Oswald Wynd published The Ginger Tree in 1977, three years after James Clavell’s Shogun became a bestseller in the US and rather set the standard for cross-cultural — or perhaps bi-cultural — literary fiction. UK critics received The Ginger Tree very well, but it never crossed the Atlantic quite the same way Shogun did — possibly relating to Clavell’s having resources as a UK-US national. Wynd lived almost reclusively in Scotland.
Wynd was born in Japan to British missionary parents, resulting in him holding dual Japanese-British nationalities. He grew up in Japan until his mid-teens, when his family moved to the US, resulting in Wynd finishing his secondary education at an American high school. For university, he returned to his parents’ native Scotland and enrolled at the University of Edinburgh. As World War II approached, he joined the army, where he was promptly reassigned to intelligence and shipped to the Far East since he was natively bilingual between Japanese and English.
When the Japanese finally captured Wynd, his knowledge of aristocratic Japanese language and manners initially caused him serious problems — upon realising he was a dual national, his captors threatened him with immediate execution for treason – but then instead provided him with protection, as the front-line level soldiers did not quite know what to do with him. His captors eventually wound up shipping him to Japan proper where he was assigned to a coal mining camp, though once there he worked as an interpreter. He successfully leveraged the status accorded to him by the guards to prevent some of the abuses which occurred in other prison camps.
Post-War, Wynd experienced a sort of identity crisis as he dealt with the contradiction between the militarised Japanese society that held him prisoner and the one in which he had grown up and with which he still felt strongly connected. Returning to Scotland, he turned to writing. The Ginger Tree is part of his body of work, which ranges from very serious literature to action thrillers which Wynd wrote under a pseudonym.
The Ginger Tree covers, from a woman’s viewpoint, a period that Wynd lived through himself as a child and then a young man in the Far East. It is a love story that explores the consequences of war, national political ambitions and decades-long scheming by a faceless military-industrial complex — the zaibatsu — upon individuals who are largely unaware of the extent that their society and culture, and therefore their individual lives, are manipulated by the former.
As part of this exploration, the story illustrates the limits of social class. The protagonists most definitely outrank the architects of tragedy and they receive all types of special considerations on that basis. At the same time, these same characters are powerless to prevent their families being ripped apart, their moral values taken hostage and their lives and culture shredded by malevolent forces, the human embodiment of which would cringe before the protagonists on the street. Something for Spectator readers to ponder on.
Compared to Clavell — whose Asian Saga, of which Shogun is the first book, ends on a note of hope about the indomitability of the human spirit — The Ginger Tree ends more with a question of what is left if all is destroyed. Decades stretch, long and meaningless, as walls rise. A latent nationalist, them-versus-us mentality emerges from the shadows. And the protagonists watch helplessly as the populace devour the rhetoric, unaware that the conflict already existed and that just as they, the characters, have been destroyed, so too will the nations that participate in these dangerous games be irrevocably changed.
The original picture is of a woodprint of late-nineteenth-century Japanese aristocracy from the Waseda University Library.