These Are Days

As I drove away I felt guilty. He was frail, sick — he had been the whole while but especially that last day. I told myself there was someone there to watch over him, to get him to a doctor if that's where he needed to go, but I had to leave now. I was driving from Mr. Yoshimura's house to my sister's apartment in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and I was supposed to have been there between seven and eight. It was 10:00 pm when I left Mr. Yoshimura's place and the drive was about an hour, and I was exhausted but rushing with adrenaline. The road was heading south, following the Hudson River toward New York City. Then a veering to the west brought me to the Tappan Zee bridge, over the river and into New Jersey. The Hudson is wide here and the bridge didn't look like a bridge but like the road just floated above the water, almost hovering over the surface of it. The moon was full. The night was clear and cold and the moonlight shimmered on the water. I had the radio playing and as I crossed over the wide open expanse of the Hudson a song came on and a woman's voice filled the air with sweetly haunting sound. "These are days," she sang, "you'll remember."

Only five days earlier — January 13th, 1995 — I had set out from Asheville. To break up the long drive I made arrangements with Janet Lanman to stay overnight at her house in Maryland, where I had visited before but never stayed overnight. In addition to making the drive easier, I wanted to talk with her because she was a friend of Mr. Yoshimura's. I was feeling apprehensive about what I was about to do, putting myself in a situation where it would be just me and the famously demanding teacher for three days and three nights, under his roof, under his stern authority. I liked Janet so well. She was as old as my mother, and all wrinkled like her, too. Janet was a well-educated woman, and well-to-do. She was thin, with short white hair and a bright smile, but her face was deeply etched with lines of care. I always imagined she carried some profound grief buried inside her, but if that was so she kept it to herself. We stayed up late, talking in her living room, surrounded by art and fine things gathered from a life of world travel. Janet assured me Mr. Yoshimura was a good man. She told me some of what she knew of his life, how dedicated he was to bonsai, what a creative force he was. Yes, she admitted, he could be strict, maybe even authoritarian at times, but she thought he and I would get along just fine.

The next day was Saturday, January 14th. I did a few chores for Janet around her lovely old yellow house before hugging her and heading on my way. It was mid-afternoon as I came barreling out of the New Jersey Palisades approaching the bridge to the New York side of the river. The road atlas had guided me this far on the journey, where my hand-written directions were to take over and lead me to Mr. Yoshimura's door. The thought crossed my mind that I would finally learn the mystery behind "girl's room," the place Mr. Yoshimura designated as where in his house I would be sleeping. That was a strange comment and had troubled me a bit, but now it seemed comic and I was only curious to find out what it meant. I glanced down to my right and riding on the seat next to me was a big basket of fruit. I thought I should arrive bearing some sort of gift, but had no idea what I should bring. Then a few days earlier I had been listening to a story on the radio in which it was mentioned that in some ancient culture acolytes of old wise teachers would bring them gifts of fruit. It was a strange idea but I didn't have a better one. The symbolism of it was good, anyway. I went to the grocery store and bought apples and oranges, bananas and grapes, and my wife put them in a reed basket so it made a nice presentation. Now the basket of fruit rode beside me and that seemed comic, too.

Briarcliff Manor is a small hamlet in Westchester County, an old part of New York. Like other old places in the Northeastern United States, many of the roads in Westchester were probably laid out before automobiles were invented so they wander all over the place and can be confusing to navigate. I got turned around trying to follow the directions Mr. Yoshimura had given me over the phone. I thought I found the place and, parking out front of it, went to the door and rang the bell. A neatly dressed middle-aged man came to the door. He looked at me, glanced at the big basket of fruit I was carrying, smiled in a polite way and said, "yes?" "I'm looking for Mr. Yoshimura," I said. "Oh," the neatly dressed man said, "the bonsai man?". It turned out I was at the wrong house but not far away from where I wanted to be. I found the right place a few minutes later, a smaller, more modest house with a greenhouse nearby. Once more I walked up to the door with my basket of fruit and knocked.

The door opened and it was Mr. Yoshimura. I was shocked by how he looked. The two other occasions I had seen him were at bonsai gatherings where he was a featured guest artist, and both times he was presentably attired in a white shirt and tie. Mr. Yoshimura was not a tall man, but on those occasions carried himself upright with a bearing of aloof importance that made him seem larger somehow. The man before me now was small, stooped and seemingly very old. He was dressed in a flannel shirt and a pair of well-worn jeans, with broken down old slippers on his feet. The thin white hair on the sides of his head was tousled and uncombed. He looked up at me and blinked through his plastic framed glasses, then invited me inside.

The house was dark inside, tight and crowded. I was surprised when a woman walked in from another room. She was younger than Mr. Yoshimura, maybe in her forties, and I recognized her. She was the mystery woman who had been onstage with Mr. Yoshimura at the World Bonsai Convention in Orlando in 1993, the first time I had seen him. She hadn't said a word while onstage, always staying a couple steps behind Mr. Yoshimura, keeping an anxious eye on him and assisting in the bonsai work as needed. Now Mr. Yoshimura introduced her. "This," he said, "is girl."

I was stunned to silence. The woman must have seen the look on my face and realized the situation. With raised eyebrows and a slight smile she extended her hand and said, "Hi, I'm GAIL."

I came to understand that Gail was Mr. Yoshimura's assistant, who lived in the house with him. She had her own room, which I would be staying in because she had made other arrangements for the next three nights. She would come and go during my time there but was never very much in evidence. I never figured out the relationship between Gail and Mr. Yoshimura, and I never made it my business to know. I later learned that Mr. Yoshimura had at least one other woman who had been a longtime assistant in the years since he relocated to America, and numerous other women, like Janet, who had been loyal, long-term students and admiring patrons. These relationships gave rise to rumor and speculation and became part of Mr. Yoshimura's mystique. The interactions I observed between Gail and Mr. Yoshimura bespoke comfortable, albeit cranky, familiarity, but nothing more than that. In terms of personality they seemed to be from opposing worlds.

No time was wasted on formalities when I arrived. In short order Mr. Yoshimura and I were seated at a table in the center of a small room that served as both dining room and study, looking over the list I had made of topics I hoped to address. The walls of the room were lined with shelves and cabinets, overflowing with books, folders and papers. There was also a phonograph and some record albums and a guitar in the corner nearby. There was a slide projector on the table, perhaps because Mr. Yoshimura knew I was bringing slide images of the Arboretum's bonsai or perhaps because that's just where it was kept. Mr. Yoshimura loaded my slides into the projector's carousel then started projecting the images onto a small screen, also crammed into the room. Here my lessons began. 

As each tree's image was thrown up on the screen, Mr. Yoshimura would study it briefly and then begin a critique. He would start by identifying the plant species, then proceed with a general overall assessment of the bonsai. This was followed by suggesting ways of styling the tree in the future. His directions were concise and specific: "Remove second lowest limb on the left side. Rotate tree forty-five degrees clockwise." Along the way he would introduce horticultural information relative to the species of plant under discussion, and usually he would comment about the container the bonsai was in, whether the pot was appropriate or not and what might be looked for as a better choice. I still have the images I brought with me then and every so often happen to see a few of them. I wince every time I do. The bonsai I showed him were all from the Staples donation, but reflecting two years of improvement since being rescued by the Arboretum. Still, they were not good. I can see that at a glance now and Mr. Yoshimura saw it at half a glance then. Yet he never gave any indication that the bonsai I was working with were such a sorry lot. Although he made many suggestions for improvement, he never said anything derogatory about the little trees and never said anything unkind about the work I was doing with them.

I had come to this encounter anxious that the arrogant, harsh and critical old bonsai master people warned me about might see right through me and find a rank beginner, or worse, a pretender. Then he would rip me apart for wasting his time. That idea seems silly to me now, as it likely does to you. But it wasn't silly to me then. Given what I knew of Mr. Yoshimura's fame and reputation, and given what I knew of my own limitations at the time, disaster seemed a plausible outcome. Now, all these years later, it is a certainty in my mind that Mr. Yoshimura understood exactly where I was in my bonsai development before I showed up at his door. Seeing the photographs of the Arboretum's bonsai would have confirmed what he already knew about my skill level, but it did give him a look at what kind of material I was dealing with. That very first night he made the suggestion that I needed to work on attracting more donations of trees for the Arboretum's collection. He did so softly, though, and framed it in a positive way: You work for a public garden — people will want to help. You need to identify these people and engage them and they will help you.

At this stage of the game, Mr. Yoshimura had a much clearer idea of my situation than I did of his.