About this item
In 1903, a young Scotswoman named Mary Mackenzie sets sail for China to marry her betrothed, a military attach in Peking. But soon after her arrival, Mary falls into an adulterous affair with a young Japanese nobleman, scandalizing the British community. Casting her out of the European community, her compatriots tear her away from her small daughter. A woman abandoned and alone, Mary learns to survive over forty tumultuous years in Asia, including two world wars and the cataclysmic Tokyo earthquake of 1923.,
About the Author
Oswald Wynd (1913 – 1998) was a Scottish writer, born in Tokyo of parents who had left their native Perth to run a mission in Japan. He attended schools in Japan where he grew up speaking both English and Japanese. In 1932 he returned with his parents to Scotland, and studied at the University of Edinburgh and began to write novels. When World War II came he joined the Scots Guards but was then commissioned into the Intelligence Corps and sent to Malaya. At the time of the Japanese invasion, he was attached to the Indian Army on the east coast of Malaya, and his brigade covered the final withdrawal to Singapore. Cut off by the Japanese advance, he was lost alone for a week in the Johor jungle. Eventually he was captured and spent more than three years as a prisoner of war, during which time he was mentioned in dispatches for his work as an interpreter for prisoners. In Hokkaidō, during…
