The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel (2 page)

Each night for a week I slept in my mother's arms as she cried herself to sleep. I breathed in the scent of her hair and grieved for her as though she were already lost to me.

During that time my father did not call my mother to his bed once. From dawn of day to dusk she busied herself with the packing of the chests that would accompany me to the Kawashima household. She told me that Kawashima Naniwa was a great man. He was the son of an ancient family, the head of a large merchant empire and was involved in Japanese politics at the highest level. She knew nothing of the women or children in his household but felt sure they would treat me well and that I would prosper. Later I was to discover that Kawashima, finding me a pretty child, had requested of my father that I be given to him to be raised in his Japanese household two years before thirteenth sister betrayed me. However, my father chose to justify my banishment, it had always been the case that whatever my behaviour I would be given to Kawashima merely because he had requested it. Of my nineteen sisters and ten brothers, I was the only one to be given away.

Ours was a rich home filled with fine silks, the most delicate of porcelain, soft blankets for winter nights and rosewood furniture intricately inlaid with ivory and jade. We had many servants, stables full of horses, kitchens that were well supplied with the best noodles, the finest rice and such superior cuts of meat that they hardly needed chewing. We were never short of sugar cakes or frosted apricots, and even the servants ate meat dumplings at least once a week. I wondered what I would be given from this wealth of luxuries to accompany me on my journey. I was then as I am now a greedy person, but, I should add, not an ungenerous one. In my opinion greed is not a bad thing, it spurs you on, makes you good at living. What is the point of life if nothing is demanded from it?

As the trunks began to fill with gifts of exquisite linen, embroidered silk runners and delicate rolls of calligraphy that were to be presented to the Kawashima family, so I came to know that I truly was being sent from my mother and my home. There was to be no last-minute reprieve.

Carefully, in the chest set aside for me, my mother placed my favourite rice bowl, a pair of her coral and silver gilt earrings, a good luck charm of a bee caught in amber, a fine leather writing case engraved with my family crest and a box of dried lychees. She said the lychees would sustain me and remind me of her until I had eaten the last one and then it would be time to forget her. I asked her if it would be easy to forget her. She said that I was not like other daughters so perhaps I would not find it hard, whereas it would break her heart to part with me. She said that she would never forget her beautiful, rebellious girl.

I stored the precious box of lychees in my writing case and determined that however hungry I might be I would only eat half of them. I did not want the memory of my beautiful mother to fade before I could return to her.

'Surely I will see you again, Mother?' I said.

'Only if that is your fate, Eastern Jewel,' she replied. 'You must be brave, little daughter, and remember that the stronger the wind, the stronger the tree needs to be.'

I left our house for the first part of my journey in a plain sedan accompanied by a fat servant woman with blackened teeth and a sweet smile. The luggage followed behind with two male servants cursing their luck that they had to leave my father's comfortable house to go on a long and difficult journey with his disgraced daughter. As we clattered through the gate of our courtyard a beggar banged on the sedan's door expectantly, only to be disappointed at the unpromising sight of a skinny girl with her fat servant woman. I took a coin from my pocket and threw it at his feet. I have always delighted in confounding people's expectations of me, and in any case it is good luck to give alms to the poor.

I looked back hoping to catch a last glimpse of my mother, but all I saw was one of our cooks carrying the pot of snake and chrysanthemum soup from her quarters back to the kitchen. A great sadness spread through my body, my mouth went dry and I was sick over the skirt of the servant woman.

I wished I had been able to show my mother that I loved her, but something in my nature finds it hard to give people what they want. I don't believe she ever knew the depth of my affection for her, ever knew that it was she who made me capable of love. The cruel gene inherited from my father was more urgent in me and often drowned my mother's gentle one. All the same, I should have overcome my nature and left her with assurances of my love and gratitude. With hindsight, I imagine that she lived her days with a brick in her heart from the loss of me.

As we bumped along the potholed roads I determined that I would not allow myself to indulge in such sadness again. After all, if one is to live a healthy life it is only natural to be the most important person in it. To feel sadness at the loss of others is like choosing to be ill when you could be well. Yet whatever we may determine, the memory of a loved mother accompanies us for the rest of our lives.

My journey to Japan was a long and exciting one on which I discovered the world was a larger place than I could ever have imagined. We went by train to Shanghai and then across the sea to Yokohama. I enjoyed the adventure of being at sea and the unusual things that happened on board ship. One morning the deck was completely covered in jellyfish that had landed there during a night storm. The captain said that it was a bad sign when the creatures of the sea were not content to stay in their own element.

There were three Europeans on the ship. They were tall and white and almost as translucent as the jellyfish. I had never seen a foreigner before and I thought them very odd. Everything about them looked out of proportion, especially their noses, and I felt very glad to be Chinese. When they spoke they sounded as though they were moaning, but I liked the blue of their eyes and the way they slapped each other on the back in greeting.

The other passengers spoke of a war just begun in the land of these lofty aliens and I tried without success to picture those pale giants in battle. They were always stumbling about as though their heads were too far from their feet so it was difficult to imagine them wielding swords.

All three of my servants suffered terribly from seasickness and spent the journey being sick or lying on the deck moaning. I was ashamed of them, especially as, like myself, the foreigners were fine sailors.

We were tired and dusty by the time we arrived at the house of Kawashima, only to be greeted by the colour of death. White lanterns hung on either side of the tall gates and fluttered from the trees in the gardens that surrounded the house. A watchman, shaking his head as though he were praying for the dead, ushered us along a narrow footpath that was edged with swept shingle. The house, a large traditional timber-built residence, was circled by a stone wall with a western-style wing built on at one end where the garden sloped to a carp-filled pool. Half hidden by winter plum trees a wooden shrine sat on one side of a deep pond and was reflected in the water.

I followed a servant into the dim interior of the house, leaving my own to follow with my possessions. The scent of camellias hung thick in the air, their ghostly blooms staring from vases arranged like sentries along the length of the hall. Because their flowers drop so abruptly they are thought to symbolise death, yet how beautiful they are in the brief time they have to prosper.

Kawashima's mother had died the previous week, and arriving as I had at a time of death was a bad omen for me. So it was that from the moment I set foot in the house the women thought me unlucky and therefore did not seek my company.

The servant beckoned us on. We passed a long room half screened with white muslin drapes where a small elderly woman, tightly wrapped in a grey kimono, was bent over a table, fat with delicious-looking food. Softly outlined against the pale drapes she appeared like a ghost at the banquet but was probably a cook or a servant of some kind. Hunger rumbled in my belly and I remembered the last proper meal I had eaten in my father's home, fish cooked with ginger, little honey dumplings and ground almond paste wrapped in rice paper as thin as tissue. I darted to the end of the table and grabbed a rice ball that was dripping in a glossy, plum oil. The old woman hissed with shock at my savage manners. My Chinese servant woman, whom I had named Sorry, because of her habit of constantly apologising, mumbled an appropriate excuse for my forgotten manners. She pulled me from the room, wiping my hands on the hem of her skirt.

The two male servants who had accompanied us from China were to return to my father's house. Sorry was to remain with me in Japan as my personal servant. I was glad of it as I had come to care for her over the course of the journey, just as she had decided to love me as best she could, and to be loyal.

We were shown to small quarters on the north side of the house that overlooked a narrow strip of garden. Although it was summer there were no flowers, no roses or peonies, nothing to sweeten the air or stir the senses. It was a garden of stones, flat and uninteresting. Compared to the spaciousness of my mother's quarters the small rooms felt like cells. Even Japanese as rich as Kawashima did not live in quite the same splendour as their high-ranking counterparts in China. Sorry went in search of food for us and to take her leave of our servants, who would enjoy a much-needed sleep before returning to Peking.

Left alone in the three almost empty little rooms, I felt sad and frightened. Compared to the noisy hallways of my family home the house was silent and full of melancholy. I ached for my mother and I wondered what would become of me without her. I missed my brothers and sisters and wondered who would there be in this house that I could play and fight with, as I had done with them. I was a person without family, banished in shame from my home. It dawned on me then for the first time, but by no means the last, that perhaps I was truly an unlovable person. I think that unconsciously I chose to live up to that expectation of my nature rather than to change it. That was a mistake, as so many things have been in my life.

I was deep in my musings when one of the household servants, a woman as skinny as a stick, came to tell me that the Kawashima family could not greet me, as they were visiting the shrine of their ancestors to pay their respects and to seek consolation. They were to return in a day or two. The stick woman gave me a cricket in a brass box pierced with tiny breathing holes. She said its chatter would keep me company. When she left I opened the box and let the cricket out. It hopped dismally to the corner of the room and sat in the dust looking as forlorn as I felt.

As in most of the difficult times in my life, all I could think of was sleep, so I curled up on the lowest bed with my back to the wall and slept. I had no idea how much time had passed when I was woken by Sorry bearing a bowl of egg noodles and some uncooked white fish. I knew that she had been gone a long time because the light had changed, but the news she returned with was worth her long absence. My Japanese family, she told me, comprised Kawashima Naniwa who was to be my new stepfather, his father Kawashima Teshima who was in his seventieth year and in deep mourning for his recently dead wife, my stepmother Natsuko and her unmarried half-crippled sister Shimako. Kawashima and Natsuko had two sons, Hideo and Nobu, and six daughters, one of whom had an unlucky birthmark marring her face. All the Kawashima offspring had the strawberry birthmark somewhere on their body. It was usually a small stain on the foot or hand; only their daughter Itani was disfigured by it.

To my amazement, Sorry told me that there were no concubines in the house. The cook, who was a great gossip, had confided in her that Kawashima took his pleasures away from home in the teahouses and brothels that flourished in the streets of Tokyo. He often went away for long periods of time to Osaka, the great merchant city, where he was said to keep a geisha in enviable luxury. This geisha was rumoured to have a hundred kimonos and many jewels which Kawashima lavished on her because of her various and delightful ways of welcoming his snake into her pit. Sorry laughed with pleasure at the vulgarity of this and apologised to me for the language she used. She said that Kawashima did not love his wife and this was Natsuko's tragedy as well as the fact that she had given him more daughters than sons, which displeased him greatly. Although Kawashima did not desire his wife he did have great respect for her, for she was the daughter of a most influential and refined family. It was whispered in the house that Natsuko's grief for her mother-in-law was false, a show to impress her husband. Kawashima's mother had been a difficult woman to please and had treated Natsuko badly, implying that her daughter-in-law had fooled her son into believing that her womb would be rich in sons.

I thought that Sorry had done well to gather so much information in so short a time. I loved gossip, it made me feel at home and I always felt safer when I knew what was going on around me. I told her that she would make a good spy. She laughed and said that we had come to a household where the servants were indiscreet and we would be wise to keep our secrets to ourselves. I knew that I would not find being secretive too hard as I had been brought up with concubines and their competitive daughters and thus had an untrusting nature.

It was to be six weeks before I met Kawashima himself. His wife and her sister Shimako welcomed me formally and without warmth on my fourth day in their home. Their coldness filled me with gloom and I was glad I had Sorry to discuss them with. I told her that I did not like them at all and she said even though it would be difficult, I must try to please them, if only to make my own life easier. She advised me to pretend that my mind was as young as my body, for they would find my knowledge of life vulgar in a girl of my years.