Mr. Yoshimura's Time in Asheville

Nine thirty the next morning I was at the hotel and Mr. Yoshimura was not waiting in the lobby. I stopped at the front desk and asked the woman working there what room Mr. Yoshimura was in. She told me the number then asked if I wanted her to call his room and let him know I was there. "No," I said. "He's expecting me." The room was on the first floor, just around the corner from the front desk, and I went directly to it and knocked. I waited a moment and listened, hearing nothing. I knocked again. I listened, heard nothing then knocked again, this time calling his name as I did. I listened and heard some faint sound of movement in the room, so I called his name again. There was the sound of the latch being taken off, then the sound of the knob being fumbled on the other side of the door. The door opened a few inches and Mr. Yoshimura was standing there lookIng up at me. I said his name again and asked if he was alright, while he staggered back from the door so I could come in. He was in his night clothes. He looked at me blankly then collapsed on the floor.

Quickly I stepped toward Mr. Yoshimura, saying his name again, bending over him to see if he was okay. He seemed barely conscious. In a moment without thought, with a strength that came from not thinking, I picked the old man up off the floor, brought him over to the bed and laid him down on it. Then I picked up the phone and called 911.

The woman from the front desk was now standing in the doorway to the room, asking if everything was alright. I explained the situation to her and she went back out to the lobby to wait for the first responders. Mr. Yoshimura came around a little bit. His eyes were partly open and he moaned, but he was not coherent. When the EMS vehicle arrived, they put him on the gurney, wheeled him out and into the vehicle, then drove off with him to Saint Joseph's Hospital. I drove there in my truck and upon arrival asked if I could wait with Mr. Yoshimura as preparations were being made for him to be examined. Once I explained how Mr. Yoshimura was from out of town and didn't know anyone else, I was allowed into a sort of staging area where he was waiting. He was still on a gurney but now dressed in a hospital gown. Mr. Yoshimura was conscious, talking more coherently, but he was quite distraught about his circumstances. Finally a nurse came to wheel him off somewhere and I had to leave. I had given the EMS personnel Mr. Yoshimura's home phone number, which allowed the hospital to get in touch with Gail, the woman who lived with him. She in turn connected the hospital with Mr. Yoshimura's daughter, Yoko, who lived in Massachusetts. Mr. Yoshimura's daughter was coming to Asheville to take charge of the situation.

There was nothing for me to do at that point except head on into work. Later, when work was over, I swung by the hospital again in hopes of being able to visit with Mr. Yoshimura. I was told he was okay, that he was resting but would not be having visitors that evening. The next day I met his daughter, Yoko, who had flown into town and taken a hotel room. What I know about the circumstances of the fateful day when Mr. Yoshimura drove from Raleigh to Asheville I learned mostly from Yoko. The story went like this: Somewhere along the way while driving on the Interstate he had suffered some sort of event, likely a stroke, and had driven off the road into a ditch. The highway patrol apparently found him there with his vehicle stuck, so they called a tow truck to pull the vehicle out of the ditch. The most amazing thing — the part of the story that didn't make sense then and still doesn't now — was that the highway patrol then allowed Mr. Yoshimura to drive on his way. Perhaps the fact that he was an old person who spoke with a heavy accent made it more difficult for the patrol officer to take a clear read on Mr. Yoshimura's mental state. We'll never know.

Likewise, we'll never know what else happened on the rest of the drive, and we can only guess what the experience must have been like for Mr. Yoshimura. He must have known something was wrong with him, and he must have been frightened. He was hundreds of miles from home, driving a big SUV-type vehicle along an unfamiliar, heavily trafficked Interstate highway, through the evening rush hour, through the gathering darkness, up a winding mountain pass before arriving after dark to a town he didn't know. Remember that he had no cell phone or GPS. A drive that should have taken between four and five hours took more than twelve for him that day. And how did he find the right hotel? It must have been blind luck.

Mr. Yoshimura spent one week in the hospital in Asheville. Yoko was with him every day and I stopped in to see him every evening after work. Yoko would take the opportunity to step away for awhile during my visits, to have a little break from what was surely a most worrisome vigil. She, too, was a long distance from home in an unfamiliar place, away from her family while waiting for her father to get well enough to travel, no doubt wondering how the next phase of his life would play out. My wife and I invited Yoko to come to our house for supper one night. It seemed to do her good to get away from the hospital for a little bit and to be around my family, my wife being a gentle person and our children being very young at the time. Yoko impressed me as a polite and refined person, maybe ten years older than my wife and me, reserved at first but warmly kind as time went by. I have always remembered Yoko with great fondness.

I went to the hospital each evening with the purpose of taking Mr. Yoshimura's mind off his troubles. On my first visit a nurse happened to come by while I was there, and I earnestly asked if she knew she had a famous patient. When she said she didn't know that I asked if she'd ever heard of the little Japanese trees called bonsai. She said she'd heard of them so I told her Mr. Yoshimura was one of the most famous bonsai artists in the whole world, that he had written a very famous book about bonsai and that he traveled all over the world teaching bonsai, and had many students and I was one of them. I said all this with great animation, to which the nurse reacted with good humored uncertainty, and all of it made Mr. Yoshimura laugh in an "aw shucks" sort of way. I quickly found the best method to distract Mr. Yoshimura was to bring along a few bonsai books when I visited him. I would sit next to his bed while he looked through the books and he would critique the trees in them, which allowed us to resume our familiar roles as teacher and student. He was such a natural teacher, but a very tough critic of bonsai, too. Once I brought with me an oversize coffee-table book titled "Classical Bonsai of Japan", a volume Mr. Yoshimura seemed to critique with particular sharpness. He sat in his bed, propped up on pillows, turning the pages of the big book one by one while delivering brief and brutal commentary on each bonsai. Mr. Yoshimura would look at a picture and say, "NO," then turn the page crisply. He'd look at the next picture, shake his head and say, "NO," and turn the page. The next picture might elicit an, "I DON'T THINK SO," and then he'd turn the page. Finally he came to a picture that he stopped to look at for more than a few seconds. "This one is maybe not so bad," he said.

It was a difficult time for Mr. Yoshimura, and for his daughter who had come to his aid, but for me it was a strangely mixed situation. I'd be at work, mostly doing nursery chores but some of the time working with the bonsai collection, and I was intensely aware that the great Yuji Yoshimura was there in Asheville, not far away. I wanted to bring a tree to the hospital to work on with him! When I went home after visiting him in the evening, it took less than five minutes to drive to my house. Mr. Yoshimura was right there in our neighborhood, and something about that fact seemed almost mystical to me, like reality had taken a detour and slipped down a curious side street for a spell. There was an aspect of the situation that made me feel lightheaded with disbelief. 

Mr. Yoshimura was there in Asheville, but for him it was as if he'd been overtaken and made a prisoner. He couldn't go anywhere or do anything until the doctors said he was well enough to travel, and then who knew what would happen. What would his life be like after this? The old teacher had spent his thirty-something years in America driving himself all over the country, headstrong and independent, and now, in Asheville, North Carolina, he had finally run out of road. He was old and broken, and now he was despondent, too. That's why I did everything I could, every day when I'd visit him, to take his mind to a better place.

When at last Mr. Yoshimura was released from the hospital, Yoko made arrangements for him to fly back with her to Massachusetts. On their way to the airport they stopped in at the Arboretum to say goodbye. Mr. Yoshimura was very frail and movement was not easy for him, but he came into my work area and looked around approvingly. He had enough energy to make a brief visit to the greenhouse, where he saw at least the tropical portion of the collection before it was time for him to be going. That was it. I had imagined so many scenarios about Mr. Yoshimura coming to the Arboretum, but I never thought it would go the way it did.