by Oswald Wynd
Of Count Kurihama I have heard nothing. He is probably concerned with what now looks as though it would become a permanent Japanese occupation of Korea, something that should please you since you believe that they ought to rule Asia. I am not sure about that, even though my baby is half-Japanese.
You say nothing of Armand’s Pierce-Arrow? I hope he hasn’t been having trouble with it. From what I read in the papers these vehicles are expensive luxuries. A number of new rich Japanese, war profiteers mostly, called narikin, have imported motorcars, but they are continually breaking down or rolling off narrow tracks into rice fields and having to be pulled out again by patient oxen. I am thinking of getting a bicycle. Aiko, the Baroness, has just bought one, a lady’s model with three-speed gears, on which she is now whizzing about the streets of Tokyo, I fear to the great danger of lives and property, liable to have some very dramatic accident shortly!
As you can see, I am in much better spirits than when I last wrote. The autumn is lovely here, sunny days and cool nights. A neighbour plays the samisen in the evening, a stringed instrument on which geishas are skilled, so perhaps I should learn to play one. It makes cool, twanging notes that have a kind of deep sadness, not like anything I heard in China, and there is also a bamboo flute which sounds like a rich contralto voice.
You ask about earthquakes. There have been some, but mostly small, setting up a rattling more than a violent movement of the earth and in this light wooden house I really wasn’t frightened at all. It is the huge fires, called the flowers of Yedo, which are terrifying; they sweep whole wards of the city, producing dreadful fire storms. Since I have been here six thousand houses were burned down in one night in the Ueno district. Though Ueno is a considerable distance from us here the sky overhead was blood red through all the hours of darkness. They say that the canals which crisscross this area are a protection, but burning wood embers, wind borne, can travel for miles. Aiko tells me that in the last fifty years, and except for the central portion around the Imperial Palace, almost the whole of this city has, at various times, been burned down and rebuilt. Naturally enough, the people here seem to have no great feeling for the permanence of material things, and if you are a city dweller the chances of losing everything you possess at least once in a lifetime are very high indeed. Many know this two and three times.
The Baroness must be the only Japanese woman who thinks it a bad thing that her country won the war against Russia. She says it only inflates their swelling conceit after the defeat of China years earlier. She tells me that there are even some military hotheads who say that it will be Britain they take on next, in spite of that treaty of friendship and alliance. I’m sure that, though you are French, you will agree that if ever the Japanese try that they will be in for a nasty shock.
Thanks so much for writing to me, and please do it again soon. Better still, on your next leave from Washington why not another visit to your beloved Japan? These days the travel involved is becoming nothing, only five days or so on the train from where you are to Vancouver and from there just another twelve to Yokohama. The world is getting much too fast for me, I have decided I am a slow person, but it does mean that all kinds of things that were impossible a few years ago are easy today. Perhaps in fifty years we will be travelling in flying machines. I recently read in our English-language paper that two Americans are rumoured to have flown twenty-four miles in only half an hour at some secret testing ground, but I must say I find this hard to believe. One wonders whatever next. My love to Armand and to you.
Sincerely,
Mary
PS Armand is not to risk your life speeding in the Pierce-Arrow. The papers also tell me that the automobile is becoming quite a menace in American streets and even on country roads.
13 Tsukiji San Chome, Tokyo, Japan
September 19th, 1905
After lunch today Aiko came on her bicycle to give me a riding lesson. The only place for this was the street in front of our house which at that time was completely empty. Misao and Fukuda came out to see the circus. They still cannot make Aiko out. That a foreigner behaves as though mad is to be expected, but this is their first experience of a Japanese who has caught the infection of that lunacy. Also, Aiko’s voice isn’t really very ladylike by local standards, she can be heard across a crowded room when she thinks she is talking to you alone. As an instructress she bellowed, there is no other word for it. Finally, by paying no attention at all to what she told me to do, I managed to stay on for all of thirty yards and was really going quite well when I hit a stone which swerved the front wheel, giving me the choice of falling off or going straight into the canal. I fell off, with the maids coming clattering to my rescue crying: ‘Ara! Ara!’ while wicked Aiko just stood by the gate laughing.
After this we sent for two rickshas and, leaving the bicycle with its back wheel padlocked, rode up to the Ginza pulled by two kurumaya men who must have thought we were both foreigners and who enlivened the journey, at least for Aiko, by a shouted exchange as they padded along on the subject of the likely morals of their two passengers, conclusions not very complimentary. Aiko was furious, but contained herself until we got to Matsuzakara’s store, when she then let out a stream of what I don’t think was very high-class Japanese, at which their jaw muscles went slack. I know she did not tip them.
We went up in the newly installed American electric elevator which clanked and gave me the feeling that it might go on strike at any moment and simply drop us four or five floors to the cellar. Our destination was the ladies’ foreign gown department which Aiko says dresses a number of the court ladies, as it used to do her when she was one of them. All I can say to that is that it can’t be a very well dressed Court. A number of the ‘models’, mounted on what appeared to be headless sewing dummies, were the last word in 1890 styles and looked as though they had been sitting there ever since collecting dust. Aiko noticed my reaction and told me about a garden party she had once attended where the ladies were mostly dressed by this department in ‘foreign style’, and where one of them was wearing an enormous cartwheel hat decorated with ostrich plumes. The moths had got at the hat and every time the lady bowed a plume fell out. Palace protocol is strict at these parties, demanding that you stay in the place to which you have been assigned by rank, and by the time the occasion was drawing to its close the court lady, still bowing, was surrounded by a kind of witches’ circle of ostrich feathers.
Aiko was on the hunt for what she called a useful two-piece she could wear for cycling and though we had a good look there was nothing remotely approximating to this. I was even more serious about looking than she, for Aiko is now threatening to scandalise Tokyo by sending to London or New York for a pair of the bicycle bloomers that are currently the fashion for more daring ladies. I’m quite certain that if she wore those here the police would arrest her on suspicion of being an anarchist. There are times when I wonder if she is not one of these at heart.
In the end the saleslady, herself wearing a charming dark kimono, poor advertising for what she had to sell, took us into a curtained booth and presented ‘fashion’ books in which we were to search for a suitable made to measure outfit. The books weren’t dated and the patterns could well have been the sort of thing Mama might have ordered about the time I was born. Finally we were bowed from the department with Aiko no nearer than she had been to a replacement for worn and shrunken tweeds brought from England many years ago, but still nearer to being up to the minute than Matsuzakara’s offerings.
Tsukiji, Tokyo
September 23rd
I gave my first luncheon-party, with the same guest list as the only other Tokyo luncheon-party I have been to, Aiko and Miss Bassett-Hill. Since I have no dining-room we had it Japanese style on a low table about which we sat on cushions, the meal a compromise between my ambitions for it and what I knew Fukuda San had hopes of achieving, the main dish one of her flattish omelettes, this time considerably flatter than usual, with pieces of chicken poking out of it as though
trying to escape from being held down under an eggy blanket. We started safely enough with a tin of Crosse and Blackwell’s imported consommé which I picked up, at a price, in Matsuzakara’s new luxury food department, finishing with the delicious soft persimmons which are in season just now, and very cheap, I got six for ten sen which Fukuda says was far too much to pay. A wine I did not attempt, certain that whatever I got would disappoint Miss Bassett-Hill, and was glad afterwards when I saw her wince over her first sip of imported Best British Sherry.
Miss Bassett-Hill wishes me to call her Alicia, I suspect not so much as an indication of our increasing intimacy as the fact that it embarrasses her to have to call someone in my position Mrs Collingsworth or Mackenzie, so prefers to use Mary. I think she had a slight struggle with her conscience about a relationship with someone who apparently holds lightly vows taken in an Anglican service and blessed by a Bishop, also High Church. However, she is by nature incapable of being truly censorious or casting even so much as a small pebble at hardened sinners, which is probably why the list of her converts will never be very long. In spite of that gaunt, black look she is a dear, and very merry as well, the setting for her laughter making it the more catching because it seems so highly improbable. In many ways I would like to copy her, though without wearing the clear markings of spinsterhood which I never could now anyway. Alicia is what Aiko never can be, highly civilised.
My guests did not leave until nearly four, refusing tea, Aiko riding off on two wheels.
12
13 Tsukiji San Chome, Tokyo
September 26th, 1905
Kentaro came yesterday. I was out in the garden by the fishpond with Tomo on a quilt beside me. Misao was sewing up the pieces of a winter kimono she had stripped down for washing and dried on a board to save ironing. We heard the gate, but thought it was the bean curd seller. Fukuda received him in the vestibule, telling him where I was. He came suddenly around the end of the bamboo fencing and stood looking at me. I had never seen him in Japanese dress, except light kimonos, the full hakama and over garment making him seem taller and at the same time almost square. What he was wearing was in muted tones of browns and greys which made him look like one of the samurai I had seen portrayed at the Kabuki, all he lacked was the topknot headdress and two swords pushing out one side of the haori coat.
Misao, in a kind of panic, gathered up her sewing and went scuttling between Kentaro and me along the stepping-stones, bowing all the way. She mounted the verandah and disappeared. Kentaro came forward slowly, his eyes on me. It was almost as though he had not yet seen Tomo, the baby drowsy under the last rays of afternoon sun, not moving. I got up, pushing against an ornamental rock to do it. What I said was in Japanese, a phrase of welcome I have heard my maids use many times: ‘Dozo o-hairi nasai.’ Without smiling he said in English: ‘What are you inviting me into, Mary? The pond?’
I think I held out my hands, I don’t really know. At any rate he took both of mine in his, which now seems a strange thing for a Japanese man to have done, for you never see them touch their women unless it is to shove them on, or when loading up a wife with whatever has to be carried. Kentaro and I stood holding hands, looking at each other. What I felt was a kind of hunger. I remembered feeling it as I walked up a path in the Western Hills. Afterwards it was the thing I tried to put from my mind first, before all the other things that had to go, too, if I was truly to own myself again. I don’t want to own myself. I don’t have to try to now.
I was the one who first looked at Tomo. Kentaro seemed almost reluctant to do this himself, letting go my hand and turning slowly. He must have stared for nearly a minute, then said: ‘Yappari nihonjin desu ne?’ The half question was not really for me, but I answered it: ‘Yes, he is a Japanese.’
Kentaro looked startled. It might almost have been that by beginning to learn his language I was in some way invading a part of his life he wanted to keep away from me. He asked if I had a teacher and I told him I had picked up what I knew from the maids, carefully not mentioning Aiko. It isn’t just instinct which tells me he isn’t going to like the news about my friendship with the unconventional Baroness.
When Kentaro said he would have supper here I knew he meant to stay the night. I carried Tomo inside, putting him down on a quilt inside a square of slats I had ordered made by a local carpenter. Kentaro followed me up on to the matting and suddenly said in a loud voice: ‘What’s that thing?’ I explained that it was to keep the boy safe, that soon he would be crawling about and could fall off the verandah on to one of the paving stones, a height of more than two feet. Kentaro said abruptly, almost with violence: ‘Take it away! My son is not to be put in a cage.’ Then he added that he would watch over our baby while I was out helping the maids prepare the meal.
It was a dismissal. He wanted to be alone with the child. He had not asked Tomo’s name and I hadn’t used it in front of him. Perhaps what I chose to call our son didn’t matter?
I went out of the room and stood in the narrow passage behind the vestibule, suddenly wanting to be able to hate Kentaro. I had been ordered out into the woman’s role, leaving the master of the house sitting by the fire box to smoke a cigarette. I could hear the maids twittering with excitement in the kitchen, but the last thing I could have done was join them there where there was absolutely nothing for me to do. Misao, usually a sweet child, can also have the black sulks, and what those two wanted now was to be alone, working together in a great clatter of gossip about Kentaro. Any suggestion from me about a supper dish would be deeply resented. They were Japanese, didn’t I think they knew what a Japanese man would like to eat?
I could have gone out for a walk, but instead climbed the stairs to the little bedroom I am using. Here the pushed back shoji gave me what I am coming to think of as a Japanese view, nothing open at all, a hemmed-in pattern of curving tiled roofs plus the tops of trees coming up from our little garden and the tightly fenced gardens of neighbours. With the canal beyond the road it would have been possible to have quite an open vista, but the house had been built to face almost west and all I could see, unless I craned my neck, was the samisen player’s unpruned kiri tree, whose sprawling branches and elephant ear leaves shelter the nests of a hundred sparrows.
I sat down in the Japanese manner, something I have been practising, and which is no longer as painful as it was, my behind supported by my heels. You don’t often see men sitting like this, in fact I never have, it was probably devised by them as a means of keeping their women docile through continuing discomfort. The odd thing is that when a woman sits any other way in these houses she looks quite dreadful, a sprawling hoyden, as completely out of keeping with her background as my wooden pregnancy chair which these days is kept well out of sight at the end of one of the verandahs. I sometimes use it still in the evening but in the morning it is always tidied away again out of sight, without any queries as to whether I might want to sit on it during the day. What was tolerated while I was carrying Tomo is now an object of a contest between the maids, particularly Misao, and me. In this little war of wills the two Japanese girls are quite as stubborn as I am, and I feel that I am only being loaned the use of this house, allowed to play strange games in it like having two ladies to lunch, but that it really belongs, by the right of their race, to Misao and Fukuda. One thing I have not done is respond to Misao’s suggestions, made in the half mime language we have evolved, that she be allowed to turn that brightly flowered silk into a kimono for me. I have no intention of being seen, or allowing Kentaro to see me, decked out in the kind of costume by which one can always identify the whore at the Kabuki theatre.
No sound came from below as I settled by the low, open window with its miniature balcony on which Misao had set a dwarf pine in a blue glazed pot where it would benefit from the autumn rains. Tomo certainly wasn’t protesting at being alone with his father and I half wondered if there was some mysterious form of communication possible between males, and the baby was quietly expressing relief at this repr
ieve from an endless association with doting females. Just recently I have realised that there can be something a little frightening about having a child that half belongs to another race, as though from the very start, almost while its eyes are still unseeing, you can sense the areas of total strangeness that will always remain. With Jane I had imagined that she looked at me with eyes holding knowledge that could never have been gained just from her tiny experience of living, but with Tomo it isn’t that, something hurtful, the inevitability of being pushed out and a door shut behind you, just as Kentaro had pushed me out and sent me about a woman’s business. But a woman’s business isn’t available here, I cannot cook and scrub and forget.
The sunset was beautiful. Though we are quite near the Ginza and the business centre, the noises of the city are never very loud. Rather more it is the sense of the river near, the hootings of small steamers and tugboats, these sometimes sternly answered by the great bronze bell at the Hongwanji temple. In the house next door the samisen began, as it often does at the sad hour. Though I have never seen her I imagine the player to be an elderly widow, that slow twanging seems like an endless song of life past, and perhaps only half regretted, so full of pain. I sat listening and my resentment stilled, as though I had been reminded that it was quite pointless, and after a time my body began to ache all over as it does when held in that position, but I didn’t move, I didn’t relax, the disciplines of this country have already begun to seep into my blood.
