The Ginger Tree (26 page)

The Dales’ new servants gave the impression they were rather awed by having to work surrounded by all this domestic splendour, really expected to be technicians, not only knowing how to deal with the icebox, but having to cope as well with an electric carpet sweeper which is noisy enough to be an express train at full speed going through a station. My not very enthusiastic reaction to all these joys of modern living could be because I can’t afford any of them. Still, what would I do with an electric carpet sweeper when all I have underfoot is straw matting? As for the icebox, I’d be in terror that it would explode during the night and burn down my house. For me even the Dales’
gramophone
, which is supposed to bring the world’s greatest music into your home, is a kind of horror, unnaturally thinned voices coming out of a background scrape almost like fingernails down a blackboard. Until they can get rid of that scratching I will also do without a gramophone.

All this is making a virtue out of what I can’t have. The Scots tend towards this, sanctifying poverty, believing that salted porridge and oatcakes, added to a mental diet of high thinking, have put us a lot nearer the throne of the Almighty than any of those self-indulgent English are ever likely to get. I don’t have to look hard for traces of a puritan arrogance in me, and in a way this has been very useful in the life I have to lead now in Tokyo. At the back of my mind is the feeling that there is a kind of virtue somewhere in not just being able to walk into a shop to buy a pair of shoes, but having to save for six months before you can re-shoe your feet, perhaps cutting out a meat meal a week in order to manage it. Somewhere, somehow all this is recorded in your favour in a big ledger, credit marks in black, while the rich of this world, wallowing in their luxuries, are getting those red debits on every page which will see them moving into eternity with a mortgage they will never be able to pay off.

Bob Junior is a very healthy baby, fair like both his parents, so I can play with him without being reminded of Tomo. He is being fed on imported dried milk, Emma Lou much put off the fresh kind by that alleged scandal about cows being infected with tuberculosis bacilli
because the diseased animals give more milk. I am not sure I believe the story, and continue to get my bottle delivered daily. If Japan’s bugs had been going to kill me they would have done it by this time. Compared with China this is a pasteurised paradise.

97 Nishi Kogura Machi, Otsuka, Tokyo
August 19, 1910

An extraordinary day following on that weird letter last week from Bob Dale wanting to see me in his office at noon today on an urgent private matter and asking me, if I met up with Emma Lou before this
appointment
, not to mention the matter to her. I did the sensible thing when you get a communication of this kind, nothing, no letter and no telephone call, though Bob had underlined the bank’s number in red. I really hadn’t intended to go and then, as I might have expected of myself, curiosity was too much, and by eleven this morning I was getting on a tram for downtown.

The Kansas and Midwest Warranty Trust Banking has the plaque for its Tokyo offices, in English and Japanese, on the cement wall of one of the just completed office blocks in Nihonbashi, ground floor with its own direct entrance from the pavement, quite spacious inside,
marble-faced
square pillars and that slightly hushed air the better banks strive for, the feeling you are in the outer sanctuary of a temple to the real gods of our time. There was a great deal of mahogany about, not a wood you see much of in Japan, and this must have been imported, already carved to a taste that certainly wasn’t local. Behind an ornamental grille sat a Japanese teller alongside a miniature American flag which, either by design or accident, was rippling in the breeze from an electric fan. The only other human visible was a lady typist, operating her machine by the hunt and peck method I used sometimes at Matsuzakara’s for foreign letters. At her rate I’d be surprised if output reached two letters a morning. Though in Western dress, which included a white shirtwaist, she was Japanese, too, her hair done in that bun-on-the-roof style I gave up long ago. Somehow Bob’s outer office employees gave
the impression that they hadn’t yet quite found out why they were here. For a moment I thought the teller was going to shout for help.

Bob must have been clock-watching and expecting me, though I hadn’t said I would come. A mahogany door opened and he came out, a professional smile making him look not quite himself, so that if I hadn’t seen him in it I might have wondered, as one does with undertakers, what his private life was like. We talked for an hour and at the end of it I was still not, as Bob would put it, in the picture, certainly not a picture that could in any remote sense involve me. What did come across was that Kansas and Midwest Warranty Trust, under its local manager, was making slow progress in its appointed task here in Tokyo which was to put good US dollars to work
inside
the Japanese economy. Midwest Warranty has invested in expensive marble and mahogany as part of its bid to be the first American bank ready to use its money to help expanding local industry. An assessment of the situation had suggested rich veins lying waiting to be exploited by financial mining, but to Bob’s pained
astonishment
, those prospect surveys had overlooked one little point, which was Japanese reaction to a heap of Midwest US dollars helping to run their businesses.

It had been quite a simple reaction: thank you so very much,
no
. Bob just couldn’t believe they meant this, feeling that his approaches had been wrong, so he tried a selection of new ones, discreet advertising, person to person contact via introductions, even to knocking on doors without introductions, which I could have told him was totally hopeless in this country. Wherever he went he met politeness and that Japanese convenience phrase:
‘Ah, so desuka?’
which can mean anything, but quite often means that way to the exit. The disillusioning message had finally reached Bob that the new industrialists out here preferred to do their own financing, prepared to struggle along with a yen that still hadn’t become a really stable world currency.

I was quite worried about the implications of all this on Emma Lou and Bob’s life in Japan, but couldn’t see where I came into things, at least in terms of a solemn appointment in his office. Also, since I have taken to having my main meal midday I get hungry about half-past twelve, and at
quarter past one I was
really
hungry and not expecting Bob to ask me to join him where he usually lunches, the Imperial Hotel grill, because in a place like that we could so easily run into someone who would later run into Emma Lou at the American Club. At a quarter to two I suggested we adjourn to the little place behind the Ginza I used to use from Matsuzakara’s.

As I chewed at pieces of age-toughened ox I suddenly had the not very brilliant idea that the Baroness Sannotera just might, through her husband, be able to offer useful contacts. He was shocked. He didn’t want the Baroness anywhere near Midwest Warranty, she was a radical who had been jailed for insulting the Emperor. And further it was most unwise for me to have any contact with the lady, particularly now that I worked in mission schools, and I was stiffening against this advice when suddenly he plunged into the real purpose of our meeting.

Bob’s idea is to loan
me
money. I sat staring at him while he gave me the picture of Midwest Warranty’s new policy for Japan. If the native industrialists didn’t want any of his dollars, then he was going to use these to finance foreigners to take yen from the Japanese. Simple, as an idea. His bank’s operations would be adapted to the country, taking on what amounted to agency functions, arranging for distribution, showrooms, and so on, in fact wet-nursing new enterprises from abroad that might not otherwise be prepared to gamble on the chance of a market in Japan. In my case the financing would be for an exclusive salon offering Western fashion clothes, this later perhaps to be expanded to much cheaper, simple lines that could be made in large quantities and then marketed through those new selling outlets that are opening up in cities all over the land, the department stores.

As I listened to all this it became quite obvious that I had been ‘investigated’ as a possible commercial proposition; he knew a great deal more than I had ever told either him or Emma Lou about my time at Matsuzakara’s, how I had started out adapting for the local market clothes from Western fashion magazines and then gone on to doing quite a bit of straight designing on my own. What he did not know, and some instinct kept me from telling him, was that I had never put these designs on paper
for myself, working out ideas with material direct on to one of our imported frames and then having sketches made by Emburi San. It was my assistant, also, who at a later stage was responsible for the detailed paper patterns sent to the workroom for the sewing girls. It wouldn’t be easy to open a salon without Emburi San’s help, and also without those girls trained to work on Western style garments. I sat there thinking about the possibility of using Bob’s dollars to buy away from old Hiro practically a whole Matsuzakara department, and Bob is dead set against any hint of bribery and corruption. There wasn’t a red wool embroidered motto hanging framed on the wall of his office, but there might well have been.

He had stopped chewing piecrust and was watching my face. He asked what my thoughts were. I said they turned towards staffing problems. He reached out across the table to cover my hand, then as quickly took it away again, glancing around the restaurant.

97 Nishi Kogura Machi, Otsuka, Tokyo
August 22nd, 1910

I have spent the last three days full of doubts, suspicious of my first reaction to Bob’s offer, not just uneasy about whether I can do what he wants and even half succeed, but also wondering whether I
want
to do it. I’ve got used to living again without real responsibility, the work I do now miserably paid, a complete blind alley and sometimes very tiring, this largely from the feeling that I am getting nowhere with a succession of pupils, but I can and do go to bed without worry except perhaps on one of the muggy nights of ‘earthquake weather’. If I do what Bob wants I will have to work and work, with no time for the reading that has become my chief pleasure, maybe almost a vice. And at the end of that work there could be failure again, another Osaka.

There was a violent thunderstorm two nights ago, lightning seemed to split my tightly closed shutters, and I lay remembering that typhoon when I was on the
Mooldera
, and how I prayed not to be allowed to die on the way to China. Again I have an infantile wish to ask the Lord to send me a sign indicating whether or not I ought to open the Mary Mackenzie
dress salon in the ancient capital of the Shoguns. I suppose, if I look at it squarely, I am really very lonely. Work could be a cure for that.

97 Nishi Kogura Machi, Otsuka, Tokyo
August 23rd, 1910

Probably because I am disturbed and uncertain as to what I should do, I am suddenly as conscious again of Kentaro as in those days when I sat in a garden by a fishpond waiting for the sound of a gate sliding open on metal runners. Always, just before we met, that intense awareness of him took possession of me, and I know this was something he felt too, if less completely. I would see it in his eyes as he came towards me, as he certainly saw it in mine. It was as though by the very act of coming to me, deciding at a particular time to do this, he shut a door on all the other areas of his living, making himself totally available for a limited period. What he gave me was rationed by those disciplines that drive him, and which even now, after much longer in this country, I don’t really
understand
. But one thing I do know, I was not just his foreign mistress, it was not only the pleasure our bodies gave each other, there was a comfort of mind in it, too, as real to him as to me, even if he did shut off that comfort as he shut the gate on leaving. Oh God, it is the comfort I have never had since, and long for as much as I long for the feel of his body on mine.

It is so hot tonight I have just crawled out under my net to open a shutter, risking burglars. Anyway, the most casual enquiries about me in the lane would make it plain that the foreign woman’s house wasn’t worth breaking into. This light has brought a thousand mosquitoes to batter against my net. A train whistles and a temple puts its gong message across the city. Lying here, I do not believe that my sudden intense feeling for Kentaro means that he is coming to me. It is just that for some reason, somewhere, he has opened a door and gone into a place long unused, making himself available again.

97 Nishi Kogura Machi, Otsuka, Tokyo
August 24th, 1910

My second ‘secret’ meeting with Bob has seen him rather shocked to find out just how much I had learned while I sat at the feet of that great teacher of modern commercial practice, Hiro Matsuzakara. Bob had planned to let me have seven and a half thousand dollars, fifteen thousand yen, for the salon project, this to his mind generous. I didn’t think it was remotely adequate, pointing out that I would require premises in downtown Tokyo, preferably just off the Ginza, that I would have to employ a really competent assistant and pay her a generous salary as well as needing at least six sewing girls for a start, plus their machines and a reasonably comfortable place for them to work in. On top of this there was stock, at a rough estimate at least three thousand yen’s worth which had to be on shelves and hangers when we opened. I had no intention of starting to work with anything less than thirty thousand yen of capital behind me.

Bob sat staring at me as though he wouldn’t have credited this hard streak in the woman he had helped to find subsistence work as a teacher of the mildly retarded. He said that for anything like a fifteen thousand dollar outlay he would have to consult head office in Kansas City by letter, not just cable. I said that was fine by me and I would go home to await developments, which called his bluff. With no more talk of head office we moved on to the terms of the Midwest Warranty’s loan to Maison Mackenzie.