Gail Tsukiyama "The Samurai's Garden"

Spoiler alert

Being confined to my bed with a stomach virus, I took a break from Embracing Defeat to enjoy Gail Tsukiyama's The Samurai's Garden. This is a coming-of-age story of 20-year-old Stephen, a Chinese boy whose grandfather's summer home is in Tarumi. Stephen's family has him recuperate from tuberculosis in 1937 there with longtime family servant, Matsu.

Through Matsu, a longtime servant to Stephen's family who first came to Stephen's grandfather's beach home in his youth, Stephen is introduced to Sachi, a beautiful Japanese woman who lives in a leper community in Yamaguchi. Stephen learns of the pain that these people have been through. Matsu's younger sister Tomoko, also contracted leprosy but she committed suicide as a young girl a long time ago. Even though this happened long, long ago Matsu is still suffering from her loss. Sachi's family wanted her to kill herself for the honor of the family, but she could not. At one point Matsu told her: "It takes greater courage to live."

The theme of this book is beauty -- the understanding that true beauty is not what appears on the surface, but what lies beneath -- in a person's heart. Sachi and Tomoko are physical beauties -- thin, young, gorgeous pale skin and faces -- popular in their village with the young men. Then leprosy takes their physical beauty away. To Tomoko this loss of physical beauty means she cannot bare to exist. Her brother comes to her and offers to help, but she won't listen. He refuses to procure her father's fishing knife, as she request him to do for her. The disease propels her to take her father's fishing knife, which she is forbidden to touch, let alone hold or use. She walks into the ocean with this knife and never returns from the sea. Meanwhile, Sachi, as a young girl, is in a similar place. She is a silly girl who equates people's worth with their physical beauty. She admits to Stephen that she did not allow herself to know Matsu in their youth. It's only after he comes to her rescue again and again that she realizes what a beautiful human being he is.

Piece by piece Stephen learns about Matsu's, Sachi's, and Tomoko's past -- along with Kenzo, Matsu's friend who owns a tea house in the village of Tarumi. He sees how nature feeds the souls of both Sachi and Matsu and he learns the valuable lesson from Sachi that true beauty is the beauty that lives within.

Meanwhile, Stephen is learning his own life is not all that idyllic. He meets Keiko, a beautiful Japanese girl his own age, but she can no longer see him because of her father's hatred of the Chinese -- especially after her older brother is killed fighting for the Imperial Army. He learns from his mother that his father is living in Kobe with another woman. When he approaches his father about this letter, his father admits that he has been with this woman for 12 years. Stephen longs for the simple existence of his youth.

The end of the novel in late October 1938 sends him back to his life in Hong Kong -- it's a life that's filled with uncertainty with his parents' marriage unraveling and the Japanese continuing their crushing defeat of China. I'm eager to read Tsukiyama's "Women of the Silk."