The Ginger Tree

by Oswald Wynd

  I am continuing to breastfeed Tomo but don’t mean to go on doing this for as long as Japanese women, which apparently can be for years. Usually, holding him, I am content not to think, wanting only these minutes. He rarely cries except when he needs something, and with three women in attendance he gets it quickly. I look at him lying back on the matting doing those upside down bicycle exercises and remember Jane, who was not a whiner, not really much of a crier, either, but never joyous-seeming like my son. It is as if Tomo knew he had been born to a golden future. Nothing could be less probable in his case, but he seems quite certain of it. Again I have that weird feeling my baby knows things which are hidden from me. It is, of course, imagination.

  Tsukiji, Tokyo

  August 4th, 1905

  The war in Manchuria drags on, though there is talk of the Americans arranging a peace between Russia and Japan. I woke up the other night suddenly wondering what would happen to me if Kentaro was killed. How selfish I am getting. I keep telling myself that it is for Tomo that I am frightened, but this isn’t true, women with children may be doubly fearful on their account, but half the fear is still for themselves.

  Yesterday I went with Misao San by ricksha to a branch of the Yokohama Specie Bank not far from the Ginza where I opened an account with one thousand eight hundred yen, keeping two hundred which I intend to spend getting to know Tokyo and my place in it, if any. Already I can see one possible future for me, quite the most pleasant of a variety of things that could happen, this to be Kentaro’s second wife. It is quite unnecessary here for a man to wait until his first wife is dead before he takes another, the concubine and her children occupying a separate house and having quite an established place in society. The present Crown Prince is not the son of the Empress, but a child by the Emperor Meiji and a court lady, a young man who could not possibly be heir to the throne in any other country but this. Most concubines are successful geisha who have retired from their profession to live with a protector. The legal wives don’t seem to protest against these arrangements.

  No one who was a decent Christian could possibly consider the life that I am willing to let become mine. I seem to have lost all sense of shame. Does this mean that I am slowly being destroyed?

  Tsukiji, Tokyo

  August 9th

  Something I have been dreading has happened, a note from Miss Bassett-Hill asking me to lunch the day after tomorrow. She says that since I have been seen abroad she hopes that I am now fully recovered from my recent confinement and illness after it. The note, delivered by hand, starts ‘Dear Mrs Collingsworth’ so she must know all about me and this almost certainly means that they also do at the British Embassy. Why should a single lady missionary want to associate with someone who has lost her character, unless it is to spy on her? It can’t just be kindness. She has probably been instructed by the Embassy to find out all she can about me so they can build up a case to put to the Japanese to have me deported. Richard could well be behind this. I want to say I can’t go, but that would show I am afraid, so I must, and try to brazen things out, something I am not trained to do. If I refuse this time she will only come at me again.

  Tsukiji, Tokyo

  August 11th, 1905

  I don’t really know what to think about what happened to me today. Miss Bassett-Hill’s house is Japanese style, only a little bigger than this but in a much larger garden, and stuffed with furniture from England. Thick carpets are laid over the matting though you still take off your shoes in the entrance, and I couldn’t believe her drawing-room when I saw it, desks, bookcases, a plush-covered sofa and chairs all crowded in, and all seeming very insecure on the soft flooring underneath. A high bookcase trembled every time I moved in my chair and I had the feeling flimsy walls were going to topple in on us under the weight of framed portraits, Miss Bassett-Hill apparently needing to bring all these reminders of her ancestors with her to the wilds of the Orient. There wasn’t one thing in that room beyond basic design and woodwork which hinted at Japan, even the sliding paper doors glazed to suggest french windows. In what had once been the alcove for formal ornament was a huge roll-top desk over which hung an electric light shaded by green beads knitted together.

  For a moment or two I didn’t realise there was a third person in the room, a woman sitting in a rocking-chair with a fixed base, only the upper portion movable on springs. These creaked as she stood. The lady was wearing a plain white blouse and a brown skirt showing her ankles, as though it had shrunk from many washings. Her black hair was dressed in the Sally Lunn loaf style I wore out to China but abandoned soon after in favour of combing straight back to a bun low on my neck. The other guest, if she was that, seemed to have lost a few vital hairpins, a not very elaborate coiffure still in acute danger of suddenly collapsing, many stray tendrils already loose. It was only when my eyes adjusted from the brightness out on the verandah that I realised the lady was Japanese. Our hostess, dressed in a total black which looked like mourning for the sins of this world, introduced us.

  ‘Baroness Sannotera, Mrs Collingsworth. I was sure you two would like to meet. And now I must go and see what my terrible cook is doing tothe lunch.’ She added in her high, thin, almost piercing voice: ‘The Baroness has recently been released from prison.’

  The one thing I was sure of in that moment was the lunch-party was going to be very different from anything I had imagined. Miss Bassett-Hill left and the Baroness, not showing any embarrassment over that introduction, moved to a side table, saying over a shoulder, ‘I’m sure Alicia would want you to have a sherry.’

  I needed something. As the Baroness turned with two glasses in her hand she added, once again in perfect English: ‘When one is associating with former jailbirds, it is always useful to know how long they were in for. I was sentenced for six months but only served three because of family influence and despite the fact that it was my third conviction.’

  I felt I was being challenged to ask why she had been in prison, so I did. The reply was immediate: ‘For staring at the Emperor Meiji.’

  Even when she explained this was a little hard to believe, but apparently it is absolutely forbidden by law to look directly at the Emperor, who is, of course, regarded as a god. When his carriage passes in the streets the crowds are expected to bow very low and keep that position until it is well out of range. All windows in upper storeys are out of bounds and during state processions the police stand facing the crowds, on the outlook for anyone disobeying the edict. The Baroness had chosen a very prominent spot near the bridge over the moat around the palace and when Emperor Meiji had been driving to a state opening of parliament had very conspicuously stood erect while everyone else was bent double. She had also shouted at His Imperial Majesty that Japanese women must be freed from slavery. There had been a great scandal leading to a prosecution and the Baroness had not only received many death threats, but also gifts of ceremonial short swords from patriotic societies with suggestions that she take her own life to atone for the shame brought on her family and her country. Her two previous convictions were for creating an obstruction outside the office of one of Tokyo’s daily papers during a campaign for votes for women, and a jail sentence of three months, later reduced to two, for having stated in a lecture that the Emperor is not divine and should not be worshipped.

  I didn’t have to account for myself to Baroness Sannotera, Miss Bassett-Hill had told her all she knows about me, which is obviously a great deal. The Baroness described how she had joined the Suffragettes during her stay in England, almost as the direct result of witnessing the junketing in London on the relief of Mafeking, that celebration of a victory in yet another stupid war that need never have been fought if women had their proper say in the conduct of world affairs. I was thinking this lady was bound for more jail sentences if she went on expressing these thoughts in Japan when our hostess called us into the next room, saying as we joined her: ‘The French may have taken to Japan, but their wines have not. I was hoping for a good deal from this bottle
, but once again my hopes have been dashed.’

  Miss Bassett-Hill is not some kind of spy for the Embassy or my relations; she learned about me from Dr Ikeda at St Luke’s where she does volunteer work twice a week. It was an extraordinary party. I will always be able to see that erect figure in black sitting at the head of a table which also wobbled on soft matting, telling us about the habit of some missionaries of returning statistics on the number of converts made each year and her comment on her own work.

  ‘I doubt very much whether, as the result of my thirty years here, I could confirm one convert. The Japanese don’t seem to care for Anglicanism. Perhaps they can’t begin to understand it. I’m not sure that I do myself. And of course, there is the fact that I am very High Church.’

  At the gate, as she was getting into her ricksha, the Baroness turned to me.

  ‘Two disreputable women like us ought to be friends. What do you think?’

  I think yes. We are going to the Kabuki theatre together next week.

  Tsukiji, Tokyo

  August 16th

  If Aiko Sannotera is a foretaste of what is going to happen to Japanese women in the twentieth century, then Japanese men are going to have to live through a revolutionary experience. To me she is like a door opened into the world again after a long time when I was shut into the cell of myself. My maids are terrified of her, they could perhaps accept such an un-female approach to living in a foreign woman, but that a Japanese, and a Baroness at that, should be so emancipated shocks them utterly. The granddaughter of a Finance Minister, who ought to be behaving like a great lady, talks to them like an equal instead of using the language for servants, and this, too, is totally unnerving.

  Aiko was divorced six years ago by her husband, who she says was remarkably patient but finally could not stand her any longer, at least as his wife, for they are still friends and it is he who contrives to have her jail sentences shortened. Also, the gods had punished a female rebel by making her barren, and though her husband had been quite willing to adopt an heir to carry on the Sannotera name, Aiko had suggested that he really ought to have a try with another woman and she is glad this has been successful, the Baron now has two sons and a daughter.

  We went to the Kabuki last night, sitting in one of the little boxes on matting in an area that would be the centre stalls in Europe, surrounded by families packed into other little railed boxes, most people eating solidly, which is necessary to sustain you through an eight-hour performance, though you can vary your attention to the stage with family gossip and in the case of one party of business men attended by geisha, with something rather different from that. I thoroughly enjoyed a theatre in which, while an actor is about to disembowel himself against a background of paper cherry blossoms, people in the box next to us could become totally concerned with curing grandpapa of hiccups resulting from too much rice wine.

  The action of the play must have reminded Aiko of her own family history. In rather a loud voice which even pushed through the shrieks of the dying actor, she told me how her grandfather, the Finance Minister, had been murdered. Four swordsmen had chopped their way into the family home, killing first the gate attendant, then two serving maids, then Aiko’s grandmother who tried to protect her bedridden husband, finally reaching the old man himself whom they literally carved to pieces. The crime for which he was slaughtered was having resisted attempts by the Army and Navy to corner more finance for their expansion.

  It is easy to see from where Aiko gets her stubborn refusal to be intimidated by the powers that be. And I can see, too, why she thinks Japan is ripe for a thousand reforms to take the country out of what she calls feudalism in new clothes. She isn’t a restful woman to be with, your mind isn’t allowed to go slack in her company, and this is what I need. I have rested too much and too long.

  Tsukiji, Tokyo

  August 20th

  Aiko was here this afternoon. She is marvellous with Tomo when I wouldn’t have expected her to have any instinctive feeling for children at all. She must know Kentaro since the Japanese upper classes seem quite close knit, but she has never mentioned him. This is not to spare my feelings, she spares nobody’s feelings, but I suspect because she finds quite unbearable the idea of my subservience to the whims of a Japanese man. What she would probably like me to do is wrap my son in a quilt and carry him out into a Tokyo night, putting behind me forever my dependence on the male.

  As a ‘new’ woman there is one thing Aiko forgets, that she was born into a wealthy family and married a rich man, her idealism never threatened by not knowing how she was going to eat tomorrow. I’m not trying to diminish her or make excuses for myself, she would die for a cause that was important in her eyes, but at the same time would see nothing odd in having her last meal before execution sent in from an expensive restaurant on a gilded lacquer tray, all this paid for by her ex-husband. I think that already we like each other as much for the areas of what seems to each the absurd in the other as for anything else. It is not a close sympathy in all things, or ever likely to be, but already a kind of warfare. In time I will make her a stronger and more worthy adversary. In only ten days she has brought me back into real living again, and for this I will be forever grateful.

  Tsukiji, Tokyo

  August 24th, 1905

  The Russo-Japan war is over, a peace treaty signed yesterday in America at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Kentaro may soon be back in Tokyo. I try not to think about what this could mean for me and for Tomo.

  Today I went alone to the Ginza for the first time, buying some home-style cakes at Fugetsudo’s, delicious little macaroons made with real ground almonds, and after that walking through a four-storey department store called Matsuzakara. This had many sections full of imports from Europe where richly dressed matrons seemed to be spending money wildly, perhaps the wives of war profiteers who have been receiving bad publicity in the papers recently.

  At Maruzen’s, the bookshop, I got a copy of Basil Hall Chamberlain’s Things Japanese which Aiko recommended, saying it is full of plain home truths for the people in this country. I also found a second-hand Shakespeare, complete works in one volume and far too small print, but last night I read Macbeth straight through because I couldn’t stop, with Tomo making little puppy-like noises in his sleep as though the light disturbed him.

  I don’t suppose we are meant to have much sympathy for Macbeth, but I did, as though I could feel everything that happened to him from those first thoughts of murder in his mind, these the beginnings of his destruction. The most terrible thing in the play is the idea of the Fates hounding, the witches their instrument, so that you know there is no escape for Macbeth, his doom inevitable. This is a little like the idea of God strict Presbyterians in Scotland still have, that He has chosen you for hell or heaven before you are born. It is a really wicked thing to pin on God. I cannot believe in Fate as we see it in Macbeth. I was not inevitably destined to climb a Chinese hill path and allow a Japanese soldier to make me with child. What I did then was from my own choice, I cannot blame God or the Fates, just myself. And often, looking at Tomo, I am glad.

  11

  Letter from Mary Mackenzie to Madame de Chamonpierre in Washington, DC, USA

  13 Tsukiji San Chome, Tokyo, Japan

  September 16th, 1905

  Dear Marie – Once again it was marvellous to hear from you and I can’t thank you enough for having acted as my ‘detective’, which I know has put you to a lot of trouble, whatever you may say about that.

  I had guessed, of course, that Jane was almost certainly at Mannington with Richard’s mother, and all I can really hope for now is that she is enough like her father, or grows up enough like him, for that world to be completely right for her. It is certainly stable enough. I hope, for her sake, that Jane in no way takes after me, and I am sure that Lady Collingsworth will do her utmost to make sure that this does not happen. I am glad, too, that Richard will not be posted back to China after his leave in England. It troubles me to think of the
damage I have probably done to his career prospects, but surely it will be understood that he is in no way to blame? No word of a divorce has reached me, but I suppose that under English law this could be done without any notification to me at all.

  My son Tomo is very well. He has been healthy from the first though it was not an easy delivery, his position in the womb wrong, I am still not very clear in what way, but the doctors at the very good hospital here had to operate just before term, which means I will never be able to have another child. As someone who is now part of what you would call the demi-monde this is probably a good thing. I am not troubled about it. With Tomo I run the risk of becoming a doting mother, which is something I must watch. My two maids appear to take few things in this life very seriously except babies, particularly boy babies, so not only can I safely leave Tomo with them, the problem will soon be to keep them from totally spoiling the child. Already he is like a little prince who has only to express a whim to have it immediately satisfied. It is quite extraordinary how early infants begin to sense their power and to use it.

  I am no longer isolated in this house as I was when I first wrote, having now two friends, one English lady and one Japanese, the latter a Baroness of somewhat unique character for this country. She has taken me out into the world of Tokyo and even beyond, for next month we go to some hill in the country for a ceremonial viewing of the autumn colours of maple trees. The Baroness wears European dress all the time … if you can call it that … and we ought to make a curious pair of sightseers, arousing considerable interest as we have already done on various expeditions, including the theatre. So you see, I am not growing in on myself as I think you would have expected me to since you thought I shut myself up in that Peking house. Tokyo I like, it is not beautiful with its endless miles of little grey wood two-storey houses, but it is full of life and much richer than China in simple entertainments for all the people, which cost little and sometimes nothing at all. I go regularly to the night markets which open up every evening with portable stalls along the main street, the Ginza. These are lit by acetylene flares and practically everything available on this earth can be bought at them. There also seem to be festivals of some kind or another every other week, most of these based on temples, but very light-hearted. It is my impression that the Japanese take religion very casually, believing in little beyond ghosts. It is a great country for ghosts, everything is haunted, including trees.