cover image Sword and Blossom: A British Officer's Enduring Love for a Japanese Woman

Sword and Blossom: A British Officer's Enduring Love for a Japanese Woman

Peter Pagnamenta, Momoko Williams, . . Penguin Press, $25.95 (345pp) ISBN 978-1-59420-089-2

The word "enduring" isn't completely accurate in describing the romance between Capt. Arthur Hart-Synnot and the young Japanese woman who became his mistress, Masa Suzuki, because he eventually abandoned her to marry an Englishwoman. Yet their tender, binational understanding is captured by British journalists Pagnamenta and Williams in recently unearthed letters dating from 1904, when the British captain first met Suzuki in Tokyo, until the year before his death, in 1942. Hart-Synnot, who hailed from a family of soldiers seated at Ballymoyer, in Ireland, was recruited to study Japanese to shore up relations between Britain and Japan, then embroiled in war with imperial Russia. At 34, unmarried, a good linguist and eager to travel, Hart-Synnot found Japan charmingly cultured, while the 25-year-old working-class divorcée Suzuki had little to look forward to beside domestic drudgery. Their affair led to language lessons, and eventually she became his housekeeper. He was posted throughout the Far East, and always returned to Suzuki until he was sent to France by WWI. Injured in battle, his legs amputated, he claimed that he could not manage to return to Japan, and instead married his nurse, to the bitterness of Suzuki. Pagnamenta and Williams offer a deeply sympathetic portrayal of this doomed long-distance romance. (June)