I am having this experience, with my nose pressed against the fence of the park to look at Mrs. Oda’s garden; what I have before my eyes is a real forest, its multiple species of plants, flowers and shrubs, its undergrowth, its halliers, coppices, groves of high grass, bushes, its path under the trees, its stones and rocks against the trunks, entwined with the roots, covered with this kind of moss so dark green that it becomes almost black, a mark of nobility and great antiquity; the garden no longer has a fence. The narrator, a Frenchman exiled in Japan, observes a garden, that of Madame Oda, which she willingly opens to those who are interested in it and to her artist friends. She herself is entirely turned towards this garden, which she shapes a bit like raising a child, by giving it the necessary impulses to grow, then by trusting it.
Everything is restraint and pleasure in this text where one slips (as it seems that the writing guides us gently) into the atmosphere of this Japanese garden and its occupants, where “under sometimes anecdotal aspects, among jokes and laughter, we talked about essential things.”
