The Ginger Tree

by Oswald Wynd

  I tell myself that it could have been one of Tokyo’s many burglars on the prowl. I should go to the police, but I don’t trust them any more than Aiko does, and anyway, what could they do? There are hundreds of robbers active on any one Tokyo night.

  December 25th

  Matsuzakara’s ‘English’ Christmas has been a great success, Santa Claus’s beard rather wispy, like a Chinese sage’s, and I found the music inadequate, an Edison Phonograph installed in the entrance hall with a girl in continuous attendance to wind the handle. Apparently there was only one seasonal wax cylinder available, this of ‘Jingle Bells’. I have heard these machines in Scotland, one of Mama’s friends was foolish enough to buy one. They may be interesting as a novelty but it is quite impossible to imagine any real music-lover listening to that tinny scraping for long. I was glad the sound hadn’t the strength to reach up to our department via the store’s open central well, though throughout the day, whenever I looked down from above, it was to see an apparently amazed crowd clustered around the horn. I suppose, if we must have new inventions all the time, it is better to produce playthings of this kind than new war instruments, but if the phonograph ever becomes really popular and widely used, it could be a horrible nuisance. The world does not need more noise, we have too much now.

  I didn’t have to cook supper tonight, this was provided by the store for employees who stayed on for the late opening, which was all of us, for we were ‘invited’ to by Mr Matsuzakara himself and you don’t refuse his invitations. Our meal was sent in, boxed, from what must have been a fairly good restaurant because for once the sliced octopus tentacle was edible, if not exactly delicious. It appeared to have been steamed soft. Usually my teeth just are not sharp enough to gnaw through what feels like the leather tongue of a Scottish farm worker’s boot. If the Japanese hope to encourage foreign visitors to this country the cuisine will have to be greatly improved. Western travellers are simply not going to wax enthusiastic over seaweed wrapped around a lump of cold rice, no matter how exquisitely this is served up in lacquer bowls and garnished with other supposedly edible forms of marine flora. A visual entertainment offered as a meal can be the cause of grave disappointment.

  I suppose being alone in a little Japanese house on Christmas night ought to make me feel melancholy, but it doesn’t, I am in bed with a hot drink made from powdered milk, conscious mainly of very sore feet.

  December 27th

  I have been followed and there has been someone watching my house, but not a plain clothes policeman or a thug sent by the Black Dragon Society. When you have been reprieved from fear it is usually quite easy to laugh, but I am not laughing yet.

  I came home weary and wasn’t really thinking of anything at all as I opened the gate but without seeing or hearing anything unusual I knew there was someone in the shadows of the little garden. I nearly turned back into the safety of lights and shops but then had the almost fatalistic feeling that whatever had been haunting me must be faced sometime.

  My gate is fitted into a low frame which means you have to bend down to get through. It is very dilapidated, sliding on rusted iron runners, prone to coming off these and jamming. I stepped through, pulled the slatted wood shut again, but at the same time contrived to jerk it off those runners. Then I went up over the flagstones to the front door which is also sliding and can only be locked from the outside by a padlock. I couldn’t find the key to this and had to grope for it in my handbag, expecting at every moment to hear a step behind me. I got the door open and almost fell into the cement-floored vestibule, remembering then how the light in there had shown up the dancing camellia during the earthquake. If I left the door wide light would shine right down to the gate. I found the switch, then turned.

  There was a shape at the gate again, trying to get out. I snatched up a bamboo and oil-paper umbrella, running out with it. The man had his back to me, trying to pull the gate off its runners, when I hit him on the side of the head with my weapon. It was a mad thing to do, if he had been carrying a knife he could easily have used it on me then. But Akira Suzuki wasn’t carrying anything. He turned, staring at me as though I was some kind of devil. I could see three red marks on one cheek from the ribs of the umbrella.

  He didn’t want to come back to the house with me, but I made him, taking him to the kitchen, setting him to fanning alight one of the charcoal braziers. I was hungry. Without trying to talk to him at all I prepared the fish I had brought home for frying. There was enough for two and when it was ready I asked if he wanted any, but he shook his head. I put on a kettle and he continued fanning to boil it while I ate. The kitchen is the coldest part of a house that in winter, with no heating on all day, never seems to lose its icy chill. The cooking braziers don’t do much to warm things up unless they have been going for hours, which they never are now. Akira was shivering. I gave him tea and he took a biscuit.

  I didn’t really have many questions to ask; what I needed was just a few more pieces to fit into a jigsaw and he supplied them. Akira was one of those outer fringe relations who, in Japanese family life, are dependent on the centre core, in this case Kentaro. They were second cousins. Kurihama money was paying the fees at Waseda University. A meeting on a tramcar had been no accident, this boy Kentaro’s continuing contact with me. It didn’t matter that I had no contact with him. The little tests to which I had been subjected outside of English and Japanese lessons had been devised by the Count, my ex-lover keeping tabs on me, trying to find out what I had in mind beyond studying a language and selling dresses and coming home to a cold house, whether I would perhaps contemplate marrying again, and if that was impossible, be willing to consider taking an available young lover. I wonder if Kentaro chose that book of lewd drawings himself?

  January 27th, 1908

  Today a registered letter was delivered to my office in Matsuzakara’s. Inside was a small blue book which gave me a credit of five thousand yen on the Nihonbashi Branch of the Yokohama Specie Bank. I re-sealed the packet and sent it back to the bank by a store courier, along with a letter to the manager stating that I wished the money to be transferred to an account opened in the name of my son by Count Kentaro Kurihama. I regretted being unable to supply them with my son’s adoptive name, but had no doubt that if they would apply to the Count he would be able to let them have this information, as well as my child’s present address.

  I am twenty-five. Yesterday the Japan Advertiser carried a short item stating that Colonel the Count Kurihama and the Countess, together with two of their four children, had sailed on the Haruna Maru for London where the Count is to take up his new appointment as First Military Attaché at the Japanese Embassy.

  16

  97 Nishi Kogura Machi, Otsuka, Tokyo

  January 17th, 1909

  I never imagined that I would return to this really rather horrid little house with a sense of joy, but last night in the ricksha coming from Tokyo Central Station, with my luggage following in another ricksha, I felt like singing, the tune in my head, absurdly: ‘Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled’, which Alicia once told me Japanese Methodists have turned into a hymn. With me it was a hymn of praise to be back in the capital after a sentence of seven months’ hard labour in the Osaka branch of Matsuzakara’s. I really wasn’t far off tears as we turned into this lane with its very mixed smells, its still open shops spilling wares out across the boarded-over drains, and men naked except for G-strings coming back almost parboiled from the bathhouse. It was home. Even the dogs appeared to remember me and didn’t bark. After what felt like an age of being an object of suspicion, derision sometimes, this was near bliss.

  Before I left for the store this morning the postman arrived with a circular, to tell me that I had honourably returned and wanting to know how I had found Osaka? I said I had found it dreadful, at which he went back towards the gate roaring with laughter. As he slid it open he called out: ‘You have become a true daughter of Yedo, lady.’ I think he may be right.

  It is absurd to label a
mass of people anywhere as all of a kind, but that is none the less how I found them in Osaka, hard shelled, interested in making money and nothing else that I could see, the city a huge area of packed ugliness with apparently no lighter side to the living in it, unless you call a brothel quarter reputed to be twice the size of Tokyo’s Yoshiwara the lighter side.

  As I as good as told him this morning, old Hiro was mad to imagine that a foreign dress department in the branch down there would be profitable. Osaka business men don’t want their wives decked out in Western clothes, they keep them at home scrubbing and cooking and having the yearly baby, certainly never wasting a penny of their husbands’ money on fripperies. A little research would have shown clearly enough that, in the unlikely event of an Osaka woman being allowed to deck herself out in alien finery, there is absolutely no place in the city where she can go to show it off.

  A cloud hangs over my pleasure at being back in Tokyo, in fact more than one. The biggest is that my seven months’ work in Osaka has resulted in a complete failure, and Hiro is going to close down what was my department there, turning it over to men’s dark serge European business suits for which there is a brisk demand. Though he has been polite enough, for him, all this has certainly put a big red debit against Mary Mackenzie as a success within the Matsuzakara business.

  A second cloud which came up this morning is the fact that takings here have not fallen off under the management of the department by Emburi San. She is a dear girl, but behind her welcome I caught the glint in her eye of someone who knows now that she is perfectly capable of running things without me. It will also have occurred to Hiro that a Japanese girl, who earns about half of what he pays me, has been successful in my role for seven months. Also, as a ‘foreign’ attraction I am not nearly so interesting as I was a few years ago, if in the least interesting. The department could coast for a very long time on the ideas I have put into it, and it could be that Emburi San is capable of producing new ideas that would work as well as mine have done. I don’t believe, either, that these days Mitsukoshi’s down the Ginza are just waiting to snap me up if I am no longer wanted here. Even in the relatively short time I have been in the country I notice a marked change in attitudes to things foreign; these were once almost an object of veneration but now the feeling about is that anything done in the West can be done here, too, perhaps better.

  So far they haven’t quite proved themselves on this. We have a sewing machine manufactured locally, selling for half the price of an imported model, but it keeps breaking down and none of the girls will now use it. However, I am sure these initial snags will be ironed out before long. Already the world is beginning to take Japanese goods, cheap cottons from Osaka flooding India, greatly undercutting British manufactures. It is in an industrial city like Osaka that you really feel their intense, concentrated drive to conquer as a people, which is perhaps one reason why I don’t like the place, quite aside from its hideousness. In the new Japan which is coming foreigners will have no role at all. There will be no need for a ‘Boxer’ uprising to drive the aliens out by force, here it will simply become unprofitable for outsiders to stay.

  97 Nishi Kogura Machi, Otsuka, Tokyo

  January 23rd, 1909

  I called on Alicia today, whom I hadn’t seen for nine months, finding her looking quite a bit older suddenly, but still crackling with her usual wicked wit. She is certainly no dried-up old spinster, and her problem at the moment is what to do about new American neighbours who, though not missionaries themselves, are renting a mission house just a short distance from Alicia’s. Her new neighbours apparently regard her as a pathetic, lonely old exile, and a considerable part of her life is now spent resisting their hospitality, which reminded me of how I had once resisted hers! In the autumn last year they had her to what they call ‘Thanksgiving Day’ which, according to Alicia, is an annual ceremony to praise God for having delivered them from the British. The ritual is observed with a meal larger even than the traditional English Christmas dinner, and poor Alicia came home to be violently sick, and then off colour for a week after this. She says they are enormously kind but that one of the things for which she has never felt a deep need is sympathy for her deprivation in not having ever experienced a husband, plus domestic bliss. She claims to be at her wits’ end in stratagems to fend them off, the wife continually showing up with parcels of ‘cookies’, which again reminded me of Alicia’s early attentions to a very unresponsive me.

  I am to help her with the problem of these Dales by coming to lunch along with them next week. We discussed a suitable menu, Alicia wondering what on earth to give them to eat since they seem to favour all kinds of things never seen on her table like boiled maize, which you have to gnaw off a cob as it drips butter, and mashed sweet potatoes. I couldn’t very well suggest roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, for I’ve had experience of Alicia’s cook’s raw meat and burnt leather, this almost certain to send the Americans home for their week of indigestion. I suggested cold meats from the new delicatessen which has opened up on the Ginza, but Alicia thought it would be rather odd to serve Jewish food in a High Anglican household to people she suspected of being Baptists.

  97 Nishi Kogura Machi, Otsuka, Tokyo

  January 30th, 1909

  I have met the Dales. Every time Emma Lou or Bob Dale used Alicia’s first name, which was often, Alicia’s eyebrows shot up towards her hairline, an unnoticed protest at the intimacy. She persisted in calling them Mr and Mrs Dale, but this was no leash at all on their informality. Emma Lou comes from a place called Pasadena in California which she had no intention of ever leaving, still rather shocked to find herself suddenly in Tokyo. He is from Nebraska, a state apparently held in some contempt by Californians, Emma Lou making more than a few references to her husband’s farm boy background. I did not at once realise that Hicksville was not actually the name of the village in which Bob was born, but a generic term for places of that size in the Middle West of America. Alicia never realised this, and kept asking polite questions about the population of Hicksville and what the weather was like. Emma Lou said the weather was continual tornadoes and the people went underground into reinforced cellars while their houses were torn away above them. Bob’s retort was that at least they didn’t have earthquakes which, in view of what happened only two years ago in San Francisco, seemed to have him scoring.

  Bob Dale is a banker and an idealist, which is probably a combination you could only expect to have coming out of the United States. Over lunch he gave us an introduction to his business philosophy which seems to boil down to honesty as the best policy and, though I certainly didn’t say it, I had the feeling that he is going to find this a shade naive as a working principle here in Japan. He is what he calls a total abstainer, something which may not last long out here, either. His wife says this is because he hasn’t yet got over seeing and hearing himself being cheered down his college football field. Alicia served sherry and a white wine, Emma Lou sipping both and telling us that these days the Californian wines were better than the French or German, at which our hostess put on an expression which said that, though she had trained herself to accept liberal views, there were still some heresies which remained anathema.

  Alicia must have shown her usual candour in what she had told the Dales about me. I was introduced to an Emma Lou putting checks on her curiosity and a Bob more than a shade uneasy in the company of someone who could only be classified, even when you kept a tight hold on charity, as a scarlet woman. He didn’t relax until it became plain that I was really interested in his banking career and then suddenly he remembered that all sinners are entitled to forgiveness. I could just feel this thought coming from him while I was prompting an account of his interview in the Kansas City head office of his bank for the Tokyo appointment.

  Tonight I have the curious feeling that the Dales are going to become important in my life, this very much like the feeling I had with Marie and Armand, that also from a first meeting, almost as though the accident of
contact wasn’t only that. I can’t believe that there are relationships in our living organised for us from ‘outside’, and yet at times I find myself believing what I don’t believe. This probably comes from not having a defined personality, or at least not one that I can define to myself. I look at people like Aiko, or Alicia, or Kentaro who seem to have absolutely fixed identities, wondering if these are the result of the accident of their circumstances, or something deliberately achieved. Kentaro could well be living by a set of rules drilled into him at an early age, but Aiko has clearly invented her own, these not in any way part of the world into which she was born. The hereditary factor may simply be the gift of a strong character, and strong characters arrive in life demanding a set of rules by which to operate. The rules can either be handily provided for them or laboriously acquired, becoming as vital to the identities using them as Mosaic Law to orthodox Hebrews. It is people like these who make a real impact on their environment and people like me who make none at all. I should be ashamed, but I’m not.

  4 Hongwanji Machi, Tsukiji, Tokyo

  April 19th, 1909

  Propped up in bed on an imported mattress I am back to doing what I did on the ship coming East, pretending that I am not keeping a journal, telling lies again, this time that I want to make notes on business matters so that Emma Lou won’t be tempted to ask what I am writing under their roof.

  I am staying with the Dales simply because I am not organised for emergencies like double pneumonia, tending to live with the blithe belief that these things happen to other people. Even in early March I was dragging myself down to the store where my performance must have gone a long way towards confirming old Hiro’s thoughts that my usefulness to him is about finished. Emburi San did her best to cover for me while I blundered about the department or sat at my desk unable to think, but what she couldn’t cover up was the way I looked, which made me chary of mirrors.