The Ginger Tree (27 page)

The terms were fascinating. Half the money I was to get would be an outright loan to me personally, repayable over fifteen years at the modest interest rate of only four per cent, which looked beautiful. What did not look so beautiful was that half of the capital sum sunk in my business by Midwest Warranty secured for them a sixty per cent holding, this holding to be operative even when I had paid off my half of the loan. Further, during the years of my slaving to clear indebtedness, forty per cent of the profits from the business were to go straight into the bank’s coffers, an arrangement to be continued in perpetuity. That sixty per cent holding made Bob’s bank my boss, able to sack me at any time with as short notice
as I had got from Hiro Matsuzakara. Also, if the business went bankrupt I remained saddled with that seven thousand five hundred dollars as a personal loan, presumably teaching English again to pay it off.

My reaction to all this was to suggest to Bob that if Midwest Warranty had been operating back in that century they could have offered Shylock some really sound tips. I went on to say that under no circumstances would I be part of any arrangement which gave the bank sixty per cent of my business, but that I would be prepared to let them have forty, along with twenty per cent of the profits.

Bob found my proposition quite unthinkable and we went our separate ways to lunch, me to the little place behind the Ginza with its ox meat and two vegetables special. My appetite wasn’t as good as usual and I skipped the pie, having what was advertised as American coffee when I looked up to see a Japanese woman about to leave the restaurant. She was neatly dressed in grey silk, skirt and small bolero jacket over a plain white blouse, the outfit perhaps a little too formal not to be finished off by a hat. It was very hot in the restaurant but she looked cool. The way to the door should have kept her half turned from me, but her head came around and after seconds I got a tentative smile. I felt a stab of excitement. Maybe the Lord in His mercy
had
sent me a sign. It was Emburi San.

Sueyama Apartments, Surugadai, Tokyo
September 14th, 1912

Emperor Meiji, the God Aiko shouted at, is dead. Last night, with two million other people packed along the route, I watched the first stage of his journey to the Imperial tombs in Kyoto. It was a pageant from five hundred years ago and the people moving through it, silent, were ghosts. Today the unreality remains, the capital completely shut down, not a tramcar running, no clattering clogs, no factory hooters to wake me. From the windows of my new flat the view of roofs is like grey waves rolling in against this hill, and the black bathhouse chimneys, with no smoke from them, might be posts caught by a high tide. The continuation of last night’s clamped-down stillness is eerie in daylight, and I wait for the reassurance of familiar sounds, something simple like the bean curd seller’s horn, but hear nothing.

In a way this reminds me of Queen Victoria’s death. I was seventeen when Edinburgh went into mourning for a monarch who had ruled longer than any other in British history. Overnight colour drained away from those stone streets as women went into black. It was as though no one had ever realised that an old lady could not live forever, and to all those who had expected somehow to spend their days safely tucked under the quilt of her reign it was almost frightening to have survived her. Mama was quite certain that the rule of the flighty and probably immoral Prince of Wales, now so strangely a king, would soon see a rapid decline in standards of public and private behaviour. The tears shed in our house, and all over Britain, were for an irreplaceable mother figure. For months
prayers in churches for the new monarch held the only slightly veiled plea that in His great mercy the Lord God of Hosts would not abandon us, or the Empire, to a grim time of decay and collapse. It seems likely that similar prayers are now being said in Tokyo temples where the gongs are silent today. Like those suddenly bereft Victorians, the Japanese are in a kind of shock at the thought of their great Emperor, the giver of the new constitution, their guide through years of change and foreign wars, replaced by a son reputed to be half mad.

I watched the procession from the relative luxury of a folding chair in the area in front of Hibiya Park reserved for the American Embassy and important US citizens, these including Bob Dale. I was on Emma Lou’s ticket. She is too near the termination of her fourth pregnancy to have any wish to attend a funeral, even an Emperor’s. Early September should have been warm, but it wasn’t, a chill more than autumnal after rain, and by one in the morning, after we had been in our places for four hours, I could have done with my Peking fur coat which is still in service though Emburi San hates to see me arriving at the shop wearing it.

Bob is being extremely nice to me just now, this not unconnected with the profit figures he has been turning in to Kansas City recently on what he likes to consider is our joint business and he is especially pleased with my current scheme to change Japan’s mourning colour, at least for ladies in Western dress, from white to black. This is quite a big project in a way since it goes against a tradition reaching back a few thousand years to roots in China, but I have hopes of pulling it off amongst my clientele and if I do this could create total panic in the foreign dress departments of stores like Mitsukoshi and Matsuzakara who are now fully stocked with autumn and winter outfits in assorted colours. I must admit to having gambled on Meiji’s dying, for when there was convincing talk weeks ago that he was even our commissioned work was put to one side in favour of total concentration on black, court dresses, street clothes, everything. There is already plenty of evidence that our two modest show windows in a Tokyo side street are watched very carefully by the fashion conscious and when the blinds go up on these tomorrow it will be to a display of jet. I have not wept for Emperor Meiji as I did,
practically on Mama’s instructions, for Queen Victoria, but I shall be wearing mourning for him.

In Japan drama of any kind never hurries and the Son of Heaven’s funeral certainly didn’t, it was well past midnight before the street lights, disguised as ceremonial lanterns, went out, leaving not a lit window anywhere. Noise thinned and then died, as though on order. The procession brought its own light, this pale, torches burning on pine resin, the men carrying them spaced at about every hundred yards. The procession moved at about half a walking pace, footfalls completely deadened by the two-foot layer of silver sand laid over all the roads on the route. There was no clopping of hooves as the Imperial Cavalry came by, the horses held on tight rein but not snorting. The marchers on foot looked dressed for the
Noh
drama, in medieval robes with the flowing lines which said China, not Japan, all in white except for some of the headdresses. Banners had black characters on white, fastened top and bottom to white painted bamboo poles. Elaborate though all this was it was also almost without pomp, the opposite of a state funeral circus in the West, as though here the object underlying pageantry was silence.

Then, in the distance, silence was broken. I felt a prickling on my skin. The sound was half groan, half creak, and came spaced at something like thirty second intervals, growing louder, aggressive intrusion into an arranged stillness, a lament that held nothing plaintive, just the grim, uncompromising and somehow immediately recognisable voice of death. A cart moaned towards us, two-wheeled, simple design in unpainted wood, the Emperor’s body housed under a curved roof, the coffin screened only by gently flapping side curtains. Pulling the cart were seven white oxen, one behind the other, seven heads waggling from side to side as thick legs went down with an almost timid caution into soft sand.

After the cart came priests, completely silent when I would have expected some kind of chanting, and behind them military and naval officers of high rank, four abreast but under a new discipline from that sand beneath their feet, unable to march. They were all in uniform, and presumably bemedalled, but seemed to have been placed in a planned gap in torchlight which diminished them to shadows.

We were kept in the dark for more than half an hour after the last of the torchbearers had rounded a corner, and we waited like that,
comfortless
, until the groaning faded and was gone. The disguised street lights came on, but in pairs, and in no hurry, not really in any pursuit of death’s procession, and for a long time there wasn’t much movement amongst the crowds, no attempt to break through the looped rope barriers. When finally we were released there wasn’t much talk either. I doubt whether anywhere else in the world such a vast number of people have begun to make their ways home in such stillness.

Sueyama Apartments, Surugadai, Tokyo
September 15th, 1912

When I got to the shop today it was to find Emburi San weeping, something I have never seen before. She told me that General Nogi, Japan’s Duke of Wellington, the great hero of all her mainland wars, has committed suicide. He left a note in which he stated that his life was now over since he could no longer be of service to his beloved Meiji, and in this he also deplored the corruption and moral depravity which in recent years he had seen seeping into Japan partly as a result of Western influences. In so far as I can make out this is a direct appeal to the military caste to return to the old disciplines of the warrior code, and I should think will have enormous impact in the country. I can see Kentaro taking something personal from this, a message from another world demanding an almost ruthless new dedication. Kentaro, like Nogi, belongs to the old aristocracy.

The papers here linger lovingly over that suicide, describing how General Nogi returned to his house on the evening before Meiji’s funeral where he and his wife bathed and donned ceremonial kimonos. They sat down before the place for formal ornament in their drawing-room in which the only object was a portrait of the late Emperor. His wife handed him a cup of rice wine which he sipped. He then picked up a dagger, stabbed her to death, and immediately afterwards ripped open his own bowels with a short sword. There is a great deal of high-flown journalistic
verbiage about Nogi now continuing in another world to serve the Emperor he had loved, with both of them watching continuously over the future destiny of Japan. An almost hysterical false note in all this really frightens me. I have a son growing up somewhere in this country who is now seven years old.

Sueyama Apartments, Surugadai, Tokyo
October 18th, 1913

That last entry in my notebooks provides an ironic comment on this one. We are now in the middle of a wave of riots in Tokyo, these coupled with wild scenes from deputies to the Diet, this all stemming from the very thing General Nogi was warning his countrymen against, huge
corruption
. It looks as though the Prime Minister, Admiral Yamamoto, will have to resign, no great loss to the country, but what has really shaken everyone is the scale of the bribery that has been going on, first from Siemens wanting to sell wireless equipment to the Navy, and then an unholy alliance between Vickers and the local Mitsui Company over the contract to build the cruiser
Kongo
. The size of these bribes is staggering, a Japanese rear-admiral getting well over four hundred thousand yen, and a
vice-admiral
more than three hundred and fifty thousand. Two directors of the Mitsui Company, two Englishmen and a German are about to be put on trial here in Tokyo on corruption charges.

Bob is being pretty unbearable about the whole business. Emma Lou says he suffers from a Midwest prejudice against anything and everything that comes out of Europe, and especially out of Britain, that latter feeling something I suppose I may have contributed to! I have given up our weekly lunch meeting at the Imperial because I got tired of being lectured on the theme, or its variations, of civilisations on the downward slope. According to Bob, the British Empire is starting to crumble because our firms resort to bribes instead of really going out into the market place to sell a sound product only on its merits. I have tried suggesting that the expanding US oil companies haven’t exactly a lily-white record, but he shouts me down, saying that the American economic structure is built on
the sure foundation that you can be a good business man and a good Baptist at the same time. Maybe you can, I don’t try to argue that point. What I feel is a bit unfair is his week-long, hawk-eyed inspection of the Mary Mackenzie shop books just to make certain that Midwest Warranty is, in fact, getting its twenty per cent profits and not a false-
entry-disguised
eighteen per cent.

I am worried about Emma Lou. After four sons and a daughter, well on the way now to that magazine illustration Thanksgiving family, she really ought to be wearing the expression of the mother in the picture, practical spirituality. But she isn’t. She has grown thin, almost to the point of scrawniness, and though dressing expensively from our shop, wears her clothes as if these had ceased to mean anything to her. I have bouts of feeling, and probably looking, like this but always with me the symptom of a hidden wish just to let go and not fight. I don’t think it is this with Emma Lou, more as though she deliberately doesn’t want to look attractive, almost purposeful about it. It is terribly difficult for either of us to talk about anything personal, confidences as alien to Emma Lou as they are to me, neither of us really able to lay out the contents of our private living to have this pawed over. There was never any probing from her side to find out what it feels like to have a Japanese lover, or to live without knowledge of what is happening to a son, and precious little news about a daughter. A good few of the women I have known would have taken a chisel and mallet to the stone of my reserve, chipping away until it cracked.

She has asked me to spend August with her in a house she has taken at Karuizawa, and I think I had better go, even if this means enduring Bob’s weekend lectures on the coming decline and fall of the British Empire.

Sueyama Apartments, Surugadai, Tokyo
January 9th, 1914

I was thirty-one yesterday, have been in the Far East for eleven years, for most of them looking after myself, and I ought at this age and from this experience to be a balanced, sensible woman about ready to hunt for the
first grey hairs. Instead, when I got to bed at about half-past one this morning I heard the temple gongs announce the hour until seven, not even dozing, lying thinking about a third-generation Minnesota-born Norwegian who was, he said, debauched by Harvard into becoming a Bostonian. Some people seem tailored to fit their names, and that is John Hansen. I haven’t asked how tall he is but it must be at least two or three inches over six feet. He is conscious of extreme height and is perpetually just slightly bent to keep in contact with the rest of us down below. He is so fair that going white will make little difference, with a long, bony face and long bony fingers, and I swear his American has a Norwegian accent, but he says that this is because I have never before run up against a cultured New Englander, and the way he speaks is upper-class Boston, something he worked hard for five years to acquire because in the international foreign correspondent business unless you come from Boston you haven’t a hope in hell.

We were introduced by Bob Dale seven weeks ago, but have actually known each other for some three hundred years, in various forms, John suggesting, very much in his cups of rye whisky, that one of them must have been as a couple of Japanese ‘semi’ insects screeching on the same branch. I never sing and neither does he, but we had both been trying to up amongst the pines above the moat in the outer precincts of the Imperial Palace, to which the public are admitted if they conduct
themselves
with proper decorum and respect. There couldn’t have been any police on duty because we weren’t thrown out. This isn’t love, it is too enjoyable. But I can lie in bed and make a Gregorian chant out of his name.

Neither of us has any sense of future, he has a wife and two children living in a place called Waltham. Her name is Elizabeth and three years ago she told him that if he refused to settle to a decent job, and continued to wander about the world writing pieces for the
Christian Science
Monitor
, he could consider their marriage as finished for all practical purposes except that she would expect half of the cheques he received and he needn’t think he could cheat on her because she knew somebody well up on the
Monitor
staff and could easily find out exactly what John was
earning. Which is why, he says, he will be poor forever, and is looking for some nice, warm-hearted woman ready to keep him in the style to which he would like to become accustomed, and with no questions asked. He doesn’t think I am rich enough yet but if I really keep at it and open a factory making corsets I may qualify.