The Garden of Evening Mists

For what is a person without memories? A ghost, trapped between worlds, without an identity, with no future, no past.

Memory is like patches of sunlight in an overcast valley, shifting with the movement of the clouds. Now and then the light will fall on a particular point in time, illuminating it for a moment before the wind seals up the gap, and the world is in shadows again.

The palest ink will endure beyond the memories of man

Anything beautiful should be given a name, do you not agree?

I have become a collapsing star, pulling everything around it, even the light, into an ever-expanding void. Once I lose all ability to communicate with the world outside myself, nothing will be left but what I remember. My memories will be like a sandbar, cut off from the shore by the incoming tide. In time they will become submerged, inaccessible to me. The prospect terrified me. For what is a person without memories? A ghost, trapped between worlds, without an identity, with no future, no past.

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

Memories I had locked away have begun to break free, like shards of ice fracturing off an arctic shelf. In sleep, these broken floes drift toward the morning light of remembrance.

That point in time just as the last leaf is about to drop, as the remaining petal is about to fall; that moment captures everything beautiful and sorrowful about life. Mono no aware, the Japanese call it.

A raintree bent towards a window in one side of the bungalow, eavesdropping on the conversations that had taken place inside over years.

It begins to rain softly, raising goose-pimples on the pond’s skin.

We were like two moths around a candle, I thought, circling closer and closer to the flame, waiting to see whose wings would catch fire first.

Before me lies a voyage of a million miles, and my memory is the moonlight I will borrow to illuminate my way.

Some element in the air between us changed, as though a wind that had been blowing gently had come to an abrupt stillness.

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 wee can ever perceive. I only understood this fully long after I had been his apprentice.

Feel your body expanding as you breathe: that is where we live, in the moments between each inhalation and exhalation.

Time did not exist; I had no idea of how many minutes had passed. And what was time but merely a wind that never stopped?

My eyes wondered from one end of the mountains to the other. 'Do you think they go on forever?' 'The mountains?' Aritomo said, as though he had been asked that question before. 'They fade away. Like all things.

On a mountain above the clouds once lived a man who had been the gardener of the emperor of Japan.

It was odd how Aritomo's life seemed to glance off mine; we were like two leaves falling from a tree, touching each other now and again as they spiraled to the forest floor.

Below these words was the garden’s name in English: EVENING MISTS. I felt I was about to enter a place that existed only in the overlapping of air and water, light and time.

There are some people...who might feel that such practices are misguided, like trying to wield heaven's powers on earth. And yet it was only in the carefully planned and created garden of Yugiri that I had found a sense of order and calm and even, for a brief moment of time, forgetfulness.

Time is eating away my memory. Time, and this illness, this trespasser in my brain.

I have become a collapsing star, pulling everything around it, even the light, into an ever-expanding void.

You’ve forgiven the British?” He subsided into his seat. For a while he was silent, his gaze turned inward. “They couldn’t kill me when we were at war. And they couldn’t kill me when I was in the camp,” he said finally, his voice subdued. “But holding on to my hatred for forty-six years . . . that would have killed me.

The mountains are as I have always remembered them, the first light of the morning melting down their flanks.