The Ginger Tree (18 page)

I didn’t have to account for myself to Baroness Sannotera, Miss Bassett-Hill had told her all she knows about me, which is obviously a great deal. The Baroness described how she had joined the Suffragettes during her stay in England, almost as the direct result of witnessing the junketing in London on the relief of Mafeking, that celebration of a victory in yet another stupid war that need never have been fought if women had their proper say in the conduct of world affairs. I was thinking this lady was bound for more jail sentences if she went on expressing these thoughts in Japan when our hostess called us into the next room, saying as we joined her: ‘The French may have taken to Japan, but their wines have not. I was hoping for a good deal from this bottle, but once again my hopes have been dashed.’

Miss Bassett-Hill is not some kind of spy for the Embassy or my relations; she learned about me from Dr Ikeda at St Luke’s where she does volunteer work twice a week. It was an extraordinary party. I will always be able to see that erect figure in black sitting at the head of a table which also wobbled on soft matting, telling us about the habit of some
missionaries
of returning statistics on the number of converts made each year and her comment on her own work.

‘I doubt very much whether, as the result of my thirty years here, I could confirm
one
convert. The Japanese don’t seem to care for Anglicanism. Perhaps they can’t begin to understand it. I’m not sure that I do myself. And of course, there is the fact that I am
very
High Church.’

At the gate, as she was getting into her ricksha, the Baroness turned to me.

‘Two disreputable women like us ought to be friends. What do you think?’

I think yes. We are going to the Kabuki theatre together next week.

Tsukiji, Tokyo
August 16th

If Aiko Sannotera is a foretaste of what is going to happen to Japanese women in the twentieth century, then Japanese men are going to have to
live through a revolutionary experience. To me she is like a door opened into the world again after a long time when I was shut into the cell of myself. My maids are terrified of her, they could perhaps accept such an un-female approach to living in a foreign woman, but that a Japanese, and a Baroness at that, should be so emancipated shocks them utterly. The granddaughter of a Finance Minister, who ought to be behaving like a great lady, talks to them like an equal instead of using the language for servants, and this, too, is totally unnerving.

Aiko was divorced six years ago by her husband, who she says was remarkably patient but finally could not stand her any longer, at least as his wife, for they are still friends and it is he who contrives to have her jail sentences shortened. Also, the gods had punished a female rebel by making her barren, and though her husband had been quite willing to adopt an heir to carry on the Sannotera name, Aiko had suggested that he really ought to have a try with another woman and she is glad this has been successful, the Baron now has two sons and a daughter.

We went to the Kabuki last night, sitting in one of the little boxes on matting in an area that would be the centre stalls in Europe, surrounded by families packed into other little railed boxes, most people eating solidly, which is necessary to sustain you through an eight-hour
performance
, though you can vary your attention to the stage with family gossip and in the case of one party of business men attended by geisha, with something rather different from that. I thoroughly enjoyed a theatre in which, while an actor is about to disembowel himself against a
background
of paper cherry blossoms, people in the box next to us could become totally concerned with curing grandpapa of hiccups resulting from too much rice wine.

The action of the play must have reminded Aiko of her own family history. In rather a loud voice which even pushed through the shrieks of the dying actor, she told me how her grandfather, the Finance Minister, had been murdered. Four swordsmen had chopped their way into the family home, killing first the gate attendant, then two serving maids, then Aiko’s grandmother who tried to protect her bedridden husband, finally reaching the old man himself whom they literally carved to pieces. The
crime for which he was slaughtered was having resisted attempts by the Army and Navy to corner more finance for their expansion.

It is easy to see from where Aiko gets her stubborn refusal to be intimidated by the powers that be. And I can see, too, why she thinks Japan is ripe for a thousand reforms to take the country out of what she calls feudalism in new clothes. She isn’t a restful woman to be with, your mind isn’t allowed to go slack in her company, and this is what I need. I have rested too much and too long.

Tsukiji, Tokyo
August 20th

Aiko was here this afternoon. She is marvellous with Tomo when I wouldn’t have expected her to have any instinctive feeling for children at all. She must know Kentaro since the Japanese upper classes seem quite close knit, but she has never mentioned him. This is not to spare my feelings, she spares nobody’s feelings, but I suspect because she finds quite unbearable the idea of my subservience to the whims of a Japanese man. What she would probably like me to do is wrap my son in a quilt and carry him out into a Tokyo night, putting behind me forever my dependence on the male.

As a ‘new’ woman there is one thing Aiko forgets, that she was born into a wealthy family and married a rich man, her idealism never threatened by not knowing how she was going to eat tomorrow. I’m not trying to diminish her or make excuses for myself, she would die for a cause that was important in her eyes, but at the same time would see nothing odd in having her last meal before execution sent in from an expensive restaurant on a gilded lacquer tray, all this paid for by her
ex-husband
. I think that already we like each other as much for the areas of what seems to each the absurd in the other as for anything else. It is not a close sympathy in all things, or ever likely to be, but already a kind of warfare. In time I will make her a stronger and more worthy adversary. In only ten days she has brought me back into real living again, and for this I will be forever grateful.

Tsukiji, Tokyo
August 24th, 1905

The Russo-Japan war is over, a peace treaty signed yesterday in America at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Kentaro may soon be back in Tokyo. I try not to think about what this could mean for me and for Tomo.

Today I went alone to the Ginza for the first time, buying some
home-style
cakes at Fugetsudo’s, delicious little macaroons made with real ground almonds, and after that walking through a four-storey
department
store called Matsuzakara. This had many sections full of imports from Europe where richly dressed matrons seemed to be spending money wildly, perhaps the wives of war profiteers who have been
receiving
bad publicity in the papers recently.

At Maruzen’s, the bookshop, I got a copy of Basil Hall Chamberlain’s
Things Japanese
which Aiko recommended, saying it is full of plain home truths for the people in this country. I also found a second-hand
Shakespeare
, complete works in one volume and far too small print, but last night I read
Macbeth
straight through because I couldn’t stop, with Tomo making little puppy-like noises in his sleep as though the light disturbed him.

I don’t suppose we are meant to have much sympathy for Macbeth, but I did, as though I could feel everything that happened to him from those first thoughts of murder in his mind, these the beginnings of his destruction. The most terrible thing in the play is the idea of the Fates hounding, the witches their instrument, so that you know there is no escape for Macbeth, his doom inevitable. This is a little like the idea of God strict Presbyterians in Scotland still have, that He has chosen you for hell or heaven before you are born. It is a really wicked thing to pin on God. I cannot believe in Fate as we see it in
Macbeth
. I was not inevitably destined to climb a Chinese hill path and allow a Japanese soldier to make me with child. What I did then was from my own choice, I cannot blame God or the Fates, just myself. And often, looking at Tomo, I am glad.

13 Tsukiji San Chome, Tokyo, Japan
September 16th, 1905

Dear Marie – Once again it was marvellous to hear from you and I can’t thank you enough for having acted as my ‘detective’, which I know has put you to a lot of trouble, whatever you may say about that.

I had guessed, of course, that Jane was almost certainly at Mannington with Richard’s mother, and all I can really hope for now is that she is enough like her father, or grows up enough like him, for that world to be completely right for her. It is certainly stable enough. I hope, for her sake, that Jane in no way takes after me, and I am sure that Lady Collingsworth will do her utmost to make sure that this does not happen. I am glad, too, that Richard will not be posted back to China after his leave in England. It troubles me to think of the damage I have probably done to his career prospects, but surely it will be understood that he is in no way to blame? No word of a divorce has reached me, but I suppose that under English law this could be done without any notification to me at all.

My son Tomo is very well. He has been healthy from the first though it was not an easy delivery, his position in the womb wrong, I am still not very clear in what way, but the doctors at the very good hospital here had to operate just before term, which means I will never be able to have another child. As someone who is now part of what you would call the
demi-monde
this is probably a good thing. I am not troubled about it.
With Tomo I run the risk of becoming a doting mother, which is something I must watch. My two maids appear to take few things in this life very seriously except babies, particularly boy babies, so not only can I safely leave Tomo with them, the problem will soon be to keep them from totally spoiling the child. Already he is like a little prince who has only to express a whim to have it immediately satisfied. It is quite extraordinary how early infants begin to sense their power and to use it.

I am no longer isolated in this house as I was when I first wrote, having now two friends, one English lady and one Japanese, the latter a Baroness of somewhat unique character for this country. She has taken me out into the world of Tokyo and even beyond, for next month we go to some hill in the country for a ceremonial viewing of the autumn colours of maple trees. The Baroness wears European dress all the time … if you can call it that … and we ought to make a curious pair of sightseers, arousing considerable interest as we have already done on various expeditions, including the theatre. So you see, I am not growing in on myself as I think you would have expected me to since you thought I shut myself up in that Peking house. Tokyo I like, it is not beautiful with its endless miles of little grey wood two-storey houses, but it is full of life and much richer than China in simple entertainments for all the people, which cost little and sometimes nothing at all. I go regularly to the night markets which open up every evening with portable stalls along the main street, the Ginza. These are lit by acetylene flares and practically everything available on this earth can be bought at them. There also seem to be festivals of some kind or another every other week, most of these based on temples, but very light-hearted. It is my impression that the Japanese take religion very casually, believing in little beyond ghosts. It is a great country for ghosts, everything is haunted, including trees.

Of Count Kurihama I have heard nothing. He is probably concerned with what now looks as though it would become a permanent Japanese occupation of Korea, something that should please you since you believe that they ought to rule Asia. I am not sure about that, even though my baby is half-Japanese.

You say nothing of Armand’s Pierce-Arrow? I hope he hasn’t been
having trouble with it. From what I read in the papers these vehicles are expensive luxuries. A number of new rich Japanese, war profiteers mostly, called
narikin
, have imported motorcars, but they are continually breaking down or rolling off narrow tracks into rice fields and having to be pulled out again by patient oxen. I am thinking of getting a bicycle. Aiko, the Baroness, has just bought one, a lady’s model with three-speed gears, on which she is now whizzing about the streets of Tokyo, I fear to the great danger of lives and property, liable to have some very dramatic accident shortly!

As you can see, I am in much better spirits than when I last wrote. The autumn is lovely here, sunny days and cool nights. A neighbour plays the
samisen
in the evening, a stringed instrument on which geishas are skilled, so perhaps I should learn to play one. It makes cool, twanging notes that have a kind of deep sadness, not like anything I heard in China, and there is also a bamboo flute which sounds like a rich contralto voice.

You ask about earthquakes. There have been some, but mostly small, setting up a rattling more than a violent movement of the earth and in this light wooden house I really wasn’t frightened at all. It is the huge fires, called the flowers of Yedo, which are terrifying; they sweep whole wards of the city, producing dreadful fire storms. Since I have been here six thousand houses were burned down in one night in the Ueno district. Though Ueno is a considerable distance from us here the sky overhead was blood red through all the hours of darkness. They say that the canals which crisscross this area are a protection, but burning wood embers, wind borne, can travel for miles. Aiko tells me that in the last fifty years, and except for the central portion around the Imperial Palace, almost the whole of this city has, at various times, been burned down and rebuilt. Naturally enough, the people here seem to have no great feeling for the permanence of material things, and if you are a city dweller the chances of losing everything you possess at least once in a lifetime are very high indeed. Many know this two and three times.

The Baroness must be the only Japanese woman who thinks it a bad thing that her country won the war against Russia. She says it only inflates their swelling conceit after the defeat of China years earlier. She tells me
that there are even some military hotheads who say that it will be Britain they take on next, in spite of that treaty of friendship and alliance. I’m sure that, though you are French, you will agree that if ever the Japanese try
that
they will be in for a nasty shock.

Thanks so much for writing to me, and please do it again soon. Better still, on your next leave from Washington why not another visit to your beloved Japan? These days the travel involved is becoming nothing, only five days or so on the train from where you are to Vancouver and from there just another twelve to Yokohama. The world is getting much too fast for me, I have decided I am a
slow
person, but it does mean that all kinds of things that were impossible a few years ago are easy today. Perhaps in fifty years we will be travelling in flying machines. I recently read in our English-language paper that two Americans are rumoured to have flown twenty-four miles in only half an hour at some secret testing ground, but I must say I find this hard to believe. One wonders whatever next. My love to Armand and to you.

Sincerely,

Mary

PS Armand is
not
to risk your life speeding in the Pierce-Arrow. The papers also tell me that the automobile is becoming quite a menace in American streets and even on country roads.

13 Tsukiji San Chome, Tokyo, Japan
September 19th, 1905

After lunch today Aiko came on her bicycle to give me a riding lesson. The only place for this was the street in front of our house which at that time was completely empty. Misao and Fukuda came out to see the circus. They still cannot make Aiko out. That a foreigner behaves as though mad is to be expected, but this is their first experience of a Japanese who has caught the infection of that lunacy. Also, Aiko’s voice isn’t really very ladylike by local standards, she can be heard across a crowded room when she thinks she is talking to you alone. As an instructress she bellowed,
there is no other word for it. Finally, by paying no attention at all to what she told me to do, I managed to stay on for all of thirty yards and was really going quite well when I hit a stone which swerved the front wheel, giving me the choice of falling off or going straight into the canal. I fell off, with the maids coming clattering to my rescue crying: ‘
Ara! Ara
!’ while wicked Aiko just stood by the gate laughing.

After this we sent for two rickshas and, leaving the bicycle with its back wheel padlocked, rode up to the Ginza pulled by two
kurumaya
men who must have thought we were both foreigners and who enlivened the journey, at least for Aiko, by a shouted exchange as they padded along on the subject of the likely morals of their two passengers, conclusions not very complimentary. Aiko was furious, but contained herself until we got to Matsuzakara’s store, when she then let out a stream of what I don’t think was very high-class Japanese, at which their jaw muscles went slack. I know she did not tip them.

We went up in the newly installed American electric elevator which clanked and gave me the feeling that it might go on strike at any moment and simply drop us four or five floors to the cellar. Our destination was the ladies’ foreign gown department which Aiko says dresses a number of the court ladies, as it used to do her when she was one of them. All I can say to that is that it can’t be a very well dressed Court. A number of the ‘models’, mounted on what appeared to be headless sewing dummies, were the last word in 1890 styles and looked as though they had been sitting there ever since collecting dust. Aiko noticed my reaction and told me about a garden party she had once attended where the ladies were mostly dressed by this department in ‘foreign style’, and where one of them was wearing an enormous cartwheel hat decorated with ostrich plumes. The moths had got at the hat and every time the lady bowed a plume fell out. Palace protocol is strict at these parties, demanding that you stay in the place to which you have been assigned by rank, and by the time the occasion was drawing to its close the court lady, still bowing, was surrounded by a kind of witches’ circle of ostrich feathers.

Aiko was on the hunt for what she called a useful two-piece she could wear for cycling and though we had a good look there was nothing
remotely approximating to this. I was even more serious about looking than she, for Aiko is now threatening to scandalise Tokyo by sending to London or New York for a pair of the bicycle bloomers that are currently the fashion for more daring ladies. I’m quite certain that if she wore those here the police would arrest her on suspicion of being an anarchist. There are times when I wonder if she is not one of these at heart.

In the end the saleslady, herself wearing a charming dark kimono, poor advertising for what she had to sell, took us into a curtained booth and presented ‘fashion’ books in which we were to search for a suitable made to measure outfit. The books weren’t dated and the patterns could well have been the sort of thing Mama might have ordered about the time I was born. Finally we were bowed from the department with Aiko no nearer than she had been to a replacement for worn and shrunken tweeds brought from England many years ago, but still nearer to being up to the minute than Matsuzakara’s offerings.

Tsukiji, Tokyo
September 23rd

I gave my first luncheon-party, with the same guest list as the only other Tokyo luncheon-party I have been to, Aiko and Miss Bassett-Hill. Since I have no dining-room we had it Japanese style on a low table about which we sat on cushions, the meal a compromise between my ambitions for it and what I knew Fukuda San had hopes of achieving, the main dish one of her flattish omelettes, this time considerably flatter than usual, with pieces of chicken poking out of it as though trying to escape from being held down under an eggy blanket. We started safely enough with a tin of Crosse and Blackwell’s imported consommé which I picked up, at a price, in Matsuzakara’s new luxury food department, finishing with the
delicious
soft persimmons which are in season just now, and very cheap, I got six for ten sen which Fukuda says was far too much to pay. A wine I did not attempt, certain that whatever I got would disappoint Miss
Bassett-Hill
, and was glad afterwards when I saw her wince over her first sip of imported Best British Sherry.

Miss Bassett-Hill wishes me to call her Alicia, I suspect not so much as an indication of our increasing intimacy as the fact that it embarrasses her to have to call someone in my position
Mrs
Collingsworth or Mackenzie, so prefers to use Mary. I think she had a slight struggle with her
conscience
about a relationship with someone who apparently holds lightly vows taken in an Anglican service and blessed by a Bishop, also High Church. However, she is by nature incapable of being truly censorious or casting even so much as a small pebble at hardened sinners, which is probably why the list of her converts will never be very long. In spite of that gaunt, black look she is a dear, and very merry as well, the setting for her laughter making it the more catching because it seems so highly improbable. In many ways I would like to copy her, though without wearing the clear markings of spinsterhood which I never could now anyway. Alicia is what Aiko never can be, highly civilised.

My guests did not leave until nearly four, refusing tea, Aiko riding off on two wheels.