The Ginger Tree (23 page)

97 Nishi Kogura Machi, Otsuka, Tokyo
November 17th

Hinobe miscalculated badly today, just how badly has yet to be seen. I used the excuse of a slight cold to stay out of the way when the Countess Kurihama was here for the first fitting of a ball gown, sending in one of the girls from the workroom. I have no way of knowing whether the Countess complained about this, but I was called into Hinobe’s office to find him in a towering rage. Who did I think I was, ordering in a chit of a girl for an important client like the Lady Kurihama? He used language that would have been an affront to a street woman, shouting. I was just about to walk out without saying anything when Hiro Matsuzakara walked in, the old man arriving on a typhoon of fury, so he must have been listening. I didn’t wait to see Hinobe wither under the blast, leaving, but not to go to the Countess in her booth.

97 Nishi Kogura Machi, Otsuka, Tokyo
November 18th

There was no Hinobe in the gown department this morning. At eleven the speaking tube called me to Mr Matsuzakara’s office. Tea was waiting, with rice biscuits. I am to be the new head of the department at a salary of one hundred and eighty yen a month. It is an almost unbelievable appointment for a woman in Japan, the old man as good as telling me this, saying there would be great opposition to the arrangement, but that he was prepared to move with the times and give me a chance to prove myself. He knows perfectly well that I have already proved myself, otherwise he wouldn’t have dreamed of moving with the times. He also knows that if I had been forced to go on working under Hinobe for much longer I would have walked out of his store, no longer in the least nervous about whether or not I could get other work in Tokyo. In the afternoon I found that Hinobe has been put in charge of the toy department at the back of the first floor. We shouldn’t have to see each other often, if at all. I think the sewing girls are happy about the change.
I owe them a great deal. If they had wanted to they could have made what I do here quite impossible.

November 19th

The Countess Kurihama came in for another fitting. I did not attend her. As she was leaving we bowed and in my best Japanese I hoped she was satisfied with the progress so far on her projected wardrobe? With great sweetness she said that she was. Kipling wrote those lines about Judy O’Grady and the Colonel’s lady being sisters under the skin. The Countess and I are
not
.

97 Nishi Kogura Machi, Otsuka, Tokyo
December 8th, 1907

I must stop letting this horrible business haunt me. That poor woman was unbalanced, not surprising when you consider she had been Hinobe’s wife for twenty years. I wish I could sleep. My nightmares are the kind you see when lying wide-eyed in the darkness. Last night I was driven almost to distraction by the gnawing of a mouse on the wood frame of the matting. When I thumped on the straw it would stop for a moment, then begin again. I’m not usually worried by mice, but I was sure that this one, so determined, was going to tear a hole in the straw and then start to work on the wadding of my quilt.

I knew there was something wrong with that woman for a good many seconds before I saw the knife. She just wasn’t the kind to have any interest in our department, shabby, her brown kimono out of date in styling, with much longer sleeve pouches than you see these days, the perfect place in which to keep a knife. She must have identified me from a description Hinobe had given her, and had to see me full face, Western dress not enough, since all the salesgirls wear it too now. It was that stare which gave me the warning, plus the look in her eyes before she turned away and pretended to be interested in a long winter coat on one of our new wax models. A lot of women come to the department just to poke around, and with no intention of buying, so many in fact that I have had to evolve a drill for dealing with them. On a signal from me, or on her own initiative, one of the salesgirls attaches herself to the unwelcome visitor and gradually edges her out, just as a Scottish sheep dog might do.
My brightest assistant, Emburi San, was coming forward when the woman dived straight at me. The blade in her hand was a good five inches long, raised well above her head for a slash down. The glove counter saved me. I jerked back behind it and the woman had to swing out in a bid to reach me. Emburi San, moving like a cat after a bird, struck the knife out of the woman’s hand.

I felt terror for a moment or two, of course, but it isn’t these moments themselves that haunt me now, it is the horrible circumstances
surrounding
them. Hinobe cut his own throat at night and bled to death seated under the pines in the outer precincts of the Imperial Palace which are open to the public. He was found by a park keeper in the morning, and wrapped in oilskin cloth beside him, in case it should rain and spoil the calligraphy, was his last message. He was joining his ancestors because he had no wish to continue living in a Japan where a faithful employee of many years’ standing could be replaced by a foreign woman who had led an immoral life.

I can’t read Japanese yet well enough for the newspapers and I have made Aiko promise to pass on everything that is being said about me in the Tokyo press, but I am sure she is not doing this. My maid Hanako pretends to be illiterate, or nearly, but I have seen her with newspapers and I know she is getting stories that are not reaching me through Aiko. The
Japan Advertiser
was discreet enough, calling me Mrs Mary
Mackenzie
, and avoiding the sensational, but its circulation is small and from the little Aiko has told me I would be a fool not to guess that the big dailies here started with headlines and are probably still running the story in the back pages. The Japanese press does not use photographs, or not that I have seen, and I don’t think I have had my picture taken when I didn’t know it, but I still feel I am being stared at in a way I never was before. I don’t think I am imagining the hostility behind those stares, either.

If I believed in the Fates, which I don’t, I would see them really enjoying a game with me. First I am allowed to find some quiet niche and settle into it, then, with no warning, they kick me out. I can almost hear the sound of laughter.

Hiro Matsuzakara has appeared to stand nobly behind me through
this time, risking press criticism of himself and his store by continuing to employ a woman who has been the cause of a man’s death. The fact is that I am still in the department for one simple reason, the scandal has brought in more than the curious to stare, it has at least doubled our actual customers, considerable numbers of the new rich ladies in Tokyo suddenly deciding that it is quite chic to get your clothes from a semi-murderess.

December 14th

Aiko has just gone. She meant to frighten me and has. She wants me to come to live in her hotel again because she doesn’t think I am safe here. She admitted not reporting most of the things that have been published in the Japanese press about me. My involvement in Hinobe’s suicide has provoked more than just a small wave of anti-foreign feeling. One of the papers, in particular, has been doing its best to keep these feelings on the boil, with letters, articles and even editorials about subtle Western
influences
seeping in to undermine the foundations of Japanese national life. Though I am not exactly the text for these sermons, my name keeps cropping up in them. Aiko claims to have heard yesterday from a very reliable source that the British Embassy is anxious to get rid of me as a source of embarrassment here, and they have offered to make all the arrangements for getting me out of the country if I am officially deported by the Japanese Foreign Office. I don’t know whether or not to believe this.

Yesterday the Countess Kurihama cancelled the order for her foreign wardrobe, taking two of the dresses we had finished for her but presumably going to that Russian at Mitsukoshi’s for the rest. Mr Matsuzakara didn’t seem as worried about the loss of this client as I had expected but then why should he, with all the other orders pouring in?

I am not leaving this house and going to a hotel. I have a feeling that my best chance of pulling out of this situation quickly is by continuing as normal, going to work and coming home. In a way getting off the tram and coming down the lane to my house is like returning to a village. The
shops along the way, the fishmonger and the greengrocer and so on, know me and on Sunday I went into them as usual, sensing no hostility of any kind. It could be that this village of my lane is not in sympathy with the rest of Tokyo on the matter of me, and is prepared to show this by kindness. Certainly the local dogs no longer bark at me as I pass and a neighbour’s fat cat comes, on sunny days, to pay informal calls.

December 19th

My maid Hanako has gone. She must have started packing soon after I left for the store this morning, an honest girl who took nothing but her own things. Akira Suzuki has not appeared for one of our exchange language lessons for well over two weeks now.

Aiko met me for lunch today in the little restaurant I always use, not by arrangement, she just showed up. She now has another worry on my account, having decided for reasons she wouldn’t give me that it is the secret societies, particularly the Black Dragon, which are not allowing the echoes of the Hinobe story to die away. According to her, the police force is riddled with members of these societies, all of them extremely nationalist and anti-foreign, some even believing that Japan should never have been opened up to the outside world at all. There doesn’t seem to be much logic in their thinking for these societies now support the militarists who have been so successful outside Japan in recent years. Aiko, of course, is remembering the brutal murder of her grandfather which makes her take a pretty extreme view of things, but when I asked her point blank if she thought the Black Dragon might try to finish the job Hinobe’s wife had started, she shied away from a direct answer to this, hinting that there might be some moves to frighten me out of Japan.

After all this at lunch finding Hanako gone hasn’t been good for my nerves, particularly after that other experience I had of a servant
disappearing
. But I am not going to spend any part of my life hiding in a hotel bedroom. It would probably be useless to try to find another servant, so I will just have to bring home simple things for supper and learn how to light and keep going a charcoal brazier.

How brave I am! Later tonight I will probably be lying curled with terror, especially if one of Tokyo’s sudden winds gets up to rattle the wooden shutters.

December 21st

I think I am being followed. I try to put it down to imagination because I haven’t really seen the man, if it is a man. It is more a sense of someone pacing me at a distance, even downtown, at midday. I have tried tricks to catch the follower but, except on the Ginza, there are no plate glass windows to act as mirrors. Side-street shops all have their wares spilling out on to the roadway under awnings and it isn’t easy to slip into one of them for a quick look back. Probably I should suspect a case of nerves and go to Dr Ikeda for something to quieten them. Or buy a bottle of whisky.

The decorations for the New Year will be going up next week, bamboo and pine branches by every gate and every shop. I would like to do as others do, but don’t know how to arrange for this without a maid to tell me. Matsuzakara’s are staging an ‘English’ Christmas this year, trying to force on the Japanese yet another occasion when they must exchange gifts. There is even to be a tree and Santa Claus, and I am continually being asked for advice on matters about which I know little, for Christmas is not greatly celebrated in Scotland. All that Mama ever did was go to church in the morning. We gave little presents, certainly, but there was no tree and no plum pudding, making that kind of a fuss still regarded as part of Popish practices. The thought of being alone at Christmas doesn’t worry me at all, but I do dread the idea of an empty house on New Year’s Day.

December 23rd

There was an earthquake last night. The weather should have made me expect it, for after snow earlier in the month it was suddenly mild again, almost muggy, what my Tsukiji maids used to call an earthquake-coming
day. It came about half-past one while I was lying awake, first a hush as though the night sounds of the city had been switched off, then a rumble that could have been a heavily laden train crossing an iron bridge. As soon as the jolting began I knew this one was going to be different from the other quakes I have been through. I got into the wadded kimono I use as a dressing-gown and was on the steep stairs down when the bumping became like being in a railway carriage shunted by a drunken engine driver. I was thrown about, then lost my footing and slid down on to a square of matting where I felt as though I was being bounced in a blanket. Above the creakings and groanings of my house I could hear shouts from neighbours already outside in their gardens. My tiny one offered a real risk of being hit by a falling tile but I still had to get out into it. There was a great clattering of things falling off shelves in the kitchen as I made for the sliding outer door, switching on a light on the way. This showed the one feature of my garden, a large camellia bush, doing a weird dance, as though suddenly possessed by some passing devil and wildly animated to the tips of its shiny, winter-enduring leaves.

It wasn’t easy to stand, I had to straddle my legs to do it, this half-way to the garden gate where, with luck, falling roofs would miss me. Beyond the wooden fencing that encloses me like a package people were still shouting, and lights blazed all around, which was rather comforting for it meant still no break in the electric wires. The shake eased before this could happen and I was staring at the gate when a shadow near it moved. The gate opened to let the shadow out into the lane, then closed again.

I tell myself that it could have been one of Tokyo’s many burglars on the prowl. I should go to the police, but I don’t trust them any more than Aiko does, and anyway, what could they do? There are hundreds of robbers active on any one Tokyo night.

December 25th

Matsuzakara’s ‘English’ Christmas has been a great success, Santa Claus’s beard rather wispy, like a Chinese sage’s, and I found the music inadequate, an Edison Phonograph installed in the entrance hall with a girl in
continuous attendance to wind the handle. Apparently there was only one seasonal wax cylinder available, this of ‘Jingle Bells’. I have heard these machines in Scotland, one of Mama’s friends was foolish enough to buy one. They may be interesting as a novelty but it is quite impossible to imagine any real music-lover listening to that tinny scraping for long. I was glad the sound hadn’t the strength to reach up to our department via the store’s open central well, though throughout the day, whenever I looked down from above, it was to see an apparently amazed crowd clustered around the horn. I suppose, if we must have new inventions all the time, it is better to produce playthings of this kind than new war instruments, but if the phonograph ever becomes really popular and widely used, it could be a horrible nuisance. The world does not need more noise, we have too much now.

I didn’t have to cook supper tonight, this was provided by the store for employees who stayed on for the late opening, which was all of us, for we were ‘invited’ to by Mr Matsuzakara himself and you don’t refuse his invitations. Our meal was sent in, boxed, from what must have been a fairly good restaurant because for once the sliced octopus tentacle was edible, if not exactly delicious. It appeared to have been steamed soft. Usually my teeth just are not sharp enough to gnaw through what feels like the leather tongue of a Scottish farm worker’s boot. If the Japanese hope to encourage foreign visitors to this country the cuisine will have to be greatly improved. Western travellers are simply not going to wax enthusiastic over seaweed wrapped around a lump of cold rice, no matter how exquisitely this is served up in lacquer bowls and garnished with other supposedly edible forms of marine flora. A visual entertainment offered as a meal can be the cause of grave disappointment.

I suppose being alone in a little Japanese house on Christmas night ought to make me feel melancholy, but it doesn’t, I am in bed with a hot drink made from powdered milk, conscious mainly of very sore feet.

December 27th

I
have
been followed and there has been someone watching my house, but not a plain clothes policeman or a thug sent by the Black Dragon Society. When you have been reprieved from fear it is usually quite easy to laugh, but I am not laughing yet.