The Ginger Tree (17 page)

I don’t go into my Tokyo kitchen either, it seems wisest not to since there is nothing I could possibly do in there anyway. It has an earth floor with two steps down to it from the level of the rest of the downstairs, and in place of a cookstove three fat charcoal-burning braziers on which heat temperatures are controlled by using a stiff paper fan vigorously for fast cooking, or not using it at all for simmering. Any kind of baking is unknown, not a hint of an oven anywhere, but Fukuda San can fry things very well and is especially good with fish done in batter, which I learned early is called ‘sakana tempura’ so I could order it often. The water supply is piped to a tap over a cement sink with an open drain under it that I suspect has a serious leak somewhere, allowing seepage into our
ornamental
pond. The goldfish that Misao San keeps bringing home from the evening fairs have regularly to be fished out quite dead. The one modern feature of that kitchen and this house is electric light, this a total surprise to me coming from Peking’s lamps and my mother’s gas fixtures in Edinburgh. Large sections of Tokyo are now lit by this method, thanks to German enterprise, not British, and there is also a system of electric tramcars which, on still nights, can be heard clanking away in the distance along the Ginza, though the lines do not come down into Tsukiji as yet. The sanitary arrangements might be said to be slightly better than those in Peking, but not much.

There are times when I feel almost content here, which I suppose
ought to shame me. It is as though I am then able to close all the doors in my mind except the one opening into this living, so that I have no past and no future, and with a great excuse for unthinking laziness in my pregnancy. At night the winds of the world sometimes probe for cracks in the tightly closed shutters, but Misao and Fukuda have left no gaps and I am safe between my two quilts. I do not even think of Kentaro who has provided me with this.

13 Tsukiji San Chome, Tokyo
April 27th, 1905

Dr Ikeda has been three times this week. I’m sure he is well paid to give me every attention, but this seems too often. I think he is worried about the position of the baby. He asks me questions about where I feel movement when it happens and I don’t think my answers satisfy him. He must be the quietest doctor in the world. His English is good enough but he never uses a word that is not necessary. I have no idea what he thinks of me as a person or as a patient, though I try to do what he tells me. Until recently he had me taking exercise every day, like walks to the Bund, but now he doesn’t seem to want me to move about very much.

I get quite frightened sometimes, more so than I think I did with Jane, though one forgets. I am not sure whether, if he was willing to, I would want Dr Ikeda to tell me exactly what he thinks is wrong. I am such an awful coward.

I do a lot of reading, but not always with my complete attention, and sometimes I seem to see my old lives beyond the words, first with Mama in Edinburgh, then with Richard, and Jane lying in her cot looking at me, but all these as pictures seen through dusty glass. I have strange dreams: the other night I was walking along Princes Street wearing the blue evening dress Mama bought me though it was sunshine and clearly morning. Someone was with me but I couldn’t see who it was, as though unable to turn my head to look. What I did see was the fashionable Saturday crowd, the ladies pretending to shop, but really showing off their new outfits and then planning to meet friends for coffee in one of
the restaurants. Princes Street has that slight dip in the middle so that at certain points you can actually see all the people promenading for at least half a mile ahead of you, and I was at one of those places when suddenly, directly in front of me, a yawning black hole opened up. Then beyond it coming towards me were people laughing and talking, and who couldn’t have seen that hole at all, but I was right on its crumbling edge, and knew that I was going to fall in and be swallowed up. That was when I woke soaking with perspiration. Unlike most dreams, I just couldn’t forget this one quickly.

Sometimes I think of the little, unimportant-seeming accidents that have changed my life, like going to stay with Margaret Blair and meeting Richard, one chance in ten thousand really. Then there was a morning walk up a path through a clump of Chinese bamboo to Kentaro. Because such slight things can swing me completely off into another way of living, am I some special kind of fool? Do other people, too, make their lives from little accidents like these? I suspect that those who really succeed in living are the ones who don’t let accidents happen to them, who plot their days like a ship’s course on a chart, and never take their eyes off the compass.

13 Tsukiji San Chome, Tokyo
May 29th, 1905

I have not been well, quite a lot of vomiting. Dr Ikeda has kept me in bed for the last week, lying flat most of the time. Today I have been propped up against another rolled quilt at my back, reading the papers.

Unlike Peking there is a daily newspaper in English here, the
Japan Advertiser
and it is rather strange to again have world news quite soon after the events have happened. Yesterday there was a great battle
between
the Russian fleet which has sailed here all the way from Europe and the Japanese Navy. Just as Kentaro said he would, Admiral Togo has utterly defeated the Russians, sinking most of their ships. What had seemed the invincible power of the Czar has been broken and, in the Far East at least, apparently destroyed forever. The editorial in the paper says
that the war on land cannot go on for much longer either, which means that Japan’s total victory is now a certainty. In the future she will have to be classed as one of the great powers of the world.

Lying here in my wood and paper house, served by two kind but really very silly girls, I wonder how this can be. Though I have not seen much of the country, I have the feeling that it is a very poor land, if not so poor as China. On my walks to the Bund there is a bridge I never use now, going some distance to another to avoid it, because at one end sits a leper beggar, the same bundle of rags I saw so often in Peking, and the same droned petition as you pass. The leper is a man and he sometimes has a small child with him, also in rags, the child trained to scream, or perhaps pinched to make him do it, when anyone approaches the bridge. The disease has almost completely destroyed one side of the man’s face, it looks as though the inside of his mouth had been turned outside. Whenever we have gone that way I have always given him something, though I haven’t much money, just my twenty-six pounds turned into nearly two hundred and fifty yen. However, all you give a beggar is a few sen. Misao thinks it quite unnecessary to give him anything. She and that shapeless wreck on the bridge are also part of these people who will soon have defeated one of the greatest nations in the West. Then I think of Kentaro praying his apologies to the souls of the men under his
command
who had been killed. To consider that God may be on the side of such a man, and thousands like him, is disturbing.

13 Tsukiji San Chome, Tokyo
June 4th, 1905

I had an uneasy night and fell asleep only after Fukuda San was up and banging about the kitchen. The noise she makes doing anything, which is a great deal, did not wake me, but a sharp, loud voice in our little vestibule did. It was a woman and she almost seemed to be shouting. A moment later, though the words were Japanese, I was sure the user was not, it was Japanese spoken with a marked English accent. I heard Misao trying to interrupt that voice, but with no success, and I was suddenly very uneasy,
conscious of only two layers of papered doors between me and the entrance area. If it had been a European house I’m pretty sure there would have been no stopping our visitor, that she would have come surging along the verandah to the room in which I lay, but the matting meant that the attack could not really be a surprise one, the lady would have to unlace or unbutton her shoes. I heard Misao say the phrase which I already recognise from its constant use:
‘Choto maté kudasai’
– please wait a little – and a moment later the maid slid back the screen, which meant that I lay exposed to the garden. The visitor, foiled at the entrance, might at any moment make her appearance through a gate in the bamboo fence. There was something about that woman’s loud, positive Japanese which made me certain she would be very difficult to stave off.

Misao had brought a calling card. On it was: ‘Miss Alicia
Bassett-Hill
’ and, also printed, up in one corner: ‘Society for the Propagation of the Christian Gospel’. ‘PTO’ was in pencil. The message on the back was as positive as the voice: ‘Have been meaning to call, but have had pneumonia.’

The lady was almost certainly a neighbour. I knew there were a few foreigners living in the Tsukiji area but in my brief walks had seen no sign of any of them, and of course the language barrier means I get no real gossip from my maids. What I felt then, and am still feeling, was almost sheer panic. It looks as though arrangements have been made to spy on me here in Tokyo. My first thought was that Mama had done this, then I was sure it was Richard. In Peking I had heard talk about so-called undesirable Britons, who cause embarrassment in foreign countries by what they do or the way they live, simply being sent home by the Consular people on orders from the Embassy. I hadn’t registered at the Embassy in Tokyo, behaving like someone in hiding, which is really what I am doing in a way.

I didn’t say a word to the waiting Misao, knowing too well that a whisper would travel through those thin walls, but shook my head violently, giving the card back with signs that it was to be returned to the visitor. Misao seemed to take fright at my agitation and went down the verandah. A moment later I heard more of the loud, confident
English-Japanese, then a clicking on the flagstones of the front walk, after which the outer gate slid open and shut on its noisy metal runners. Misao San brought me a present from Miss Bassett-Hill, a tin of Huntley and Palmer’s assorted biscuits. I’m afraid that a meeting with this woman cannot be avoided.

Tsukiji, Tokyo
July 16th

I fell into that black hole which in my dream I saw opening in front of me. I remember Dr Ikeda peering down. He seemed a long way up, a face at the mouth of a vertical cave. One of the nurses told me that after the operation he was always coming in to see how I was doing. She half admitted that she thought I was dying. They had to cut the baby from me, there was no other way. Nearly four weeks later I am still in pain from that, but insisted on breast-feeding my child as soon as I was conscious enough from the drugs they gave me. My baby is a boy, of course. He has some dark hair and a powerful voice, already with two slaves, Misao and Fukuda, three, if I am to be counted. It is easy to see that the maids are delighted the child looks like a Japanese. I keep thinking about names for him, but have got nowhere on that important matter.

Perhaps I should have him christened, though I do not think
Presbyterians
are supposed to believe that infants who die unbaptised go to hell. I certainly don’t, and probably it is quite wrong to even consider baptism when his father is of such a different faith.

I have only written to Mama twice since coming to Japan, with no reply. Ought I to let her know she has a grandson or would the news shock everyone in that house? Miss Bassett-Hill sent in a huge net bag of oranges the day after I got back from hospital. She must have known that I came home with a baby I am not entitled to by my marriage, and as a missionary ought to be shocked, especially as a single lady missionary. So why the oranges unless she has some commission to see me whatever I do? The thought of her makes me uneasy.

Tsukiji, Tokyo
July 23rd

The terrible heat of the last ten days was broken by a violent
thunderstorm
last night, this seemed determined to stay circling over the Sumida River area and directly above us. The crashing sounded like the world breaking up. I had the maids for company, Misao letting out almost continuous squeaks of terror, but the baby slept solidly through it all in a way that amazed the three of us. Twice the electric light flickered and went out, but it came on again moments later. Rain was suddenly a cloudburst. Though the canal on the opposite side of our street should have acted as a drain it didn’t, and soon we had flooding over the lip of our outer gate, geysers spouting through the slats like the overflow of a reservoir. In minutes our entrance area was under water and the fishpond in the garden overflowed, but what looked like the beginnings of disaster was all gone by morning, the air fresh, the sun bringing heat without the muggy humidity we have been enduring. I was sitting out on the verandah in my chair and Misao had the baby on a mat in the garden when I heard her asking him if he was her friend: ‘
Anata boku no o-tomodachi desu ka?
’ My baby showed his gums, and there was his name – Tomo. The maids are delighted with it.

This afternoon I decided I have been playing the invalid for long enough and I went for an enormous long walk, which was down the stepping-stones to the gate, through this and across the road to the canal bank where I stood looking down at mud left by a retreating tide, feeling that I had come far enough. A commotion at our gate didn’t make me turn at once but when I did it was to see a ricksha there with its shafts lowered and for a moment I thought I had been caught and Miss
Bassett-Hill
was lurking under the raised hood. However, what came out was not a person, but a huge parcel which Misao and Fukuda collected between them, apparently excited. By the time I had joined my maids the parcel was sitting in the middle of the living-room matting, the baby still out in the sun, for the time being neglected. It was obvious that the parcel as such was a suitable object for deep respect, almost veneration, Misao and
Fukuda both sitting on their legs staring at it. I settled into my chair and then had practically to prod them into getting on with untying the string around brown paper, which was done with a solemn adherence to ritual. First I was handed a folded white and red paper symbol which indicated a gift and then a label on which was one word printed in English – ‘Mary’ – together with an address written with a black brush in Japanese. There was a second layer of wrapping under the brown paper, but what was eventually revealed was a red cloth fish.

It was a very big fish, at least three feet long, about one and a half wide, and standing a couple of feet off its carved wooden base on which were decorations, in bright green, of artificial seaweed and water ferns. Fins and tails were of cloth, sewn on, but the scales and head were stylised hand painting. I had guessed the fish was stuffed with something before it was pushed over matting to me and Misao had demonstrated how you got inside, via a slit under the tail portion. I put in my hand and pulled. Out came yard upon yard of a heavy silk crêpe in a soft grey tone as a background to huge flaring blooms of peony flowers and a design of leaves, the material obviously intended for the most exotic of kimonos. With the last folds came something else, a wallet of gold brocade. Inside were twenty new one-hundred-yen notes.

From my reading in Marie’s books on Japan I knew that the fish is the symbol of the male child. I sat in my wicker chair out on the boards of the verandah, watched by my bright-eyed maids, wondering if this was Kentaro’s way of acknowledging the birth of a son? It could also be my whore’s price, two thousand yen leaving him free to wash his hands of me and Tomo. I looked at the silk again. No respectable woman in this country would ever be seen wearing that heavy crêpe splashed with gaudy flowers. It could only be made up into the kimono for a courtesan.

Tsukiji, Tokyo
July 27th

Last night I did not sleep. One says this often enough meaning that one did not sleep well, but I never closed my eyes. Every hour I heard the night
watchman coming down our street, striking his wooden clappers
together
and shouting that he was busy watching for burglars but had seen none and we were not to worry.

I kept thinking about what I could do with two thousand yen. It is exactly the money Mama insisted I carry out into the world from Edinburgh. Now I have it again. A thousand dollars is a lot more than most of the emigrants from Europe have to take with them to a new world but I’ve heard that the Americans are strict about refusing to admit the morally depraved. I’m sure that if I went to their Consul that is how he would classify me. Also, Tomo is a Japanese by birth, I couldn’t just take him anywhere I wanted to go. And wouldn’t it be wrong to bring up a half-Eastern child in the West? My thoughts kept going round and round, getting me nowhere.

I am continuing to breastfeed Tomo but don’t mean to go on doing this for as long as Japanese women, which apparently can be for years. Usually, holding him, I am content not to think, wanting only these minutes. He rarely cries except when he needs something, and with three women in attendance he gets it quickly. I look at him lying back on the matting doing those upside down bicycle exercises and remember Jane, who was not a whiner, not really much of a crier, either, but never
joyous-seeming
like my son. It is as if Tomo knew he had been born to a golden future. Nothing could be less probable in his case, but he seems quite certain of it. Again I have that weird feeling my baby knows things which are hidden from me. It is, of course, imagination.

Tsukiji, Tokyo
August 4th, 1905

The war in Manchuria drags on, though there is talk of the Americans arranging a peace between Russia and Japan. I woke up the other night suddenly wondering what would happen to me if Kentaro was killed. How selfish I am getting. I keep telling myself that it is for Tomo that I am frightened, but this isn’t true, women with children may be doubly fearful on their account, but half the fear is still for themselves.

Yesterday I went with Misao San by ricksha to a branch of the Yokohama Specie Bank not far from the Ginza where I opened an account with one thousand eight hundred yen, keeping two hundred which I intend to spend getting to know Tokyo and my place in it, if any. Already I can see one possible future for me, quite the most pleasant of a variety of things that could happen, this to be Kentaro’s second wife. It is quite unnecessary here for a man to wait until his first wife is dead before he takes another, the concubine and her children occupying a separate house and having quite an established place in society. The present Crown Prince is not the son of the Empress, but a child by the Emperor Meiji and a court lady, a young man who could not possibly be heir to the throne in any other country but this. Most concubines are successful geisha who have retired from their profession to live with a protector. The legal wives don’t seem to protest against these arrangements.

No one who was a decent Christian could possibly consider the life that I am willing to let become mine. I seem to have lost all sense of shame. Does this mean that I am slowly being destroyed?

Tsukiji, Tokyo
August 9th

Something I have been dreading has happened, a note from Miss Bassett-Hill asking me to lunch the day after tomorrow. She says that since I have been seen abroad she hopes that I am now fully recovered from my recent confinement and illness after it. The note, delivered by hand, starts ‘Dear Mrs Collingsworth’ so she must know all about me and this almost certainly means that they also do at the British Embassy. Why should a single lady missionary want to associate with someone who has lost her character, unless it is to spy on her? It can’t just be kindness. She has probably been instructed by the Embassy to find out all she can about me so they can build up a case to put to the Japanese to have me deported. Richard could well be behind this. I want to say I can’t go, but that would show I am afraid, so I must, and try to brazen things out, something I am not trained to do. If I refuse this time she will only come at me again.

Tsukiji, Tokyo
August 11th, 1905

I don’t really know what to think about what happened to me today. Miss Bassett-Hill’s house is Japanese style, only a little bigger than this but in a much larger garden, and stuffed with furniture from England. Thick carpets are laid over the matting though you still take off your shoes in the entrance, and I couldn’t believe her drawing-room when I saw it, desks, bookcases, a plush-covered sofa and chairs all crowded in, and all seeming very insecure on the soft flooring underneath. A high bookcase trembled every time I moved in my chair and I had the feeling flimsy walls were going to topple in on us under the weight of framed portraits, Miss Bassett-Hill apparently needing to bring all these
reminders
of her ancestors with her to the wilds of the Orient. There wasn’t one thing in that room beyond basic design and woodwork which hinted at Japan, even the sliding paper doors glazed to suggest french windows. In what had once been the alcove for formal ornament was a huge roll-top desk over which hung an electric light shaded by green beads knitted together.

For a moment or two I didn’t realise there was a third person in the room, a woman sitting in a rocking-chair with a fixed base, only the upper portion movable on springs. These creaked as she stood. The lady was wearing a plain white blouse and a brown skirt showing her ankles, as though it had shrunk from many washings. Her black hair was dressed in the Sally Lunn loaf style I wore out to China but abandoned soon after in favour of combing straight back to a bun low on my neck. The other guest, if she was that, seemed to have lost a few vital hairpins, a not very elaborate coiffure still in acute danger of suddenly collapsing, many stray tendrils already loose. It was only when my eyes adjusted from the brightness out on the verandah that I realised the lady was Japanese. Our hostess, dressed in a total black which looked like mourning for the sins of this world, introduced us.

‘Baroness Sannotera, Mrs Collingsworth. I was sure you two would like to meet. And now I must go and see what my terrible cook is doing to
the lunch.’ She added in her high, thin, almost piercing voice: ‘The Baroness has recently been released from prison.’

The one thing I was sure of in that moment was the lunch-party was going to be very different from anything I had imagined. Miss
Bassett-Hill
left and the Baroness, not showing any embarrassment over that introduction, moved to a side table, saying over a shoulder, ‘I’m sure Alicia would want you to have a sherry.’

I needed something. As the Baroness turned with two glasses in her hand she added, once again in perfect English: ‘When one is associating with former jailbirds, it is always useful to know how long they were in for. I was sentenced for six months but only served three because of family influence and despite the fact that it was my third conviction.’

I felt I was being challenged to ask why she had been in prison, so I did. The reply was immediate: ‘For staring at the Emperor Meiji.’

Even when she explained this was a little hard to believe, but
apparently
it is absolutely forbidden by law to look directly at the Emperor, who is, of course, regarded as a god. When his carriage passes in the streets the crowds are expected to bow very low and keep that position until it is well out of range. All windows in upper storeys are out of bounds and during state processions the police stand facing the crowds, on the outlook for anyone disobeying the edict. The Baroness had chosen a very prominent spot near the bridge over the moat around the palace and when Emperor Meiji had been driving to a state opening of
parliament
had very conspicuously stood erect while everyone else was bent double. She had also shouted at His Imperial Majesty that Japanese women must be freed from slavery. There had been a great scandal leading to a prosecution and the Baroness had not only received many death threats, but also gifts of ceremonial short swords from patriotic societies with suggestions that she take her own life to atone for the shame brought on her family and her country. Her two previous
convictions
were for creating an obstruction outside the office of one of Tokyo’s daily papers during a campaign for votes for women, and a jail sentence of three months, later reduced to two, for having stated in a lecture that the Emperor is not divine and should not be worshipped.