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- Herausgeber: Aderyn Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Winner of the Bath Novel Award 2020 When lonely and socially isolated translator, Gareth, takes up traditional Japanese archery in 1990s Bristol, he learns that to study Kyudo is to reach out, to another culture, another time, other people… But when one of them reaches back, two lives that should never have touched become strangely entangled. In wartime Tokyo, Tanaka Mie finds herself wandering the burned-out ruins of her dead parents' fire-bombed home with only hazy recollections of how she survived. Setting out on a hike to a mountain village shrine, away from the charred city, she begins a life to which she is not sure she is entitled, a life which feels like living on the other side of the sky. To visit the past or the future, even in imagination, is to change it. But it is also to be changed. The Arrow Garden is a delicately-wrought tale of truth, selfhood, and acceptance, which transcends time in its lyrical exploration of what it means to live.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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THE ARROW GARDEN
First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Aderyn PressGweledfa, Felindre, Swansea, Wales, SA5 7NA
www.aderynpress.com
Copyright © 2023 Andrew J King
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The moral right of the author has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-9163986-4-1
eISBN 978-1-9163986-5-8
Cover design: Kari Brownlie
Text design: Elaine Sharples
Printed in Great Britain by 4edge Ltd
In memory of Anne1933 – 2022Mother, teacher, supporter and astute critic
The Void
There is a moment when the arrow stands in the target. And there is a moment, just before that, when it does not. No matter how I stare, I can never catch the instant of its arrival.
If I look towards the archer, I can just see the brief flash of movement as it leaves the bow. The eye can track its flight, but often arrives at the target to find the arrow already planted, as if it had grown there.
A camera, perhaps, could resolve the uncertainty between the note of the bowstring and the percussion of the target. The image might reveal a flying stick, naked and exposed, quivering with all the chances of its flight. Even a bursting of the paper as it pierced the target. But would that satisfy? After all, if it was a fair shot, then it already stands in the target. And no camera can ever capture the moment between there and not there.
But there must be something in the void, in the moment between moments. For everything else, forwards and backwards, grows out of that.
1 Ashibumi
The archer takes up position at the shooting line, feet braced well apart, establishing the foundations of the shot.
‘Of course, you’ve never met my aunt.’
Hiroshi’s English was impeccable. Probably because it was patched together from textbook phrases like ‘Hiroshi’s English was impeccable’ or ‘Of course, you’ve never met my aunt’. Of course I’d never met his aunt. Weeks squashed together in an attic office and this was the first time he’d admitted to having any sort of personal life, never mind an actual living relative.
‘Quite a character. A very nice person…’
‘Eh?’
‘… although, as a matter of fact, she had some odd ways.’
He didn’t seem to register my puzzled silence.
‘We felt it might be because of her experiences in the Pacific War. She lost all her family, except for my father.’
I admit, I was struggling. Thirty seconds before, we had been deep in the minutiae of translation, wrestling the maintenance schedule for a medical waste incinerator out of Japanese and into English.
‘She was almost killed herself. A real survivor. She never spoke about it, certainly not to us children.’
In the middle of a section entitled ‘Schedule of Monthly Inspections’, he’d pushed back his chair, put his glasses down on the desk and come out with this … stuff.
‘To my sister and I she was just Auntie Mie. She bought us little treats: shaved ice with syrup in the summer, cakes in the winter, presents on our birthdays. She never married, but apart from that she lived a perfectly normal life, most of the time.’
The yellow stained fingertips strayed upward toward his mouth, but finding no cigarette, settled on his tie instead and unnecessarily re-arranged it.
‘She could be very … determined.’
He paused, as if waiting for something.
‘But quite humorous also, more … uninhibited than most people.’
Again, a pause, during which it dawned on me that what he was waiting for, was me.
‘Sounds fun!’ I said and immediately regretted it.
‘Yes! My sister and I adored her! But the presents were a little odd.’
His tone became confidential.
‘At first she would just buy us the usual little toys. But as we got older, she started giving us things that were rather… strange.’
Our desks stood side by side, facing the low wall under the slope of the attic roof, his to the right of mine. I sensed he was looking at me. Waiting for me to say something like: ‘Oh? What sort of strange things?’ I cleared my throat and pointed out, as tactfully as I could, that we had a minor deadline to meet. He gave a grunt, snapped his glasses back on and twenty seconds later we were once more tussling over the correct usage of ‘air filter retention ring’ and ‘flexible drive-belt tensioner’.
At first, I congratulated myself on having steered our relationship back onto professional ground. As the morning wore on, I began to suspect my satisfaction had been premature. There was an atmosphere. By lunchtime, I was desperate to get out of the office.
