The Japanese Quince

Very little seems to happen in “The Japanese Quince”: A middle-aged man takes a stroll around a garden, encounters a flowering tree and a neighbor, and then returns home. In reality, the story says much by saying little. What the story does not say is equally important as what it does say. The third-person narrator never reveals the cause of Nilson’s physical discomfort nor does he reveal much about his family. Nilson is depicted as a conventional-bound person strikingly in contrast with the colorful, dynamic tree and its melodious songbird. The nondescript life of Nilson stands in stark relief against the intense presence of the tree and bird.

Nilson’s physical discomfort is introduced in the opening paragraph, and it is referenced as a recurring motif throughout the story. Though his condition is never diagnosed, the location of the pain (“a faint aching just above his heart,” Paragraph 5) suggests that this is as much a spiritual as a physical condition. Nilson initially finds “a reassuring appearance of good health” (Paragraph 2) when he looks in the mirror, but this is perhaps a false reassurance in light of the “feeling of emptiness just under his fifth rib” (Paragraph 1). The careful phrasing suggests that Nilson may be in “good health” physically but he is unwell emotionally. The word “emptiness” implies the lack of depth that characterizes his life and, more broadly, the Edwardian culture around him. Nilson attempts to fill the void in his life—a void that is “faint” and not fully acknowledged—with external tokens of his status and social reputation.

As Nilson moves through his house from upstairs to downstairs and ultimately outside, the reader sees no progression in his understanding. He is bound by regularity and order. The newspaper is predictably laid out on the sideboard, waiting for him. The cuckoo clock strikes eight, as it does every day. Even the decision to “take a turn” in the garden (Paragraph 4) and enjoy the early spring air is a minor change in his usual routine. It is reasonable to assume that Nilson has taken this morning walk before, even if he had never noticed the tree from his upstairs window.

Most of the story’s action (limited though it is) occurs in the garden. The regularity of Nilson’s life is documented with slight hints and verbal gestures. Nilson starts to “pace the circular path” (Paragraph 5) which, like his life, involves merely going in a circle. Even the word “pace” carries with it the sense of repetition, obligation, and perhaps drudgery. His progress around the path is described by the word “revolutions,” which suggests that his pacing in the garden is equivalent to the path of the Earth in orbit: each day is another revolution, another predictable series of circular routines, governed by clocks and newspapers. The hands of the clock go round in a circle, and the paper is published each morning as the Earth completes another revolution.

The story begins to build toward a crisis when Nilson notices that the pain is still there after two laps around the path. He takes deep breaths (a remedy suggested by his wife’s doctor), but this only exacerbates the “faint aching.” In dealing with this emergent pain, Nilson adopts strategies from the world of business and accounting. First, he attempts to audit his diet from the previous evening but, the narrator says, “he could recollect no unusual dish” that might have caused him indigestion (Paragraph 5). This is not surprising, of course, because he presumably eats the same predictable diet each day. His next strategy is to put a label on it, linking to the theme of Naming and Classifying as a Way of Knowing. He wonders if he might be having an allergic reaction; the narrator says, “it occurred to him that it might possibly be some smell affecting him” (Paragraph 5). Nilson’s efforts to identify the cause come up empty. The narrator says that he could “detect nothing except a faint sweet lemony scent” coming from the blossoms (Paragraph 5). The repetition of the word “faint” within the same passage is evidence that the internal feeling in his heart is linked to the external world that he is sensing. The paragraph suggests that his heart is yearning to blossom and break free from the stifling confinement of his life.

The crisis seems to be suspended by the unexpected sensory overload of sight and sound: “Mr. Nilson smiled; the little tree was so alive and pretty! And instead of passing on, he stayed there smiling at the tree” (Paragraph 5). He takes delight and pride in his aloneness, the way someone might exult in secret or private knowledge. Nilson’s sense of uniqueness is disrupted as he immediately realizes that he is not alone. The irony is subtle but powerful. Nilson thought himself to be physically alone—that is, nobody else was literally there. Once he realizes Tandram’s presence, however, he is revealed to be alone in an emotional sense. This isolation from others is heightened by the fact that Tandram is first described as “the stranger” only to be identified in the following sentence as “his next-door neighbour” (Paragraph 6). Nilson’s lack of self-awareness is evident once again when the narrator describes Tandram as looking exactly like Nilson—a fact that seems to escape Nilson’s attention.

Nilson is “emboldened” to examine Tandram more closely. He is not emboldened to rush heroically into battle or a burning building; rather, he is emboldened to simply acknowledge and engage with a fellow human being. Their brief conversation is formulaic, except for a discussion of the tree. Neither of them knows what variety the tree is, so they must rely on a label to name it for them: Japanese quince. The tree’s name evokes an “exotic” sense of another place far removed and remote from London. As they make small talk about the tree, Nilson notes that the quince is purely ornamental and does not bear fruit. Tandram, in turn, offers facts about blackbirds and how different their song is from thrushes. A sense of one-upmanship emerges from this dialogue, heightening that even in their friendly conversation the men see each other as competitors.

The story reaches its climax when Nilson and Tandram are suddenly startled by one another. Nilson reacts “as if he had seen himself” (Paragraph 19), which, of course, is the case. He comes to the threshold of seeing himself, but he pulls back in surprise and settles into his habitual patterns and habits. A “shade” passes over Mr. Tandram’s face (Paragraph 20), which recalls how doppelgangers in literature and folklore often have a ghostly, haunting appearance. Both men withdraw and return to their homes. The tree and the blackbird remain untouched and unspoiled as a witness to what might have been. Even the sunlight is described in Paragraph 23 as a living thing (“darting and quivering”), which suggests the potentially transforming nature of this experience. Nilson had approached the threshold of a transformative experience before pulling back and retreating into isolation.

At the end of the story, Nilson is upset when he hears a cough or sigh and looks up to see Tandram in the window looking out at the garden. The cough reminds him, perhaps, of the sensation in his chest—a final reminder of how the two men double each other and a partial explanation for his troubled mood. Moreover, Tandram is partially concealed, the narrator says, “in the shadow of his French window” (Paragraph 25), which recalls the theme of Social Separation and Alienation that runs through the story in subtle ways. Nilson is upset because he cannot quantify and control what he feels and what he experienced in the garden. He only understands what can be counted, like his investments, as opposed to feelings, which, in his mind, cannot be counted. In the end, he remains unable to understand himself, his neighbor, or the little tree with its songbird. He has so thoroughly repressed his authentic self beneath social conventions and material prosperity that he withdraws back into the familiar, but shallow, world of the newspaper.