Free The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng Page A

morning the sun comes to rest on it and it burns red and gold, as though the gods had just forged it in their furnace and placed it in the sea to cool.”
     
     
The unadorned lines and subtle curves of the massive gate looked to me like a Japanese ideogram, as though a word of piety had been transformed into a physical structure, an expression of prayer made real.
     
     
He came from a samurai family, he told me, part of an aristocratic dynasty that was dwindling in power. Traders were weakening the power and influence once held by the aristocratic and military classes, and often these families borrowed heavily from these businessmen when the rice crops in their fiefdoms failed. Endo-san’s father had displeased the emperor and had moved away from Tokyo to venture into commerce, selling rice and lacquer to the Americans and the Chinese.
     
     
“Your father worked for the emperor of Japan?” I asked, impressed.
     
     
“Many of the aristocracy do. It is not as important as you think. My father was one of the officials in charge of court protocol,” Endo-san said. “He advised Western diplomats on how to address the emperor, the proper clothing to wear, the appropriate gifts to present.”
     
     
“How did he anger the emperor?”
     
     
“The emperor was surrounded by a clique of high-ranking military advisors who wished to expand our territories by taking China. My father thought that would be a grave mistake. Unfortunately he did not keep his views to himself.”
     
     
His father had ensured that his children would never forget their past and Endo-san had spent his childhood learning the skills of the samurai: hand-to-hand combat, archery, horse riding, swordsmanship, flower arranging, and calligraphy. His father also taught him the skills of trade, marrying the principles of warfare to those of buying and selling. “ ‘Business is war,’ my father used to tell us,” Endo-san said as he sipped his tea.
     
     
He was born in 1890, into one of the most turbulent periods in Japanese history. Japan was then emerging from sakoku, a self-imposed national seclusion under the Tokugawa Shogunate that had lasted for two hundred years.
     
     
“Sakoku —’chain the land’—meant that Japan had closed her doors to foreigners. People could not travel out of Japan. Some did; those who were caught were sentenced to death. Those who traveled out could never return. The laws made by Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu were enforced strictly.”
     
     
He told me that the shogun was the supreme military commander, having more power than the emperor, who was merely a figurehead.
     
     
“Due to the shogun’s strict laws, this period of seclusion became a golden age for the arts: haiku poetry, kabuki, and Noh plays. But by the nineteenth century Japan was crippled by famine and poverty. We were weak, left behind as the world outside advanced. When the Americans sailed to our shores we had to succumb to their demands to open up the country.”
     
     
I nodded in agreement. It was the same all over Asia. I myself was the result of such a tale.
     
     
“The closed-door policy weakened my country. While the nations of the West conquered and colonized, Japan sat to one side, wishing to participate in world events but hamstrung by its historical seclusion and lack of experience and technical knowledge. We sent our brightest minds to Europe to learn, and the success of the Western nations inspired our own military ambitions. “He shook his head slowly.
     
     
“And it was the coming of the gai-jin —the “outside people”—that made trade so lucrative. By the time of my childhood we were besotted with the West. I was taught to play the works of the great European composers, I studied European and American history and I was given lessons in reading and writing and speaking English. That is why I can talk to you today, in a Japanese shop, in Malaya, thousands of miles from our respective homelands. Strange, is it