The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel

by Maureen Lindley

  The day I arrived, I went to the bathhouse and spent hours washing with a ball of finely milled soap that smelled of chestnuts. The steam was comforting, the heat quite wonderful, but I was full of sadness. I could do nothing but sit hugging myself as salty tears streamed from my eyes. Unbidden, the vision of Mai's plump little face came to my mind and stirred my heart with loneliness for her. It seemed I was destined to lose everyone I loved. My own fault, of course. Boria was right, I was headstrong and unable to compromise, but that didn't mean that I was without doubt or regret.

  There are bound to be those in every life who capture your affection, whether you want them to or not. Mai was one of those people in mine. I can still picture her perfectly, remember well the little mole shaped like a berry at the corner of her mouth, the comforting cushion of her breasts, and her front tooth, clipped at an angle, which she broke while biting on a coin to help her through the birth of her twins. If I concentrate I can summon up the cracked tones of her strange voice and hear her husky childlike laughter. My tears were for Mai, for letting her down and for the loss of her.

  I found myself wishing that I had not taken Xue's pendant. If only in the secret part of her, I wanted Mai to think well of me. I determined that in future I would not be grasping where wealth was concerned. Money comes and goes but memories can be coloured for ever by one venal act.

  The inn served excellent food and for the ten days that I was there I made the most of it. I gorged myself on little clams that just resisted the bite, mussels steaming in their sea juice, silky oysters and hearty stews of sea turtle. I ate freshly boiled life-prolonging eggs and goose testicles braised to a delicious goo with rice that tasted of almonds. In my heart I am Japanese, but I am Chinese in my stomach and love every kind of food. After the deprivations of Mongolia I was excited by so much variety and indulged myself in everything that took my fancy. I bought myself a huge box of preserved plums and a jar of ginger in syrup to eat in my room between meals.

  I formed a plan to travel to Tokyo by sea in the guise of a sophisticated Chinese woman, a young widow perhaps, or the daughter of a wealthy merchant family. I set about changing my look so that even Natsuko would not recognise me, at least not from a distance. Although I loved my jodhpurs and boots, they were in a poor state, and so much my trademark that I would have been instantly recognised in Tokyo. I threw them out and chose for myself a collection of high-necked dresses that buttoned on the side and emphasised my figure. They were cut from lengths of rolling satin that caught the light. I selected the most gorgeous colours I could find, a floral pink that lit my face, a luminous amethyst that reminded me of the Mongolian sky, and one for evenings of the most delicate ivory piped with gold. I bought satin shoes with little heels, and jade earrings that danced above the collars of my dresses and turned my eyes to the colour of damsons.

  Port Arthur was full of treasures. I secured lip paints and perfumed oils, pencils of kohl to outline my eyes, sake and Russian tobacco, and just for fun some chewing gum flavoured with cherries.

  I had my by then shoulder-length hair styled with a permanent wave, copying the Eurasian girl pictured on cigarette packets who contrived to look inviting and sulky at the same time.

  I knew that I had caused a stir in Port Arthur, as any young woman on her own was bound to do. But apart from one night when I visited the Polish flower girl that Nobu had slept with, I spoke only to the manager at The White Syringa Inn and to the shopkeepers.

  I went to the house of flowers because I wanted to see the foreign girl's golden hair and look at an occidental woman's body. I had to pay highly for her time, but it was worth it if only to discover that golden hair is more like straw in colour and texture than gold, and in the Polish girl's case was not replicated anywhere else on the body. Her limbs were big and round, her thighs seemed out of proportion to the slimness of her waist. It confirmed my prejudice that oriental women are not only the most beautiful, but smell the best too. Her scent was milky, but I liked her round blue eyes and her straight nose. She told me that she remembered Nobu because he had made her listen to his poetry, which she did not understand.

  While I was there I took a pipe of opium and was massaged by a blind woman in her fiftieth year who in her youth had been a popular flower girl with ugly men who told her that they were handsome and that she was lucky to be chosen by them. She said although blind she could always tell if a man was ugly because of the way he took a step backwards on introduction.

  At night in The White Syringa Inn, I would lie on my bed with the shutters open, watching the stars. I smoked Turkish cigarettes, drank sake and usually fell into a drunken sleep a few hours before dawn. My dreams were of overgrown gardens full of dark shrubs, and lowering trees where oily laurel pressed against snowberry, and bindweed coiled its way through black wisteria. Every night in those domestic jungles I fought for air as the advancing plants threatened me with their motionless breathing.

  I always slept late into the morning, waking to a delicious breakfast brought to me by a serving woman who never caught my eye. I took time over my dressing, luxuriating in the feel of hot scented water on my skin and the caress of satin as it slipped over my body. I learnt to walk on shoes with heels and to sway in the dresses that only allowed short strides, lest they split at the seams. I revelled in being a free and independent woman about to start at last on the adventure of my own life.

  One day I purchased my ticket for a berth on the boat that would take me to Yokohama, and looked forward to the long journey.

  The day the boat pulled out of the port, I stood on deck and glanced up to the house on the cliff where I had first met Kanjurjab; it looked lonely and uncared for. At eye level the teeming port was alive with people, noise and life, and I felt at home. I believe that I am more suited to live at eye level than on top of the hill. I don't think that is something that can be said of most Manchu princesses.

  Two days later in the port of Kagoshima I left the boat to walk on land and to look at new faces. Kagoshima, unlike Port Arthur, had few shops and was hardly cosmopolitan, but I managed to buy soap and fresh supplies of sake. In a small, open-to-the-sky restaurant on the dockside, where you had to stand to eat, I took a bowl of plain steamed noodles to settle my stomach. It felt good to be walking on true Japanese soil again.

  When I returned to the boat, an elegant young Japanese woman, dressed in an ankle-length skirt and, despite the fine weather, a jacket with a fur collar and matching hat, had boarded. She was leaning against the handrail smoking what I knew by its scent to be French tobacco. She wore shoes with the highest heels I had ever seen, and at her feet sat a small, expensive-looking snakeskin suitcase. Her blue-black hair was cut into a sleek bob and outshone the dark fur of her hat.

  She greeted me with the American 'Hi', and offered me a cigarette from a crumpled blue packet. Introducing herself as Madam Hidari, she asked me in Japanese if I spoke English.

  'Yes, I do a little, but I am out of the habit,' I said, accepting the cigarette. 'But you are Japanese, why do you wish to speak English?'

  'Oh, only to p-practise,' she said with a slight stammer. 'I love everything American, their language, their fashion, their music. Oh, just everything. I would like to speak English p-perfectly.'

  'I love most things Japanese,' I replied. 'But I am happy to practise English with you.'

  She laughed, lit my cigarette with a silver lighter and then, as though we were already on familiar terms, she put her hand on my arm and told me that she thought me beautiful and looked forward to my company on the trip.

  From the moment I first saw Tamura Hidari posing on the deck as though she were acting in a film I sensed that we would be friends. I liked the way she dressed, the way she chain-smoked, always lighting a fresh cigarette before the old one was half finished, and the way she held my eyes when speaking as though I was the only person in the world of interest. I liked too the feeling of excitement she created around herself, as though ordinary everyday things when happe
ning to her took on more colour, more drama than when happening to others. Tamura possessed that quality, rare in Japan, of glamour. She was a beauty in a most individual way and, like most beautiful women that I have known, she sometimes looked so plain that it made you question why you had ever found her attractive. There was nothing pretty about her face, but it had a clean elegance that spoke of independence and modernity. Individually her features were undistinguished, but arranged together they were surprisingly arresting. She emphasised her too-small eyes with a smoky shadow smudged beneath her lower lashes, which lent them mystery. She had a delicate nose and wide lips that were always pale because she never wore lip paint. Her body was straight and slim like a boy's, and she smelled of jasmine, her favourite fragrance. She ate little and was hardly ever still. She always stuttered when pronouncing the letter P, which I found endearing. And conversely, there was about the frailty of her body a hint of the strength of mind that mirrored my own.

  Tamura was the widow of a businessman who had died young, leaving her with an infant daughter, a couple of small businesses and some properties in the Chinese student quarter in Tokyo, which she rented out mostly to students and shopkeepers. She had been in Kagoshima to inspect the small import company she owned and was in the process of selling.

  'Business is a man's world,' she said. 'But it is surprising how well, given the chance, we women can do at it.'

  Tamura told me that she was alone in the world because she did not speak to or trust her husband's family. They kept her daughter from her and would not let her see her. She said they had tried to steal the business from her too, but because her husband had included her name in the ownership papers they had not succeeded.

  'But they will never give up,' she said. 'If I stay in Japan it will eventually be the worse for me.'

  Tamura's father-in-law had been struck down by a stroke so he could not move or speak or take Tamura to the courts to reclaim his son's business as he would have wanted.

  'It's woman against woman at the moment,' Tamura told me, 'and I am a match for my mother-in-law, but soon, when she realises her husband will not get better, she will enlist the help of her son-in-law and I could lose everything.'

  They wanted her to live in their house under her mother-in-law's watchful eyes, a fate that would have driven Tamura to suicide. Her husband had been the only son amongst seven daughters. His mother had doted on him and could not bear his young widow to have any happiness.

  'They would have p-preferred it if I had been the one to die,' she said in a matter-of-fact way. 'Lucky for me, it is the gods who choose.'

  Recently Tamura, not at all concerned with reputation, had begun a venture introducing cafe girls, the newly popular rivals to the geisha, to businessmen and politicians. She said that in these modern times young men found geishas boring, while older men were keen to indulge in something new. Cafe girls wore western clothes, permed their hair and could dance in the American style. They smoked in public and were exciting companions for men who neither wished to adopt a geisha nor to endure the mannerly courtship geishas were trained to expect. Cafe girls accepted money, gifts and favours, they offered their bodies readily, but unlike common prostitutes they were educated, modern and often well connected.

  'I don't care that I am no longer respectable,' Tamura said. 'One day soon I will sell everything I own, gather up my little daughter Sachiko and go to New York. In America I will be respectable, I will educate Sachiko and see that she makes a good marriage. I hope her husband will be an American. My husband was rare amongst Japanese men in treating me as his equal. I would like Sachiko's husband to consider her his equal.'

  As the boat progressed to Yokohama, so my friendship with Tamura was cemented. I confided my story to her, and she was amazed to learn that I had lived as the wife of a Mongolian prince. When I spoke to her of Jon, she said that I shouldn't feel bad about him as at least I had made his life interesting and given him a more varied history than he could have hoped for before knowing me.

  'A p-princess and an adventuress will make good friends,' she assured me. 'You and I will be as close as sisters, Yoshiko. I know it, and when I am this sure I am never wrong. We will come to trust each other with our secrets, because even though you are a p­princess, we are fashioned from a similar cloth.'

  She was right. Not that we were really alike in little things, but more that we had the same determination to make our own lives, whatever the cost. Like me, regardless of tradition, Tamura ignored class and convention and took the path most enticing to her.

  The journey passed quickly in her company and on the last day as we passed Mount Fuji I pointed it out to her, saying, 'How beautiful it is, Tamura, the snow so untouched. It will be as cold as Suiyuan at the top.'

  'I don't care for mountains and open views much,' she said. 'I am only at home where buildings etch the skyline and the streets are full of p-people.'

  'You would hate Mongolia, Tamura,' I said. 'There is nothing but space there.'

  I knew what she meant by open spaces being frightening, but despite my love of cities and my unhappiness in Mongolia, nature still had the power to touch me without fear. For all her strength, Tamura did not entirely trust herself with her own survival. She believed that money solved every problem and that without it life was a dangerous thing. But money, while useful, will not solve every problem and it would have been of little help to her at the top of Mount Fuji.

  Perhaps having a child made Tamura more vulnerable than me. While I was sure that I was the safety net in my own life, Tamura thought hers was wealth, but despite that, she was one of the bravest women I have ever known. I had no doubt that she would be happier in America, where money could buy you any life you wanted. In that land of giants the rules were not made by old men whose chauvinistic traditions were bred in the bone. It was easy to picture Tamura swinging on her high heels through the streets of New York, wafting the scent of jasmine around and standing out in the crowd.

  Before the journey was over she had offered me one of her smaller houses in the students' quarter, which she said was a very lively area. If I agreed to accept the men she sent to me, she could assure me that in no time at all I would have enough money to establish my own household, or even to join her in New York. I had no desire to go to America, Japan was my only family, but I accepted her offer. It solved my problem of where to live, and I knew that the men Tamura would introduce me to would be of the highest rank and that my life would not be boring. It would suit me very well until it was time to move on.

  That journey from Port Arthur to Tokyo remains with me as one of the most delightful trips I have ever made, and the day I met Tamura Hidari remains one of the most fortunate of my life.

  My twentieth birthday was celebrated in Tokyo, just as I had hoped it would be all those months ago on the cold plains of Mongolia. It was thrilling to be back in my home city, and I loved the house that Tamura set me up in, not least because every room spoke to me of her. It stood three storeys high with two rooms on each floor and had windows hung with shades the colour of parchment. It was painted pale yellow and wisteria grew against the front walls, reaching almost to the roof. The first floor had a wooden veranda where in the evening, in the cooling air, it was pleasant to sit and listen to the crickets chatter. A long staircase with a turned handrail rose through the house like a tree heading for the light. Every room was warm, which endeared the house to me more than any other of its numerous advantages. At ground level there was a kitchen that smelled of rice water and vegetables. It had two sinks, one at kneeling height, the other sunk into the stone floor. There was a low table bleached white by the summer sun which filled the room from dawn to noon. Three or four sleeping mats were rolled neatly by a door that led out to a walled yard, empty except for a large smooth stone for washing clothes.

  I took up residence at the top of the house where in the slightest breeze the roof whispered small complaints to itself. My bed, a low wooden frame with a thin mattress, had a
blue cover made from a silk as crisp as paper. It was embroidered with white honeysuckle and single-petal peonies. Behind a tall screen, there was a jug and a basin for washing as well as a square basket filled with cotton towels. Shards of sunlight channelled their way through the thin fabric of the blinds, showing up motes of dust in the lit air.

  The rooms on the first floor were mostly used for entertaining, although if I felt tired in the afternoon I would sleep in one or other of them. They were furnished with bamboo furniture, which Tamura liked better than dark wood. She said the gloominess of rosewood and ebony reminded her of her mother-in-law's house. Delicate drawings of storks and weeping fig trees in painted frames lined the walls. There was an oil painting of a girl with long hair carrying an open fan. She was taking tea with an old man who looked like the three-chinned Wu, only not quite as sly. Both rooms shared the veranda and when the wisteria was in flower they seemed cooled by its fragrance. One had a western-style daybed draped with an old kimono and there was a gramophone, which stood on the floor, accompanied by a stack of popular dance and jazz records. By the glass door that led to the veranda, a small painted chest housed not only sake and vodka, but also the newly imported gin that looked like water, smelled of juniper and tasted of sloe. Tamura had generously filled a cedar box with Turkish and French cigarettes, enough to last a month.

  The second room was longer and more traditional in style. It had a low Japanese bed which stood only an inch above the floor, a paper screen that hid a large Satsuma-ware washing bowl, and a low bench where tea could be made and served in plain white bowls fashioned from such fine porcelain that you could see the tea glowing through.