The Ginger Tree by Oswald Wynd ~ 1977. This edition: Harper Collins Perennial Classics, 2002. Paperback. 324 pages.
January 1903. Twenty-year-old Mary Mackenzie, a decidedly sheltered Edinburgh Presbyterian brought up in financially challenged upper-middle-class circumstances by a sternly religious widowed mother, is sailing to China to marry her betrothed, an English military attaché she has only met a few times. Mary will be “marrying up”; accepting Richard’s offer is seen as something of a marital coup in her social circle.
As the ship sails through troubled winter seas, Mary writes in her very private journal regarding the sea change occurring in her own attitudes and opinions, as she sheds first her uncomfortable corsets and then some of her previously unquestioned viewpoints on class distinctions and the quiet yet fervent jockeying for position among those seeking to move higher in the ranks.
Marry arrives at her destination, marries her passionless fiancé, bears a baby daughter and tries her best to fit into the rigidly structured community of British and European pseudo-exiles who have drawn ever closer together both physically and emotionally since the bloody Boxer Rebellion just a few years before.
With husband Richard off on a military mission, Mary uncomplainingly carries on with a life much more joyless and circumscribed than she had thought to find herself in. It is perhaps not particularly surprising that she falls into a brief yet passionate affair with a high ranking Japanese nobleman convalescing from injuries received while serving as a military officer in the Russo-Japanese War.
One short week of forbidden love has long-reaching consequences. Mary finds herself pregnant. Scandal ensues. The betrayed Richard casts her off – “puts her out”. The baby daughter will be sent to Richard’s mother back in England, while Mary will be returned to Edinburgh and whatever life she can make for herself under the care of her devastatingly appalled mother.
Then Mary skips out.
Slipping out of the hotel room where Richard has parked her while she awaits her passage “home”, Mary instead travels to Tokyo and sets herself up in a modest little house, all paid for by a previous money-gift from ex-lover Count Kentaro, who apparently feels a certain responsibility towards his Scottish fling, though he demonstrates no intention of otherwise recognizing or continuing their relationship.
A son is born and Mary revels in an unexpectedly joyful experience of second-chance motherhood, until the Count reappears, casually reignites the love affair, inspects the child, likes what he sees and arranges a parental kidnapping, leaving Mary distraught and socially isolated in her adopted homeland, as the British community is now completely closed to her as a result of her wayward ways.
How Mary remakes her life as a stranger in a strange land makes up the remainder of this rather tall tale, which is not quite as melodramatic as this description might make it sound. There is a deep sensitivity and substantial verisimilitude here, very likely formed by the author’s own experience as a son of Scottish missionaries, living in Japan from his birth in 1913 until 1932, when the family returned to Scotland. Wynd returned to Asia in WW II as a member of the British Army Intelligence Corps, and subsequently spent three years as a Japanese prisoner of war in Hokkaido.
Wynd’s timeline does not exactly match that of his heroine in this novel, but the depiction he gives of expatriates living amongst the Chinese and Japanese communities of the early 20th century up until the start of World War II is convincingly depicted and serves as a historically plausible backdrop to fictional Mary’s tale.
As for Mary Mackenzie, we leave her on board another ship in August, 1942, outbound from Japan, returning to the land of her birth and a possible reunion with her long-lost daughter.
This epistolary novel was a very good read, and it has reminded me of my other encounter with Oswald Wynd a few years ago, reading one of his thrillers written under the non-de-plume of Gavin Black. As The Ginger Tree most pleasurably did, The Eyes Around Me kept me absolutely engaged.
I do believe this will be a writer I will quest after in 2022. Most of his books are out of print, but his popularity was such that there are some copies still floating about, and I intend to search out as many as I can reasonably afford. I expect that I will find them very diverting.
My rating: 8.5/10
A point and a half docked because the detail fell off in the later years of Mary’s story, though understandably so. An awful lot of historical and dramatic ground was covered here.
Kudos to the writer for keeping this saga at a modest 324 pages. Some rather clever technique was shown here, hopping us through the story in ever-greater leaps towards the end, but still keeping it (fictionally) very believable.
Leaves & Pages 