changes, as well as acute renderings of his emotions, including first love and his growing respect for qualities of resilience and endurance. Given what is coming, Japan’s war against China folding into World War II and years of suffering in China and Hong Kong, we know that Stephen will need these qualities. Given the example set for him by Matsu, we are confident he will endure, leaving his tuberculosis and his boyhood behind him, and carrying the beauty and strength of the little village with him always.
