A real-life Madame Butterfly. The tragic love story of an aristocratic British officer and a young Japanese woman, played out against the turmoil of the early twentieth century. In 1904, when thirty-four-year-old British Army captain Arthur Hart-Synnot was sent to Japan to learn the language of his country's new ally, romance was the furthest thing from his mind. At least five generations of the Hart family had served in the British Army-his father, grandfather, and uncle had risen to the rank of general, and the ambitious young officer expected to keep up the tradition. Arriving in Tokyo on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War,

Arthur met Masa Suzuki at the Officers' Club and tested out his first few words of Japanese on her. Masa had grown up in the working-class section of Tokyo, amid small-shop keepers and craftsmen. The sixth in a family of seven, she had left school at age fourteen to work in a shop. She was a dutiful Japanese daughter-when she helped her mother serve meals, she would kneel at a respectful distance while her father and brothers ate. Arthur and Masa fell in love quickly and powerfully. Throwing convention to the wind, they lived together in Tokyo until orders came for Arthur to return to England. For the next decade and a half, the two unlikely soul mates attempted to make a life together, testing the limits of racial and cultural tolerance in their countries and in themselves. Separated for years at a time, they stayed in touch through long, deeply affectionate letters they wrote to each other in Japanese. The great love affair sustained Arthur through some of the most horrific battles of the First World War, and even when the relationship came to an end, in a way that neither could have foreseen, they continued their correspondence.

They wrote to each other through the troubled interwar period, as Arthur's family estate was caught up in a civil war in Ireland, as the great earthquake of 1923 ravaged Tokyo, as the militarists seized control of Japan and took the country into a brutal invasion of China, and finally, in a bitter twist of fate, as the once-allied Britain and Japan faced off against each other in the Second World War. Her letters to him were lost, but she saved every one of his, more than eight hundred in total. The authors use this treasure trove of letters to describe a story of great love and great loss and of destinies etched amid the conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century.

The following is an excerpt from the book Sword and Blossom

by Peter Pagnamenta and Momoko Williams

One

Return to Ballymoyer

Swift and faithful

· Hart family armorial motto, Celer atque fidelis, granted 1883 ·

When Captain Arthur Hart-Synnot came back to Ireland on a bright summer morning in July 1906, and walked down the gangplank of the overnight boat from Holyhead, he had not seen his father for two and a half years. The major general had received his telegram and was there to meet his eldest son and accompany him on the train for the last stage of his five-thousand-mile journey back from the Far East. A family of soldiers who had spent years in India and the farthest outposts of the British Empire, the Hart-Synnots were accustomed to the long sea journeys, extended personal separations, and occasional periods of great loneliness that military service required of them. As the train steamed close to the shore, passing the oyster beds along the ten-mile fjord that cut deep into the coast and divided County Down from Louth, and the sun caught the wooded slopes of the Mourne Mountains on the other side of the water, they began to catch up on family news.

At Newry Station the coachman was waiting with the old black landau. Once the luggage was transferred, the captain and the general were driven up the narrow country road, past the low stone walls and scrubby hedges that divided the small fields of South Armagh, gradually gaining height on the two-hour journey to Ballymoyer. When they reached the lodge and turned into the gates, a crowd of estate workers and staff from the house were waiting for them, with a banner strung across the drive welcoming Captain Hart-Synnot home.

Arthur knew many of the faces from his childhood, and some had served under his father in the Irish Brigade in South Africa. They cheered and waved, grabbed the shafts beside the two horses, pushed the carriage from behind, and helped turn the wheels up the long gravel avenue that ran through the parkland towards the house. This was not a family used to displays of affection in public, but Arthur stepped down and embraced his mother and his sisters on the porch. A brass band played, and a little later the family and guests sat down to a noisy lunch with many toasts. The captain made a speech in which he said how happy he was to be back home with friends and family.

Only four years before, his father had been given a similar hero's return when he came back to Ballymoyer from the Boer War. Since then he had retired from the army and devoted his energies to the estate that his wife, Mary, had inherited, and which he had known since their marriage. With seven thousand acres of low hills, moorland, and small tenant farms, seventy miles north of Dublin, the property was one of the largest in the county of Armagh. The Synnots had made their money in the linen trade and mining and, unlike many other Irish landowners, had always been resident landlords. General Hart added his wife's surname to his own to become General Hart-Synnot, confirming his place among the Anglo-Irish gentry. The general was eager to show Arthur the improvements he had begun to make on the estate demesne, the home farm that was not rented out to tenants, knowing his son shared the same love for the place he would one day inherit.

The original stone manor had been built in the eighteenth century in a gentle valley at a point where three brooks, after racing down from their own glens, reached flatter land and joined together to continue as one fast-running trout stream. In the early nineteenth century a more imposing house in the classical style, with a stucco façade of three stories and a colonnaded porch, had been added onto the earlier, rougher building, and the two were linked with creaking corridors and staircases. The library, the smaller bedrooms, and the servants' hall were in the old section at the back, but the principal bedrooms, drawing room, and dining room were in the grander addition, looking across the lawns and parkland to stands of beech on the hillside. Over the years the gardens had been landscaped and replanted, and the streams channeled and directed over weirs, but the sound of rushing water could still be heard all round the house, and gave a calming, almost drowsy background noise. For Arthur's return, both parts of the house were full, with relatives who had come to greet him and would stay until the following day. The celebrations did not end till after dinner, when the general directed a fireworks display on the lawn. That night Arthur must have wondered how he was going to tell his family what had happened to his personal and emotional life on the other side of the world, and how he wanted nothing more than to put Ireland behind him as fast as possible and get back to Tokyo.

Two and a half years earlier, before he left for the East, Arthur had known almost nothing about Japan, and his ambitions were centered on the army. The military connection was hard to ignore at Ballymoyer. Portraits of mustachioed ancestors in full uniform were hung all over the house, along with their swords and honors. Military biographies and campaign histories filled the library shelves. Arthur's grandfather General Henry Hart had edited Hart's Army List, the annual compendium setting out names, rankings, and organization that was indispensable to army messes and clubs around the British Empire. His father was a major general who had fought Ashanti tribesmen in West Africa, the Zulus in Natal, the Egyptians at Tel el Kebir, and a whole range of recalcitrant natives in India and Afghanistan. His father's brother Reginald was another major general, the better known because while still a young officer he had won the Victoria Cross, for crawling up a dry ravine in Afghanistan to rescue a wounded soldier, under withering fire from Afridi tribesmen shooting at him from behind rocks. Uncle Reginald's book, Reflections on the Art of War, laying out his forthright approach to "push-on" soldiering, was an inspiration to young officers. His father's other brother, Uncle Horatio, was a colonel with the Royal Engineers. In 1883, the three Hart brothers had jointly revived a coat of arms once used in the family, with a stag's head and rampant antlers over the motto "Celer atque fidelis," meaning "Swift and faithful."

The soldiering tradition conditioned Arthur's outlook and made him the sort of man he was. No one ever thought he would do anything else but become an officer. Family custom put him into the army, and family connections assisted his career through it. When Arthur left Sandhurst in 1890, he went out to India as a subaltern. He joined the 1st Battalion of the East Surrey Regiment at DumDum, near Calcutta, where his father was the colonel, and saw his first fighting in the mountains along the India-Afghanistan border, on a march to relieve a British force besieged by Pathan tribesmen in Chitral. When his Uncle Reginald, also serving in India, was sent to quell yet another rising by the Afridis around the Khyber Pass, he asked to have his nephew attached to the expedition.

After eight years in India, Arthur returned to England to go to Staff College, coached for the examination by his father. By this time his younger brother Ronald had, in his turn, just joined the East Surrey Regiment, and his father had come home to be a general. The British Empire was at its apogee. When Queen Victoria came to review her troops on the Aldershot parade ground in the summer of 1899, General Fitzroy Hart was able to ride past his sovereign at the head of his brigade, in plumed helmet, immaculate uniform, and highly polished boots, on a magnificent seventeen-hand Waler horse that belonged to Arthur, with his two sons jogging along beside him as members of his staff. At moments like this, when the pomp was at its most splendid and the military bands at their most stirring, it was not surprising that British rule over much of the world seemed so natural, or that families like the Harts could derive so much of their identity from it. A few months later, when that mastery came under challenge in southern Africa, and the Boer War broke out, professional soldiers like the Harts welcomed the chance for some sustained action against a more challenging enemy than the primitive tribesmen they usually found themselves up against. The war could bring honors and promotion. Arthur, his brother Ronald, his father, Fitzroy, and the seventeen-hand Waler all sailed for Cape Town in 1899 as part of the first Expeditionary Force, impatient to get there lest the fighting end too quickly. The only regret in the family was that Uncle Reginald, now in India, could not be released to come along, too.

Published by the Penguin Group; May 2007;$16.00US; 978-0-14-311214-3 Copyright © 2007 Peter Pagnamenta and Momoko Williams