The Ginger Tree (22 page)

It is sometimes best to give way to feeling, not to try to control it. Just since writing that I am calmer. I don’t know whether it is true that I hate him. His duty, once he has seen this clearly, or thinks he has, is the most sacred thing in his life. Everything else must be sacrificed to it. Working every day is what I need, to come back each night so worn out I’ll be unable to think about anything.

Aiko won’t tell me what preparations she had made for today’s interview at Matsuzakara’s but I think that finally having agreed to help me she set about this rather differently from the way she tackles most things, making use of contacts that normally she would scorn, these
probably including her ex-husband. At two o’clock we went up in the elevator to the private offices of Mr Hiro Matsuzakara, received by his male secretary in a room that except for a desk, a few chairs and a carpeted floor was otherwise entirely Japanese, with inner paper screens hiding the windows of a modern building, the place for formal ornament holding a small plum tree in blossom and a scroll painting of a waterfall.

Aiko may have been forced to wait in police stations but she is not accustomed to doing it in the anterooms of Tokyo business executives of the new rich class, and I had the feeling, as clearly did the nervous young man, that suddenly she would push up from her chair and go sailing over to bang open that inner sliding door before we were summoned. She is very frightening to Japanese men, they seem to sense at once that she is likely to do the opposite of what they have a right to expect from our sex.

It is hard for me to tell the age of Japanese men but I would put Mr Hiro Matsuzakara in his early sixties, a round face, clipped hair, spectacles magnifying small eyes that are not benign. He knew a great deal about Aiko, though she would have disdained to know much about him, and they did not like each other. Instead of sitting awkwardly on the edge of her chair like a Japanese lady should, she was pushed back in it, her legs braced on the floor, as though this posture helped her to throw words across a huge, blackwood desk on which there was very little beyond a small vase containing a single, forced iris. They both talked very fast by turns, ignoring me, and I felt like a girl being introduced to a new school she knows she isn’t going to like. The head of the school didn’t want me to join them, either, and the fact that he has taken me on shows the pressures that must have been on him, Aiko’s former friends obviously still willing to help her on a non-controversial matter like finding someone a job. Quite suddenly Mr Matsuzakara’s head jerked around towards me and he used speech in marked contrast to the rapid fire Japanese, each word groped for and drawn forth with great travail.

‘How – you – seru – crowses?’

It was a good half minute before I realised he was asking how I meant to sell his gowns. He had sent me that signal in near English to let me know that I didn’t have to use my interpreter. I had absolutely no idea
how I would sell anything, but had the good sense to stick to the housekeeping side at first, the way his merchandise was being offered to the public in the gown department, to my mind very badly indeed in comparison with other departments in the store. From this I warmed up to say that the gowns themselves were anything from ten to twenty years out of date, the dresses on his dummies would now be available in London only from a theatrical costumier. Aiko had to translate theatrical costumier, but there were no other interruptions, Mr Matsuzakara
staring
straight at me as he listened, only an occasional glint from spectacles indicating that his head had moved even fractionally. He was not unlike the frog on lotus leaf which is a common subject in their painting, that complete motionlessness likely to be ended by a sudden, huge leap. The thought of Mr Matsuzakara leaping in my direction over the top of his desk ought to have put me off what I had to say, but for some reason it didn’t. I was heard out, then there was a long pause, then the secretary was called and someone called Hinobe was summoned to audience. Mr Matsuzakara explained who would be joining us.

‘Hinobe he in charge Engurish crowses for raidy.’

We didn’t have long to wait before the manager of the foreign gown department joined us. He was a man in his late forties or perhaps early fifties, grey in spite of black hair, grey European business suit, grey skin, slightly stooped as he stood, after three bows to his employer, only a short distance inside the room. Some say that the Japanese face is expressionless, but I no longer find it that. Mr Hinobe was looking at me with a deep hatred I feel pretty certain will never diminish.

97 Nishi Kogura Machi, Otsuka, Tokyo
December 3rd, 1906

My Dearest Marie – You really are a faithful friend. I hadn’t written to you for a year but the moment you get a letter, and in spite of your busy life in Washington, you sit down and write to me. I can’t tell you what this means, living as I do. Thank you very much, too, for what you said about Tomo, and also for what you
didn’t
say. I know that a good many people here think that it was all for the best, though of course they don’t put this into words to me. I won’t pretend that I am over the pain of it, but I have adjusted, and that’s something I suppose.

You say I didn’t tell you much about my life here. There really isn’t all that much to tell. This is a tiny house in a suburb where no one else wants to live, the place practically falling down so I pay a very small rent. I get up in the morning at seven to leave here at eight for an hour’s tram ride into the centre of the city. My employment at Matsuzakara’s means that at nine, or soon after, I have started a long day of fitting European clothes on to Japanese women whose bodies were never meant to model our fashions. At one I go to lunch in a small restaurant behind the Ginza where the ‘foreign’ food is eatable, if not much more. At about five-thirty, or six, I get on a tram again for the ride back to Otsuka where my maid of all work has a supper of sorts ready for me.

The house has one room upstairs and two down and since the maid
has to have one of the downstairs ones I am rarely separated from her by more than one thickness of paper. We are so close physically that I am sure, sometimes, that I can hear Hanako
thinking
!

What do I do for amusement? Well, I told you about my friend the Baroness and once in a blue moon we go to the theatre together, this really part of my Japanese lessons. Then there was a glorious three days in early autumn when I claimed a holiday from my reluctant employers and we went together to the Baroness’s ex-husband’s villa at Kamakura. I swam every day and sampled how the Japanese rich live, which believe me is very well in a discreet sort of way, their sprawling mansions hidden behind drab fences and modest gates so as not to irritate the proletariat, who are people like me. What the new Baroness thinks of these amiable relations between her husband and his first spouse, leading to the lending of houses, I have no idea, though I can guess.

I am very poor. What they pay me at Matsuzakara’s is considered remarkable as a salary for a woman, but is still a pittance. However, I manage, and food is cheap here. I shop myself on Sundays, the store having adopted the European practice of closing on that day, though nothing in my suburb seems to close on any day and if you decide to do your marketing at ten o’clock you still find plenty of places open in which to do it. I no longer ride in rickshas, just take tramcars, the network now extended all over the city and very efficient if very crowded. Almost always I have to stand on the ride in to work and the same all the way home again, which is a little trying after a day on your feet.

I read a great deal, anything I can get. I picked up six volumes of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, tenth edition, at a night stall, these from KYS to PAY, and am reading them straight through so one day I shall be one of the world’s best-informed women on all matters between KYS and PAY. Six volumes out of twenty-eight will be, after all, quite a slice of human knowledge. Then there are my Japanese lessons, given to me in return for English lessons, by a student at Waseda University who was what I believe is now called a ‘pick-up’ in America, this on a tramcar, shameless of me, but a woman in my position can be shameless and not lose any sleep.

I shall certainly not lose any sleep over Akira Suzuki, who is nineteen, very sweet, but has not learned to laugh much, deadly serious about German moral philosophy, especially someone called Kant. Since my volume KYS misses Kant by quite some distance I am not able to engage in discussions with Akira on this subject, a disappointment to him. At the end of our fifth or sixth session here in this little house he said suddenly that he thought a foreign wife would greatly help him in his career as a Professor of European Philosophy and would I consider marrying him? I was able to deal with that little problem by saying that in so far as I knew I was still married. He then waited for three more lessons before
presenting
me with what I thought was a book of colour prints, but turned out to be a series of very specific pictures of intimate physical relations between men and women. My reaction to a not very subtle suggestion of another form of close association was to wrap Akira’s present in a ceremonial cloth, known as a
furoshiki
, returning this to him next week along with a small bag of oranges. He is very fond of the fruit. I am now waiting, but without much nervousness, for his next move. It seems ridiculous that I am not quite five years older than this boy, I seem to feel a lifetime between us.

The situation at my work is rather curious. There is no doubt at all that in the ten months I have been in the department business has greatly improved. This has a great deal to do with me, not necessarily as a result of my skill as a saleswoman, though I am not bad, but there is great interest in a foreign woman employed by a Japanese store. There have been one or two newspaper stories about this which brought a lot of women to stare, some of whom I trapped, with a ruthlessness that might surprise you, into buying a dress. The clothes were dreadful when I came here, but are much better now. I found that the idea of sending a buyer to Europe had never been thought of and when I suggested that it might be worth the money to the proprietor he was horrified, saying that it was up to me to produce the designs that would be made up by a whole team of Japanese women and girls kept up under the roof, working both by machine and hand for long hours. So that is what I am doing, though most of my ‘designs’ are paper patterns straight from English home
sewing magazines. Occasionally I try something of my own, and one or two of these ‘models’ have been quite successful in a small way. The main thing is to design for short legs.

I have now persuaded Mr Matsuzakara to open a corset department next door to ‘gowns’, something that had never been thought of, and a great lack, believe me. The Japanese figure has to be quite brutally bullied into anything even approximating a European shape and we are starting to make our own corsets up under the roof, too. There is plenty of whalebone available from the new Japanese whaling fleet.

So here I am, already senior saleslady and part time designer, with a staff of two under me, a young girl who suggests that she may one day have a mind of her own, and one frightened matron, widowed, who wouldn’t say boo to a goose for fear of losing her employment. I am no longer in fear of losing mine, though the manager of the department would like nothing better than to discharge me. However he knows, and more importantly Mr Matsuzakara knows, that if they did get rid of me I would simply walk down the Ginza to the rival store, the much bigger Mitsukoshi’s, who have already approached me in a very oblique and Oriental way. It was as a result of this approach that I got a rise in my salary from Mr Matsuzakara.

I now receive considerable attention from this gentleman, who keeps visiting our department as though it interested him more than any of the others and chatting to me in his quite terrible English, usually completely ignoring the section manager, a Mr Hinobe. From what I know of the Japanese male it is just possible that the old man is contemplating
enlivening
his declining years by taking a new concubine, and is considering me as a possible candidate.

It is really quite extraordinary that someone as lazy as I am, who didn’t even learn to cook at home in Edinburgh, and for years was used to doing literally nothing, now finds that she really enjoys business. What I do is hard on my feet, but I think I have a flair for it. And as a sort of by-product of my work I am dressing rather well these days, the sewing slaves up under the roof seem to quite like me and, of course, I must be an advertisement for the department. When you have your
holiday in Japan, Marie, you shall have a most elegant gown made here of raw Nagano silk, which is my favourite material.

You will think I have ambitions to be a
couturière
? The Maison Mackenzie just behind the Ginza, perhaps? There is certainly the money here to support an enterprise like that, with more and more Japanese women going into European dress.

I hope this long letter will let you see that my life in Tokyo is not without its interests, sometimes even small excitements. I have no news at all of my son. The idea is that I never shall. The main reason now for my staying on in this country is no longer that I am afraid to go anywhere else, but a continuing hope that one day, here, Tomo will be restored to me. I am still sometimes woken in the night by the clappers of the watchman going his rounds, coming straight from a dream in which I was playing with my baby on straw matting. In those moments, with my maid Hanako snoring below, I am the loneliest woman on earth. But I have tested friends for whom I sometimes thank the God who may be there. My love to you and Armand.

Yours,

Mary

97 Nishi Kogura Machi, Otsuka, Tokyo
November 9th, 1907

I am still feeling a kind of shock. If I write down what happened I may see that it doesn’t matter very much. Perhaps it is something I should have been expecting but I never even thought about the possibility.

The important visitor in Hinobe’s little office beyond the department was dressed in a matron’s sombre kimono and dark sash, her
overgarment
almost black except for a white flecking through the silk. Her hair was not in one of the traditional coiffures, but unoiled, and brought to a bun on the back of her neck rather in the way I wear mine, this not flattering to a roundish face. She was sitting on the edge of her chair, straight-backed, but not because foreign furniture made her uneasy as is so often the case, the lady was contemptuous of this form of support. On
the desk was a lacquer tray holding two cups of green tea and a plate of biscuits. I was quite certain that the lady had politely declined these offerings but if Hinobe had been snubbed he was showing no signs of being cast down, his eyes glowing with an excitement he couldn’t
suppress
. He saw me come in but decided not to acknowledge me for at least a minute, his usual performance, so I gave mine, which was to announce myself after only twenty seconds.

He pretended to be startled by my arrival even though I had been sent for and was elaborately polite, but in the language reserved for use to inferiors. All this was just an intensification of the almost continuous warfare between us. I was invited to sit down, but since this would have meant fetching a chair from the other side of his desk, I did not. Quite slowly the visitor rose, turned, looked at me, then bowed.

I have now learned a great deal about Japanese bows. A book could be written on the art, which is subject to stricter rules than flower arranging. There are bows for one’s social equals, these variable according to the circumstances of the meeting, and for one’s superiors, bows for servants, tradesmen, even tram conductors, men’s bows to women, always
shallow
, women’s to men, always very deep, plus a huge assortment of women’s bows for other women, these a complete language in themselves. Without saying one word a lady can place you exactly where she thinks you ought to be and more fool you if you don’t know that you are being assigned your status, as newcomers to what seems the world’s politest country never do. The visitor’s bow was really very generous, classifying me as almost a lady, if not quite. Hinobe suddenly threw the bomb on which I had heard a fuse sizzling.

‘The honourable lady who is now with us is none other than the Countess Kurihama.’

Hinobe, along with everyone else employed in this store, plus a high percentage of the people who come up to the department just to stare, knows the circumstances under which I came to Japan. These have been discreetly publicised, I expect on Mr Hiro Matsuzakara’s orders. There was nothing I could do about that, so I accepted it. What I find it impossible to accept is the Countess’s open curiosity, this strong enough
to make her visit the store just to have a look at me. No wonder I had rated almost a lady on the bowing scale; by her vulgar action she had demoted herself, and she knew it. Hinobe’s voice went almost falsetto with joy: ‘The Countess has done us a great honour. Her husband, Colonel the Count Kurihama, has just been appointed military attaché to the Japanese Embassy in London and the lady has come to us, most graciously, to have a wardrobe made for her English life. You understand?’

I understood all right. For weeks I will have to be in attendance on this woman, countless fittings from corsets upwards, for day dresses, ball dresses, court gowns, hats, shoes even. Every time Kentaro goes out with his wife in London he will be looking at his mistress’s handiwork. I don’t think he sent her to me, I think she came herself rather than go to the Russian woman from Harbin who is now doing my job, rather badly I hear, at Mitsukoshi’s.

From London we have imported adjustable dressmaker’s ‘shapes’, wire frames designed to be altered by recorded measurements to an exact duplicate of a client’s figure. I use them for any original, or semi-original designing I do, and our workroom girls now rely on them absolutely. The measurements are very detailed and I have trained a fitter to take them, but Hinobe, almost as though he had been so instructed by the Countess, insisted that I attended to her personally. That tiny changing room, with Kentaro’s wife standing there in only a thin under kimono, created in me the kind of tension I found almost unbearable. I just couldn’t get into my professional self at all. At one stage I was actually trembling, and I am sure she noticed.

She could tell me where Tomo is now, and how my baby is, but if I asked would deny any knowledge of my son by her husband. I didn’t feel malice from her exactly, but at the same time I knew it gave her pleasure to have me on my knees beside her with a tape in my hands. She treated me as I learned to treat Chinese servants, you accept what they do for you without really noticing them as people. When I asked the Countess to turn around or raise an arm she did so, smiling slightly, but saying nothing, her eyes fixed on herself in a mirror. I am sure she looked at me sometimes, but I never caught her doing it.