The Ginger Tree (28 page)

I had been missing joy. We make it together. He doesn’t mind about Elizabeth any more, but loves his children, a boy and a girl, which is sad. All these years I have never really talked to anyone about Tomo, but I did to John. What he said was: ‘You poor bitch.’ Then he bought us another drink.

I am drinking too much, something I have never done before. It just happens, I suppose, because I am keeping pace with him. If I don’t, he says he can see a Scotch Presbyterian reformist glint in my eye, and he’s had that before, in the New England version. Tokyo has always been Kentaro’s city to me, in which I was allowed a place on sufferance, but now John and I own it. At the moment what we own is a winter snarl of snow and sleet and inches of mud in every street, but when the spring comes we will take over the plum blossom and the cherry blossom, and then the beach at Kamakura for the hot weather. He has to go to Shanghai in March, but only for two weeks.

Sueyama Apartments, Surugadai, Tokyo
February 2nd, 1914

John would like to move in here with me. He hasn’t suggested it, there hasn’t been a word said on either side about it, but it is what he wants. I want it, too, and yet there are all kinds of bars. The extreme respectability of these apartments is not one of them. Some of my neighbours are Japanese ‘modern girls’ being maintained in so-called foreign style by business gentlemen whose main domestic addresses are elsewhere in the city. From that point of view it wouldn’t matter at all; from mine it would for some reason.

I have been trying to think why. I suppose part of it is still Mama in Edinburgh in spite of what I have made of my life since then, but another
part is how I have been living since I broke from Kentaro’s protection. One of the reasons I endured that wretched little Japanese house, and then my teaching English and that whole pattern was a probably
ridiculous
feeling that I must completely own myself again and that some sort of respectability in the eyes of the world was part of this. I am terrified of losing what I have with John, taking up the attitude that would lead to this, or even just saying the word that would do it. But if I open this door and have him move in I will be living again in defiance of the world around me, and I know what that means, a label that would stay with me for the rest of my life.

I can’t fool myself either that there would be any security with John, that is not on offer. Already what we have is threatened by habit.
Yesterday
when I was waiting for him in the lobby of the Imperial he came in, saw me, raised a hand, then turned aside to talk to a group of three pressmen, keeping them from the bar while he told some story that had them all laughing. It was nothing really, and yet it wouldn’t have happened two weeks ago.

Last night I woke up with the thought that in Tokyo it may be known that I can never have another child. Foreigner gossip goes round and round in circles here and I shouldn’t let myself feel sick at the idea of what might be said about me in bar talk that John could have heard before we met. I wonder what it would be like to live in a society where you just took what you wanted with no thought or worry about consequences to yourself or to others. Would it be bliss or hell?

Sueyama Apartments, Surugadai, Tokyo
July 9th, 1914

I have taken to visiting my neglected friends again. Alicia is suddenly almost frail, and was rather cool, perhaps because we don’t meet as often as we used to. It could also be that she has heard about John Hansen and thinks, as she would probably put it, that I have ‘broken out again’. These days she is seeing a good deal of the wife of the British Ambassador, and the Embassy appears to have taken her under its wing, which I suppose is
natural enough; as we grow older we seek our own kind, losing the inclination to experiment.

I went to see Aiko, too. There is a rumour that she has a Japanese radical leader as her lover, but if this is true then there was certainly no evidence of a man in the little house where she now lives surrounded by what I can only call squalor, her indifference to minimal comfort as marked as her total lack of interest in dress. She has, of course, nothing but contempt for my business, regarding it as a form of pandering to the subjugation of our sex, part of a male conspiracy to keep women content with fripperies, treating as sophistry my argument that since convention, and most climates, demand that we wear clothes it is not a bad idea to make these as attractive as possible, or at the very least neat, tidy, and clean. I have long had a sneaking feeling that Aiko doesn’t really share her race’s belief that personal cleanliness is equal to godliness.

Emma Lou is now certainly the friend with whom I am most at ease, not a hint left of the hysterical girl of that time at Takayama. Once she expected the world, through Bob, to offer her everything on a platter, but has come to realise that to clutter your life with hopes of this kind is a waste of time and the sensible thing is to settle for what you have in hand, looking around to notice how much worse off some others are. It is almost the old evangelical count your blessings, and is out of character in some way. There are times when I seem to sense something explosive under this new calm. She is much more intelligent than I thought when we first met, and growing more so, whereas Bob seems to me to be sinking deeper and deeper into the sagging chair of his dogmatisms. I think he has really done very well, financing a whole string of foreign companies with a potential for penetrating the Japanese market, none of these really big, but enough of them to give him the feeling he is achieving at least part of what he set out to do in this country.

When I was with Emma Lou on Tuesday for a cup of the tea I taught her how to make, she surprised me by asking suddenly if John Hansen and I were exchanging letters. I said that if three from me and one back from him could be called that then we were doing it. I also told her without any prompting that after his two weeks in Shanghai John had
gone on to Hong Kong, then to French Indo-China, then Singapore, and that there was now a project for a series on the Dutch administration of Indonesia which would take him to Java. Emma Lou may have heard things in my voice that I wasn’t meaning to have it convey for she said, quietly: ‘Don’t waste yourself again, Mary.’

It was probably good advice but I didn’t know how to acknowledge it, so I had another cup of tea. So did she. Then the children descended on us. Emma Lou is training a new amah to help look after them, a raw country girl clearly terrified of American young, and not without reason.

Sueyama Apartments, Surugadai, Tokyo
August 4th, 1914

John is in Yokohama staying at the Grand. He didn’t admit having been in Japan for two days before telephoning, but did say he had come on the French line
Porthos
and I know when she docked because we have been waiting for a long overdue shipment of Belgian trimming lace which was in her holds. He has asked me to lunch tomorrow at the Imperial. When you have decided to deal firmly with something that has become a bit of a problem, lunch is a good time to choose, no soft lights, no music, and poor waiter service.

I have no cause for any bitterness, that flare-up between us was mainly the result of a form of starvation from my side, I wanted it so much that it happened. It is humiliating to realise this, and to have to meet him again knowing that truth. But I am also curious to see how a man like John parcels up something like our relationship for discreet disposal. I know what a Japanese man would do: nothing, simply go away without a word; but in American society women have secured the right to be deferred to, their feelings officially respected. There is that beautiful fetish of equality which I have seen even Bob acknowledging in his relations with Emma Lou, probably as a result of having been at a co-educational college. The Englishman, like the Japanese, still hasn’t allowed his life to be complicated by such foolishness.

Sueyama Apartments, Surugadai, Tokyo

Lunch with John was certainly memorable, but not for the reasons I was expecting. I was almost half an hour late, held up by a fitting for one of our more temperamental clients who had managed to antagonise even the usually bland Emburi San. John was already at a table, with two whiskies waiting. He stood up, came around to pull out my chair, then said almost in my ear: ‘Mary, last night at eleven Britain declared war on Germany. I’ve just come from the press agency. The cables came through too late for this morning’s papers.’

I sat down really without any reaction at all, this only beginning to come as John, drinking his whisky, talked. The murder of an Archduke in a Balkan town hadn’t meant a thing to me, an item eclipsed by a train crash on a branch line from Tokyo in which two people had been killed and fourteen injured. That was real, I had travelled on the line with Aiko.

For more than ten years now European politics have really been totally beyond the areas of my interest, and I found it hard to believe that the assassination of a man about whom I knew nothing at all was going to lead to a war involving most of Europe and probably a good bit of the world beyond it. John says that is what will happen but I wonder if he is taking an American view of another European flare-up that won’t really become a lasting fire? After all, the Kaiser has rattled his sabre often enough, but the fact remains that he is a cousin of King George, and the loved grandson of Queen Victoria who insisted on measuring her for her coffin.

John believes the fighting could go on for years and, if it does, this will give Japan her real chance to make herself the dominant power in Asia. No one in the West will have any interest in what is happening out here, particularly on the Chinese mainland, except perhaps the United States, and even with them attention will be the other way, towards Europe. John is pretty cynical about Japan as the gallant ally of Britain and France, saying that if her military bring this country into the conflict it will be to make quite sure that no one makes any protest about Japanese expansion on the Asiatic continent.

I was suddenly very depressed, but John was excited. He sees himself as a man with a role to play all through a time of upheaval and change, and a role he has designed for himself. He sails on Tuesday for the States on the
Mongolia
without telling Boston he is coming, in this way avoiding a cable ordering him to stay on covering events in the Far East. He plans to get to Europe quickly, if not for the
Monitor
then some other paper. We said goodbye in the lobby, and he promised to write, but he won’t, and neither will I.

Sueyama Apartments, Surugadai, Tokyo
September 17th, 1914

John was right, Japan has come into the war on the side of the British and the French, after three weeks of seeming indecision. Could Kentaro, still in London, have played a part in all this, his despatches convincing Tokyo that the Allies will withstand the Kaiser’s hordes? Anyway, Japan has struck her first blow against Germany by taking Tsingtao.

I have come to hate this flat with its little box rooms and its view of roofs to the horizon. I keep thinking about a house in Yokohama, preferably up on the Bluff, from which you can see both Fuji and the sea. It would mean commuting but the new electric trains do the distance between the two cities in under forty minutes.

I begin to feel like a war profiteer, all the signs point towards no austerity here, quite the reverse, a sudden great enthusiasm for
everything
British, including clothes from Mary Mackenzie. Western dress is the fashionable thing, though as yet I haven’t read any suggestions in the press for any form of women’s auxiliary service that might require uniforms I could make, this giving me the excuse to expand into a small factory.

At the British Embassy they are having parties to turn sheets into bandages. Alicia has declined, saying she is too old for war work, and I have not been invited. The Ambassadress is said to smoke cigarettes openly at these gatherings. Is Marie doing the same these days?

Sueyama Apartments, Surugadai, Tokyo
May 28th, 1915

The sinking of the
Lusitania
, with the drowning of so many Americans on her, seems to have focused all United States attention on Europe, and the militarists here certainly haven’t been slow to take advantage of the situation. Japan’s twenty-one demands on China are outrageous. Issued to any other country they would have meant war, yet it would seem that this clear statement of Japan’s plans with regard to China is going to be allowed to pass almost unnoticed by the rest of the world.

The demands include total territorial rights forever in the Kiaochow peninsula and Tsingtao which Japan took from Germany last year; the exclusive right to colonise South Manchuria, together with total freedom to exploit Inner Mongolia for any mineral resources that may be there. The Port Arthur peninsula, seized from Russia while I was in Peking, but still completely Chinese territory, is to go to Japan on a ninety-nine-year lease and there are to be yet more mining rights granted in central China while at the same time no harbour or any other territory may, from now on, be leased to any other foreign power. To cap all this, as a kind of crowning insult, it is suggested that China would be ‘wise’ to accept Japanese advisers in her government and in her army, this latter with the idea of joint Japanese-Chinese military forces at some time in the near future.

Perhaps my sense of shock from all this is a bit unreasonable since I was born into a country whose king is also Emperor of India, and whose empire was continuing to expand while I was a schoolgirl. I can remember
what the captain of that ship along the Chinese coast told me about how we acquired Wei-Hai-Wei to which we are no more entitled than the Japanese to Tsingtao, perhaps less so since we didn’t even fight for it. If Kentaro had been out to defend those twenty-one points, which he certainly would never do to me, but may be doing in London, I can imagine what he would say. This would simply echo the views of the ruling caste of which he is a part and it wouldn’t totally surprise me if he got a sympathetic hearing amongst the ruling caste in England. Japan was to become the protector of Asia just as Britain was the protector of India as well as a good half of Africa from Cape Town up to Cairo. He might have added that Japan’s imperial expansion was certainly taking place a little later than the expansion of the other ‘great’ powers, but could scarcely be condemned on this account. I can also see him suggesting politely, over the port at some country-house weekend, that the British were in no position to admonish their Oriental ally in the war against Germany for trying to do in a limited way in the Far East what Britain had done in a huge way throughout the whole world.

I couldn’t have refuted these arguments, at least not from the point of view of someone defending British policy, and perhaps I am being sentimental about those twenty-one demands which I found so
detestable
, this because I felt a kind of affection for the Chinese that I don’t really feel for the Japanese, or am ever likely to. This is not being rational, I know. When I was in Peking I didn’t speak the language, my contacts very limited from this, and half the foreigners there had recently run the risk of having their heads chopped off and stuck up on staves. My personal life wasn’t exactly glitteringly happy while I was there, either, and yet I believe that if I was now taken from this part of the world for the rest of my days, it is China that would come into my dreams, a procession of camels tinkling through the Hatamen, an old woman with jade in her ears smiling at a new bride, the Summer Palace floating on its hills, a wicked old woman on the dragon throne. I dare say the Chinese need discipline, either from within or without, but I can’t see the Japanese as the right people to administer this. I suspect that as conquerors they go with rock-hard hearts, demanding total submission from those they
conquer. Sometimes I feel that the truth about the Japanese is that they have hard hearts for everything that is not contained by these islands and their national ‘way’.

Sueyama Apartments, Surugadai, Tokyo
June 11th, 1915

In a war that looks like tearing the world apart I am making money and hunting for a house. I ought to feel guilty, I have twinges of it, but being at least a partial outcast from it has thinned my sense of duty towards the country in which I was born, indeed, for any country. I still have a British passport, but I feel stateless, and very remote indeed from those ladies rolling bandages at the Embassy.

I have been down in Yokohama on odd occasions over the last month, just wandering around by myself. There is a great deal of new building going up on the Bluff, which was once almost a foreign concession and is still largely occupied by Europeans and Americans, but with a fair number of newly rich Japanese moving in who don’t want to live in native style and are building themselves concrete mansions to match their neighbours. It was next to one of these places being built, cement mixers busy, that I came on my house, a survivor from another day, modest, withdrawn under its heavy tile roof, and with the wooden fencing about the garden sagging, some of it about to collapse.

There was no resistance to my invasion, the gate bar was rotten. I stood looking at something I knew was going to reconcile me once and for all to the country in which I will live out my life, which is asking a lot of a house and garden. I had been passing nothing but rose beds in front of the concrete palaces. The rose resists this country, you can make it grow, but it blooms saying it hates it here. I stared at weeds, a dried-out carp pool, and stepping-stones, the only colour green, restful to the eyes. There was also a very aged pine suffering from needle fall as a result of having had to endure the last few winters without one of the straw overcoats the Japanese put on these trees in the autumn to help them survive for centuries beyond their normal life span. The house was
considerably larger and of much better basic design than that shack in Otsuka I had abandoned with no tears, but even more ruinous, with tiles off the roof and sags that weren’t an architect’s art, just rotten timbers.

I don’t know why all this presents the kind of challenge I can’t resist, and I am certainly mad to want the place. It will ruin me to make the house habitable and to restore the garden, adding a new crop of domestic worries to my business ones.

For information about a property nobody seemed to want I went to the nearest police station. He was a fat policeman, fond of himself, wearing a white uniform and sitting in a cane chair that looked too frail to go on supporting him for much longer. His head was shaven, with his cap, wearing its spotless white summer cover, on the desk in front of him. There, too, was his sword of office laid longways behind a writing set. He looked up at me and I knew at once that his considerable experience of dealing with foreigners up here on the Bluff hadn’t warmed him towards us at all. Also, I was a woman who had to be shown her place. If Aiko had been with me there would have been a flaming row in seconds, but I was made wise by the hissing serpent of my desire and, after bowing, plus asking to be excused for troubling him, I sat down on a bench to wait his pleasure. An alarm clock ticked. The policeman dipped a pointed brush in black ink and did a little careful calligraphy, this with the flourishes of a scroll painter, then looked at me again to say:
‘Nani?’

It was as economical a way to ask me what I wanted as could be found, his tone not even touching the fringe of politeness. At Matsuzakara’s, and in my own shop, and from contact with fishmongers and grocers and tram conductors, I have learned quite a lot about women’s language, and think I have become quite good at it for a foreigner. It starts with omissions, words one must never dream of using, these exclusively for the male, then allows you other words that most men would rather cut belly than let slip from their lips. Few Western women ever bother with these subtleties, but I offered them as obeisance to a plump officer of the law, explaining that I was a helpless female from Tokyo who could only throw myself on his mercy for help with my problem.

Oh, it worked! It worked so fast that in only moments I was drinking
tea produced on shouts to back living quarters, this brought by a wife who didn’t always worship her lord according to the best traditions. Never in all the time of his service up in this suburb had the policeman met a foreigner who came as near to understanding the true heart of Nippon as I did. And when he heard what I wanted, which was to preserve and live in one of the few remaining truly Japanese houses in the district, the artist lurking behind a uniform and a bad case of obesity came out from hiding. He, too, on his rounds had looked at the ruin of what had once been great beauty and felt the deep pity of it.

The house had belonged to an elderly couple who had lost both their sons in the Russo-Japanese war and when the old man died his widow, rather than face the world on her own, had slit her wrists and bled to death. Naturally, as a result of this, the place was haunted and unrentable and the dilapidations had started. The heir was a nephew who ran a shirt factory at Omori half-way to Tokyo, a modern man who had no use for such an old house which was anyway too far from his work, and for some years the property had been a liability to him. Recently, however, with the sudden boom in building on the Bluff, the land had acquired real value and the policeman believed that the factory owner was now asking a ridiculous price, though in so far as he knew no offer for the place had as yet been accepted.

I left a sub-station leaving behind an ally who promised, if I was successful in getting the Misune property, to do everything within his considerable powers to see that I found honest tradesmen to help me repair it.

Sueyama Apartments, Surugadai, Tokyo
June 19th, 1915

I don’t know a great deal about the newly popular science of psychology but have heard the theory that a woman living without a man for as long as I have tends, at my age, to go odd in one way or another. My friends, however, haven’t offered me the charity of this nonsense, screaming that I am a fool, but since I was expecting this I took my negotiations for a
ruined property to an advanced stage before I told the sources from which the money will have to come anything about what I had done.

On the Monday morning after my Sunday meeting with the
policeman
I went down to Omori to visit the Misune Shirt Factory. Before many years are out Mr Yunkichi Misune is going to be defended by a huge staff and secretaries trained not to give you an appointment, but I caught him while his only defence against the world was still just an office boy with a lisp.

I didn’t use my women’s language plus meekness on the shirt maker, he wouldn’t have appreciated the performance; a young man of about thirty, certainly not much more, who is what Bob calls a go-getter. And he is go-getting so fast that before I had been with him for ten minutes he told me he is already selling his shirts in Burma. The fact that he has achieved world markets from a factory set up inside what looks like an abandoned school was a bit of a surprise until he showed me his
equipment
, this shining and new, the most modern cloth cutting machines imported from Germany only months before the outbreak of war. One man, working from a chalked top layer pattern can cut twenty-five other layers of cloth at once with precision and total neatness, and I watched quite fascinated with thoughts of possible Mary Mackenzie mass
produced
simple dresses not entirely remote from my mind. My very real interest soon had Mr Misune accepting me as a kindred spirit and when we got back to his cubbyhole of a chairman’s office the inevitable waiting green tea was ignored, a bottle of Osaka Scotch whisky produced instead. It would have been bad tactics to say no to this, so I sipped the repulsive stuff slowly.

Mr Misune had already had an offer for the family homestead on the Bluff, which was bad news. I gathered that it was quite a good offer but he had decided to hold out for a better one, which I didn’t care for either. It was clear right away that he regarded the house as a complete write-off and was thinking only of land values, and I was careful not to let slip even the smallest hint that I was hoping to preserve the ruin. I had a feeling, too, that for some reason he didn’t much like whoever it was who was trying to buy his property, and that he did quite like this foreign woman
who was really interested in his machines. I asked how much he wanted. Looking at me from behind glinting glasses he said six thousand yen, which was clearly at least a thousand more than my rival’s bid. I said five thousand and we fought our way to five and a half, settling there.

I didn’t let Bob Dale know what I had done until three days ago. I had to tell him then because I want to borrow eight thousand yen from Midwest Warranty, which is what I am going to need on top of my own savings of about three thousand before I can hope to move into my new home. Bob is quite appalled that I want to add this sum to the loan I already have with his bank and has demanded security in the form of a proportion of my holdings in Mary Mackenzie which will give him total control of the company if I can’t meet repayments. Ten days ago I would never have believed that I would come to want a house so much as to put myself at risk in this way.

Both Bob and I are steered through the intricacies of Japanese
company
law by a Eurasian lawyer called Harry Nishimoto who went down to Yokohama to see what I had done and came back with the suggestion that I ought to be certified. I am a bit shaken, but with my head still unbowed, and I more or less ordered Harry to proceed with the deal as agreed verbally with Mr Misune, and also in an exchange of notes which I think would be binding as mutual statements of intent. So I am really into this, with no withdrawal now, and probably am in for a year or so of horrors during which builders will find that the fabric of the house I want to preserve is not rotten in places, but all over. However, I shall meet each blow as it comes, I hope with unshakable fortitude!