The Ginger Tree (19 page)

13 Tsukiji San Chome, Tokyo
September 26th, 1905

Kentaro came yesterday. I was out in the garden by the fishpond with Tomo on a quilt beside me. Misao was sewing up the pieces of a winter kimono she had stripped down for washing and dried on a board to save ironing. We heard the gate, but thought it was the bean curd seller. Fukuda received him in the vestibule, telling him where I was. He came suddenly around the end of the bamboo fencing and stood looking at me. I had never seen him in Japanese dress, except light kimonos, the full
hakama
and over garment making him seem taller and at the same time almost square. What he was wearing was in muted tones of browns and greys which made him look like one of the
samurai
I had seen portrayed at the Kabuki, all he lacked was the topknot headdress and two swords pushing out one side of the
haori
coat.

Misao, in a kind of panic, gathered up her sewing and went scuttling between Kentaro and me along the stepping-stones, bowing all the way. She mounted the verandah and disappeared. Kentaro came forward slowly, his eyes on me. It was almost as though he had not yet seen Tomo, the baby drowsy under the last rays of afternoon sun, not moving. I got up, pushing against an ornamental rock to do it. What I said was in Japanese, a phrase of welcome I have heard my maids use many times:
‘Dozo o-hairi nasai.’
Without smiling he said in English: ‘What are you inviting me into, Mary? The pond?’

I think I held out my hands, I don’t really know. At any rate he took both of mine in his, which now seems a strange thing for a Japanese man
to have done, for you never see them touch their women unless it is to shove them on, or when loading up a wife with whatever has to be carried. Kentaro and I stood holding hands, looking at each other. What I felt was a kind of hunger. I remembered feeling it as I walked up a path in the Western Hills. Afterwards it was the thing I tried to put from my mind first, before all the other things that had to go, too, if I was truly to own myself again. I don’t want to own myself. I don’t have to try to now.

I was the one who first looked at Tomo. Kentaro seemed almost reluctant to do this himself, letting go my hand and turning slowly. He must have stared for nearly a minute, then said:
‘Yappari nihonjin desu ne?’
The half question was not really for me, but I answered it: ‘Yes, he is a Japanese.’

Kentaro looked startled. It might almost have been that by beginning to learn his language I was in some way invading a part of his life he wanted to keep away from me. He asked if I had a teacher and I told him I had picked up what I knew from the maids, carefully not mentioning Aiko. It isn’t just instinct which tells me he isn’t going to like the news about my friendship with the unconventional Baroness.

When Kentaro said he would have supper here I knew he meant to stay the night. I carried Tomo inside, putting him down on a quilt inside a square of slats I had ordered made by a local carpenter. Kentaro followed me up on to the matting and suddenly said in a loud voice: ‘What’s that thing?’ I explained that it was to keep the boy safe, that soon he would be crawling about and could fall off the verandah on to one of the paving stones, a height of more than two feet. Kentaro said abruptly, almost with violence: ‘Take it away! My son is not to be put in a cage.’ Then he added that he would watch over our baby while I was out helping the maids prepare the meal.

It was a dismissal. He wanted to be alone with the child. He had not asked Tomo’s name and I hadn’t used it in front of him. Perhaps what I chose to call our son didn’t matter?

I went out of the room and stood in the narrow passage behind the vestibule, suddenly wanting to be able to hate Kentaro. I had been ordered out into the woman’s role, leaving the master of the house sitting
by the fire box to smoke a cigarette. I could hear the maids twittering with excitement in the kitchen, but the last thing I could have done was join them there where there was absolutely nothing for me to do. Misao, usually a sweet child, can also have the black sulks, and what those two wanted now was to be alone, working together in a great clatter of gossip about Kentaro. Any suggestion from me about a supper dish would be deeply resented. They were Japanese, didn’t I think they knew what a Japanese man would like to eat?

I could have gone out for a walk, but instead climbed the stairs to the little bedroom I am using. Here the pushed back
shoji
gave me what I am coming to think of as a Japanese view, nothing open at all, a hemmed-in pattern of curving tiled roofs plus the tops of trees coming up from our little garden and the tightly fenced gardens of neighbours. With the canal beyond the road it would have been possible to have quite an open vista, but the house had been built to face almost west and all I could see, unless I craned my neck, was the
samisen
player’s unpruned
kiri
tree, whose sprawling branches and elephant ear leaves shelter the nests of a hundred sparrows.

I sat down in the Japanese manner, something I have been practising, and which is no longer as painful as it was, my behind supported by my heels. You don’t often see men sitting like this, in fact I never have, it was probably devised by them as a means of keeping their women docile through continuing discomfort. The odd thing is that when a woman sits any other way in these houses she looks quite dreadful, a sprawling hoyden, as completely out of keeping with her background as my wooden pregnancy chair which these days is kept well out of sight at the end of one of the verandahs. I sometimes use it still in the evening but in the morning it is always tidied away again out of sight, without any queries as to whether I might want to sit on it during the day. What was tolerated while I was carrying Tomo is now an object of a contest between the maids,
particularly
Misao, and me. In this little war of wills the two Japanese girls are quite as stubborn as I am, and I feel that I am only being loaned the use of this house, allowed to play strange games in it like having two ladies to lunch, but that it really belongs, by the right of their race, to Misao and
Fukuda. One thing I have not done is respond to Misao’s suggestions, made in the half mime language we have evolved, that she be allowed to turn that brightly flowered silk into a kimono for me. I have no intention of being seen, or allowing Kentaro to see me, decked out in the kind of costume by which one can always identify the whore at the Kabuki theatre.

No sound came from below as I settled by the low, open window with its miniature balcony on which Misao had set a dwarf pine in a blue glazed pot where it would benefit from the autumn rains. Tomo certainly wasn’t protesting at being alone with his father and I half wondered if there was some mysterious form of communication possible between males, and the baby was quietly expressing relief at this reprieve from an endless association with doting females. Just recently I have realised that there can be something a little frightening about having a child that half belongs to another race, as though from the very start, almost while its eyes are still unseeing, you can sense the areas of total strangeness that will always remain. With Jane I had imagined that she looked at me with eyes holding knowledge that could never have been gained just from her tiny experience of living, but with Tomo it isn’t that, something hurtful, the inevitability of being pushed out and a door shut behind you, just as Kentaro had pushed me out and sent me about a woman’s business. But a woman’s business isn’t available here, I cannot cook and scrub and forget.

The sunset was beautiful. Though we are quite near the Ginza and the business centre, the noises of the city are never very loud. Rather more it is the sense of the river near, the hootings of small steamers and tugboats, these sometimes sternly answered by the great bronze bell at the Hongwanji temple. In the house next door the
samisen
began, as it often does at the sad hour. Though I have never seen her I imagine the player to be an elderly widow, that slow twanging seems like an endless song of life past, and perhaps only half regretted, so full of pain. I sat listening and my resentment stilled, as though I had been reminded that it was quite pointless, and after a time my body began to ache all over as it does when held in that position, but I didn’t move, I didn’t relax, the disciplines of this country have already begun to seep into my blood.

I heard when Misao dared to disturb the Lord and Master below with the suggestion that he might like his supper. I waited until I was sure there had been time for her to set up the table, and then descended the almost ladder stair without being summoned, to find Kentaro seated
cross-legged
in the baby’s corner of the room making origami paper toys, a little procession of completed ones marching towards the small quilt. The sight seemed to stop my heart.

The
samurai
who had suddenly called on us had taken off his
haori
coat which Misao must have tidied away, and appeared utterly intent on what he was doing, entertaining an infant. Tomo was lying on his stomach, a position he only rarely rolls himself into, and I was sure his father’s hands must have turned him over, settling him like that. Tomo lay absolutely still, black eyes fixed on fingers working paper. I thought I had come in silently but Kentaro turned his head and then smiled. It was the smile I remembered from the temple, which ripped away a soldier’s years.

Later we made so much noise in that little upstairs room that it might almost have been one of the small earthquakes. Tomo, left below, woke and started to yell. I tried to get up to go to him but Kentaro held me. After a while we heard Misao coming from the maids’ room and then her voice singing the little song she uses often, this always seeming to me like a cross between a lullaby and a marching tune.

Tsukiji, Tokyo
October 9th, 1905

I spend my days waiting for him to come. He never tells me when he is going to, sets no times, makes no promises. On Tuesday he brought me what a Japanese woman might use as a sash ornament, a gold brooch with three small rubies. I have a feeling that the maids are watching me in a way they never have before, something intense now about their
curiosity
which makes me uncomfortable. There can be no doubt at all that Tomo recognises his father, the baby’s interest when Kentaro arrives quite marked.

This morning I tried to put some kind of normal control over feeling by writing to Marie, attempting the light view of things in the way I have done quite easily before, but the words wouldn’t come. I have heard nothing from Aiko and am sure she is keeping away because she knows Kentaro is back and visiting me. I still haven’t said anything about her to him, there has been no occasion to, and he never asks me questions about anything. Though he is almost always kind, I have the feeling there is no room in his life for him to consider me too deeply. This may be unfair. But there is no understanding between us of what the other is thinking. He may be completely incurious about what is in my mind. The second wife is for relaxation, you have a duty towards her, but it is a much lighter duty than you bear towards a first wife. Perhaps this is something I’m imagining from my own uncertain situation. It is uncertain because, though I am now sure Kentaro will always look after me, I want more than what we are giving each other. I don’t really know what that more could be, but I want it anyway.

Tsukiji, Tokyo
Ocober 11th, 1905

I’m sure Kentaro knows I cannot have any more children and is glad of this. He must have seen Dr Ikeda. Is it possible that this was something arranged, that after Tomo there could be no others? No, that could not be, not in a hospital like St Luke’s. And I have heard that Dr Ikeda is a Christian. I must not let myself think these things.

Yesterday Kentaro told me that Fukuda San will be leaving at the end of the month. Her mother is ill at home in Sagami Prefecture, and needs to be looked after. Somehow this seems an excuse that has been used often before and it leaves me wondering whether, for some reason, he does not approve of the girl? I thought I noticed the other day that Fukuda had been crying, but this was possibly from worry about her mother. I shall miss her. She is in many ways more mature than Misao, and though Misao is really Tomo’s nurse I feel much happier about leaving the baby when I know that Fukuda will be there to look after him.
In fact I just don’t go out unless I’m sure both of them will be home and, even then, on outings with Aiko I’m suddenly hit by spasms of worry about all the things that might happen, including fire, that great bogey of Tokyo life which has come to haunt me, too. The earthquakes are just Kentaro’s dragon twitching. In a brick house I might be nervous but only light wood and paper round about gives the feeling that you wouldn’t be trapped. Alicia says that the heavy tile roofs are the real danger, that they sometimes come down all in one piece over the collapsed framework of the houses, like a lid.

Since Kentaro’s return I haven’t once been in the city, only going for walks down to the river, sometimes with Misao carrying Tomo tied on her back in the Japanese fashion. I don’t really approve of this method of taking the baby out for it seems likely that Aiko is right when she says that tiny legs straddled across a woman’s spine have made countless generations here bow-legged. There is no doubt that Kentaro is slightly so, in spite of all the hard exercise to which he has subjected his body.

I am a sort of half prisoner in this house again, after having broken free for a time, Kentaro never suggesting that we go anywhere together. It is not the thing for men of his class in society to be seen in public with their wives of either category, first or second. It is as though, having expensively established a woman in a house, they expect to find her in it at any time of day or night.

One of the things I am determined to do, whether this is approved of or not, is learn the language properly. I cannot go on living in a country in which I am unable to really communicate with the people. I want a teacher, and may even learn to read and write in spite of all those thousands of characters that have to be memorised if you are going to do this.