The Ginger Tree by Oswald Wynd (Perennial Classics, HarperCollins, Publishers)

“I have heard that people change east of Suez and that could be what is happening to me,” Mary MacKenzie writes in a notebook days after turning twenty-one. The sheltered daughter of a severe Presbyterian mother, she is on a voyage to China, in 1903, en route to marry a young diplomat whom she barely knows. As she travels further from Scotland, she’s startled to find she’s developed a taste for curry and has stopped wearing her corset. “It’s almost frightening,” she tells herself, “that you can travel on a ship and feel yourself changing,” an observation she knows she can never write to her mother.

By the time she reaches her fiancé in Beijing, Mary has discovered her own mind and isn’t reluctant to speak it—or write it in a series of private notebooks. Bored by her handsome husband and her new baby, within a year of her arrival she embarks upon an affair with a Japanese military officer, becomes pregnant with his child, and is banished from her house, her husband, and her daughter. Under the intricate and omniscient protection of her aristocratic lover, Mary is taken to Tokyo and placed in a comfortable house of her own, where she gives birth to a son.

An event that is still shocking even in this century separates Mary from her baby and his father but she’s determined to remain in Japan with hopes that she may someday see her son again. For the next thirty-six years, she manages to make a life for herself in Tokyo, through years of sweeping social transformation and several wars. On the periphery of her life is the man who brought her to his country, with whom she has a bond that goes beyond the physical. He is the only person who may someday reunite her with her lost son.

This would be an ordinary historical romance, were it not for the history told through the lively voice of Mary’s candid letters and journals. Oswald Wynd gives intimate descriptions to life in Tokyo that indicate a deep knowledge and experience of that subject. The Ginger Tree takes on a surprising depth of detail as soon as Mary arrives in Japan. From her “pretty little house” which is “really not a house at all but a flimsy box around a game played to quite simple rules,” to the varying degrees of comfort ranging from no chairs to the recent invention of electric lights imported by German interests, Mary’s new life is made up of hundreds of curiosities. She’s  wakened at night by the sound of the night watchman’s wooden clappers and his cries that all is well and learns to appreciate eight-hour performances of Kabuki in which an actor prepares to disembowel himself while members of the audience hiccup from too much rice wine. She shops in the Ginza where rich women buy European imports in a four-storey department store and becomes friends with a Japanese Baroness who was imprisoned for staring at the Emperor Meiji. She describes the night sky brightened to blood-red by neighborhood fires that can destroy six thousand houses in one night and recreates the sounds that punctuate her domestic life, “the hootings of small steamers and tugboats,” “the great bronze bell at the Hongwanji temple,” the mournful music played on a neighbor’s samisen. She gives a startling first-person account of the beauty and terror of a tsunami and a detailed look at the Emperor Meiji’s funeral procession. 

At a certain point, the question of how did Wynd know so much about his character’s Japanese life demands an answer, one that is as compelling as the novel he has written. Born in Tokyo to Scottish missionary parents in 1913, Wynd was given Japanese citizenship at birth. Japan was his home until he was in his teens (when his parents moved him to Atlantic City where he went to high school—a kind of culture shock that’s unimaginable) and he spoke fluent and faultless Japanese. 

After moving back to Scotland just in time for the start of the Second World War, Wynd became part of the British Army’s Intelligence Corps, no doubt because of his command of Japanese. He was captured by Japanese troops and under interrogation by their secret police, admitted his dual nationality. For what was perceived as a betrayal of his birthplace, he was threatened with execution but instead served as an interpreter while imprisoned in Hokkaido. Here “he was baffled by the Japanese treatment of prisoners,” the Independent reports with true British understatement. When he was released at the end of the war, he swore never to return to Japan nor to “recognize his erstwhile ‘fellow countrymen’ in civilian life.”

Using the pen name of Gavin Black, Wynd wrote fifteen thrillers and seven novels under his own name. Two of them were about women in Japan—The Ginger Tree with its remarkably feminine point of view and his first novel, The Black Fountains, which tells the story of a young Japanese girl who returns to Japan after being educated in the U.S., just before the outbreak of World War II, an opposite mirror image of Wynd’s own experience.

He died in Scotland at the age of 85, with twenty-three years of his life spent in Asia and three and a half of those within a prison camp. It’s extraordinary that his bitterness and anger toward his birthplace only surface at the very end of The Ginger Tree, when Mary, facing repatriation at the beginning of World War II says she will only return to Japan “when Tokyo and Yokohama lie in ruins.” Even then Wynd’s attachment to Japan and the Japanese is made stunningly clear in his concluding paragraph, which is a masterpiece of subtlety and heartbreak.~Janet Brown