The Ginger Tree

by Oswald Wynd

  I thought I had a stubborn cold that wouldn’t shake off until that morning when my alarm went at quarter to seven and I tried to push back the heavy quilt, finding I couldn’t. What I was able to do eventually was crawl to the inner vestibule to meet the postman and it was he who got the word out about my near total collapse in a maidless house. Before noon Dr Ikeda arrived to take charge once again, and I was very glad to see him. He gave me an injection and about two came back to have me buttoned into a ricksha fitted with its winter hood up, the lower waterproof cover over my legs about the only thing that kept me from toppling forward into the road between the shafts.

  I was less than semi-conscious through great stretches of Tokyo to St Luke’s in Tsukiji, and the only thing I can remember hearing from Dr Ikeda after we arrived was an apology: ‘So sorry, hospitaru bery furu. No private prace.’ I didn’t care whether I had a private place or not, all I wanted was a bed, and I got that, in a ward mostly of post-operative patients not one of whom, in the whole time I was there, disgraced herself by giving the slightest sign of pain endured. Japanese women bring so many admirable qualities to the process of being alive that I can understand Aiko’s frustration at not being able to whip them up into concerted action against their much less admirable males. If the meek really inherit the earth then the women should have Japan, but I don’t think they are going to.

  Later I had the chance of a private room, but I didn’t take it for two reasons, first, mobile fellow patients were looking after me in the ward rather better than the nurses, and second, I am no longer being financed by a member of the Japanese aristocracy. My visitors were Aiko back from a crusade in Sendai, Alicia bringing all sorts of thoughtful little presents like lavender water and handkerchiefs, Emburi San to present old Hiro’s offering, a box of not very expensive pink and white rice flour dumplings tied up with ceremonial pink and white string, while she herself gave me a Formosan pineapple not easy to eat in bed, but sweet of her. Emma Lou Dale came every day when the crisis was over, treating me more like a favourite sister than someone she had just met once for lunch.

  I was really startled when she announced that I was coming to them to convalesce, my immediate reaction a rather brusque no I wouldn’t dream of it, which clearly hurt her feelings for she didn’t come for two days after that. Alicia did, however, to tell me that Emma Lou was pregnant and frightened. It would have been worrying enough having a first baby in Pasadena surrounded by loving relations, and the idea of this happening in Tokyo where, beyond Bob and a borrowed house, there was nothing but strangeness, led to a sequence of fears, the one opening out of the other. Alicia told me that I was to go to the Dales to recuperate, allowing Emma Lou to fuss over me.

  I have enjoyed being fussed over. The Dales have inherited the furloughing missionaries’ cook and maid, but Emma Lou insists on carrying trays herself and I hope my being here is of some use to her, for there is certainly no way I can repay her kindness. I am sure that Bob had serious qualms about allowing me to occupy the guest bedroom in a mission house but if there were any protests his wife stamped on them. I have slumped into protective warmth just as I did in that little house not far from here while waiting for Tomo to be born. This is a recess from real living and I don’t want even to think about what is going to happen when I get back to Matsuzakara’s.

  So far Emma Lou has said nothing about her pregnancy, not even a hint, and I can’t raise the matter until she does. I wonder how Alicia found out? Through Dr Ikeda at the hospital? She has missed her vocation, she should have been a detective.

  4 Hongwanji Machi, Tsukiji, Tokyo

  April 22nd, 1909

  I was downstairs for a couple of hours today and when I came back up here and settled again into this welcoming bed I said something to Emma Lou about being in their debt forever, and she said we are here to help each other, surely, then began to cry. It all came out, the baby three months on the way, and her terror not just of the unknown in that, but a sense of the alien all around, people talking a language she can’t understand, and even in this house sitting on other people’s chairs and lying in other people’s beds. She had been looking for a place to which they could move and make a home of their own but had seen nothing that she could begin to imagine as that. Had I ever had a house in this country that I felt was my home? I could see that Alicia had told her about the shack in which I am living now so we skipped that and I went back to the house Kentaro had rented for me. As I described it, Emma Lou’s eyes grew bigger and I knew she had heard about the kidnapping of my baby, and suddenly I was back to banging Misao’s head against the matting and went silent. After some time Emma Lou said: ‘You’re brave, I’m not. I just wanted to stay home, that’s all. I thought Bob was settled in California. That’s what usually happens when they come from the Mid-West. They don’t want to go anywhere else. He never told me he wanted to come out here to the Orient. You know this, I never even liked going to a Chinatown back home. There’s something about those places that scares me.’

  I don’t know what use I can really be to Emma Lou. Am I supposed to tell her that having a baby in a strange place is nothing to worry about? I am not going to lie to this girl.

  Takayama, Miyagi Prefecture

  July 16th, 1909

  Kentaro’s dragon has moved again, this time in a manifestation new to me. The beach here forms a crescent between two bluffs, each about a hundred feet high, on which the summer shacks are set amongst old pines, about thirty of these weathered grey wooden boxes that in winter are shuttered against the south-easterly storms that build up terrible force over unthinkable distances of ocean. An after-lunch close-down of all activity is traditional, something I accept happily enough, though I don’t go to lie down on my canvas cot, taking the hammock swung between two trees. Today I broke the rules and a little after two walked past houses that might have been suddenly evacuated, not one of the hundred or so holidaymakers in sight, even the children forced to take naps, their scooters abandoned in rank grass, a baseball bat lying on a path. On some of the verandahs privileged foreigners’ dogs lifted heads to watch me go by but not one of them broke a heat-enforced peace by so much as a growl.

  I have got into the Japanese summer habit of carrying a paper fan wherever I go, flicking this back and forth for the little private breeze you have to perspire to produce, but otherwise I think I look decorous enough, certainly feeling half suffocated by the way I have to dress. I packed two long-sleeved white blouses for this holiday and by continual washings have worn nothing else, conforming to what is accepted as genteel in Takayama because I feel I should for Emma Lou and Bob. Particularly for Bob. I am very necessary to help him with Emma Lou just now, and he is appreciative enough of that, but at the same time since coming to a place where the population is about ninety per cent missionary he has had some bad attacks of unease about sharing a roof with a woman of my background, or rather being seen to share a roof with her, which is why I never settle into that hammock without checking that my skirt is down over my ankles. In this country it is impossible for a foreigner to come to a community of other foreigners without being followed by a case history. Mine didn’t mean that the Dale household was ostracised, there was just no fraternisation, no neighbour showing up on our verandah with a freshly baked pumpkin pie.

  When I reached them the sands were totally empty, the sea with just enough strength to crunch together small pebbles at the water line. A few miles out, not seeming to move, was a sizeable sea-going sampan, its two ribbed sails set for the wind that might be coming. Grey overcast screened the sun but let its heat through, and the sea was so flat it had a burnished pewter look, visibility clear to the horizon. I was sitting on a sand dune staring over the water when that horizon lifted.

  What had been a perfectly drawn line where grey sea met a lighter grey sky was now serrated, like the teeth of a very fine saw blade, and topping some of these teeth, flecks of white. The thing coming towards me had its own colour, purple turning to green under t
he uneven frill of white along that broken crest, but the sea between me and it was still flat, still polished.

  I wasn’t frozen by terror, I could run, already climbing the path to the bluff when the fishing sampan began to mount the tidal wave, sucked up to a summit where a sudden whipping of foam covered the boat before it was tossed down the slope beyond. Where the path turned towards the sea again, perhaps twenty feet higher up, I saw the tsunami inflating itself for the assault on the coast. Blood thumping in my ears had kept out the roaring, but I heard it then, almost animal, a great, continuous bull-bellow.

  The wave struck as I neared the first of the pines, hitting the cliffs, impact an earth tremor. I fell. I didn’t turn my head to see the ocean mount the land, wanting only to shut out the noise, continuing to crawl upwards, half expecting a tentacle of water to come probing for me. When I did look the beach was covered, and the sword grass dunes beyond it, a plantation of young larches shivering in a lake of swirling brine.

  I stood to stare at the suck-back, a huge rake drawing down trees, grass, fishing nets, a wooden hut, scoring the sand and tumbling rocks to well beyond what had been low tide mark, exposing the gouged bed of the sea floor itself. Then I saw another vast wave coming.

  There were two more tsunamis, smaller than the first, but repeating its pattern, as though sent to complete the destruction, that earthquake from cliff impact first, then the hideous thunder of dissolution against an unresisting beach, the suck-backs scraping flat what had been small hillocks of dunes. The last wave left behind it a sea of uncrested swells that might have been sent to us from a distant great storm, but there was still no wind, and a returning silence was punctuated by the howling of dogs.

  I have spent the rest of the day dreading tonight, of what might happen in moonless dark, conscious as never before in Japan of the almost total physical insecurity in which everyone has to live out their lives in this country. Many of the natural disasters are localised, with a kind of personal quality, almost your district devil adapting his works to create a recurring terror. In these islands it isn’t the vast earthquake or the huge flood that keeps fear at the back of the mind, but more the threat of an endlessly repeated pattern of lesser devastations, the seventeen typhoons that hit the island of Kyushu annually, and never miss a year, the volcano hanging over the peaceful valley, napping in the sunshine, sending up its innocent, thin white plume of smoke and then, suddenly one night, becoming a red, erupting boil whose lava may not reach your fields, but whose ash and pumice will, suffocating the rice crops.

  I will never be able to look at an ocean’s horizon again without remembering that these can lift. After those waves at Takayama there was no sign at all on a flattening sea of a two-masted sampan waiting for a wind.

  Takayama, Miyagi Prefecture

  July 17th, 1909

  In a disturbed community Emma Lou, not surprisingly, is more disturbed than most. She is obsessed by the idea that her baby will be born prematurely and if this should happen while we are still at Takayama they will both die. It is no use telling her that we chose this resort because it is quite near Sendai where a friend of Dr Ikeda’s is the professor of obstetrics at the university and that this professor has been alerted about Emma Lou’s case. Not that there really is a ‘case’ that I can see, for there don’t seem to be any complications foreseen beyond a slightly too narrow pelvic bone structure which is apparently unusual out here and worries the doctors a little, I think, though Emma Lou herself doesn’t know anything about this.

  I can certainly remember periods of acute depression myself when I was carrying Jane, but these weren’t chronic, and I wasn’t submerged in them. I think pregnancy has in some way greatly increased Emma Lou’s feeling of the unreality of everything around her, as if she can’t really believe that she is in this strange place, Japan, and that this is happening to her here. It is my guess that she blames Bob, not for fathering the child, that isn’t the resentment, it is much more that he is responsible for placing her in this setting where she has to act a role, for which there have been no rehearsals, against scenery that is for her weird and unnerving. After those terrible waves she just lay weeping. Today she is up again, but not really moving, lying in that long chair on the verandah. She ought to have some exercise.

  Bob and I have discussed taking her back to Tokyo, but the city heat was driving her crazy. I ought to go myself, I can’t really afford this time away from Matsuzakara’s when there is considerable uncertainty about my future in the store, yet it is impossible to leave these two on their own.I have a sense of being needed by Emma Lou in a way that I haven’t felt from anyone since coming to the East, almost a total dependence on me. Bob has really caught the infection of his wife’s fears and here, where he can’t escape to his office, is beginning to wear the heavy guilt of the man responsible for it all. What a lot of nonsense is talked about the joy of having a first baby, it can be absolute hell all around.

  17

  Letter from Mary Mackenzie to Marie de Chamonpierre in Rome

  97 Nishi Kogura Machi, Otsuka, Tokyo

  February 19th, 1910

  Dear Marie – I am horrified to realise that it is five months since your last letter and nothing done about this from my end. We always have excuses and mine are that since last autumn I have been in one of those periods of change which seem to hit me whenever I appear settled in a nice comfortable rut. Actually, that isn’t quite the case this time, for I could see what was coming from some distance off and, slack character that I am, refused to do anything about it. The fact is that I am no longer one of Tokyo’s queens of fashion (if I can claim that I ever was), having been dismissed from my job at the department store at the end of September. From a sort of peak when I could do no wrong everything started to go downhill. I was sent to Osaka to open a department in the Matsuzakara branch there, hating every minute of it, living in a dreadful half-foreign hotel, with continual indigestion from half-foreign food, and totally friendless. I had some introductions to people in Kobe, but it was too far to go, even at weekends, so for seven months I had my work which went from bad to worse, plus my own company.

  I can’t really blame them at Matsuzakara’s for what has happened. After I got back to Tokyo I should have put all my effort into redeeming my reputation with the store, but instead I seemed to have no ‘go’ left, and capped this by coming down with pneumonia, which meant that the department had plenty of time to learn it could get along without me. Finally, on top of everything else, I took a long summer holiday at a beach resort with friends, so it really isn’t surprising that old man Matsuzakara’s patience was exhausted and it became his painful duty to get rid of me. I was very angry at first but, as with so many of what look like injustices in this life, seen from even a short distance away you begin to realise you weren’t completely the wronged victim. However, lest I seem too noble, let me say that Hiro Matsuzakara will never be one of my favourite characters in this land of the rising men and the subjugated women.

  While I am still talking about myself, which is ninety per cent of the time in my letters to you, I’ll just round off about where and what I am now. I still live in my little Japanese house in the far from fashionable suburb of Otsuka, this a construction become so frail with age that in the last sizeable quake I thought it was coming down around my ears. I also have a job, or a series of jobs, these found for me by friends who have become in my Tokyo life something like what you and Armand were to me in Peking. They are Americans, he is a banker, and in consequence knows many American missionaries. When Bob suggested that I might teach English in mission schools I was totally flabbergasted, for reasons I really don’t have to explain to you. The Dales know my history and I would have thought that the last thing they would want to do was risk sponsoring me amongst the more solemn-minded of their countrymen. I think it was the wife who bullied her husband into doing this. Possibly, too, my obviously blameless life over the last few years – I have been working too hard for it to be anything e
lse! – gives me a reformed sinner rating, and if so I am very glad, for it means I can go on eating.

  Don’t get the wrong impression, I am not a full-blown teacher shaping the destinies of young Japanese boys and girls; far from it, just a sort of special tutor for the backward ones who are too stupid to be affected in moral matters, or really anything else, by their instructor. I discovered after I had taken it on that I am doing a job for which no one else could be found, and one of the many things that is odd about it are the hours, late afternoon and up to nine o’clock. I don’t mind about this since evenings at home in this little house weren’t really any great joy, and I now get backhere for a late snack, fall between quilts, and sleep solidly. I don’t have a maid, but the greengrocer’s wife has supplied her daughter for casual cleaning, and I have mornings and early afternoons free to do my shopping, which I rather like.

  After some years of a running war with charcoal braziers in my kitchen I have bought an oil stove to cook on, an American model, very grand, two burners plus a real oven instead of a tin portable one, and all this has seen me becoming rather gourmet about my food, needing a solid midday meal before I sally forth to face the totally blank faces of my assorted pupils. The stove has the added advantage that it really warms a place that used to be like the inside of an icebox, which is probably why I am becoming a kitchen girl. Before I was modernised, and endured chilblains all winter, I used to think with almost sick longing of that wonderful ugly stove in Peking, or your steam heating.

  Sometimes I think about the dream flower land that was conjured up for me by those books on Japan you gave me to read in Peking. I’m not being nasty, Marie, when I suggest that your trips here were probably in the cherry blossom season and your excursions out from the best hotel. I remember you being ecstatic about Nikko, which I have yet to visit, but you really couldn’t have thought the cities beautiful? In my possibly prejudiced view, and remembering Osaka, Japanese cities are the most hideous I have seen. Tokyo has charm but, aside from the Imperial Palace with its green moat, not much to look at. In every direction from a not very attractive red brick commercial centre there stretches for what feels like hundreds of miles (when you are in a bouncing tramcar) grey little two-storey houses, with grey tile roofs, the only trimming to this huge, overloaded poles carrying the electricity and telephone wires. The lanes are better, narrow and twisting, and I am quite fond of my lane, but it is not beautiful.