The Ginger Tree

by Oswald Wynd

  He had stopped chewing piecrust and was watching my face. He asked what my thoughts were. I said they turned towards staffing problems. He reached out across the table to cover my hand, then as quickly took it away again, glancing around the restaurant.

  97 Nishi Kogura Machi, Otsuka, Tokyo

  August 22nd, 1910

  I have spent the last three days full of doubts, suspicious of my first reaction to Bob’s offer, not just uneasy about whether I can do what he wants and even half succeed, but also wondering whether I want to do it. I’ve got used to living again without real responsibility, the work I do now miserably paid, a complete blind alley and sometimes very tiring, this largely from the feeling that I am getting nowhere with a succession of pupils, but I can and do go to bed without worry except perhaps on one of the muggy nights of ‘earthquake weather’. If I do what Bob wants I will have to work and work, with no time for the reading that has become my chief pleasure, maybe almost a vice. And at the end of that work there could be failure again, another Osaka.

  There was a violent thunderstorm two nights ago, lightning seemed to split my tightly closed shutters, and I lay remembering that typhoon when I was on the Mooldera, and how I prayed not to be allowed to die on the way to China. Again I have an infantile wish to ask the Lord to send me a sign indicating whether or not I ought to open the Mary Mackenzie dress salon in the ancient capital of the Shoguns. I suppose, if I look at it squarely, I am really very lonely. Work could be a cure for that.

  97 Nishi Kogura Machi, Otsuka, Tokyo

  August 23rd, 1910

  Probably because I am disturbed and uncertain as to what I should do, I am suddenly as conscious again of Kentaro as in those days when I sat in a garden by a fishpond waiting for the sound of a gate sliding open on metal runners. Always, just before we met, that intense awareness of him took possession of me, and I know this was something he felt too, if less completely. I would see it in his eyes as he came towards me, as he certainly saw it in mine. It was as though by the very act of coming to me, deciding at a particular time to do this, he shut a door on all the other areas of his living, making himself totally available for a limited period. What he gave me was rationed by those disciplines that drive him, and which even now, after much longer in this country, I don’t really understand. But one thing I do know, I was not just his foreign mistress, it was not only the pleasure our bodies gave each other, there was a comfort of mind in it, too, as real to him as to me, even if he did shut off that comfort as he shut the gate on leaving. Oh God, it is the comfort I have never had since, and long for as much as I long for the feel of his body on mine.

  It is so hot tonight I have just crawled out under my net to open a shutter, risking burglars. Anyway, the most casual enquiries about me in the lane would make it plain that the foreign woman’s house wasn’t worth breaking into. This light has brought a thousand mosquitoes to batter against my net. A train whistles and a temple puts its gong message across the city. Lying here, I do not believe that my sudden intense feeling for Kentaro means that he is coming to me. It is just that for some reason, somewhere, he has opened a door and gone into a place long unused, making himself available again.

  97 Nishi Kogura Machi, Otsuka, Tokyo

  August 24th, 1910

  My second ‘secret’ meeting with Bob has seen him rather shocked to find out just how much I had learned while I sat at the feet of that great teacher of modern commercial practice, Hiro Matsuzakara. Bob had planned to let me have seven and a half thousand dollars, fifteen thousand yen, for the salon project, this to his mind generous. I didn’t think it was remotely adequate, pointing out that I would require premises in downtown Tokyo, preferably just off the Ginza, that I would have to employ a really competent assistant and pay her a generous salary as well as needing at least six sewing girls for a start, plus their machines and a reasonably comfortable place for them to work in. On top of this there was stock, at a rough estimate at least three thousand yen’s worth which had to be on shelves and hangers when we opened. I had no intention of starting to work with anything less than thirty thousand yen of capital behind me.

  Bob sat staring at me as though he wouldn’t have credited this hard streak in the woman he had helped to find subsistence work as a teacher of the mildly retarded. He said that for anything like a fifteen thousand dollar outlay he would have to consult head office in Kansas City by letter, not just cable. I said that was fine by me and I would go home to await developments, which called his bluff. With no more talk of head office we moved on to the terms of the Midwest Warranty’s loan to Maison Mackenzie.

  The terms were fascinating. Half the money I was to get would be an outright loan to me personally, repayable over fifteen years at the modest interest rate of only four per cent, which looked beautiful. What did not look so beautiful was that half of the capital sum sunk in my business by Midwest Warranty secured for them a sixty per cent holding, this holding to be operative even when I had paid off my half of the loan. Further, during the years of my slaving to clear indebtedness, forty per cent of the profits from the business were to go straight into the bank’s coffers, an arrangement to be continued in perpetuity. That sixty per cent holding made Bob’s bank my boss, able to sack me at any time with as short notice as I had got from Hiro Matsuzakara. Also, if the business went bankrupt I remained saddled with that seven thousand five hundred dollars as a personal loan, presumably teaching English again to pay it off.

  My reaction to all this was to suggest to Bob that if Midwest Warranty had been operating back in that century they could have offered Shylock some really sound tips. I went on to say that under no circumstances would I be part of any arrangement which gave the bank sixty per cent of my business, but that I would be prepared to let them have forty, along with twenty per cent of the profits.

  Bob found my proposition quite unthinkable and we went our separate ways to lunch, me to the little place behind the Ginza with its ox meat and two vegetables special. My appetite wasn’t as good as usual and I skipped the pie, having what was advertised as American coffee when I looked up to see a Japanese woman about to leave the restaurant. She was neatly dressed in grey silk, skirt and small bolero jacket over a plain white blouse, the outfit perhaps a little too formal not to be finished off by a hat. It was very hot in the restaurant but she looked cool. The way to the door should have kept her half turned from me, but her head came around and after seconds I got a tentative smile. I felt a stab of excitement. Maybe the Lord in His mercy had sent me a sign. It was Emburi San.

  18

  Sueyama Apartments, Surugadai, Tokyo

  September 14th, 1912

  Emperor Meiji, the God Aiko shouted at, is dead. Last night, with two million other people packed along the route, I watched the first stage of his journey to the Imperial tombs in Kyoto. It was a pageant from five hundred years ago and the people moving through it, silent, were ghosts. Today the unreality remains, the capital completely shut down, not a tramcar running, no clattering clogs, no factory hooters to wake me. From the windows of my new flat the view of roofs is like grey waves rolling in against this hill, and the black bathhouse chimneys, with no smoke from them, might be posts caught by a high tide. The continuation of last night’s clamped-down stillness is eerie in daylight, and I wait for the reassurance of familiar sounds, something simple like the bean curd seller’s horn, but hear nothing.

  In a way this reminds me of Queen Victoria’s death. I was seventeen when Edinburgh went into mourning for a monarch who had ruled longer than any other in British history. Overnight colour drained away from those stone streets as women went into black. It was as though no one had ever realised that an old lady could not live forever, and to all those who had expected somehow to spend their days safely tucked under the quilt of her reign it was almost frightening to have survived her. Mama was quite certain that the rule of the flighty and probably immoral Prince of Wales, now so strangely a king, would soon see a rapid decline in standards o
f public and private behaviour. The tears shed in our house, and all over Britain, were for an irreplaceable mother figure. For months prayers in churches for the new monarch held the only slightly veiled plea that in His great mercy the Lord God of Hosts would not abandon us, or the Empire, to a grim time of decay and collapse. It seems likely that similar prayers are now being said in Tokyo temples where the gongs are silent today. Like those suddenly bereft Victorians, the Japanese are in a kind of shock at the thought of their great Emperor, the giver of the new constitution, their guide through years of change and foreign wars, replaced by a son reputed to be half mad.

  I watched the procession from the relative luxury of a folding chair in the area in front of Hibiya Park reserved for the American Embassy and important US citizens, these including Bob Dale. I was on Emma Lou’s ticket. She is too near the termination of her fourth pregnancy to have any wish to attend a funeral, even an Emperor’s. Early September should have been warm, but it wasn’t, a chill more than autumnal after rain, and by one in the morning, after we had been in our places for four hours, I could have done with my Peking fur coat which is still in service though Emburi San hates to see me arriving at the shop wearing it.

  Bob is being extremely nice to me just now, this not unconnected with the profit figures he has been turning in to Kansas City recently on what he likes to consider is our joint business and he is especially pleased with my current scheme to change Japan’s mourning colour, at least for ladies in Western dress, from white to black. This is quite a big project in a way since it goes against a tradition reaching back a few thousand years to roots in China, but I have hopes of pulling it off amongst my clientele and if I do this could create total panic in the foreign dress departments of stores like Mitsukoshi and Matsuzakara who are now fully stocked with autumn and winter outfits in assorted colours. I must admit to having gambled on Meiji’s dying, for when there was convincing talk weeks ago that he was even our commissioned work was put to one side in favour of total concentration on black, court dresses, street clothes, everything. There is already plenty of evidence that our two modest show windows in a Tokyo side street are watched very carefully by the fashion conscious and when the blinds go up on these tomorrow it will be to a display of jet. I have not wept for Emperor Meiji as I did, practically on Mama’s instructions, for Queen Victoria, but I shall be wearing mourning for him.

  In Japan drama of any kind never hurries and the Son of Heaven’s funeral certainly didn’t, it was well past midnight before the street lights, disguised as ceremonial lanterns, went out, leaving not a lit window anywhere. Noise thinned and then died, as though on order. The procession brought its own light, this pale, torches burning on pine resin, the men carrying them spaced at about every hundred yards. The procession moved at about half a walking pace, footfalls completely deadened by the two-foot layer of silver sand laid over all the roads on the route. There was no clopping of hooves as the Imperial Cavalry came by, the horses held on tight rein but not snorting. The marchers on foot looked dressed for the Noh drama, in medieval robes with the flowing lines which said China, not Japan, all in white except for some of the headdresses. Banners had black characters on white, fastened top and bottom to white painted bamboo poles. Elaborate though all this was it was also almost without pomp, the opposite of a state funeral circus in the West, as though here the object underlying pageantry was silence.

  Then, in the distance, silence was broken. I felt a prickling on my skin. The sound was half groan, half creak, and came spaced at something like thirty second intervals, growing louder, aggressive intrusion into an arranged stillness, a lament that held nothing plaintive, just the grim, uncompromising and somehow immediately recognisable voice of death. A cart moaned towards us, two-wheeled, simple design in unpainted wood, the Emperor’s body housed under a curved roof, the coffin screened only by gently flapping side curtains. Pulling the cart were seven white oxen, one behind the other, seven heads waggling from side to side as thick legs went down with an almost timid caution into soft sand.

  After the cart came priests, completely silent when I would have expected some kind of chanting, and behind them military and naval officers of high rank, four abreast but under a new discipline from that sand beneath their feet, unable to march. They were all in uniform, and presumably bemedalled, but seemed to have been placed in a planned gap in torchlight which diminished them to shadows.

  We were kept in the dark for more than half an hour after the last of the torchbearers had rounded a corner, and we waited like that, comfortless, until the groaning faded and was gone. The disguised street lights came on, but in pairs, and in no hurry, not really in any pursuit of death’s procession, and for a long time there wasn’t much movement amongst the crowds, no attempt to break through the looped rope barriers. When finally we were released there wasn’t much talk either. I doubt whether anywhere else in the world such a vast number of people have begun to make their ways home in such stillness.

  Sueyama Apartments, Surugadai, Tokyo

  September 15th, 1912

  When I got to the shop today it was to find Emburi San weeping, something I have never seen before. She told me that General Nogi, Japan’s Duke of Wellington, the great hero of all her mainland wars, has committed suicide. He left a note in which he stated that his life was now over since he could no longer be of service to his beloved Meiji, and in this he also deplored the corruption and moral depravity which in recent years he had seen seeping into Japan partly as a result of Western influences. In so far as I can make out this is a direct appeal to the military caste to return to the old disciplines of the warrior code, and I should think will have enormous impact in the country. I can see Kentaro taking something personal from this, a message from another world demanding an almost ruthless new dedication. Kentaro, like Nogi, belongs to the old aristocracy.

  The papers here linger lovingly over that suicide, describing how General Nogi returned to his house on the evening before Meiji’s funeral where he and his wife bathed and donned ceremonial kimonos. They sat down before the place for formal ornament in their drawing-room in which the only object was a portrait of the late Emperor. His wife handed him a cup of rice wine which he sipped. He then picked up a dagger, stabbed her to death, and immediately afterwards ripped open his own bowels with a short sword. There is a great deal of high-flown journalistic verbiage about Nogi now continuing in another world to serve the Emperor he had loved, with both of them watching continuously over the future destiny of Japan. An almost hysterical false note in all this really frightens me. I have a son growing up somewhere in this country who is now seven years old.

  Sueyama Apartments, Surugadai, Tokyo

  October 18th, 1913

  That last entry in my notebooks provides an ironic comment on this one. We are now in the middle of a wave of riots in Tokyo, these coupled with wild scenes from deputies to the Diet, this all stemming from the very thing General Nogi was warning his countrymen against, huge corruption. It looks as though the Prime Minister, Admiral Yamamoto, will have to resign, no great loss to the country, but what has really shaken everyone is the scale of the bribery that has been going on, first from Siemens wanting to sell wireless equipment to the Navy, and then an unholy alliance between Vickers and the local Mitsui Company over the contract to build the cruiser Kongo. The size of these bribes is staggering, a Japanese rear-admiral getting well over four hundred thousand yen, and a vice-admiral more than three hundred and fifty thousand. Two directors of the Mitsui Company, two Englishmen and a German are about to be put on trial here in Tokyo on corruption charges.

  Bob is being pretty unbearable about the whole business. Emma Lou says he suffers from a Midwest prejudice against anything and everything that comes out of Europe, and especially out of Britain, that latter feeling something I suppose I may have contributed to! I have given up our weekly lunch meeting at the Imperial because I got tired of being lectured on the theme, or its variations, of civilisations on the do
wnward slope. According to Bob, the British Empire is starting to crumble because our firms resort to bribes instead of really going out into the market place to sell a sound product only on its merits. I have tried suggesting that the expanding US oil companies haven’t exactly a lily-white record, but he shouts me down, saying that the American economic structure is built on the sure foundation that you can be a good business man and a good Baptist at the same time. Maybe you can, I don’t try to argue that point. What I feel is a bit unfair is his week-long, hawk-eyed inspection of the Mary Mackenzie shop books just to make certain that Midwest Warranty is, in fact, getting its twenty per cent profits and not a false-entry-disguised eighteen per cent.

  I am worried about Emma Lou. After four sons and a daughter, well on the way now to that magazine illustration Thanksgiving family, she really ought to be wearing the expression of the mother in the picture, practical spirituality. But she isn’t. She has grown thin, almost to the point of scrawniness, and though dressing expensively from our shop, wears her clothes as if these had ceased to mean anything to her. I have bouts of feeling, and probably looking, like this but always with me the symptom of a hidden wish just to let go and not fight. I don’t think it is this with Emma Lou, more as though she deliberately doesn’t want to look attractive, almost purposeful about it. It is terribly difficult for either of us to talk about anything personal, confidences as alien to Emma Lou as they are to me, neither of us really able to lay out the contents of our private living to have this pawed over. There was never any probing from her side to find out what it feels like to have a Japanese lover, or to live without knowledge of what is happening to a son, and precious little news about a daughter. A good few of the women I have known would have taken a chisel and mallet to the stone of my reserve, chipping away until it cracked.