The Ginger Tree (31 page)

I tell myself that dozens of Japanese youths from the wealthier families are summering here in Karuizawa, and that I must not do now what I have longed to do often before and never permitted myself, set in train some kind of investigation. I did find out that the Massami family are from Kyoto, which I have a feeling is the kind of place in which Kentaro might have wanted Tomo to be brought up. And if that boy was a
yoshi
– ? No! I must
not
. Oh God, I came up here to empty that trunk!

Noki Besso, Karuizawa
September 2nd, 1923

This is a place of wild rumours after yesterday’s earthquake. One is that Fuji has erupted and smothered Tokyo and Yokohama in burning ash. I don’t believe this, and neither do I believe that a vast wave has come in from the sea to pour over the capital and its port. The only thing we know for certain is that it isn’t a local disturbance as we thought yesterday, something connected with our volcano. My guess is that we were on the fringe of a huge shock centred in or near the Tokyo area. Even here it was bad enough to shatter all communications down from these mountains, no telephone or telegraph, and the talk is that at least seven of the forty railway tunnels between us and the Takasaki plain have collapsed.
Certainly
there have been no trains.

The American agent for Harley Davidson motorcycles came up here on one of his machines last week, finding the track almost impassable then because of mud from recent rains and when he tried to go down again this morning the track had disappeared under a landslide. It looks as though we are imprisoned up on this plateau. All those wild stories heard over the years about what will one day happen to these volcanic islands don’t sound so wild now. At the community notice board I heard a man say that if there was some vantage point at the edge of these mountains from which we could look down we might find that the sea came right up to them, half of the country having slid down into that vast hole on the ocean floor known as the Tuscarora Deep. The stories will get even wilder before we hear what has really happened.

I brought only one maid up here with me. Toba San, usually so cheerful, is in a dreadful state, convinced that her family down in the disaster-prone Izu Peninsula have been wiped out and that Cook has been killed in our Yokohama house. I try to calm her down, but there is something horribly infectious about the girl’s panic, and the way she continues showing an almost total lack of the usual Japanese emotional control, her eyes streaming tears whenever I look at her. Certainly there is a grim sense of doom hanging over this valley, as though everyone feels that the terror which has struck elsewhere is somehow on schedule for us soon. I keep looking at the volcano Asama which looms over this place, and I see others doing it, too, but the only sign of activity from the crater is the usual thin, almost innocent-seeming plume of white smoke
drifting
away. Last night there was a red glow reflected by low cloud, but this is quite common. The village food shops are emptying fast, with queues forming to buy tinned goods and the question wherever there is a clump of people is: ‘Have you had any news?’ The last I heard was of a party being organised to go down to the plains on foot, but this isn’t going to be easy if the track has gone, the railway to us used a cog system to get up what are practically precipices.

One thinks almost endlessly about the people down in the cities and I can’t get away from a feeling that by being up here I have somehow evaded an experience that should have been part of my life. The
earthquake
was at midday, when Peter was quite likely to have been at home. Emburi San, in charge of the salon, would probably have been getting rid of the last customer for the morning and thinking about sending out for her usual sandwich and milk.

Aiko is also in Tokyo. I saw her last month when she came to the salon just before I left the city, and with that quite crazy request. I was supposed to go into the cubicle where the wife of the Minister for Home Affairs was being fitted for a gown to ask that lady to use her influence on her husband to get Katsugi, the radical leader, out of Sugamo jail. Since she married that man I really think Aiko is a little bit unbalanced, though perhaps the only real change is that these days, instead of going to jail herself, she spends her time trying to have her new husband’s sentences
reduced or quashed. If he were my husband I would prefer him in jail. The only time Aiko brought Katsugi to my house in Yokohama he had a good look around, ate everything in sight, and then called me a highly paid lackey of the ruling élite, which I didn’t feel was a very good description of what I do for a living. I think Aiko got the message then that I didn’t really care for the company of her revolutionary, though I am still much concerned about her, particularly now.

How long are we going to be trapped up here under this damn smoking mountain?

The Imperial Hotel, Tokyo
October 16th, 1923

Like everyone else in this city, I have become anaesthetised to horror, destruction on this scale producing its own drug to blunt one’s reactions. There are nearly three thousand people packed into this hotel, its lounges, lobbies and many corridors turned into dormitories. The only reason I have got in, arriving back in Tokyo when I did more than a month after the earthquake, was simply because last spring I opened a small shop in the arcade here as a kind of trial run for the much more ambitious project planned for the Motomachi in Yokohama. So now I sleep surrounded by brocades and silks and tourist gewgaws, which must be the only collection of this kind of merchandise within a twenty-mile radius that hasn’t been reduced to ashes. I am
not
open for business. Anything that could be of any use has gone from these shelves to the refugee supply stall upstairs and when I look around at the too much stock I have left, so carefully selected by Emburi San and me, it seems, in these circumstances, a load of rubbish. I stay in this little cell most of the time to be available to any of my staff who have survived the holocaust. They all knew about this shop and they ought to learn, in time, that this hotel has survived intact. So far only one has been, the youngest sewing girl. She survived because she was at home with a heavy cold that day. She hasn’t much hope for any of the others, including Emburi San because she has heard that in the area behind the Ginza the fire came quickly
before thousands who were trapped in the wreckage could be dug out.

I don’t want to think about it. There is so much that one mustn’t think about. Peter was found under the crumpled heap of his concrete house, one of the known dead. There are probably two hundred thousand who died no one can say where or how. I still haven’t heard anything at all about Aiko, though it has been confirmed that the Baron Sannotera was killed in his office. On September first, just before noon, Bob Dale, that former total abstainer, was in the hotel bar above me here, experiencing one of the world’s most devastating earthquakes with a whisky glass in his hand. Afterwards, from what I hear, he did impressive work with the rescue squads. Soon after I arrived we met in one of the food queues, and I thought he was suddenly looking a lot older, but then we all are. He has been down here a few times, but we didn’t have very much to say to each other. That seems to be a common condition, you see people sitting staring at pieces of the decorative stonework to be found all over this hotel, as though using it for some kind of self-hypnosis.

The Japanese, with their long experience of natural disasters, seem to have evolved an almost unique understanding of how to deal with these. They get up on their feet again quickly, shake themselves, cremate their dead, and turn once more to living. Here in Tokyo most of the streets have already been cleared, some trams are running, and Bob Dale is taking me to Yokohama tomorrow by electric train, these operating again. I funked going down there alone. My cook and her two children have survived unhurt, the police got a message to me from her native place in the country to which she has gone. Toba San, who made the journey with me from Karuizawa, is in Izu, but I haven’t heard yet what she has found there.

I can’t read. No one seems able to, you don’t see people in the hotel with books open. For something to do this afternoon I tidied this place, really to get those garish brocades out of my sight. Under a bottom shelf is what I brought down from Karuizawa, a suitcase of summer clothes and a basket containing household linen, together with that box of letters and my journals, the symbolic trunk that Peter told me to get rid of, and I meant to. Well, I haven’t, and I won’t now. I lugged that suitcase and
basket through a chaos of packed trains and stations where we had to change in order to get here, and the symbolism of the box, if it has to have one, has altered, becoming the only link now left to connect me with those dead years.

Yesterday I went out for a walk. It is only when you are outside this hotel that you really appreciate the miracle of its survival, the new Imperial finished only last year to plans and under the supervision of the American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. A more improbable building to resist a vast earthquake is difficult to imagine, since it is built entirely of stone cemented together without any steel frame at all, the design said to have been inspired by Mayan temples. There isn’t a crack anywhere in the building, its narrow windows and low construction resisted the fires that burned right to its back and side doors.

There is another even more impressive survival, the massive walls beyond the moat which surround the Imperial Palace. Here the stone is unmortared, huge rocks just fitted together and apparently completely undamaged, topped off still by those old pines that show no signs that I could see of scorching. The residence of the god who lives amongst the Japanese is unaffected by the disaster immediately beneath him, though it is rumoured that the god himself, accompanied by what these days amounts to his keepers, was safely away enjoying the hill air of Nikko. When I turned from the palace to look south ruin stretched to Tokyo Bay, though I could identify the Ginza by a line of burned out shells that had once been its department stores, including Matsuzakara’s.

The Imperial Hotel, Tokyo
October 17th, 1923

I minded the ruin of Peter’s house much more than my own. Mine was somehow purged devastation, broken tiles, but the rest almost clean ash from burned wood; his great slabs of that concrete piled in on itself. I didn’t ask how they had found his body, the heap looked as if no squads of diggers had disturbed it in any way, and those huge pieces of fractured cement still had their white outer coating in places, as though the fire had
missed this pile. The view from the Bluff, in autumn sunshine, was better than it ever had been, all obstructions cleared away. Fuji was serene.

As we were walking back to the train for Tokyo, along what used to be the Motomachi, Bob asked me if I had kept in touch with Emma Lou. I said we had for the first two years, then she hadn’t answered a letter and it had become cards at Christmas which had stopped too. He told me that they had been divorced, adding: ‘I haven’t told anyone here yet. It’s just happened. Emma Lou went to Nevada where you can divorce your husband if you can prove his dog bit you.’

A cart pulled by an ox had the crown of a road still fissured and scarred from heat, the load new tiles. I couldn’t see any building ready for tiles, but there had to be one somewhere. Bob and I were separated by the ox, a curious deferring to the solemn-eyed beast that would probably end up as inedible meat in a ‘foreign’ restaurant, or perhaps tourist ‘sukiyaki’. When we joined up again I asked Bob why he had kept on that big house for six years. He said: ‘I guess I kept it on because I went on hoping she’d change her mind and come back. Good thing she didn’t. It would have fallen on her if she had. It’s just a heap of bricks.’

I remembered then that Peter had told me Bob was known to be going to the Yoshiwara. I really had nothing to say to him, just as I hadn’t been able to say anything to Emma Lou on the boat. In the train we sat staring out at the blackened sites of factories, some of them with metal chimneys still standing, most of these heat twisted. He said suddenly: ‘I’m going to manage our office in Shanghai. Let me tell you, Mary, you won’t find our new man here so easy to get a loan out of.’ He laughed.

The Imperial Hotel, Tokyo
November 3rd, 1923

Harry Nishimoto, who became Peter’s lawyer too, has just been to see me here, the day after he got back from hospital in Kobe. He was on pier number one at Yokohama seeing a friend off on the
Empress of Australia
when the dock split under him. He remembers going down into the water with huge blocks of concrete crashing all around, and then nothing until
he came to on board the liner at sea en route for Kobe. He was lucky, only a leg fractured in two places.

Harry’s news is startling. In this disaster-prone country it has been his firm’s policy for years to carry duplicates of all important legal
documents
in their Kobe branch office, and amongst these was Peter’s Will. If he died suddenly Peter meant to have the last laugh on me. I have been left the house he knew I didn’t care for, though a heap of rubble rather spoils the joke, and there is no point now in his ghost hanging around to see what I would do with my inheritance. His legacy means that, in addition to my own ground, I have another four acres of adjoining land on the Bluff. It would have been nearer five if a large chunk of Peter’s garden hadn’t collapsed on to the ruins below.

Harry doesn’t think the Bluff is ever going to recover as a residential area but says he might be able to find me a speculator who would buy my land, though I needn’t expect much for it. He was shocked when I said I intended to be that speculator and was authorising him to buy for me all the land, plus ruins, that he could acquire on the Bluff for the forty thousand yen I had available.

Harry would do a great job protecting new widows from sharks; he gave me a little lecture on the sensible handling of available assets and then, when he saw I was still bent on fiscal lunacy, asked what that forty thousand represented in my affairs. I told him that before the earthquake there had been forty-three thousand eight hundred in my account at the Yokohama Specie Bank which would still be to my credit when they got their records sorted out, because I had my bank book to prove my claim. In addition I had the goodwill of a vanished business, some potential in a matter of months from the little shop in which he was sitting, and that I intended opening another shop in Yokohama just as soon as it could be built. I also told him I meant to rebuild my house on the Bluff exactly as it had been, down to the last detail, this in the best Shinto religious tradition for reconstructions.