The Ginger Tree (29 page)

Sueyama Apartments, Surugadai, Tokyo
June 23rd, 1915

A very curious development in the matter of the Yokohama house. I was in my office behind the shop working on the books which continue to show us healthy, but perhaps not healthy enough for the expenses ahead of me, when Emburi San came in to say there was a man out front asking for me, someone she had never seen before. We don’t often get men in
here, a few American husbands, one or two French, never British and certainly never Japanese, except delivery boys.

At first I thought my visitor was a Spaniard, decided olive skin, very dark in a sleek way and with such a high forehead his eyebrows almost seemed to be midway between chin and the start of straight black hair that was rather long and combed straight back without a parting. His tailor was not in Tokyo or London, my guess being that the suit came from Paris, moulded to a slim figure. He was carrying a cane which is not something you often see here. Perhaps because I haven’t had a great deal of contact with Eurasians, other than Harry, it didn’t occur to me that this man had Japanese blood. Then he told me his name, Peter Nasson, and I knew who he was, the head of Nasson and Company, Silk
Exporters
, one of a handful of Eurasian families who have almost cornered this particular trade and become very rich in the process, the Nassons the richest of them all.

He looked the sort who might come with his wife to help her buy clothes, and I glanced around for the woman who should have been flipping through the ready-mades. The two of us were alone, Emburi San away on a sudden mission to the sewing room, her feet creaking the stairs. Mr Nasson chose not to sit in my office, but I did, waiting for him to state his business. He came to the point at once. I had bought a property on the Bluff while he had been in the process of negotiating for it in order to make it part of the garden of the house he was building next door. He suggested that there was something far from straightforward about the way I had nipped in while his deal was pending, to undermine this, clinching the matter before he had been given the time, or the opportunity, to perhaps improve on his offer.

Today was certainly hot for June, but I was suddenly a lot warmer than the weather warranted. I told him I had been house hunting, found the place I wanted, and had offered for it. His eyebrows went up into that thinker’s forehead. He said: ‘House hunting? Surely you mean to tear down and rebuild?’ I said I meant to preserve with love and care. He smiled. It was the kind of smile a company chairman might use to suppress any slight hints of revolt amongst his directors. There was
something like pity in his voice. ‘I will give you six thousand yen for that land.’ ‘No.’ ‘Six thousand five hundred.’ ‘No.’ He took a deep breath, so deep it stretched the cloth of his suit. ‘You’ll bankrupt yourself trying to save that place. And when you have I may decide to buy the land off you. Good day, Madame.’

I followed him out into the salon. ‘You’d tear down that house and destroy that garden?’ He was almost at the door before he turned. ‘Naturally. The house is useless and I don’t care for Japanese gardens.’ I shouted: ‘You’ll never get your hands on my place!’

There was some satisfaction from the surprise on his face. He went out quietly, closing a glass panel with great care, a gentleman whose breeding was in marked contrast to that of the yelling virago he was leaving. I stood fuming, determined to plant quick-growing poplars between my house and his cement monstrosity. Now I am a little ashamed of my performance, but only a little.

Sueyama Apartments, Surugadai, Tokyo
July 6th, 1915

Dinner at the Imperial was pleasant, the place very warm, ceiling fans stirring a tepid air, but we had a refreshing iced soup that was new to me. Mr Nasson had brought the recipe from Switzerland and given it to the chef, and it made an effective start to the studied perfection of the meal. He didn’t make a visible fuss over the food but I knew that they were sweating in the kitchens to give him no excuse to, and, of course,
everything
had been ordered in advance, there was no question of my being offered a choice. He is certainly the kind of man who, in Europe, would send back a wine not completely to his taste but there is no point in doing that here because, so he tells me, all wines are sick by the time they reach here and never recover full health. All I know about wines is that if they are on the acid side I suffer.

There was no attempt made to disguise the fact that the purpose of a most expensive meal served in the Imperial yesterday was to repair an unfortunate contact and to establish the kind of climate between us in
which I could be brought gently to see reason. I think his aloof manner is defensive, rooted in perhaps two things, first that he is Eurasian and, second, that he inherited money and a company, which really means that he has only to be clever enough to maintain the business he was given. And selling silk to world markets that are clamouring for it really doesn’t put one’s administrative skills to much of a test.

The matter of my house and land was not mentioned at dinner, but it will be, perhaps during a projected trip to Miyanoshita in the motorcar Mr Nasson has imported from America. He tells me that the road up is dreadful, not much more than a mountain track, but the views are worth the terrors of the journey.

Mampei Hotel, Karuizawa
August 7th, 1916

Dear Marie – It was so good of you to find the time to write to me. You say that in Rome you are not exactly in the front line, but I should imagine that practically everything you think and do is governed in one way or another by the war. Out here the truth is that it mightn’t be happening, except for the booming prosperity it has brought to Japan, with her new markets that are in so many cases just replacements for British goods which can no longer be supplied. I open my paper with a sense of guilt sometimes and particularly after this horrible summer with its dreadful slaughter in France and the failure of Sir Douglas Haig’s offensive against the German armies. I was interested in what Armand says about tanks and how if they had been used in the recent battles the Germans might easily have been smashed. He is probably right when he says that the Allies are handicapped by old-fashioned thinking on the matter of making war, but I have always had the feeling, from what I have read of him, that Mr Winston Churchill, who advocates the use of these tanks, is rather a harebrained young man. Certainly it doesn’t look as if our leaders have much idea of what they are doing.

You ask for news of me and this is really that, in a small way, I am part of this Japanese boom, more prosperous financially than I would have believed possible only a few years ago. Recently my main interest, aside from business, has been the massive repairs needed to the house on the Bluff in Yokohama in which I am now settled, up here for a two-week holiday after the move. You and Armand must come to me for a long visit. Basically everything has been kept in Japanese style, some chairs to my own design made by a local carpenter, plus certain conveniences as well, like flush WCs (two of them) as well as a modern kitchen with an electric icebox. I promise you would be comfortable, and I think charmed as well. So, when this war is over, I will expect you.

Some time next year I will be opening a branch Mary Mackenzie shop in the main street of Yokohama, the Motomachi. This is really because I can see a great influx of tourists into Japan the moment this war is over, especially American tourists, and I am planning a pretty trap to lure their dollars away from them! This will be an emporium offering the most superb silks and brocades, featuring Japanese materials in ready-mades of various kinds that can be worn by Western women (and perhaps men?), the idea being to get right away from the now inevitable kimono. The project is something quite different, really, from my Tokyo business. And if I am clever enough I can’t see it failing. I might pay retaining fees to a special squad of the ricksha coolies who wait at pier number one for the big liners to dock, the idea being that new arrivals are whisked away from the bottom of gangplanks and delivered directly to my tender mercies by wild-looking Orientals who ‘no speakee English’, or French, or anything else! The travellers will be so relieved to find me and my staff who
can
understand them that they will loiter amongst my alluring wares while their wallets are still plump with travel money.

You see how disgustingly commercially minded I am getting? It is a racial trait that lurks somewhere deep in the core of most Scots, only needing the right circumstances – these usually far from home – to bring it out from hiding. After all, at the union of the two kingdoms hordes of us went south with Royal James, our one object in that descent on London being to loot the place. And ever since we have dug ourselves
into England’s empire, in many cases great chunks added to it by Scottish effort. There was a time when you French worked hard to bring a leaven of civilisation to the wild tribesmen of the north but, alas, this never really ‘took’, and we have remained raiders at heart, subject to strange
compulsions
that the rest of the world can only look at slightly askance. As I grow older I have more and more sympathy for my English husband with whom I still have no contact of any kind. To do myself some justice though, I never blamed him in any way for what happened, for I knew perfectly well that it was all me. Further, as an observer, you knew this, too! It is one of life’s little miracles that you and Armand remained my friends.

What you said about my visiting Europe after the war has made me wonder about that. Until very recently the answer would have been that I didn’t have the money, but now I do I still think it improbable that I will ever leave Japan, at least to go as far afield as the other side of the world. There are a number of reasons for this. I couldn’t be near it without visiting Scotland again but there would be no welcome for me there. As well as never having had a word from my mother in answer to all my letters from Japan, I also have not had so much as a postcard from any of my other relations; two aunts, an uncle, cousins, who all seem to have cast me into outer darkness, perhaps on a command from Mama. Over the last few years I have written her lawyers three times simply to ask how she was, just some basic information. I have had three ruthlessly formal replies stating that she was well, nothing else.

It may puzzle you that such an unforgiving attitude should be part of living amongst a people with a wild streak, but it is awareness of this streak in all of us which makes our middle classes so determined to serve respectability at all cost. Maybe if I went back to Edinburgh it would be as a tourist viewing the sights and returning to a hotel bedroom with sore feet to stare at that castle on its rock.

No, out here is the bed I have made for myself, and the thing for me to do is lie on it, especially since I am now able to afford a very comfortable mattress. I will always be a foreigner in Japan, of course, and at one time this would have worried me, but it doesn’t any more. When I was living
as Kentaro’s mistress I tried to bend my stubborn will into some sort of conformity with the Japanese way of doing things, even seeing myself as some kind of adopted subject of the Son of Heaven, mortifying the natural flesh that is me in a bid to do this. All absolute nonsense; the Japanophiles, those Western converts to the Japanese way, are simply objects of amusement to the natives, who laugh behind politely raised hands. I laugh too, these days, but without raising my hand.

You must come and see me in the little museum of old Japan of which I am the foreign curator, and this right in the middle of a suburb containing many examples of the most horrible new-rich housing you will ever see anywhere. Until that happy meeting at pier number one in Yokohama, my very real love to you and to Armand.

Yours,

Mary

17 Ura Machi, The Bluff, Yokohama
September 11th, 1917

Emma Lou’s news yesterday was in a way a shock. Since moving down here I haven’t seen anything like as much of them as I used to, and though she asked me to come up and stay in Karuizawa with her either in July or August I didn’t, largely because we chose the summer period when business is slack to make extensive alterations to the shop, and I had to be available during this. Japanese builders do eccentric things if you are not watching them.

At the beginning of September I was away for a week at the Kamakura Hotel, having told no one where I was going and spending my time in and out of the sea from that wonderful beach. It seems that Emma Lou has been trying to get in touch with me ever since she returned to Tokyo. She is sailing on the
Empress of Russia
for America on the sixteenth with the children, but without Bob. There was something cryptic about this announcement over the telephone which made me uneasy, and I tried to get her to come downtown to have lunch with me, but she was too busy packing and making what she called the final arrangements for Bob. She
has asked me to come to the ship at half-past ten before a noon sailing. All this is very unlike her, but I can’t just ring Bob up to find out what has been happening, and I realise suddenly that it is quite a long time since I have even seen him briefly, this at the end of May.

Upheavals amongst one’s friends are what you have to expect out here, relationships being continually undermined by home leaves or appointments to countries thousands of miles away. Someone coming back to Japan after a five-year absence would be very lucky to find, amongst the foreigners still living here, even a handful of the people he had known before. I seem to be as durable as a marble slab in the cemetery, but then not so many returnees would go out of their way to look me up, even if they were feeling lonely. Somehow I had always thought of the Dales as fixed, too, and in recent years Emma Lou has stopped talking about Pasadena. Instead of going back to the States for their last long holiday they all went down to the Philippines for three months on a house exchange basis with other Americans.