Bitter Fruit

I was given The Ginger Tree, by Oswald Wynd, to read before the birth of my first child. ‘It will take your mind off things,’ said my friend. Indeed it did. Through all the dramas of a premature birth, the book stayed in my hands. The life of a young girl at the turn of the twentieth century in China and Japan provided an escape and a refuge. It still does. In times of crisis or just a bout of ’flu, I return to The Ginger Tree. It has the power that all the best books have, the power to create its own reality. I step into it and am enveloped.

This is curious, for The Ginger Tree is not a great novel. Certain sections I always skip, and some of the characters in the second half fail to come to life. So why does this book grip me? Why, seventeen years after I first read it, do I still reread it regularly? The book follows the life of Mary Mackenzie. In 1903, as a girl of 20, she leaves Scotland to marry an English military attaché posted to Peking. A cold man with no ability to offer companionship or affection, he is also disastrous in bed. Mary has a brief affair with a Japanese officer. When the affair is discovered she is disgraced and moves to Japan, where she tries to make a life as an independent woman. She lives in Japan until the start of the Second World War when she returns to England. As her story unfolds we witness immense global changes, including Japan’s emergence as a military power, from the perspective of a single woman. Mary’s life is told through letters, first-person prose and diary entries, and her voice is direct and immediate. I am not sure if I would have liked her, but I can clearly imagine meeting her. From the first diary entry when she leaves off her corset and decides not to send her notebook home to her repressive mother, I am compelled to listen. ‘Ever since Port Said I have found myself wanting to write down things that she must never see . . . It is almost frightening that you can travel in a ship and feel yourself changing.’ The author, Oswald Wynd, who was middle-aged when he wrote this book, captures with great skill the character of Mary as she moves from being a young girl, hungry for independence and challenge, to an older woman who has paid the price for both. Much of the success of the book lies in the author’s clear, understated prose. The newly arrived Mary notices the smell of Peking: ‘not one of the spicy smells that are supposed to be a feature of the Orient, but more like rancid butter that has been slightly heated in a pan’. The smell is everywhere, ‘but is particularly pungent rising from the fur rug that is put over your knees in rickshas’. She concludes, ‘It is as though the whole city had been dipped in some substance which gives off this reek, faint in some places, strong in others.’ Wynd employs the same restraint in his choice of detail. On board the ship taking her to her new life, the young Mary daringly agrees to play the piano at a concert. She soon realizes her mistake. The songs are suggestive and the men have been drinking and are making loud jokes. Her discomfort is summed up in a small but telling detail. When she starts to accompany a fellow passenger, Mrs Price, one of the hooks at the back of her dress gives way. ‘I could feel the gap, but had to play on wondering how many others would go . . . I was sure that everyone was watching those hooks and eyes, and not Mrs Price.’ The book changes for me when Mary falls in love with Count Kentaro Kurihama, the enigmatic Japanese military attaché, and becomes pregnant. She is ‘put out’ by her husband, and separated from their baby daughter. Kentaro arranges for her to move to Japan for the birth of their child. Briefly they are happy together. But a few months after the birth, the Count considers it his duty as a father to remove their baby son and have him adopted by a Japanese family. The child can therefore be raised as a Japanese and avoid the stigma of being a neissei, or half-caste. Mary has thus lost both her children and now, because she cannot forgive him, she must also lose Kentaro. The rest of the book centres on how she accepts the life she has made for herself and charts her determination to succeed, no matter how much personal anguish this brings her. The book is no longer a novel about a young girl coming of age, but a novel about loneliness and loss. Mary does not belong anywhere, and this for me is one of her attractions. She is rejected by her mother, her English husband and most of the Europeans she encounters in the Far East. Nor does she belong in Japanese society: like the ginger tree in her garden she remains ‘the stubborn stranger’, inspiring dislike ‘to the point of bitterness’. She has signed up to a lifetime of loneliness, ‘years of aching feet and a half-frozen heart’, but at least she does not have to pretend to fit in. This is the most she can hope for. The chapters describing her success as a businesswoman fail to engage me. I do not mind this. In fact I almost welcome it. My normal critical faculties have been suspended. This is like life. Lonely year follows lonely year. Nothing much happens. Like Mary, I wait for the return of Kentaro. The encounters between the lovers are brief and written with great economy and understatement. But I do not think I have read many books that say so much about passion. There is nothing sexually explicit. But the sexual attraction between the two is clear. Mary describes it as ‘an intense awareness’ that takes possession of her just before they meet. ‘I know this was something he felt too . . . I would see it in his eyes as he came towards me, as he certainly saw it in mine.’ On a hot night, lying alone under her mosquito net, despite not seeing him for years, she is once again conscious of that intense awareness. She does not believe it means he intends to seek her out. ‘It is just for some reason, somewhere, he has opened a door and gone into a place long unused, making himself available again.’ The encounters are a relief against the bleakness of lives lived without each other. When he first visits after the birth of their baby, they hold hands in the small Japanese garden and stare at each other. ‘What I felt was a kind of hunger,’ she recalls. Then she goes on, ‘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 to truly own myself again.’ What love means to this fiercely independent woman is what it means to many – a holiday from the struggle of being oneself. She admits, ‘I don’t want to own myself. I don’t have to try now.’ Love offers Mary a brief respite from loneliness. In fact her love is defined by the loneliness, for it gives her rare moments with Kentaro their poignancy. Five years after seeing him last, thirteen years before seeing him again, Mary writes: ‘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’. In a rare moment of anguish, she continues, ‘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.’ When they meet again after twenty-three years apart, the promise of that comfort is as instantaneous and overwhelming as in their youth. They stand staring at each other for several minutes. Then Kentaro turns and shouts for a maid. ‘When the girl arrived he said: “Clear away the meal. Lay out the quilts.”’ Three days later the middle-aged lovers visit a nearby shrine. It is set on top of a mountain. They climb the flights of steep steps, lined on each side by vast cryptomerias that have been formed ‘into a designed loneliness’. On the paved landing before another flight, ‘we paused to lift our heads and in a complete silence acknowledge a deepening isolation from the rest of the world’. In that mutual isolation they finally accept each other. Loneliness and love have come together – for a time at least. This book is not only about the love between two adults. It is also about Mary’s love for her two absent children. By the end of the book Mary is reconciled to both but estranged from Kentaro. Her daughter invites Mary to come and live with her in England. Kentaro, from whom Mary parted after the Rape of Nanking in 1937, has her put on the last ship to leave for England. ‘The last act’, she thinks, ‘in his enduring duty towards a woman he got with child on a Chinese hill thirty-seven years ago.’ In fact she is mistaken. Kentaro’s last act is to arrange a meeting between her and their son when the ship halts at Singapore. It is the final scene of the book and extraordinary for its restraint and dignity. ‘I had learned the proper disciplines,’ as Mary comments. Her son is a pilot and does not expect to survive the war. He shows her a photograph of his family. Her grandson has inherited Kentaro’s smile. They talk of the mundane, ‘the tastelessness of most tropic fruit’. The emotion and heartbreak of the last forty years are never allowed to surface. A tiny detail reveals how hungrily she is watching him, ‘His hand went to the sword hilt, which meant he was getting up’ – and leaving her for good. Like Mary I spent a number of years in both China and Japan. I also spent a number of years lonely and frozen-hearted – as have most of us. And it is the description of that desolate country rather than any actual place, and the escape that passion offers, if only briefly, that make me return again and again to The Ginger Tree.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 13 © Harriet Sergeant 2007