LITMIR.BIZ

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That first spring, the arrival of this fabled wonder coincided with a royal visit from the Duke and Duchess of Connaught. ‘I hope you will not think me wanting in loyalty.’ Mary wrote to her family, ‘if I say that they have been almost more of an excitement to me than the royal visitors.’ Mary had been ill, and the contemplation of the flowers in her garden, particularly the cherry blossom, meant more to her than if she had been up and busy: ‘The crown of the year has come at last … an outburst of bewildering beauty such as no words can convey to those who have not seen it for themselves.’

      On the streets of Tokyo every avenue was planted with cherry trees in long, close-set rows; every garden boasted its carefully nurtured groves. ‘Over the river at Mukojima they dip to the water, and spread away inland like a rosy tidal wave; and the great park at Uyeno seems to have caught the sunset clouds of a hundred skies, and kept them captive along its wide forest ways.’ The double cherry blossoms were the most magnificent of all, surpassing ‘every other splendour of nature’. During the two weeks or so when the blossom was at its best, the Japanese flocked, day after day, to look at them. From her veranda Mary watched the tall grove of cherry trees in the garden, their branches waving softly against the sky, storing up ‘the recollection of their loveliness until the next year should bring it round again’.

      However, ‘I would not want you to think that existence is one long series of cotillion figures out here,’ she wrote in a more sombre mood; ‘it can be very sad and very bitter.’ At times there was an almost mystical quality to her response to the natural world – her ‘cherry blossom metaphysics’, as she liked to call it, which in her dark moments brought great solace. On her frequent travels around Japan the merest glimpse of Mount Fuji – or Fuji-san, the name reverently given to the perfectly cone-shaped, snow-capped volcano – was usually enough to lift her spirits and banish her lingering sense of disappointment with life. ‘In Japan one cannot think of Fuji as a thing, a mere object in the landscape;’ she mused, ‘she becomes something personal, dominating, a factor in life. No day seems quite sad or aimless in which one has had a glimpse of her.’

      This natural affinity with all things Japanese, which began with the natural world, opened Mary’s mind to many other, more perplexing aspects of Japanese life. Throughout her time there she was almost startlingly open to what must have seemed a deeply alien culture. She was strangely aware of the bluntness of her own, western faculties when it came to describing the exquisite delicacy of Japanese sensibilities. ‘English is a clumsy, square-toed vehicle of expression,’ she wrote in exasperation, ‘and stumbles along, crushing a thousand beauties of my Japanese thought-garden, which a more delicate language (or a more skilful writer!) might have preserved for you.’

Very soon Mary learned to love the Japanese people, as well as their country. Her natural peers were ‘the little hot house ladies’ of the imperial court, ‘with their pretty shy ways and their broken confidences about the terror of getting into European clothes.’^* The life of the court was very formal: the clothes, etiquette and food were all strictly regulated. The speech used by the imperial family differed from that of ordinary people. There were special terms for the royal-feminine and the royal-masculine, and courtiers had to take care when speaking to one of the princes to use certain words meant only for royal ears. ‘Is this not a puzzling sum?’ Mary exclaimed. Even when the Frasers attended the Emperor and Empress at Enryo Kwan, their palace by the sea, this formality persisted. A simple walk around the palace gardens was conducted with rigid protocol. Members of the court followed the sovereigns, in the strictest order of precedence, in all their uniforms and finery, ‘like some huge dazzling snake, gliding in and out of all the narrow paths’.

      Even the smallest details of imperial life, Mary observed, seemed to have a peculiarly Japanese grace. The chrysanthemum, symbol of the Japanese imperial house, appeared embossed in gold on royal invitations, on the panels of the court carriages, and even on the servants’ liveries. Thursdays were reception days at court and Mary was fascinated by the refreshments offered to the diplomatic corps on these occasions, which included maple leaf shapes made entirely of sugar: ‘Large and small, deep crimson, green and orange, with three leaves, or five or seven, they were piled on the delicate china in such an artistic fashion that I could not refrain from an exclamation of pleasure when they were offered to me,’ she wrote.

      Mary was intrigued by the ladies of the court, but she felt greater sympathy for the ordinary people of Japan, particularly her own servants. ‘The very smart people here affect the most impassive countenance and a low voice in speaking,’ she noted, while only the lower classes could express their emotions and joie de vivre, although their habits did sometimes surprise her. She was supposed to enter her servants’ courtyard only at appointed times, but she could not resist observing them from behind the blinds of one of the upper windows. Once, in the terrible heat of summer, when even she could bear no more than ‘the thinnest of white garments’ against her skin, she arrived in her kitchen to find, to her quiet amusement, her cook’s grandmother ‘without a shred of raiment on her old brown body’.

      Big Cook San, as her principal chef was known, was a particular favourite. Ever since the influenza epidemic which had swept the country earlier that winter he had suffered from bad lungs, and so when Mary and Hugh went on a visit to Horiuchi, a fashionable seaside summer resort, they took him with them, hoping that the change would do him good.

      Big Cook San descended to the platform, jingling like a gypsy tinker with all the saucepans that he had hung round himself at the last moment. An omelette pan and a bain-marie, miraculously tied together, hung over his shoulder; a potato-steamer from his waist; in one hand he carried a large blue tea-pot, and in the other a sheaf of gorgeous irises, carefully tied up in matting, for fear there should be no flowers at Horiuchi!

      Mary’s greatest affection, though, was reserved for Ogita, her samurai, guide and interpreter, her ‘right hand in a thousand matters of life’. When he died, of influenza, she recorded his death with real grief. ‘Do you wonder that I tell you so much about a mere servant?’ she wrote. ‘He has been so helpful and faithful, has carried out all my whims with such gentle patience, has piloted me through so many journeys, taught me so many quaint stories, that a part of my Japanese life has died with him.’

Ogita was a tall man of soldierly bearing, a master swordsman and a teacher of Japanese fencing. After his illness Mary was shocked to see death written on the face of this ‘valiant, humble, upright soul’. Ogita lived in a little house in the British legation compound with his wife and five children, and when Mary visited him there and saw him lying on a couple of worn mats on the floor, she thought he looked pitifully long and thin, and much too large for the tiny room. Although he was often too weak to speak, until the very last his two hands always went up to his brow when she entered, and there was always ‘a light of welcome’ shining for her in his eyes. Once or twice he said to her: ‘Okusama^* is very kind; I would get well if I could; but I can never travel with her any more, and I am too tired to live.’

      After his death, Mary went to visit Ogita one last time. Incense was burning in the house, and freshly gathered flowers had been placed near the coffin head.

      He lay very straight and stiff, with a smile of peace on his thin face. His hands were crossed on his breast, and his long blue robes were drawn in straight folds, all held in place with little packets of tea, which filled the room with a dry fragrance; the coffin was lined with these, and his head rested on a pillow of the same. Beside him on a stand lay his most precious possession, his sword; and before the weeping wife left me kneeling there, she touched my shoulder, and pointed to the sword, bowing her head in reverence, and whispering, ‘Samurai, Okusama!’

      Mary, a devout Catholic, had tried without success to convert Ogita to her faith. Although she was to remember this with regret after his death, she comforted herself with the thought that he had been ‘a samurai and a gentleman to the last; and I do not believe that any true gentleman was ever shut out of heaven yet.’¹⁵

      When Elizabeth Blanckley arrived in Algiers in 1806,

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