The Ginger Tree

by Oswald Wynd

  He pretended to be startled by my arrival even though I had been sent for and was elaborately polite, but in the language reserved for use to inferiors. All this was just an intensification of the almost continuous warfare between us. I was invited to sit down, but since this would have meant fetching a chair from the other side of his desk, I did not. Quite slowly the visitor rose, turned, looked at me, then bowed.

  I have now learned a great deal about Japanese bows. A book could be written on the art, which is subject to stricter rules than flower arranging. There are bows for one’s social equals, these variable according to the circumstances of the meeting, and for one’s superiors, bows for servants, tradesmen, even tram conductors, men’s bows to women, always shallow, women’s to men, always very deep, plus a huge assortment of women’s bows for other women, these a complete language in themselves. Without saying one word a lady can place you exactly where she thinks you ought to be and more fool you if you don’t know that you are being assigned your status, as newcomers to what seems the world’s politest country never do. The visitor’s bow was really very generous, classifying me as almost a lady, if not quite. Hinobe suddenly threw the bomb on which I had heard a fuse sizzling.

  ‘The honourable lady who is now with us is none other than the Countess Kurihama.’

  Hinobe, along with everyone else employed in this store, plus a high percentage of the people who come up to the department just to stare, knows the circumstances under which I came to Japan. These have been discreetly publicised, I expect on Mr Hiro Matsuzakara’s orders. There was nothing I could do about that, so I accepted it. What I find it impossible to accept is the Countess’s open curiosity, this strong enough to make her visit the store just to have a look at me. No wonder I had rated almost a lady on the bowing scale; by her vulgar action she had demoted herself, and she knew it. Hinobe’s voice went almost falsetto with joy: ‘The Countess has done us a great honour. Her husband, Colonel the Count Kurihama, has just been appointed military attaché to the Japanese Embassy in London and the lady has come to us, most graciously, to have a wardrobe made for her English life. You understand?’

  I understood all right. For weeks I will have to be in attendance on this woman, countless fittings from corsets upwards, for day dresses, ball dresses, court gowns, hats, shoes even. Every time Kentaro goes out with his wife in London he will be looking at his mistress’s handiwork. I don’t think he sent her to me, I think she came herself rather than go to the Russian woman from Harbin who is now doing my job, rather badly I hear, at Mitsukoshi’s.

  From London we have imported adjustable dressmaker’s ‘shapes’, wire frames designed to be altered by recorded measurements to an exact duplicate of a client’s figure. I use them for any original, or semi-original designing I do, and our workroom girls now rely on them absolutely. The measurements are very detailed and I have trained a fitter to take them, but Hinobe, almost as though he had been so instructed by the Countess, insisted that I attended to her personally. That tiny changing room, with Kentaro’s wife standing there in only a thin under kimono, created in me the kind of tension I found almost unbearable. I just couldn’t get into my professional self at all. At one stage I was actually trembling, and I am sure she noticed.

  She could tell me where Tomo is now, and how my baby is, but if I asked would deny any knowledge of my son by her husband. I didn’t feel malice from her exactly, but at the same time I knew it gave her pleasure to have me on my knees beside her with a tape in my hands. She treated me as I learned to treat Chinese servants, you accept what they do for you without really noticing them as people. When I asked the Countess to turn around or raise an arm she did so, smiling slightly, but saying nothing, her eyes fixed on herself in a mirror. I am sure she looked at me sometimes, but I never caught her doing it.

  97 Nishi Kogura Machi, Otsuka, Tokyo

  November 17th

  Hinobe miscalculated badly today, just how badly has yet to be seen. I used the excuse of a slight cold to stay out of the way when the Countess Kurihama was here for the first fitting of a ball gown, sending in one of the girls from the workroom. I have no way of knowing whether the Countess complained about this, but I was called into Hinobe’s office to find him in a towering rage. Who did I think I was, ordering in a chit of a girl for an important client like the Lady Kurihama? He used language that would have been an affront to a street woman, shouting. I was just about to walk out without saying anything when Hiro Matsuzakara walked in, the old man arriving on a typhoon of fury, so he must have been listening. I didn’t wait to see Hinobe wither under the blast, leaving, but not to go to the Countess in her booth.

  97 Nishi Kogura Machi, Otsuka, Tokyo

  November 18th

  There was no Hinobe in the gown department this morning. At eleven the speaking tube called me to Mr Matsuzakara’s office. Tea was waiting, with rice biscuits. I am to be the new head of the department at a salary of one hundred and eighty yen a month. It is an almost unbelievable appointment for a woman in Japan, the old man as good as telling me this, saying there would be great opposition to the arrangement, but that he was prepared to move with the times and give me a chance to prove myself. He knows perfectly well that I have already proved myself, otherwise he wouldn’t have dreamed of moving with the times. He also knows that if I had been forced to go on working under Hinobe for much longer I would have walked out of his store, no longer in the least nervous about whether or not I could get other work in Tokyo. In the afternoon I found that Hinobe has been put in charge of the toy department at the back of the first floor. We shouldn’t have to see each other often, if at all. I think the sewing girls are happy about the change. I owe them a great deal. If they had wanted to they could have made what I do here quite impossible.

  November 19th

  The Countess Kurihama came in for another fitting. I did not attend her. As she was leaving we bowed and in my best Japanese I hoped she was satisfied with the progress so far on her projected wardrobe? With great sweetness she said that she was. Kipling wrote those lines about Judy O’Grady and the Colonel’s lady being sisters under the skin. The Countess and I are not.

  15

  97 Nishi Kogura Machi, Otsuka, Tokyo

  December 8th, 1907

  I must stop letting this horrible business haunt me. That poor woman was unbalanced, not surprising when you consider she had been Hinobe’s wife for twenty years. I wish I could sleep. My nightmares are the kind you see when lying wide-eyed in the darkness. Last night I was driven almost to distraction by the gnawing of a mouse on the wood frame of the matting. When I thumped on the straw it would stop for a moment, then begin again. I’m not usually worried by mice, but I was sure that this one, so determined, was going to tear a hole in the straw and then start to work on the wadding of my quilt.

  I knew there was something wrong with that woman for a good many seconds before I saw the knife. She just wasn’t the kind to have any interest in our department, shabby, her brown kimono out of date in styling, with much longer sleeve pouches than you see these days, the perfect place in which to keep a knife. She must have identified me from a description Hinobe had given her, and had to see me full face, Western dress not enough, since all the salesgirls wear it too now. It was that stare which gave me the warning, plus the look in her eyes before she turned away and pretended to be interested in a long winter coat on one of our new wax models. A lot of women come to the department just to poke around, and with no intention of buying, so many in fact that I have had to evolve a drill for dealing with them. On a signal from me, or on her own initiative, one of the salesgirls attaches herself to the unwelcome visitor and gradually edges her out, just as a Scottish sheep dog might do.My brightest assistant, Emburi San, was coming forward when the woman dived straight at me. The blade in her hand was a good five inches long, raised well above her head for a slash down. The glove counter saved me. I jerked back behind it and the woman had to swing out in a bid to reach me. Emburi San, mov
ing like a cat after a bird, struck the knife out of the woman’s hand.

  I felt terror for a moment or two, of course, but it isn’t these moments themselves that haunt me now, it is the horrible circumstances surrounding them. Hinobe cut his own throat at night and bled to death seated under the pines in the outer precincts of the Imperial Palace which are open to the public. He was found by a park keeper in the morning, and wrapped in oilskin cloth beside him, in case it should rain and spoil the calligraphy, was his last message. He was joining his ancestors because he had no wish to continue living in a Japan where a faithful employee of many years’ standing could be replaced by a foreign woman who had led an immoral life.

  I can’t read Japanese yet well enough for the newspapers and I have made Aiko promise to pass on everything that is being said about me in the Tokyo press, but I am sure she is not doing this. My maid Hanako pretends to be illiterate, or nearly, but I have seen her with newspapers and I know she is getting stories that are not reaching me through Aiko. The Japan Advertiser was discreet enough, calling me Mrs Mary Mackenzie, and avoiding the sensational, but its circulation is small and from the little Aiko has told me I would be a fool not to guess that the big dailies here started with headlines and are probably still running the story in the back pages. The Japanese press does not use photographs, or not that I have seen, and I don’t think I have had my picture taken when I didn’t know it, but I still feel I am being stared at in a way I never was before. I don’t think I am imagining the hostility behind those stares, either.

  If I believed in the Fates, which I don’t, I would see them really enjoying a game with me. First I am allowed to find some quiet niche and settle into it, then, with no warning, they kick me out. I can almost hear the sound of laughter.

  Hiro Matsuzakara has appeared to stand nobly behind me through this time, risking press criticism of himself and his store by continuing to employ a woman who has been the cause of a man’s death. The fact is that I am still in the department for one simple reason, the scandal has brought in more than the curious to stare, it has at least doubled our actual customers, considerable numbers of the new rich ladies in Tokyo suddenly deciding that it is quite chic to get your clothes from a semi-murderess.

  December 14th

  Aiko has just gone. She meant to frighten me and has. She wants me to come to live in her hotel again because she doesn’t think I am safe here. She admitted not reporting most of the things that have been published in the Japanese press about me. My involvement in Hinobe’s suicide has provoked more than just a small wave of anti-foreign feeling. One of the papers, in particular, has been doing its best to keep these feelings on the boil, with letters, articles and even editorials about subtle Western influences seeping in to undermine the foundations of Japanese national life. Though I am not exactly the text for these sermons, my name keeps cropping up in them. Aiko claims to have heard yesterday from a very reliable source that the British Embassy is anxious to get rid of me as a source of embarrassment here, and they have offered to make all the arrangements for getting me out of the country if I am officially deported by the Japanese Foreign Office. I don’t know whether or not to believe this.

  Yesterday the Countess Kurihama cancelled the order for her foreign wardrobe, taking two of the dresses we had finished for her but presumably going to that Russian at Mitsukoshi’s for the rest. Mr Matsuzakara didn’t seem as worried about the loss of this client as I had expected but then why should he, with all the other orders pouring in?

  I am not leaving this house and going to a hotel. I have a feeling that my best chance of pulling out of this situation quickly is by continuing as normal, going to work and coming home. In a way getting off the tram and coming down the lane to my house is like returning to a village. The shops along the way, the fishmonger and the greengrocer and so on, know me and on Sunday I went into them as usual, sensing no hostility of any kind. It could be that this village of my lane is not in sympathy with the rest of Tokyo on the matter of me, and is prepared to show this by kindness. Certainly the local dogs no longer bark at me as I pass and a neighbour’s fat cat comes, on sunny days, to pay informal calls.

  December 19th

  My maid Hanako has gone. She must have started packing soon after I left for the store this morning, an honest girl who took nothing but her own things. Akira Suzuki has not appeared for one of our exchange language lessons for well over two weeks now.

  Aiko met me for lunch today in the little restaurant I always use, not by arrangement, she just showed up. She now has another worry on my account, having decided for reasons she wouldn’t give me that it is the secret societies, particularly the Black Dragon, which are not allowing the echoes of the Hinobe story to die away. According to her, the police force is riddled with members of these societies, all of them extremely nationalist and anti-foreign, some even believing that Japan should never have been opened up to the outside world at all. There doesn’t seem to be much logic in their thinking for these societies now support the militarists who have been so successful outside Japan in recent years. Aiko, of course, is remembering the brutal murder of her grandfather which makes her take a pretty extreme view of things, but when I asked her point blank if she thought the Black Dragon might try to finish the job Hinobe’s wife had started, she shied away from a direct answer to this, hinting that there might be some moves to frighten me out of Japan.

  After all this at lunch finding Hanako gone hasn’t been good for my nerves, particularly after that other experience I had of a servant disappearing. But I am not going to spend any part of my life hiding in a hotel bedroom. It would probably be useless to try to find another servant, so I will just have to bring home simple things for supper and learn how to light and keep going a charcoal brazier.

  How brave I am! Later tonight I will probably be lying curled with terror, especially if one of Tokyo’s sudden winds gets up to rattle the wooden shutters.

  December 21st

  I think I am being followed. I try to put it down to imagination because I haven’t really seen the man, if it is a man. It is more a sense of someone pacing me at a distance, even downtown, at midday. I have tried tricks to catch the follower but, except on the Ginza, there are no plate glass windows to act as mirrors. Side-street shops all have their wares spilling out on to the roadway under awnings and it isn’t easy to slip into one of them for a quick look back. Probably I should suspect a case of nerves and go to Dr Ikeda for something to quieten them. Or buy a bottle of whisky.

  The decorations for the New Year will be going up next week, bamboo and pine branches by every gate and every shop. I would like to do as others do, but don’t know how to arrange for this without a maid to tell me. Matsuzakara’s are staging an ‘English’ Christmas this year, trying to force on the Japanese yet another occasion when they must exchange gifts. There is even to be a tree and Santa Claus, and I am continually being asked for advice on matters about which I know little, for Christmas is not greatly celebrated in Scotland. All that Mama ever did was go to church in the morning. We gave little presents, certainly, but there was no tree and no plum pudding, making that kind of a fuss still regarded as part of Popish practices. The thought of being alone at Christmas doesn’t worry me at all, but I do dread the idea of an empty house on New Year’s Day.

  December 23rd

  There was an earthquake last night. The weather should have made me expect it, for after snow earlier in the month it was suddenly mild again, almost muggy, what my Tsukiji maids used to call an earthquake-coming day. It came about half-past one while I was lying awake, first a hush as though the night sounds of the city had been switched off, then a rumble that could have been a heavily laden train crossing an iron bridge. As soon as the jolting began I knew this one was going to be different from the other quakes I have been through. I got into the wadded kimono I use as a dressing-gown and was on the steep stairs down when the bumping became like being in a railway carriage shunted by a drunken engine dr
iver. I was thrown about, then lost my footing and slid down on to a square of matting where I felt as though I was being bounced in a blanket. Above the creakings and groanings of my house I could hear shouts from neighbours already outside in their gardens. My tiny one offered a real risk of being hit by a falling tile but I still had to get out into it. There was a great clattering of things falling off shelves in the kitchen as I made for the sliding outer door, switching on a light on the way. This showed the one feature of my garden, a large camellia bush, doing a weird dance, as though suddenly possessed by some passing devil and wildly animated to the tips of its shiny, winter-enduring leaves.

  It wasn’t easy to stand, I had to straddle my legs to do it, this half-way to the garden gate where, with luck, falling roofs would miss me. Beyond the wooden fencing that encloses me like a package people were still shouting, and lights blazed all around, which was rather comforting for it meant still no break in the electric wires. The shake eased before this could happen and I was staring at the gate when a shadow near it moved. The gate opened to let the shadow out into the lane, then closed again.