The Ginger Tree

by Oswald Wynd

  A cart pulled by an ox had the crown of a road still fissured and scarred from heat, the load new tiles. I couldn’t see any building ready for tiles, but there had to be one somewhere. Bob and I were separated by the ox, a curious deferring to the solemn-eyed beast that would probably end up as inedible meat in a ‘foreign’ restaurant, or perhaps tourist ‘sukiyaki’. When we joined up again I asked Bob why he had kept on that big house for six years. He said: ‘I guess I kept it on because I went on hoping she’d change her mind and come back. Good thing she didn’t. It would have fallen on her if she had. It’s just a heap of bricks.’

  I remembered then that Peter had told me Bob was known to be going to the Yoshiwara. I really had nothing to say to him, just as I hadn’t been able to say anything to Emma Lou on the boat. In the train we sat staring out at the blackened sites of factories, some of them with metal chimneys still standing, most of these heat twisted. He said suddenly: ‘I’m going to manage our office in Shanghai. Let me tell you, Mary, you won’t find our new man here so easy to get a loan out of.’ He laughed.

  The Imperial Hotel, Tokyo

  November 3rd, 1923

  Harry Nishimoto, who became Peter’s lawyer too, has just been to see me here, the day after he got back from hospital in Kobe. He was on pier number one at Yokohama seeing a friend off on the Empress of Australia when the dock split under him. He remembers going down into the water with huge blocks of concrete crashing all around, and then nothing until he came to on board the liner at sea en route for Kobe. He was lucky, only a leg fractured in two places.

  Harry’s news is startling. In this disaster-prone country it has been his firm’s policy for years to carry duplicates of all important legal documents in their Kobe branch office, and amongst these was Peter’s Will. If he died suddenly Peter meant to have the last laugh on me. I have been left the house he knew I didn’t care for, though a heap of rubble rather spoils the joke, and there is no point now in his ghost hanging around to see what I would do with my inheritance. His legacy means that, in addition to my own ground, I have another four acres of adjoining land on the Bluff. It would have been nearer five if a large chunk of Peter’s garden hadn’t collapsed on to the ruins below.

  Harry doesn’t think the Bluff is ever going to recover as a residential area but says he might be able to find me a speculator who would buy my land, though I needn’t expect much for it. He was shocked when I said I intended to be that speculator and was authorising him to buy for me all the land, plus ruins, that he could acquire on the Bluff for the forty thousand yen I had available.

  Harry would do a great job protecting new widows from sharks; he gave me a little lecture on the sensible handling of available assets and then, when he saw I was still bent on fiscal lunacy, asked what that forty thousand represented in my affairs. I told him that before the earthquake there had been forty-three thousand eight hundred in my account at the Yokohama Specie Bank which would still be to my credit when they got their records sorted out, because I had my bank book to prove my claim. In addition I had the goodwill of a vanished business, some potential in a matter of months from the little shop in which he was sitting, and that I intended opening another shop in Yokohama just as soon as it could be built. I also told him I meant to rebuild my house on the Bluff exactly as it had been, down to the last detail, this in the best Shinto religious tradition for reconstructions.

  I think his leg was hurting him, or he needed a drink, for his voice seemed to hold pain as he asked where, if I spent all my capital buying land on the Bluff, I expected to get the money to restart my business and rebuild my house? I said I would borrow from the bank the thirty thousand yen I estimated I would need for the house and the shop on Motomachi, doing this on the security of the land he was to start buying at once.

  Harry thinks I am headed for commercial suicide. I believe in that high shelf above Yokohama once again becoming the most desirable residential area in the city. In five or six years those empty lots scattered amongst the newly reconstructed mansions, and belonging to me, should be worth at least a quarter of a million.

  21

  17 Ura Machi, The Bluff, Yokohama

  April 9th, 1924

  A copy of the Last Will and Testament of Mrs Isabel Mackenzie arrived this morning from her lawyers in Edinburgh. Since I am a minor legatee there was really no need to send me that copy, but I am pretty sure that Mama left instructions this was to be done. When I saw the fat parcel from Scotland I couldn’t think what it might be, but the bulk was from all my letters home for over twenty years, each still in its envelope, yet all opened and presumably read.

  I have been sitting here trying to imagine what the arrival of those letters meant to Mama after she had stopped writing to me. Was she waiting, before she answered one of them, for some indication that I repented my sins? I always signed them with love, but there really wasn’t much love in what went before the signature; behind everything I put down there is a kind of resentment at still being classified the outcast. If I had tried even just a little harder I might have broken that barrier between us.

  The mention of me in her Will is as cold as ice clinking in a tall glass. ‘To my daughter, Mary Mackenzie, formerly Collingsworth, I bequeath the contents of her father’s library.’ She hadn’t cared much for Father’s library, disliked it, in fact, but had clearly kept those books safe behind glass all this time. My first reaction was to write to the lawyers telling them to sell the books and give the money to a suitable charity, but I have decided to send for them. The father I never really knew may, in a way, be available through those volumes.

  The Will is quite simple. There are other small legacies; five pounds for every year in her service to a woman whose name means nothing to me, so Jessie and the Cook either died or left. It would seem that Mama only had one maid of all work for those twelve years that had earned a faithful employee a total of sixty pounds as a remembrance. There was a larger amount, two hundred this time, to the Elizabeth Atkins Grant Home for Fallen Young Women in Glasgow, this followed by a distribution of jewellery, of which there was a good deal, to assorted relatives and friends in Edinburgh. Finally, Jane was the sole legatee of the residue of the estate, this cancelling, after probate, an income of three hundred pounds sterling originally paid annually to Richard Collingsworth on behalf of his wife, but continued to the Collingsworth family from 1906 on the understanding that the income was for Mrs Mackenzie’s granddaughter, Jane Collingsworth.

  This is the first I have heard of an income paid by Mama to Richard on my behalf. I can remember very clearly indeed my worries in Peking about a dowry, these the result of what Marie said about diplomats having to marry where money is. Three hundred pounds a year doesn’t seem a great income in these postwar years of inflation, but in China at the beginning of the century it would have gone a long way towards paying our living expenses.

  Richard managed that little matter very neatly, and I’ll never know how he did it. What I do know is that Mama must have stinted herself to find that money every year, a huge sum out of an income that could not have been more than seven or eight hundred. There was never one word in her letters that would have given me a clue to this situation and she must have gone on paying that money to Jane as a matter of pride. I can see now how she was bound to have felt a certain bitterness against a daughter whose choice of a husband had created her impoverishment and she would have believed that I knew all about those payments. Poor Mama and that dour, stubborn Scotch pride. I suppose there is a lot of this in me, too.

  17 Ura Machi, The Bluff, Yokohama

  April 13th, 1924

  Today I ordered the trees for the restoration of my garden now that the bulk of the work on the house is finished. I really only have memory to guide the contracting gardeners, as with the carpenters on the house, for there has been no trace of old Sato since the earthquake. Komoro, my ricksha coolie chauffeur, turned up all right, tracing me to the Imperial Hotel, but only to tell me that the Dodge
was a heap of twisted metal and that he was going back to his native place to become a farmer. He went with my blessing and some money, likely to be better at farming than he was at driving.

  My determination to have this house and garden as near as possible to what they were isn’t just a personal madness, but something shared with countless thousands of Japanese who, in an unstable natural environment, achieve a stability of a kind by this sort of continuity. The shrines at Ise, where the Emperor makes regular reports to his ancestors, are of wood and straw, rebuilt dozens of times over the centuries, but always to precisely the same plan. And in this country it is almost as easy to replace your garden as it is your house, no question at all of putting in young trees and waiting for them to grow, you buy your trees of an age and size you want, these then delivered and planted by experts who will guarantee to turn a piece of waste ground into a mature garden in one year flat. This never ceased to amaze me when I saw it happening before the earthquake on some vacant lot, but now all over Tokyo and Yokohama whole gardens are arriving from the undamaged surrounding countryside, transported on carts pulled by oxen, or tired horses. Everywhere the traffic is patient for these loads, as though acknowledging them as symbols of a rebirth; a vast pine, with its roots in a huge straw-matting bundle, holding up a procession of unhonking automobiles and motor lorries.

  The trees I have ordered are of fairly modest size, six twenty-year-old kiri, and an only seventy-year-old pine as replacement for a two-hundred-year-old charred stump. This is a compromise with cost; I could have had another two-hundred-year-old, along with crutches to support its aged limbs, for a price – a thousand yen. I might have been able to beat them down to eight hundred, but they wouldn’t have gone below that. These days it is a seller’s market for trees.

  17 Ura Machi, The Bluff, Yokohama

  April 19th, 1924

  A team of workmen are due to start today preparing the ground for my garden, which arrives early next week. I am staying home to supervise the digging. The only things growing here now are weeds, or so I thought. The seeds of these couldn’t have survived that scorching, so they must have arrived on the winter winds. I had a look at the almost pure charcoal of my old pine before climbing up the mound to where the stump of the ginger tree stuck up like a creosoted stake. I couldn’t believe what I saw fighting weeds for its share of sunlight: a new green shoot come up from a nest of blackened roots, this already bearing nine of the unmistakable, aromatic leaves. I pinched one to make sure and got the ginger scent on my fingers.

  I have no belief in omens except when they are good ones. This is a good one. I am back in a house still perfumed by newly planed wood, feeling an absolutely ridiculous joy. I shall stay with the diggers all day to make quite certain that an artificial hill is once again crowned by that stranger tree.

  22

  17 Ura Machi, The Bluff, Yokohama

  October 11th, 1928

  Today saw the end of a series of flaming rows with Harry Nishimoto, the end because I gave him my final instructions, stating that if he wouldn’t do what I told him my affairs would be out of his hands. To hear him talk now you would think that the four hundred and eighty thousand yen from the sale of most of my land on the Bluff was the direct result of his brilliant planning, but right here in this notebook, and only a few pages back, is the clear evidence of what a lunatic he thought me when I insisted on buying up here to the limit of my then available funds. He wants me to convert the yen from the sale into something like two hundred thousand US dollars’ worth of assorted stocks and shares on the New York market. According to Harry, all the indicators are not just set fair, everything points to the present boom going right through the roof, and that by buying on margin I could double my capital in a year. He has sheaves of brokers’ letters full of juicy forecasts about the American economy and says that everyone is buying on margin these days.

  Well, I am not going to. Buying on margin means that if shares go down you have to cover the drop or end up with nothing. It may be a Scotch thing, but I like my money in something you can see and touch if you want to, which is why I have decided to become a landlady. From the big sell-up I kept back, as well as this place, a four-acre lot further over on the Bluff, and on this I intend to build two three-storey blocks of flats for rent to give me an income, a decision that has brought Harry as near to foaming at the mouth as his shrewd business man image of himself will allow.

  Fighting him has left me feeling a little tired, and summer in the Motomachi shop was pretty exhausting too. I think I must go away somewhere for a rest before starting to deal with architects and builders, not to mention all the complex new legislation about foreigners owning property in this country.

  A year from now Harry is going to have for me, itemised in detail, the profits I would have made on those New York margin buys if I had taken his advice, and he ought to get some pleasure out of that. I wonder what commission he has from his American brokers? Pretty good, I should imagine. And, of course, he sees no chance at all of a percentage on the flats I am building. I hear that his Italian wife is proving to be very expensive.

  17 Ura Machi, The Bluff, Yokohama

  October 23rd, 1928

  I have been to Nikko. It took me twenty-four years to get to the tourist mecca which is a top priority must on all the ten days in exciting Japan schedules. The tourist board here have come up with a new slogan to help keep the hotels full – ‘Nippon, the land of colour, courtesy and charm’. Well, maybe.

  Nikko is sensational in a way, an orgy of wood carving covered with red and gilt lacquer, these buildings set against the sombre green of huge cryptomerias, but after one day my feet were as sore as they used to be when I worked in Matsuzakara’s, endless stone steps to climb for yet another spectacle of a glittering temple against a dark background.

  I may have been a little jaundiced by the fact that my visit coincided with a descent on the place by nine hundred passengers from the round-the-world cruise liner Carinthia, all of them with sorer feet than mine, and sagging at the knees from the weight of photographic equipment they carried. Everywhere you looked there were little groups arranging themselves against a cute Japanese setting for a permanent record of travel to be pasted in half a thousand snapshot albums. I thought I would be all right since I had avoided the Western-style hotel, but the Osana, which had been recommended to me, turned out to be one of those charming native inns that have been mentioned in the guide books, and I got back in the evening to find a banquet of bad semi-European cooking disguised as Japanese cuisine being served to two hundred of the round-the-world adventurers. Service for the rest of us was non-existent; after my bath I had an hour’s wait before my meal tray arrived, this loaded with what could have been, and probably was, chilled rejects from the big party downstairs. They must have had geisha in, or imitation geisha, for I could hear the twanging of a samisen poorly played, a screeching voice offering the visitors what was probably the delicately veiled insult of the latest brothel ditty. A sliding door was pushed back and I looked up, meaning to tell the maid what I thought of my dinner.

  Kentaro was standing there. He was wearing the one-layer cotton hotel kimono and was flushed from his bath, or sake, or both. A Japanese woman would have pushed herself up to bow. I didn’t move. He said: ‘How are you?’ I said: ‘Very well. Thank you for asking after all these years.’ He stepped on to the matting, pulled shut the almost all paper door, as if for privacy. I said: ‘You’re looking very fit.’ He said: ‘I’m all right,’ and went on standing there, looking down at me. I told him I had heard he had been made a general. He said: ‘Please don’t mention it,’ then smiled.

  I can never see anything even faintly resembling that smile on a stranger’s face without a stab of feeling. I remembered the dragon under Japan. I don’t know what he was remembering. He stood there for what seemed minutes, not a word between us, then suddenly turned, slid open the door again, clapped his hands and shouted: ‘Oi!’ Almost at once there was an answer fr
om one of the elusive maids. When the girl arrived he said: ‘Clear away the meal. Lay out the quilts.’

  In China long ago I asked myself if this was love. I still don’t know. All I know is that, whatever the condition, for three days I was weak with it, and still am, remembering. The tourists had gone next day, Nikko returned to an autumnal emptiness, and though the painted buildings continued to glare at us even under a grey sky, their garishness was a little subdued, the mausoleums suggesting history rather than show places. We wandered amongst them according to some plan in Kentaro’s mind that he didn’t reveal to me, which was in keeping with a man who never reveals anything, but walks in the contained silence of a totally private identity even when using words to others.

  I walked with him, asking no questions, for I didn’t want his answers. If I had asked him how Tomo was Kentaro would have said he was well, and if I had wanted to find out what our son was doing now he would have said he didn’t know. I could have reproached him with what he did to me all those years ago, but if I had he would have said nothing.

  What I do know now is that he has kept track of me always. There have been long times when I wasn’t aware of this, years even, but little that I did was hidden from him. He knew of my relations with Peter and probably had even been informed about the Norwegian Bostonian. I can sense, too, a continuing curiosity, as though he felt an unwavering interest in how a woman like me, with no backing from her own people, would make out amongst his. I wonder if he thinks I have made out quite well, or does he find me hardened by those years of aching feet and a half-frozen heart? Oddly, perhaps, I don’t really much care what he thinks of me, I just want to be with him when this is possible.

  I did try one experiment. We were having our evening meal at the inn, the food much better now the foreigners had gone, Kentaro shovelling his in from a lifted bowl and with considerable noise. We might have been living in the same rooms for twenty-five years, except that I was not maintaining a respectful silence, talking about Karuizawa, asking if he had been there, to which he grunted an assent. I said that I had been going up every summer since 1923, sometimes only for a week or ten days, but always during the all-Japan tennis tournament on those courts of packed volcanic pumice, where the ball has an elasticity of bounce I haven’t seen anywhere else. For three years I had watched a very promising player who seemed to have suddenly disappeared from the tennis scene, and I wondered what had happened to him. The name was Kenichi Massami. Kentaro put down his rice bowl, poured some tea into it, then drank, not to waste a grain. He said: ‘Never heard of him.’