It was a pepper tree. A California pepper tree of the Anacardiaceae family. It has “California” in the name, so naturally there are plenty of them growing around here. You see them all the time, so they’re easy to recognize. With coarse bark and leaves that hang down like willows or ferns, they develop clusters of small red berries. The one in my neighborhood had grown large and thick and its branches hung down over the road.
The tree was always there. I admired it every time I passed by. The word “luxuriant” came to mind, written with the Chinese characters for “melancholy” and “blue.” The tree created a melancholic shade that made just about everything look blue. Whenever I passed by it, I would remember the voice of Mei, the young girl from the animated film My Neighbor Totoro, and how she called a row of trees “a tree tunnel.” As soon as I would think this, my children would say “a tree tunnel” in unison, imitating Mei. My husband would always say: “It takes about a hundred years to grow that much.” He, too, had lived close to a hundred years, and thus he felt an affinity for the tree as he said this.
In short, it was a tree that each member of my family had become attached to in our own way. It stood in front of a few small houses. Rental homes with no yards or fences. They were hidden in the shade of the tree. The tree, which was larger than these homes, was always there, its branches hanging down over the road in a luxurious manner.
It was an early morning in spring when my daughter went outside and called out: “The tree’s been cut!”
It was all so sudden that it didn't seem real. A feeling came over me, reminding me that I was aware things like this could happen. I had had this experience many times before, in many places, and I was never able to do anything about it. I had felt bad, many times over, about not being able to help the dying trees.
I tried making up a story: “The tree had fallen ill and was beginning to rot.” We had, a long time ago, cut down a pine tree for this very reason. I tried another story: “It was pressing against the power lines, so the city took action and cut it down.” That the residents considered the tree a nuisance, or even hated it—this was the hardest explanation to consider.
“Should we ask someone about it?” asked Tome, my youngest.
“But it’s not really something we can ask anyone about, is it?” replied Sarako, the older of the two.
That evening the sky was pink. To both the east and west, it was brilliantly colored. I took the dogs for a walk, up to where the tree had been. We had walked here often in the past. Back then, the dogs were young and I took them out every day. There were two houses that had dogs along the way. We always got barked at. My dogs were young and reckless, and when they got barked at by dogs they didn’t know, they barked right back without caring that they were probably in someone else’s territory. This time, too, we got barked at, but my dogs (who had once, long ago, been young) had now become feeble granny dogs. They no longer cared about dogs they didn’t know. Since our dogs didn’t react to them, you could hear the other dogs’ barking begin to mellow out. As a result, I realized that what I had thought was a voice meant to intimidate was actually just showing off—a voice calling out: “Look at me! Look!” There were many acacias along the path. Each one was in bloom. The oxalis, too, spread out all over. It was evening, so the flowers were closed up. There were lawns where succulents had been planted. There was a creeping geranium, its flowers in bloom, climbing up a fence, with no end in sight.
The tree was gone. Bright light stretched out over the road. It was now thoroughly empty. The branches and trunk had been pulverized, seemingly put through a chipper shredder. Several Mexican men were cleaning up the wood chips. Perhaps they were the ones who lived near the tree, or perhaps they had just been hired to help cut it down.
All traces of the tree had gone. In the spot where it had once stood was now a dense pile of fine sawdust that resembled sand. It was a small spot, about the size of three tatami mats. I thought it was miraculous that such a giant tree could grow out of such a small spot and support itself. The sidewalk had been vigorously torn up. At my feet were fallen leaves, which were scattered over the sidewalk and the road. They fell the moment the tree was cut down. As the felled tree was dragged down and cut apart, its leaves spread all around.
For a while after this happened to the tree, I was sad, and I stopped going down that road. And then after a short while I returned to Japan. I spent most of spring in Kumamoto. My oldest daughter Kanoko, who was pregnant at the time, came along with her husband as well. I took them to the town of Takamori in Aso as I wanted to show them the giant tree there. This is the story of a living tree.
Takamori sits at the foot of Mt. Aso in Kumamoto. It’s only forty minutes from the Kumamoto Airport. There are houses and crop fields. There are sources here and there where water wells up. There are ugly sources that have been used up for commercial purposes, and there are ones that resemble communal wells that the local people use in their everyday lives. If you travel a little way, you’ll find one lying quietly in a space between the trees. The water is completely green in color due to the trees’ reflection in the water’s surface. A moss-covered statue of the Water God sticks out in the middle of the water’s surface. If you peer inside, you can see that the bottom of the lake is densely covered in moss, and that fish are moving around down there. Water springs up all over the place. There are sources were the water flows from where it bubbles up. There are also sources where the water trickles down from where it has climbed up, like from the side of a mountain cliff.
Oh, wait, this wasn’t meant to be a story about water. It’s a story about trees. In Takamori, there is an old sakura cherry tree. It is called the Isshingyō: a name suggesting that it “wholeheartedly” (isshin) practiced the “austerities” (gyō) of someone holy. It seems to be a tree loaded with such meaning. Nearby there also stands a large sugi, or cedar tree called the Takamoridono no sugi.
And so, en route from picking up Kanoko and her husband from the airport, we went to go see the Isshingyō cherry tree. It was past its flowering season. The loud and chaotic Cherry Blossom Festival that is held right in the middle of flowering season was over, and the festival stalls and dance stage had only recently been taken down and cleared away. The cherry tree was all leaves. I’ve read somewhere that the difference between the yamazakura variety of cherry tree and the somei-yoshino variety is that once the latter loses its flowers, it grows leaves, whereas the flowers and red buds of the former variety sprout out at the same time.
Kanoko, who was pregnant, held hands with her husband, and they walked around the large cherry tree. Instead of looking at the scraggly cherry blossoms that remained on the aged branches, they looked down toward the flowers that bloomed plentifully around the old cherry tree’s roots: violets, veronica plants, tiny and common vetches. Kanoko spoke to her husband, saying: “These really bring me back to when I was a kid . . . ”
On the way back I wondered whether or not we’d have time to stop by the giant sugi. Just thirty minutes up the road that runs in front of the giant cherry tree, you end up at a spot where a small sign stands modestly on the side of the road, as if it’s meant be to passed by without being noticed. There is a small gate on the path. It’s closed. You open it up and go inside. The gate is meant to keep cows from running away. Inside the gate, there is cow dung everywhere. Of course, it feels like you’ll end up stepping in some. Up ahead is a stand of trees, luxuriant, damp, and dark. The kind of place where you’d get bitten by mosquitos in summer. Covered all over with vines, ferns, and moss. If you force your way in there, that’s where it is—the giant sugi. It splits in two from the roots. It stretches upwards, halts, and then hangs down. One of these days it will completely envelop itself within itself. It will also completely envelop those of us looking up at it. It’s that kind of tree.
But no matter how much I ran the numbers, we just didn't have the time. Kanoko and her husband had just arrived in Kumamoto, and I had to bring the pregnant one home to rest. Just as we were leaving for the day, my father seemed to be feeling unwell, so I also had to hurry back to his place. The plan was to show Kanoko and her husband around Aso in three days’ time. I thought we could look at the water and the mountain’s crater and go to the hot springs. We could also check out the giant sugi then.
But my father died the following day. He had met with Kanoko and her husband, and said in broken English that it was nice to meet him: “Naisu tu mii-chuu.” Then he compared Kanoko’s pregnant belly with his own. His stomach muscles had completely withered away, and they could no longer support his internal organs. His abdomen had become swollen. That night, his condition worsened. And then on the following day, he passed away. We were all in quite a state of commotion. There was the hospital, the funeral home, the contacting of relatives, and so on. Naturally we cancelled our trip to Aso. On the way back from visiting the funeral home, the bank, and the hospital, I thought that at the very least I could bring Kanoko and her husband to visit the so-called Jakushinsan no kusu camphor tree. My father’s remains were already enshrined in the funeral parlor. Oh . . . saying that makes it feel like my father is no longer my father. He had rented a space in the funeral parlor, and that’s where he was now. No wait, he died, and so he wasn’t really there. I mean, it wasn’t the case that he either “was” there or “wasn’t” there . . . This was the kind of thing that was on my mind as I was driving around.
We headed toward the rural area that runs from within Kumamoto City out to Tabaruzaka. We could see a forest of camphor trees across the way. As we got closer, it became clear that what we had thought was a forest was actually a thicket comprised of a single giant camphor tree. The tree was in a well-maintained park, but there was no one around. Flowers bloomed in clusters along the path leading from the parking lot: violets, veronica plants, henbits, tiny and common vetches. Kanoko and her husband held hands and walked around the giant camphor. I laid down on the bench that had been placed under the tree.
I looked up, looked at the tree, looked at my hands, looked at the sky. It was a lightly cloudy sky. It was a giant, giant tree covered in wrinkles. They were tired, sad hands covered in wrinkles. As I was gazing at them, I realized I’d made a big mistake. I’d just been thinking that the red color on camphor trees this time of year was from new growth. But that wasn’t so. It was the old leaves that had turned red, and they were mixed in with the green of the new buds. The red leaves rustled in the wind, and rained down to cover the surface below, just like a cherry tree as it loses its blossoms.
There’s one more tree I want to mention. A short while after my father died, I returned to California. I then noticed a flowering tree on the road home from my youngest daughter Tome’s school. It was one I hadn’t noticed before and yet I couldn’t help but feel a sense of nostalgia about it. The flowers were purple, with sharply defined, thin petals that resembled crosses. The whole tree was covered in these flowers. Under the flowers hid shiny green leaves. It was extremely beautiful, so whenever I passed by it on my bike I would slow down and admire it. Then one day I stopped my bike completely and told Tome to go pick a few flowers and leaves off of the tree. Tome was a good girl, and so she’d do whatever embarrassing thing her mother told her to do. As I looked at the flowers and leaves that she had plucked and brought to me, I felt confident. It was a bead tree. Of the Meliaceae family, the genus melia, native to Asia, native to Kumamoto. Written with the Chinese character meaning “maple” or “autumn foliage” plus the character for “cedar.”
Bead trees grow quickly. The ones that sprouted up about twenty years ago along the riverbed of Kumamoto’s Tsuboigawa are already large trees that cast shade. They don’t only grow in the wild; you can find them planted in parks here and there. In winter, their leaves fall and yellow seeds hang down on bare branches.
For a long time I’d thought this bead tree was a wax tree. You can get wax from a wax tree, and so, in feudal times, the local fiefdom in what is now Kumamoto incentivized their growth. They were planted along the old highway that ran from Ōtsu around Aso and ended up in Daibu. I remembered that long ago, when I had first moved to Kumamoto, people had told me that those trees along the highway were wax trees.
Be that as it may, the trees growing along the highway are not wax trees, they’re bead trees. It was three years ago that I realized this, in the April that my mother died, in that busy time I spent traveling between California and Kumamoto between April and May. During that time, the bead trees started blooming here and there, and then they bloomed in full.
Wax trees and bead trees actually look exactly alike, but their flowers are different. The flowers of the wax tree don’t draw attention. The flowers of the bead tree are gorgeously vibrant and bloom in May. And so now, these flowers that Tome picked in our neighborhood in Southern California—these were undoubtedly from a bead tree.
If you look closely, you’ll see that they are two-toned: both white and purple. Each petal on the flower is thin and sharply defined, and this is the reason why they give the impression of having a cross-like shape. But actually, they have five petals per flower bud. And they have a fragrance that commands attention. It’s a powerfully sharp scent, and merely two flowers were enough to fill our whole house with its fragrance.
The bead trees over there in Kumamoto along the riverbank of the Tsuboigawa, and even the ones growing in parks over there—their flowers must be in full bloom by now. They float before my eyes. My father had also died in April, but now there was no one there anymore, and it was no longer necessary for me to return to Kumamoto throughout April and May. No me, no father, no mother. Thinking this way opened up a wide void.
I know it without having to see it. Over there along the riverbank the bead trees are being blown in the wind, and their flowers are falling off. Within the thicket along the riverbank, a male pheasant yearns for its mate, and is calling out to her. The multiflora rose is reaching maturity and splitting off into clusters, and the whole riverbank has turned white as if dusted with talcum powder.
