The Waiting Barbarian

The Waiting Barbarian is a garden stone that Yabu gives to Kasigi Omi, transforming a personal gift into a memorial to two different kinds of waiting. Its successive names connect military memory, a night of shared good fortune, and the painful contrast between survival and death; its visible markings become part of Yabu’s meditation on bodily impermanence.

Origin and Gift

Yabu says the stone came from Kyushu, where he found it about fifteen years earlier while serving in The Taikō’s army. He had been waiting for The Taikō to order an attack as the army prepared to crush the rebels and subdue the island. He first called it the Waiting Stone, preserving that interval of suspended action in its name.

Yabu offers the stone to Kasigi Omi for his garden at Mishima, both to commemorate the occasion and to mark the night and their good fortune. The gift follows an experience Yabu describes as marvelous, though the screams of that night remain part of what he remembers. The stone therefore carries more than a military recollection: it binds the garden object to a particular shared experience and to the bond between uncle and nephew.

Names and Meaning

Yabu initially proposes renaming it the Stone of Barbarian Peace, associating it with the night and with his own seemingly endless wait for peace. Kasigi Omi suggests the Happiness Stone instead, as a reminder to himself and his descendants of the honor Yabu has shown him. Yabu rejects both alternatives. He settles on The Waiting Barbarian, a name that joins the barbarian and himself through their common condition of waiting: Yabu lived, while the barbarian died.

The name makes the stone a memorial not only to Yabu’s past but also to a death that he recognizes as distinct from his own survival. He imagines the barbarian being reborn Japanese to compensate for his suffering, and imagines descendants eventually seeing the stone and finding contentment in it. The imagined future extends remembrance beyond the immediate gift, while leaving the dead man’s identity and fate within the limits of what Yabu says.

Material Memory

Yabu reads the stone’s surface as a record of human vulnerability. He sees flecks that resemble tears and veins of blue mixed with reddish quartz that suggest flesh; these details prompt his reflection on impermanence. The stone does not erase the barbarian’s suffering or restore the dead. Instead, its enduring form holds a memory of a body and a life that did not endure.

Yabu’s final pleasure in planting and naming a stone gives the object a place in the garden and a continuing story. Its name preserves the tension at the center of the gift: Yabu can offer an honored possession and imagine descendants remembering it, but the memory it carries is inseparable from the barbarian’s death. The Waiting Barbarian thus makes patience, survival, loss, and the changing meanings of remembrance visible in a single object.