Tiger and bamboo back piece

The rain has not stopped since Tuesday, so the bamboo along the east wall bends low and the gutters run like streams. You asked whether the rumours from the village were true. They are, though not in the way the baker tells them. Abbot Hideo sent me down to the lower gate with a lantern because the dogs would not stop barking.

The tiger was standing in the road below the gate, head lowered, as if it had been walking towards us for a long while and had only now decided to arrive. It was thinner than I expected and grey in the lantern light, its stripes running into the shadows so that I could not tell where the animal ended and the leaves began. Its paws were the size of my two hands laid side by side. It did not growl. It looked at me the way Father Anselm looks at a bad translation, patiently, expecting better.

I did not run, which surprised me more than it surprised the tiger. I set the lantern on the wall and knelt in the mud, because the abbot taught us that a visitor who comes low is a guest and one who comes tall is a thief. After a while it turned and walked back into the bamboo, and the leaves closed behind it without a sound. In the morning there were prints in the mud by the gate, each one filled with rainwater and holding a single bamboo leaf, dark and perfectly flat, as though someone had pressed them there to keep.

Brother Kenji says it was a sign that we should enlarge the garden. I think it was a message for the abbot, who has been ill since autumn and has stopped asking for his tea. I have put one of the leaves between the pages of this letter. Keep it safe for me, and do not show it to Mother.

Your loving brother, Tomas