The Ginger Tree

by Oswald Wynd

  Before the World War Peter used to go to Embassy ceremonial occasions, like Empire Day, but now he has even less chance of getting through those portals than I do, forever to be unforgiven for what he did in 1912. About then, sensing what was coming in Europe, he renounced his British citizenship along with his father’s name of Williams, taking his mother’s name of Nasson and her Swiss nationality. There was logic as well as an instinct for self-preservation behind this move, for Peter’s father was half British, half Japanese, whereas his mother was all Swiss, which made him just a quarter of a Briton with a good solid claim on neutrality through the years 1914–18. As he puts it, no invitation to the British Embassy for the rest of his life is a small price to pay for never having seen the mud of Flanders. A divorce from his wife, who now lives in Deauville, was part of his loss at this time, too, the lady English and a patriot who only lives in France because the climate is so much better. Somehow I can’t see Peter as a married man and I tell him that he only suggests marrying me because he likes to have his brand stamp on everything within his orbit.

  I have never before put down on paper what I feel about Peter, and I find myself staring at the words, suspicious of them. Twenty years ago the idea of having as a lover someone who could calmly admit to being a physical coward would have appalled me. The Samurai warrior was a big part of Kentaro’s attraction, the mystery of a man who could sit facing the rising sun offering prayers for his dead soldiers. I never got in behind the mystery. The curtain at times seemed to be rising but before anything was revealed it dropped again. Peter is not mysterious. He mocks me by our similarity. With him I have nothing to defend, it would be a waste of time. Married, we would quarrel too much. This way, we each have our houses to withdraw to, the separate identities they offer by a physical environment, the studied perfection of the more than slightly bogus Japanese for me, a concrete horror glittering with the evidence of Nasson money for him. From either of our bedrooms on a fine morning we can see Mount Fuji, the peerless one.

  The garden is now very hot. Up here with the shoji pushed back for the sea breeze that hasn’t yet arrived I can feel heat radiating past me skywards. The geriatric pine, under careful nursing and winter wraps, has recovered its needles and these days its gnarled limbs are crutched by wooden props. I am pretty certain Sato says prayers to that tree when working around it, and there are times when the idea of a venerable vegetable growth having a soul doesn’t seem too weird to me, at least not when I am out as a guest in my garden. There is another tree which Sato dislikes almost to the point of bitterness, this probably in the main because he can’t identify it. He comes from Kyushu where a sub-tropic climate, or near it, rears many exotics but he has never seen a tree like this one. With positive hatred in his voice he calls it a foreign thing. Actually, it is totally inoffensive, doesn’t grow very fast, and has quite pretty pointed leaves which take on a reddish tinge in autumn. When you crush one of these between your fingers it gives off a faintly gingerish smell, and though a bushy habit makes it a little out of place in a formal Japanese garden, especially where it grows up near the focal point of a stone lantern on a miniature hill, I am still not letting Sato touch it. I have warned him that if I come home one day and find that tree gone he will go, too. Its odd-plant-out look somehow accents, for me at any rate, the carefully maintained perfection of everything else around it. Sometimes I see Sato straightening his back and pausing to curse my tree, but it survives.

  17 Ura Machi, The Bluff, Yokohama

  June 17th, 1923

  Peter, back from Shanghai, insisted that I go up with him to a performance of the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, saying that the programme, being totally sentimental, ought to appeal to me. We went in his Morris Cowley, which is what the British call a ‘saloon’, windowed in like a hearse, and stuffy with engine smells. I much prefer my open Dodge touring car and my ex-ricksha coolie chauffeur.

  The concert included the ‘Fingal’s Cave’ overture which ought to have brought tears to my Scottish eyes, but didn’t, Liszt, and finally Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony. Programme notes in Japanese and near-English told us to look out for the love theme in the work, stating: ‘ … at first quite loud sadness becoming more softly and not often, then only to arrive at last like small echo in booming death cave’. Peter said that after this information we should be ready for anything, including a big laugh, but I found myself waiting for the little theme, moved by it, wanting it to be much stronger at the end than the pathetic little suffocated whisper it became.

  I was conscious of Peter watching me and in the car driving home he was suddenly quite vicious, saying that I was like a world traveller trying to move around with a heavy trunk stuffed with my own past, and it was about time I learned that all any of us need is a very light suitcase. When I didn’t say anything to that he came in to the attack again. According to him, I have a large personal area for a misty dream, this dedicated to the sacred figure of my warrior, now a general. Couldn’t I see that I had got a big damn nothing out of the dream? I said I had a son from it. He said: ‘Where?’

  I could have cried out then. I had been back in the dream, listening to that music, seeing Kentaro again in the Tsukiji garden looking down at his son for the first time, then, later, squatting on the matting making a little procession of origami toys. Peter was trying to make me cry, but I didn’t do it.

  He says that I should go through that big trunk to throw away everything that won’t fit into the light suitcase. He may be right. Actually, quite a lot has been got rid of already. When Richard was killed in France in early 1918 I didn’t beat myself with shame at what I had done to him; all I really felt was relief that I was free of a man who had refused to divorce me, this from what I could only see as a kind of malice, though it may have been principle. Jane, now nineteen, I remember on her birthday. Tomo, soon to be eighteen, comes through a door into a shadowed room much more often, but I can never manage to see his face, and always his father seems to be with him, as though to keep me from doing this.

  I might rent a house in Karuizawa for August and take that psychic trunk with me to sort out the contents once and for all, as Peter suggests. I wonder if he suspects I have hung on to this box with my journals? He can’t have seen it, it has always been hidden and locked.

  Noki Besso, Karuizawa

  August 18th, 1923

  I was down this morning at the tennis courts watching the men’s singles semi-finals for the Karuizawa Cup. It was a hard battle between an American called Wendels and a Japanese youth, Kenichi Massami, who lost in the last set. It was only when they were coming off court that I saw how young the Japanese player was, no match physically or in years for the American. Then, as he straightened from picking up a towel, the Japanese boy looked at me. He was angry at losing. His look could have come straight from Kentaro.

  I tell myself that dozens of Japanese youths from the wealthier families are summering here in Karuizawa, and that I must not do now what I have longed to do often before and never permitted myself, set in train some kind of investigation. I did find out that the Massami family are from Kyoto, which I have a feeling is the kind of place in which Kentaro might have wanted Tomo to be brought up. And if that boy was a yoshi – ? No! I must not. Oh God, I came up here to empty that trunk!

  Noki Besso, Karuizawa

  September 2nd, 1923

  This is a place of wild rumours after yesterday’s earthquake. One is that Fuji has erupted and smothered Tokyo and Yokohama in burning ash. I don’t believe this, and neither do I believe that a vast wave has come in from the sea to pour over the capital and its port. The only thing we know for certain is that it isn’t a local disturbance as we thought yesterday, something connected with our volcano. My guess is that we were on the fringe of a huge shock centred in or near the Tokyo area. Even here it was bad enough to shatter all communications down from these mountains, no telephone or telegraph, and the talk is that at least seven of the forty railway tunnels between us and the Takasa
ki plain have collapsed. Certainly there have been no trains.

  The American agent for Harley Davidson motorcycles came up here on one of his machines last week, finding the track almost impassable then because of mud from recent rains and when he tried to go down again this morning the track had disappeared under a landslide. It looks as though we are imprisoned up on this plateau. All those wild stories heard over the years about what will one day happen to these volcanic islands don’t sound so wild now. At the community notice board I heard a man say that if there was some vantage point at the edge of these mountains from which we could look down we might find that the sea came right up to them, half of the country having slid down into that vast hole on the ocean floor known as the Tuscarora Deep. The stories will get even wilder before we hear what has really happened.

  I brought only one maid up here with me. Toba San, usually so cheerful, is in a dreadful state, convinced that her family down in the disaster-prone Izu Peninsula have been wiped out and that Cook has been killed in our Yokohama house. I try to calm her down, but there is something horribly infectious about the girl’s panic, and the way she continues showing an almost total lack of the usual Japanese emotional control, her eyes streaming tears whenever I look at her. Certainly there is a grim sense of doom hanging over this valley, as though everyone feels that the terror which has struck elsewhere is somehow on schedule for us soon. I keep looking at the volcano Asama which looms over this place, and I see others doing it, too, but the only sign of activity from the crater is the usual thin, almost innocent-seeming plume of white smoke drifting away. Last night there was a red glow reflected by low cloud, but this is quite common. The village food shops are emptying fast, with queues forming to buy tinned goods and the question wherever there is a clump of people is: ‘Have you had any news?’ The last I heard was of a party being organised to go down to the plains on foot, but this isn’t going to be easy if the track has gone, the railway to us used a cog system to get up what are practically precipices.

  One thinks almost endlessly about the people down in the cities and I can’t get away from a feeling that by being up here I have somehow evaded an experience that should have been part of my life. The earthquake was at midday, when Peter was quite likely to have been at home. Emburi San, in charge of the salon, would probably have been getting rid of the last customer for the morning and thinking about sending out for her usual sandwich and milk.

  Aiko is also in Tokyo. I saw her last month when she came to the salon just before I left the city, and with that quite crazy request. I was supposed to go into the cubicle where the wife of the Minister for Home Affairs was being fitted for a gown to ask that lady to use her influence on her husband to get Katsugi, the radical leader, out of Sugamo jail. Since she married that man I really think Aiko is a little bit unbalanced, though perhaps the only real change is that these days, instead of going to jail herself, she spends her time trying to have her new husband’s sentences reduced or quashed. If he were my husband I would prefer him in jail. The only time Aiko brought Katsugi to my house in Yokohama he had a good look around, ate everything in sight, and then called me a highly paid lackey of the ruling élite, which I didn’t feel was a very good description of what I do for a living. I think Aiko got the message then that I didn’t really care for the company of her revolutionary, though I am still much concerned about her, particularly now.

  How long are we going to be trapped up here under this damn smoking mountain?

  The Imperial Hotel, Tokyo

  October 16th, 1923

  Like everyone else in this city, I have become anaesthetised to horror, destruction on this scale producing its own drug to blunt one’s reactions. There are nearly three thousand people packed into this hotel, its lounges, lobbies and many corridors turned into dormitories. The only reason I have got in, arriving back in Tokyo when I did more than a month after the earthquake, was simply because last spring I opened a small shop in the arcade here as a kind of trial run for the much more ambitious project planned for the Motomachi in Yokohama. So now I sleep surrounded by brocades and silks and tourist gewgaws, which must be the only collection of this kind of merchandise within a twenty-mile radius that hasn’t been reduced to ashes. I am not open for business. Anything that could be of any use has gone from these shelves to the refugee supply stall upstairs and when I look around at the too much stock I have left, so carefully selected by Emburi San and me, it seems, in these circumstances, a load of rubbish. I stay in this little cell most of the time to be available to any of my staff who have survived the holocaust. They all knew about this shop and they ought to learn, in time, that this hotel has survived intact. So far only one has been, the youngest sewing girl. She survived because she was at home with a heavy cold that day. She hasn’t much hope for any of the others, including Emburi San because she has heard that in the area behind the Ginza the fire came quickly before thousands who were trapped in the wreckage could be dug out.

  I don’t want to think about it. There is so much that one mustn’t think about. Peter was found under the crumpled heap of his concrete house, one of the known dead. There are probably two hundred thousand who died no one can say where or how. I still haven’t heard anything at all about Aiko, though it has been confirmed that the Baron Sannotera was killed in his office. On September first, just before noon, Bob Dale, that former total abstainer, was in the hotel bar above me here, experiencing one of the world’s most devastating earthquakes with a whisky glass in his hand. Afterwards, from what I hear, he did impressive work with the rescue squads. Soon after I arrived we met in one of the food queues, and I thought he was suddenly looking a lot older, but then we all are. He has been down here a few times, but we didn’t have very much to say to each other. That seems to be a common condition, you see people sitting staring at pieces of the decorative stonework to be found all over this hotel, as though using it for some kind of self-hypnosis.

  The Japanese, with their long experience of natural disasters, seem to have evolved an almost unique understanding of how to deal with these. They get up on their feet again quickly, shake themselves, cremate their dead, and turn once more to living. Here in Tokyo most of the streets have already been cleared, some trams are running, and Bob Dale is taking me to Yokohama tomorrow by electric train, these operating again. I funked going down there alone. My cook and her two children have survived unhurt, the police got a message to me from her native place in the country to which she has gone. Toba San, who made the journey with me from Karuizawa, is in Izu, but I haven’t heard yet what she has found there.

  I can’t read. No one seems able to, you don’t see people in the hotel with books open. For something to do this afternoon I tidied this place, really to get those garish brocades out of my sight. Under a bottom shelf is what I brought down from Karuizawa, a suitcase of summer clothes and a basket containing household linen, together with that box of letters and my journals, the symbolic trunk that Peter told me to get rid of, and I meant to. Well, I haven’t, and I won’t now. I lugged that suitcase and basket through a chaos of packed trains and stations where we had to change in order to get here, and the symbolism of the box, if it has to have one, has altered, becoming the only link now left to connect me with those dead years.

  Yesterday I went out for a walk. It is only when you are outside this hotel that you really appreciate the miracle of its survival, the new Imperial finished only last year to plans and under the supervision of the American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. A more improbable building to resist a vast earthquake is difficult to imagine, since it is built entirely of stone cemented together without any steel frame at all, the design said to have been inspired by Mayan temples. There isn’t a crack anywhere in the building, its narrow windows and low construction resisted the fires that burned right to its back and side doors.

  There is another even more impressive survival, the massive walls beyond the moat which surround the Imperial Palace. Here the stone is unmortared,
huge rocks just fitted together and apparently completely undamaged, topped off still by those old pines that show no signs that I could see of scorching. The residence of the god who lives amongst the Japanese is unaffected by the disaster immediately beneath him, though it is rumoured that the god himself, accompanied by what these days amounts to his keepers, was safely away enjoying the hill air of Nikko. When I turned from the palace to look south ruin stretched to Tokyo Bay, though I could identify the Ginza by a line of burned out shells that had once been its department stores, including Matsuzakara’s.

  The Imperial Hotel, Tokyo

  October 17th, 1923

  I minded the ruin of Peter’s house much more than my own. Mine was somehow purged devastation, broken tiles, but the rest almost clean ash from burned wood; his great slabs of that concrete piled in on itself. I didn’t ask how they had found his body, the heap looked as if no squads of diggers had disturbed it in any way, and those huge pieces of fractured cement still had their white outer coating in places, as though the fire had missed this pile. The view from the Bluff, in autumn sunshine, was better than it ever had been, all obstructions cleared away. Fuji was serene.

  As we were walking back to the train for Tokyo, along what used to be the Motomachi, Bob asked me if I had kept in touch with Emma Lou. I said we had for the first two years, then she hadn’t answered a letter and it had become cards at Christmas which had stopped too. He told me that they had been divorced, adding: ‘I haven’t told anyone here yet. It’s just happened. Emma Lou went to Nevada where you can divorce your husband if you can prove his dog bit you.’