The Ginger Tree

by Oswald Wynd

  Sueyama Apartments, Surugadai, Tokyo

  June 11th, 1915

  In a war that looks like tearing the world apart I am making money and hunting for a house. I ought to feel guilty, I have twinges of it, but being at least a partial outcast from it has thinned my sense of duty towards the country in which I was born, indeed, for any country. I still have a British passport, but I feel stateless, and very remote indeed from those ladies rolling bandages at the Embassy.

  I have been down in Yokohama on odd occasions over the last month, just wandering around by myself. There is a great deal of new building going up on the Bluff, which was once almost a foreign concession and is still largely occupied by Europeans and Americans, but with a fair number of newly rich Japanese moving in who don’t want to live in native style and are building themselves concrete mansions to match their neighbours. It was next to one of these places being built, cement mixers busy, that I came on my house, a survivor from another day, modest, withdrawn under its heavy tile roof, and with the wooden fencing about the garden sagging, some of it about to collapse.

  There was no resistance to my invasion, the gate bar was rotten. I stood looking at something I knew was going to reconcile me once and for all to the country in which I will live out my life, which is asking a lot of a house and garden. I had been passing nothing but rose beds in front of the concrete palaces. The rose resists this country, you can make it grow, but it blooms saying it hates it here. I stared at weeds, a dried-out carp pool, and stepping-stones, the only colour green, restful to the eyes. There was also a very aged pine suffering from needle fall as a result of having had to endure the last few winters without one of the straw overcoats the Japanese put on these trees in the autumn to help them survive for centuries beyond their normal life span. The house was considerably larger and of much better basic design than that shack in Otsuka I had abandoned with no tears, but even more ruinous, with tiles off the roof and sags that weren’t an architect’s art, just rotten timbers.

  I don’t know why all this presents the kind of challenge I can’t resist, and I am certainly mad to want the place. It will ruin me to make the house habitable and to restore the garden, adding a new crop of domestic worries to my business ones.

  For information about a property nobody seemed to want I went to the nearest police station. He was a fat policeman, fond of himself, wearing a white uniform and sitting in a cane chair that looked too frail to go on supporting him for much longer. His head was shaven, with his cap, wearing its spotless white summer cover, on the desk in front of him. There, too, was his sword of office laid longways behind a writing set. He looked up at me and I knew at once that his considerable experience of dealing with foreigners up here on the Bluff hadn’t warmed him towards us at all. Also, I was a woman who had to be shown her place. If Aiko had been with me there would have been a flaming row in seconds, but I was made wise by the hissing serpent of my desire and, after bowing, plus asking to be excused for troubling him, I sat down on a bench to wait his pleasure. An alarm clock ticked. The policeman dipped a pointed brush in black ink and did a little careful calligraphy, this with the flourishes of a scroll painter, then looked at me again to say: ‘Nani?’

  It was as economical a way to ask me what I wanted as could be found, his tone not even touching the fringe of politeness. At Matsuzakara’s, and in my own shop, and from contact with fishmongers and grocers and tram conductors, I have learned quite a lot about women’s language, and think I have become quite good at it for a foreigner. It starts with omissions, words one must never dream of using, these exclusively for the male, then allows you other words that most men would rather cut belly than let slip from their lips. Few Western women ever bother with these subtleties, but I offered them as obeisance to a plump officer of the law, explaining that I was a helpless female from Tokyo who could only throw myself on his mercy for help with my problem.

  Oh, it worked! It worked so fast that in only moments I was drinking tea produced on shouts to back living quarters, this brought by a wife who didn’t always worship her lord according to the best traditions. Never in all the time of his service up in this suburb had the policeman met a foreigner who came as near to understanding the true heart of Nippon as I did. And when he heard what I wanted, which was to preserve and live in one of the few remaining truly Japanese houses in the district, the artist lurking behind a uniform and a bad case of obesity came out from hiding. He, too, on his rounds had looked at the ruin of what had once been great beauty and felt the deep pity of it.

  The house had belonged to an elderly couple who had lost both their sons in the Russo-Japanese war and when the old man died his widow, rather than face the world on her own, had slit her wrists and bled to death. Naturally, as a result of this, the place was haunted and unrentable and the dilapidations had started. The heir was a nephew who ran a shirt factory at Omori half-way to Tokyo, a modern man who had no use for such an old house which was anyway too far from his work, and for some years the property had been a liability to him. Recently, however, with the sudden boom in building on the Bluff, the land had acquired real value and the policeman believed that the factory owner was now asking a ridiculous price, though in so far as he knew no offer for the place had as yet been accepted.

  I left a sub-station leaving behind an ally who promised, if I was successful in getting the Misune property, to do everything within his considerable powers to see that I found honest tradesmen to help me repair it.

  Sueyama Apartments, Surugadai, Tokyo

  June 19th, 1915

  I don’t know a great deal about the newly popular science of psychology but have heard the theory that a woman living without a man for as long as I have tends, at my age, to go odd in one way or another. My friends, however, haven’t offered me the charity of this nonsense, screaming that I am a fool, but since I was expecting this I took my negotiations for a ruined property to an advanced stage before I told the sources from which the money will have to come anything about what I had done.

  On the Monday morning after my Sunday meeting with the policeman I went down to Omori to visit the Misune Shirt Factory. Before many years are out Mr Yunkichi Misune is going to be defended by a huge staff and secretaries trained not to give you an appointment, but I caught him while his only defence against the world was still just an office boy with a lisp.

  I didn’t use my women’s language plus meekness on the shirt maker, he wouldn’t have appreciated the performance; a young man of about thirty, certainly not much more, who is what Bob calls a go-getter. And he is go-getting so fast that before I had been with him for ten minutes he told me he is already selling his shirts in Burma. The fact that he has achieved world markets from a factory set up inside what looks like an abandoned school was a bit of a surprise until he showed me his equipment, this shining and new, the most modern cloth cutting machines imported from Germany only months before the outbreak of war. One man, working from a chalked top layer pattern can cut twenty-five other layers of cloth at once with precision and total neatness, and I watched quite fascinated with thoughts of possible Mary Mackenzie mass produced simple dresses not entirely remote from my mind. My very real interest soon had Mr Misune accepting me as a kindred spirit and when we got back to his cubbyhole of a chairman’s office the inevitable waiting green tea was ignored, a bottle of Osaka Scotch whisky produced instead. It would have been bad tactics to say no to this, so I sipped the repulsive stuff slowly.

  Mr Misune had already had an offer for the family homestead on the Bluff, which was bad news. I gathered that it was quite a good offer but he had decided to hold out for a better one, which I didn’t care for either. It was clear right away that he regarded the house as a complete write-off and was thinking only of land values, and I was careful not to let slip even the smallest hint that I was hoping to preserve the ruin. I had a feeling, too, that for some reason he didn’t much like whoever it was who was trying to buy his property, and that he did quite like this fo
reign woman who was really interested in his machines. I asked how much he wanted. Looking at me from behind glinting glasses he said six thousand yen, which was clearly at least a thousand more than my rival’s bid. I said five thousand and we fought our way to five and a half, settling there.

  I didn’t let Bob Dale know what I had done until three days ago. I had to tell him then because I want to borrow eight thousand yen from Midwest Warranty, which is what I am going to need on top of my own savings of about three thousand before I can hope to move into my new home. Bob is quite appalled that I want to add this sum to the loan I already have with his bank and has demanded security in the form of a proportion of my holdings in Mary Mackenzie which will give him total control of the company if I can’t meet repayments. Ten days ago I would never have believed that I would come to want a house so much as to put myself at risk in this way.

  Both Bob and I are steered through the intricacies of Japanese company law by a Eurasian lawyer called Harry Nishimoto who went down to Yokohama to see what I had done and came back with the suggestion that I ought to be certified. I am a bit shaken, but with my head still unbowed, and I more or less ordered Harry to proceed with the deal as agreed verbally with Mr Misune, and also in an exchange of notes which I think would be binding as mutual statements of intent. So I am really into this, with no withdrawal now, and probably am in for a year or so of horrors during which builders will find that the fabric of the house I want to preserve is not rotten in places, but all over. However, I shall meet each blow as it comes, I hope with unshakable fortitude!

  Sueyama Apartments, Surugadai, Tokyo

  June 23rd, 1915

  A very curious development in the matter of the Yokohama house. I was in my office behind the shop working on the books which continue to show us healthy, but perhaps not healthy enough for the expenses ahead of me, when Emburi San came in to say there was a man out front asking for me, someone she had never seen before. We don’t often get men in here, a few American husbands, one or two French, never British and certainly never Japanese, except delivery boys.

  At first I thought my visitor was a Spaniard, decided olive skin, very dark in a sleek way and with such a high forehead his eyebrows almost seemed to be midway between chin and the start of straight black hair that was rather long and combed straight back without a parting. His tailor was not in Tokyo or London, my guess being that the suit came from Paris, moulded to a slim figure. He was carrying a cane which is not something you often see here. Perhaps because I haven’t had a great deal of contact with Eurasians, other than Harry, it didn’t occur to me that this man had Japanese blood. Then he told me his name, Peter Nasson, and I knew who he was, the head of Nasson and Company, Silk Exporters, one of a handful of Eurasian families who have almost cornered this particular trade and become very rich in the process, the Nassons the richest of them all.

  He looked the sort who might come with his wife to help her buy clothes, and I glanced around for the woman who should have been flipping through the ready-mades. The two of us were alone, Emburi San away on a sudden mission to the sewing room, her feet creaking the stairs. Mr Nasson chose not to sit in my office, but I did, waiting for him to state his business. He came to the point at once. I had bought a property on the Bluff while he had been in the process of negotiating for it in order to make it part of the garden of the house he was building next door. He suggested that there was something far from straightforward about the way I had nipped in while his deal was pending, to undermine this, clinching the matter before he had been given the time, or the opportunity, to perhaps improve on his offer.

  Today was certainly hot for June, but I was suddenly a lot warmer than the weather warranted. I told him I had been house hunting, found the place I wanted, and had offered for it. His eyebrows went up into that thinker’s forehead. He said: ‘House hunting? Surely you mean to tear down and rebuild?’ I said I meant to preserve with love and care. He smiled. It was the kind of smile a company chairman might use to suppress any slight hints of revolt amongst his directors. There was something like pity in his voice. ‘I will give you six thousand yen for that land.’ ‘No.’ ‘Six thousand five hundred.’ ‘No.’ He took a deep breath, so deep it stretched the cloth of his suit. ‘You’ll bankrupt yourself trying to save that place. And when you have I may decide to buy the land off you. Good day, Madame.’

  I followed him out into the salon. ‘You’d tear down that house and destroy that garden?’ He was almost at the door before he turned. ‘Naturally. The house is useless and I don’t care for Japanese gardens.’ I shouted: ‘You’ll never get your hands on my place!’

  There was some satisfaction from the surprise on his face. He went out quietly, closing a glass panel with great care, a gentleman whose breeding was in marked contrast to that of the yelling virago he was leaving. I stood fuming, determined to plant quick-growing poplars between my house and his cement monstrosity. Now I am a little ashamed of my performance, but only a little.

  Sueyama Apartments, Surugadai, Tokyo

  July 6th, 1915

  Dinner at the Imperial was pleasant, the place very warm, ceiling fans stirring a tepid air, but we had a refreshing iced soup that was new to me. Mr Nasson had brought the recipe from Switzerland and given it to the chef, and it made an effective start to the studied perfection of the meal. He didn’t make a visible fuss over the food but I knew that they were sweating in the kitchens to give him no excuse to, and, of course, everything had been ordered in advance, there was no question of my being offered a choice. He is certainly the kind of man who, in Europe, would send back a wine not completely to his taste but there is no point in doing that here because, so he tells me, all wines are sick by the time they reach here and never recover full health. All I know about wines is that if they are on the acid side I suffer.

  There was no attempt made to disguise the fact that the purpose of a most expensive meal served in the Imperial yesterday was to repair an unfortunate contact and to establish the kind of climate between us in which I could be brought gently to see reason. I think his aloof manner is defensive, rooted in perhaps two things, first that he is Eurasian and, second, that he inherited money and a company, which really means that he has only to be clever enough to maintain the business he was given. And selling silk to world markets that are clamouring for it really doesn’t put one’s administrative skills to much of a test.

  The matter of my house and land was not mentioned at dinner, but it will be, perhaps during a projected trip to Miyanoshita in the motorcar Mr Nasson has imported from America. He tells me that the road up is dreadful, not much more than a mountain track, but the views are worth the terrors of the journey.

  Letter from Mary Mackenzie to Marie de Chamonpierre in Rome

  Mampei Hotel, Karuizawa

  August 7th, 1916

  Dear Marie – It was so good of you to find the time to write to me. You say that in Rome you are not exactly in the front line, but I should imagine that practically everything you think and do is governed in one way or another by the war. Out here the truth is that it mightn’t be happening, except for the booming prosperity it has brought to Japan, with her new markets that are in so many cases just replacements for British goods which can no longer be supplied. I open my paper with a sense of guilt sometimes and particularly after this horrible summer with its dreadful slaughter in France and the failure of Sir Douglas Haig’s offensive against the German armies. I was interested in what Armand says about tanks and how if they had been used in the recent battles the Germans might easily have been smashed. He is probably right when he says that the Allies are handicapped by old-fashioned thinking on the matter of making war, but I have always had the feeling, from what I have read of him, that Mr Winston Churchill, who advocates the use of these tanks, is rather a harebrained young man. Certainly it doesn’t look as if our leaders have much idea of what they are doing.

  You ask for news of me and this is really that, in a small way, I am part
of this Japanese boom, more prosperous financially than I would have believed possible only a few years ago. Recently my main interest, aside from business, has been the massive repairs needed to the house on the Bluff in Yokohama in which I am now settled, up here for a two-week holiday after the move. You and Armand must come to me for a long visit. Basically everything has been kept in Japanese style, some chairs to my own design made by a local carpenter, plus certain conveniences as well, like flush WCs (two of them) as well as a modern kitchen with an electric icebox. I promise you would be comfortable, and I think charmed as well. So, when this war is over, I will expect you.

  Some time next year I will be opening a branch Mary Mackenzie shop in the main street of Yokohama, the Motomachi. This is really because I can see a great influx of tourists into Japan the moment this war is over, especially American tourists, and I am planning a pretty trap to lure their dollars away from them! This will be an emporium offering the most superb silks and brocades, featuring Japanese materials in ready-mades of various kinds that can be worn by Western women (and perhaps men?), the idea being to get right away from the now inevitable kimono. The project is something quite different, really, from my Tokyo business. And if I am clever enough I can’t see it failing. I might pay retaining fees to a special squad of the ricksha coolies who wait at pier number one for the big liners to dock, the idea being that new arrivals are whisked away from the bottom of gangplanks and delivered directly to my tender mercies by wild-looking Orientals who ‘no speakee English’, or French, or anything else! The travellers will be so relieved to find me and my staff who can understand them that they will loiter amongst my alluring wares while their wallets are still plump with travel money.