Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth.
From William Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra Act I, Scene I.
*
Devastation has come to my little corner of Tokyo. A neighbour’s garden, whose bamboo grove I used to see swaying in the wind every day, whose plum tree delighted me with shade in summer and blossom in winter and which was home for a pair of charming mejiro, or warbling white-eyes, has been laid waste.
It started with a small gang of hired men and their rented chainsaw and continued with strimmers and pickaxes. All that’s left standing is a solitary pine tree.
All day the hireling engines charged the trees
This is Stanley Kunitz’s apt description of similar events in his poem The War Against the Trees, from which I take this post’s title. He continued:
I saw the ghosts of children at their games
And then,
I watched them disappear
Into the suburbs of their grievous age.
I have imagined the affronted mejiro departing like hungry ghosts to a nearby park. And I have heard the wailing of other birds, especially the hiyodori or brown-eared bulbuls. These are never quiet birds, but since the havoc wreaked upon the garden, their shrill voices have become louder around the apartment block I live in, and they have even visited our balcony. Are they looking for sanctuary, or have they come to berate our species for our crimes?
It’s hard to blame the workers – they presumably need the work. And even the owners are doing no more than to follow the sovereign logic of our society: when something is no longer useful, tear it down and sell it for development.
And no doubt I am selfish even to bewail the loss of the beauty of “The little O, the Earth”1 that this small garden represented to me. There I would see the snow accumulate like powdery wrapping paper on plum blossoms and thicken the bamboo leaves into swaying fans of green and white.
However, unlike the local botanical garden, which I support through my payment of local taxes, I did nothing to maintain that private garden now in ruins, and I could hardly expect it to be maintained for my benefit.
But now, in Kunitz’s words, that the “green world” has “turned its death-foxed page”, a sadness has settled over the neighbourhood, and the incessant cries of the bewildered hiyodori sound like the wailing of phantoms expelled from the sanctuary of their now-lost garden.
